and interpretation done primarily in the public oral context of a community of interpreters.
Instead, Bible reading and interpretation was increasingly done by private readers in the silence
of his or her own mind.
Third, concerning how the Bible was interpreted. Gutenbergs technological breakthrough of
moveable type and printing press also allowed the Church as a whole to read the Bible as a
printed document, as a book. And this reading was significant in light of the fact that the Bible
was now a mass-produced printed document that could be read by different people in different
locations who, all the while, were reading the very same document made up of individual pages
that were exactly alike. No longer were Bible readers at the mercy of a copyists handwritten
mistakes; textual variants became a thing of the past to be replaced by corrected inserts and later
editions. Because of this new textual consistency of the reading source, the methods used to
interpret the Bible also underwent rapid change. The older "Bible as story" hermeneutical
methods (dominated by allegorys three and four-fold senses of Scripture) were replaced by the
"Bible as book" hermeneutical methods as more and more people had access to their own private
copies of the biblical text and were now educated enough to read it. Protestants, especially,
became the people who read the Book, while the Catholic church--in its continuing emphasis
upon interpretation through the lens of church tradition--adapted the new hermeneutical
methods much more slowly. For Protestants, the new hermeneutical methods were tailor-made to
the new Bible as book understanding.
Those monumental individuals of the Reformation--like Martin Luther and John Calvin--took
advantage of all three of the above-mentioned changes in their reading and interpretation of the
Bible. As they stood against the dogma of the Roman Catholic church they were, in reality,
standing for a new way to interpret Scripture, a new way made possible by the new technology.
Their subsequent cries of sola Scriptura and the priesthood of the believer, were cries for
hermeneutical methodologies dependent upon other criteria besides the dominant methodology
then in current use, one based upon the traditions of the Roman Catholic church. In the minds of
the Reformers, the Bible could no longer be interpreted solely by church dogma. And as we have
seen, the primary hermeneutical tool of the Roman Catholic church at that time was allegory.
Luther, once an allegorization expert, chose a new hermeneutical tool after his break with
Catholicism: the "historical" understanding. Robert M. Grant and David Tracy comment upon
the reformed Luther:
solid sense for the arming of theologians against Satan. He admits the existence
of allegories in scripture, but they are to be found only where the various authors
intended them. Therefore a historical understanding of the author and of his times
is essential to the exegete. The historical understanding, as he points out in the
preface to his commentary on Isaiah, gives us the primary meaning of the text. It
is clearly associated with knowledge of the scriptures as a whole, by means of
which the ordinary expressions and idioms of scripture can be grasped (1984:94).