Michael Legaspi
Assistant Professor, Theology
Creighton University, United States

Michael Legaspi is a biblical scholar and a historian of biblical interpretation. After earning a degree in Near Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins, Legaspi continued his studies at Harvard, where he received a PhD in Hebrew Bible. There he completed a dissertation on the development of Enlightenment biblical criticism within the context of the German university. His interests include early Jewish and Christian exegesis, eighteenth-century intellectual history, and theologies of scripture. He has written reviews and articles for various series and periodicals, including the Journal of Religion and Society, Journal of Early Modern History, History of Universities, and the Journal of Biblical Literature. He is presently working on a book-length study of the relation between classical philology, biblical studies, and critical theology in the early modern period. This work examines the development of modern biblical criticism as a cultural project oriented toward the transformation of biblical authority in a post-confessional context. Legaspi is Assistant Professor of Theology at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, where he teaches courses on the Old Testament and the history of biblical interpretation.

Wisdom as Interpretive Skill:
Scriptural Appropriation and the Hermeneutics of Recovery
Wisdom brings practical intelligence into the compass of larger aspirations for human flourishing. It is the skill of living well. But because it is an acquired skill, wisdom has a necessary historical dimension. It seeks contact with what cultural forebears achieved, learned, and desired. A key question in the acquisition of wisdom, then, is how to appropriate knowledge of the past in ways that allow the community to meet new challenges and to use knowledge of the past to secure contemporary moral, social, and intellectual goods. There is, then, an inescapable hermeneutical dimension to the quest for wisdom, a need for the creative appropriation of inherited practices and ideas. The importance of the Bible for Western culture can hardly be overstated. Its status as the repository of wisdom for the greater part of Western history, likewise, can scarcely be refuted. A systematic study of biblical interpretation—with its many ramifications throughout the political, intellectual, and religious life of Europe and the Middle East over the course of two millennia— affords the investigator a unique opportunity to examine manifold efforts to appropriate inherited knowledge in socially, morally, and culturally constructive ways. The purpose of this project is to examine biblical interpretation itself as a strategic, wisdom-seeking activity undertaken in various historical and cultural contexts. It will offer new analytical tools and proposals for the renewal of contemporary scriptural interpretation. An extensive series of formal case studies conducted according to specific criteria lies at the center of this project. Given the distinctively communal character of wisdom, this project will concentrate upon communities of interpretation rather than on renowned individuals (as most histories of interpretation do). It will offer a systematic understanding of groups as such, attending to important factors like social location, significant institutions, linguistic orientation, religious tradition, historical pressures, and cultural aspirations. Using new analytical tools, it will show how interpreters in communities appropriated biblical texts and ideas in order to respond to historical pressures and achieve goals vital to the group. In addition to the creation of new disciplinary tools for the evaluation and historical study of interpretation as a wisdom-seeking activity, this project seeks to harvest insights from the history of interpretation which may inform and renew contemporary practice.

Thus far, Legaspi has examined materials for one of the project’s case studies on biblical interpretation as developed by Pietists and Enlightenment thinkers in eighteenth century German contexts. This case study features a comparison of two distinct but related groups attempting to recover the Bible as wisdom in self-consciously post‐confessional environments. It shows, moreover, a surprising level of continuity between the two groups, especially in the ways that each used forms of historical criticism to create a conceptual separation between the culturally contingent outer “shell” of the biblical traditions and a critically purified inner core believed to be directly relevant to modern culture. The Pietist project was based on a promethean, missionizing vision of world reform. The Enlightenment project included a cultural appropriation of biblical materials motivated, above all, by theologial and political irenicism. In coming to this conclusion, Legaspi has compiled notes on primary and secondary materials, which will form the basis for an article‐length treatment.

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