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The Letter and Spirit of Biblical Interpretation: From the Early Church to Modern Practice is unavailable, but you can change that!

For the better part of fifteen centuries, Christians read Scripture on two complementary levels—the literal and the spiritual—and their interpretation was regulated by the common doctrine passed down in the rule of faith. In the modern period, a gradual but significant shift occurred in Bible reading. The spiritual sense became marginalized in favor of the literal sense, which came to be equated...

one truth intended by the author. This does not mean that every early modern exegete emphasized the human author’s situation to the same degree. Most exegetes, however, became increasingly satisfied with pursuing a single truth in each text. Thus Erasmus, who advocated the spiritual sense, looked for the one key or point to the parables, and Calvin spoke of a “genuine sense” of the text, claiming more pointedly that to discover authorial intent is almost the only task of interpretation. Again, beginning
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