The Text Itself

One of my stranger hobbies is literary criticism. I really enjoy tearing into texts layer by layer, imagining narratives from different angles, the works. During my forays into criticism, I've become acquainted with several different critical theories or 'lenses'. A lens is, to put it simply, a way of thinking about a text. There's a historical lens, an African-American lens, and, a personal favorite, the psychoanalytic lens. Each one represents a distinct school of thought that places emphasis on specific aspects of textual analysis. Everyone has a favorite, and to a certain extent, that favorite can become a crutch.

The reason I bring this up is because our buddy Martin Luther was a hardcore literary critic. His poison, unlike my penchant for science fiction, was the New Testament. Just like every other literary critic out there, Luther had a favorite lens: structuralism. The battle cry of structuralism is "The Text Itself". In other words, Luther, with his fellow structuralists, believed that all that was necessary to understand the true meaning of any narrative were the words that were on the page. Luther appeared to have become obsessed with the notion.

Definition of Structuralism

You can see this in his sermon Babylonian Captivity of the Church, where he picks apart Christ's words at the Last Supper in two different languages (German and Latin) to get to their meaning. At one point, in discussing a concept he doesn't quite understand himself, he says that "in clinging simply to his (Christ's) words," he has to accept it.

Structuralism, in my limited experience, is useful- but only to a point. Clinging to "the text itself" can yield amazing insights, but it excludes entirely authorial intent, historical context and any other non-textual influences that might have bearing on any narrative. In Luther's case, I think he got a bit tangled up in "the text itself". Even in just the sermon cited above, he seems to run into problems that appeals to syntax can't solve. The truth is, nothing is written in a vacuum. Especially with regards to an ancient text, the words on the page can only take you so far in understanding their meaning.

Luther clearly understood that there was more to be uncovered in the Bible he loved so dearly, he just suffered from the lack of hundreds of years of development of critical theories. If only he could see us now...

Structuralism Credit
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