Appealing to Scripture in Moral Debate: Five Hermeneutical Rules

Appealing to Scripture in Moral Debate: Five Hermeneutical Rules. By Charles H. Cosgrove. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002. viii + 224 pp. $22.00 (paper).

Appealing to Scripture in Moral Debate offers some useful advice in a particularly challenging area of biblical inteipretation. The author argues for the value of clear rules, not as constraining debate, but as encouraging authors to practice consistency of argument and seek mutual intelligibility as we wrestle with both the meaning of Scripture and the ethical challenges of our times. The rules will not resolve all our conflicts; there will continue to be differences both in the exegesis of Scripture and in its application to new contexts and questions. But they can improve the quality of our conversation.

Cosgrove's five rules, or "hermeneutical assumptions," as he also calls them, are: (1) give the purpose of biblical laws, insofar as it can be discerned, a certain priority over the laws themselves, (2) assert the necessity of analogical thinking in making connections between antiquity and today, (3) privilege those aspects of the scriptural witness that stand on the side of the poor and oppressed, (4) specify that Scripture s scope, as Scripture, does not extend to matters open to scientific investigation, and (5) call for adjudication among the variety of possible interpretations on the basis of moral-theological concerns. The author handles each of these topics with a considerable richness of nuance and with full awareness that some of them involve a certain circularity of reasoning.

The heritage of biblical scholarship in which Cosgrove works is primarily Protestant, but this does not, in itself, rule out the Anglican or Roman Catholic reader. Cosgrove acknowledges that others will want to specify somewhat different rules and that his five are not the only possible ones. In fact, he offers, in an appendix, a list of several others that are in current use and expresses a hope that the present work will encourage others to make their presuppositions explicit and clear (p. 181).

To what extent are Cosgrove's rules likely to be useful specifically to Anglicans? There is much that will seem familiar. Some of the rules echo, in more modern terms, perspectives characteristic of the English Reformation and embodied in the works of authors like Richard Hooker: for example, the need to distinguish between scriptural rules that remain in force and those that do not; the willingness to accept other modes of knowing alongside Scripture; a certain refusal to expect of the Bible a detailed, predetermined blueprint for human life and ecclesiastical teaching. Others are newer, particularly the liberationist emphasis on what Cosgrove calls "countercultural witness"-a perspective that would probably have seemed quite foreign to earlier theological generations of our established-church tradition. One significant element Anglican readers will not find here is the notion of common prayer as a principal context for hearing and understanding Scripture. Cosgrove does, however, evince a lively sense of the Christian community as a living, growing, changing reality in contrast to the Puritan hope of finding such clear and detailed definitions of doctrine and ethics in Scripture that the church need only obey.

Theologians, ethicists, and biblical scholars working in the contemporary ecumenical context form Cosgroves primary audience. But while Cosgrove's reasoning is sometimes dense, he writes clearly; and clergy as well as academic theologians will find the book accessible and highly relevant as we all continue our efforts to understand, compare, and weigh conflicting arguments in our current ethical conflicts.

L. WILLIAM COUNTRYMAN

The Church Divinity School of the Pacific

Berkeley, California

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Spring 2004
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