Theological Foundations

A question about hermeneutics:
I've done some research on the topic of hermeneutics. What I found has helped me to narrow down this complicated application. However my research has also made me much more cautious of relying on only one source for true Catholic interpretation. My Question now is:  How far out from the interpretation of Sacred Scripture itself can we trust commentaries?   Am I correct in saying that the Pope's Theology of the Body is a Catholic hermeneutic interpretation of Scripture?  Can we trust a commentary on the Pope's Theology of the Body to also be in harmony with the" spirit of the Church's interpretation"?  Can there be a hermeneutic interpretation of a hermeneutic interpretation? Or would that just be opinion and suggestions on a hermeneutic interpretation? Sorry I sound like I'm talking in circles!

Some background found by the questioner:
  From the Catholic Encyclopedia online: which is the 1910 edition.

...And the results flowing from the application of the principles of hermeneutics are not less important than those derived by means of the formal laws of logic, since the controversies between Jews and Christians, between Christians and Rationalists, between Catholics and  Protestants, are in the end brought back to hermeneutic questions....

  ....If the interpreter wishes to fully understand the writer, he must be guided by these quasi-criteria of the author's meaning: his language, his train of thought or the context, and his psychological and historical condition at the time of writing. Hence flows the first and highest principle of hermeneutics: Find the sense of a book by way of its language (grammatically and philologically), by way of the rules of logic (from the context), and by way of the writer's mental and external condition. Expressing the same truth negatively, we may say that any meaning of a passage which does not agree with its grammar, its context, and the internal and external conditions of its author, cannot be the true sense of the writer. In the case of Scripture, the fact of its inspiration and of its authentic interpretation by the Church must be added to the three common criteria of interpretation; hence any meaning not in keeping with Scriptural grammar, context, or the concrete conditions of the Biblical writers, or not in harmony with the fact of inspiration and the spirit of the Church's interpretation, cannot be the true sense of Scripture. Regard to only the first three of these criteria renders the exegesis rationalistic; observance of the first four is a recognition of the specific Christian doctrine of Biblical inspiration; but it is only the conjunction of the fifth with the other four that gives birth to true Catholic exegesis without destroying the rational and simply Christian character of the interpretation. .....

  ....These are the sources of the rules of universal hermeneutics; in the case of the Sacred Scriptures, the scientific interpreter must be well-grounded in the so-called Sacred or Biblical language; he must be well-versed in Biblical history, archaeology, and geography; he should know the various Christian dogmas bearing on the Bible and their history; finally he must be instructed in patrology, ecclesiastical history, and Biblical literature. Before entering on the explanation of any particular book of Scripture, the commentator must also be versed in the dogmatic, moral, philosophical, and scientific questions connected with his particular subject. In the light of these many requirements, one easily understands why it is so hard to find commentaries which are fully satisfactory, and one also realized the need of reading several commentaries before one can claim fully to understand the Scriptures or any part thereof. ....

Comment from Jack McBride:
Fr. Raymond Brown has what I think is a good article on Hermeneutics in chpt. 71, pgs. 605-623 of the Jerome Biblical Commentary.

Answer from Fr. Kevin Holmes, instructor of this course:
>>> My Question now is: How far out from the interpretation of Sacred Scripture itself can we trust commentaries?

This is a very important question. As the question suggests, not all commentaries are equally reliable. The first point to be made is that there is no such thing as "the interpretation of Scripture itself." Anytime anyone says anything beyond the actual text of Scripture, there is some interpretation going on. Even if someone used ONLY Scriptural texts but chose certain passages to put together in a certain sequence, there would be a certain interpretation involved. So there is no guarantee that there will be one straight-forward meaning of any passage that is universally acknowledged and will reliably be presented in every commentary.

Someone in an RCIA meeting once asked me where he could find "the Catholic interpretation of Scripture" -- meaning a book that would give the Catholic interpretation of each chapter and verse of the Bible. The answer is that there is no such book. Certainly, there are many reliably settled interpretations of particular passage (as, for example, "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church"), but there is no compendium containing all of these. Some passages of Scripture can authentically be interpreted in several different ways (for instance, the Parable of the Good Samaritan is a moral teaching about charity, but it is also an allegorical description of the redemptive work of Jesus Christ). Other passages (like some of the legal regulations in the Book of Deuteronomy, for example) have never been held to have any particular meaning (apart from the literal rule given to the Israelites).

The "bottom line" answer to your question is: every commentary must be judged by its fidelity to the Faith as it is held and preached by the living Magisterium.

>>> Am I correct in saying that the Pope's Theology of the Body is a Catholic hermeneutic interpretation of Scripture?

We could say that Pope John Paul is offering new insights into passages of Sacred Scipture by using an anthropological hermeneutic, that is, an interpretaton that comes from his understanding of the human person. But you could say the same thing without using the word "hermeneutic" too.

>>>Can we trust a commentary on the Pope's Theology of the Body to also be in harmony with the" spirit of the Church's interpretation"?

Yes. First because of the divine help promised to the one holding his office. Even if the Pope does not teach something while invoking the gift of infallibility, we have the general confidence that his teaching is trustworthy. We would not expect infallibility to be invoked here because Pope John Paul was not so much defining a new teaching as we was offering new and richer insight into traditional teaching . . . which is a second reason for finding this teaching trustworthy. And a third reason is that when we (as serious believers, with open minds and hearts) read what Pope John Paul writes on the theology of the body, it strikes us as beautiful, true and helpful.

>>>Can there be a hermeneutic interpretation of a hermeneutic interpretation? Or would that just be opinion and suggestions on a hermeneutic interpretation? Sorry I sound like I'm talking in circles!

Maybe you are a little too much in love with the word "hermeneutic." A hermeneutic usually denotes a rather comprehensive interpretive "key" that is applied to a whole written text. So you could (unfortunately) use a "Marxist hermeneutic" as a way to look at the New Testament. Within that, you would have many particular interpretations of individual texts . . . but those wouldn't be "new hermeneutics." You could also apply a hermeneutic to Marxism itself (for example, trying to read Das Kapital in terms of unresolved sexual issues that Karl Marx might have had) . . . but you wouldn't really get to this from the text of Sacred Scripture. Hermeneutics really has to do with the interpretation of a text; it doesn't make much sense to talk about the interpretation of an interpretation.