An excerpt from William DiPuccio, The Interior
Sense of Scripture: The Sacred Hermeneutics of John W. Nevin (Studies
in American Biblical Hermeneutics 14; Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press,
1998), pages 102-105.
The unity of thought and language has tremendous
implications for Nevin’s hermeneutics. The “in-forming word” (thought)
is the basis from which the “word processional” (language) emanates. We cannot,
therefore, consider the interpretation of language apart from the “animating
spirit” from which it derives its “being.” Language is not merely the “algebraic
sign” of this animating soul, “but the very form in which it looks out upon us
with its own living presence.” There is a “spiritual element,” a “distinctive
life,” which belongs even to the outward form of language. This needs to be
grasped before the language can be understood. The key to the meaning of
language, then lies in the soul of words which is in them “objectively before
they reach our minds.”
Nevin draws a graphic example of
his linguistic theory from poetry. Without “poetic taste” no amount of
philology or history can reveal the sense of great poets like Homer, Horace, Shakespeare
or Goethe. The language of the poet affects the minds of his readers only as
they are drawn into felt sympathy with the spiritual elements of his own life.
By “spiritual infection” they thus become poets in their own measure and
so enter into the “true historical sense” of his or her language. Only the “spirit
of poetry” – that is, the same mind in both the poet and the readers – can be
trusted to articulate the sense of a poet’s composition. All language is thus “the
embodiment of spirit in word.” The soul that is in literature, art, and science
can only be grasped “by inward soul-intuition.”
If this is true of language in its
capacity to convey natural truths, how much more is it true when such language
is animated by the substance of supernatural truth? As in poetry the mind of
God lodges itself in the Scriptures so that it cannot be understood or
explained apart from this supernatural and spiritual element which is “part of
its very being.” The divine and the human meet together in the totality of what
is spoken and so must also be apprehended “each in the other” in order to render
the language intelligible. Or, in the language of Ricoeurean hermeneutics, to “experience”
the world of the text the reader needs to engage the text with some attitude of
belief.
Nevin believed that the outward
letter of Scripture can never exhaust its meaning and power because the mind of
God is truly in the Bible. The situation is analogous to common human speech which
involves much more than we can see or record. Our “external natural mind,” as
he explains it, forms only a small part of “our full inward existence.” Within
this, our rational mind opens “right into the spiritual world itself; and there
it is, that the real complex forces, which enter as innumerable fibres into the
constitution of our outward conscious thought and speech, are all the time at
work for this end – though we know it not.” Behind the complex web of human
language, therefore, “is the interior ocean of things, invisible, immaterial,
and eternal – the region of the universal in distinction from the single and
particular, the region of ends and causes in distinction from mere effects –
which is continually pressing, as it were, to come to some utterance in his
outward thought and speech.”
The propositions of Scripture,
then, are pregnant with a sense going beyond logic and grammar. Neither thought
nor language alone can fully fathom them. In this way, Nevin could say that the
Scriptures are mystical. Not that they are shrouded in uncertainty, rather they
possess an undivided simplicity. John’s gospel, for instance, has the logical
sharpness of a scholastic and the depth of a mystic. he was intuitive and
contemplative, seeing the object with the soul.
But how is it, asks Nevin, that
the divine life (which he regards the spirit of prophecy) can “be actually resident
in the words spoken, when the speech itself is at an end,” much less in a
printed book? In the constitution of God’s word, whether spoken or written,
nothing less in reality than a Divine life of its own, derived from the life
which it is thus made to enshrine.” The words of Christ are spirit and life. As
such they must enclose “universally the quality of His own being.” Standing in
the power and glory of the heavenly and spiritual world, they are “interiorly
pregnant also with the celestial fire of that life.”
Obviously, existential
participation in this Divine reality involves more than reading and studying
the word for Nevin. It necessitates both obedience and faith. Keeping Christ’s
commandments is nothing less than “the simple being of the soul in the element
of spirit and life thus effluent from Himself.” The ancients, according to
Nevin, attributed wisdom to the one “who had the knowledge of the good in
himself practically, as his own inmost being – something well understood, at
the same time, to be in him only by indwelling inspiration from the Almighty.”
Nevin identifies this dimension of
participation with faith. Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the quintessential
Romantic, Nevin defines faith as the organ by which the supernatural element in
Scripture is grasped. It is “an original capacity for perceiving the divine.”
There is, therefore, “an original, necessary correlation” between faith and the
objective side of revelation just as there is a correlation between the eye and
the light it sees. As in art and poetry, the object is not placed in the word
by the interpreter nor produced by the word, rather it is already in the
word, waiting to be grasped. The word of God possesses an innate potency
and life by which, as 1 Peter 1:23 says, we are born again. In the words of
Jesus, “He that is of God heareth God’s words; ye therefore hear them not,
because ye are not of God.”
