The early Church engaged in a trenchant, philosophical debate over the nature of scriptural interpretation. Some writers on hermeneutical method showed great insight and perspicacity; others seemed to make less of the problem it raised than they ought. Although most held some general view of inspiration of the scriptures, it was more often over the question of interpretation that they disagreed. We shall examine one or two of the philosophical difficulties of hermeneutics which were raised by early Christians and which are debated still.

There were, of course, many areas of disagreement about how scripture ought to be interpreted but we can distinguish two major schools of thought, both of which cover a broad spectrum of ideas: the literalists and the allegorists.

a) The literalists: these were the people who believed that scripture could, somehow or other, be taken “at face value”; that there is an obvious and evident meaning of the text or, alternatively, that there is no hidden meaning.

A great literalist was Porphyry (c. 230 - c. 305), one of Christianity’s detractors. He attacked the allegorising tendency in the Church when he wrote of those “who boast that the things said plainly by Moses are riddles, treating them as divine oracles, full of hidden mysteries, and bewitching the mental judgment by then-own pretentious obscurity, and so they put forward their own interpretations” (Against the Christians, III).

What hope does ‘the hope that is in us’ (I Peter 3:15) offer to the world in which we live today? That is the question to which I will address myself.

Jesus said ‘when it is evening, you say, it will be fair weather; for the sky is red. And in the morning, it will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening. You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times’ (Mt 16:2-4).

The Pharisees and Sadducees had just asked Jesus for some extra ‘sign from heaven’, and with these words he refused it to them: sufficient signs are already there, if they choose to see them: the signs of the times. Good Pope John frequently made use of this phrase, appealing to the modem church to read correctly to day’s ‘signs of the times’. Elsewhere in the gospels Jesus is reported as prophesying extensively about ‘signs’ in the future — nearly all of them very fearful signs: earthquakes, wars, famines, and ‘all this is but the beginning of the sufferings’ (Mt 24:8). We have certainly no proof that we are now in the age when ‘the end will come’ (Mt 24:14), and it would be foolish to leap to that conclusion: Christians have tended to do so time and again in times of human disaster and have, afterwards, often been left looking a little silly. Nor can we begin to surmise what the last age, described uneschatologically, will be like when it arrives.

In a rather bleak essay, Charles Davis observed in 1970 that ‘the general verdict upon liturgical reform is that it has failed to solve the problem of worship in a secular age’ and ‘that the chief effect of the reforms has been to uncover an insoluble problem’. Any sociological response to liturgical renewal came after the late sixties as a critical reaction to changes implemented as a result of Vatican II. There was certainly no sociological participation in the demands for liturgical change prior to 1963. As a result the Conciliar reforms did not so much answer a sociological scepticism as generate one that has developed increasingly since. The attempt to relate the shape of rite, to what were perceived as the cultural and social needs of a secular modem society, merged with a wish to maximise the active participation of the laity in the liturgy, whose simplicity and clarity of form, would enable a worshipping community to develop as a witness to an increasingly sceptical society.

Pre-Conciliar forms of rite were rigid in shape, objectively secured in complex rubrics, but were considered as implausible and irrelevant to contemporary needs. The tenor of the new rites was a mixture of looser simplified rubrics, in the General Instruction ol the Roman Missal, 1969, matched to a sensitivity to pastoral and cultural needs. But this wish for some degree of adaptability (that satisfied neither radicals nor conservatives) pre-supposed some criteria of assessing changes in form as affecting local situations. If indigenization was to occur some form of systematic evaluation seemed desirable. Initially, the changes were met with indifference by sociologists of religion, who have displayed little interest in the social nature of liturgy since.