Wirkungsgeschichte: How the History of Interpretation Shapes What Texts Can Mean

Introduction: Why Reception Matters for Exegesis

Every time you open a biblical text, you do so in a room that is already furnished. The room has windows cut at certain heights; the chairs are arranged in familiar clusters; there are grooves in the floor where feet have walked, over and over, for centuries. Those grooves are Wirkungsgeschichte—literally, the “history of effects.” The term, associated above all with Hans-Georg Gadamer, names both a reality and a discipline. The reality is that Scripture has a history of impact in communities, liturgy, doctrine, law, art, politics, and personal piety, and that history conditions how we can hear the text today. The discipline is the interpreter’s cultivated awareness of that conditioning and a deliberate practice of reading with and through the tradition’s effects rather than pretending to read from nowhere (Gadamer, 2004).

For doctoral students in historiography and exegesis, Wirkungsgeschichte is not optional. It is the difference between handling texts as if they were newly minted and handling them as living words that have already done things in the world. It alters how you frame questions, how you weigh interpretations, and how you teach. It widens your evidentiary field: commentaries and grammars remain essential, but so do hymnals and iconography, ecclesial canons and political speeches, sermons and synods. And it introduces a discipline of intellectual humility. You are not the first reader here. Many before you have found nourishment—or poison—at this well. Your task is to learn to see those prior readings clearly, to judge them rightly, and to situate your own work responsibly within the stream.

This chapter introduces Wirkungsgeschichte. It clarifies the distinction between Wirkungsgeschichte and the broader field of reception history; sketches the intellectual genealogy from Gadamer and Jauss to contemporary biblical practice; proposes a method for incorporating reception into exegesis; and explores detailed case studies that show how tracking the history of interpretation materially changes the reading of specific texts. Along the way, we will engage both the promise and the peril of reception-aware exegesis, and we will close with advanced assignments calibrated to make Wirkungsgeschichte part of your scholarly reflex.

1. Concepts and Genealogy: From “Historically Effected Consciousness” to Reception Aesthetics

Gadamer coined the phrase wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein—“historically effected consciousness”—to name the inescapable truth that our understanding is always already shaped by history’s effects. We never meet a text as a blank slate; we approach from within tradition (Überlieferung), with its authorities, prejudgments, and exemplars. For Gadamer, that is not a defect to be scraped off; it is the condition of possibility for understanding. Interpretation is a fusion of horizons, where the world of the text and the world of the reader meet, and where the past’s voice resounds within the present’s questions (Gadamer, 2004). Crucially, he resisted the fantasy of a method that would extract a pure, unmediated “meaning” from behind the text and outside history. Our knowledge is dialogical and traditioned.

In literary studies, Hans Robert Jauss developed a complementary account under the banner of reception aesthetics. Works do not have a single, once-for-all “meaning”; they generate histories of reception as they encounter new horizons of expectation. To write a work’s history is to chart not just its production but also its effects on successive audiences, including moments when its horizon jars against theirs and thereby produces aesthetic and moral innovation (Jauss, 1982). Jauss’s interest was not merely descriptive. Reception history can be normative: it can teach us to value readings that expanded moral imagination, that democratized access, that generated new artistic forms.

Biblical studies absorbed both Gadamer’s and Jauss’s insights. On the theological side, Anthony Thiselton helped popularize Wirkungsgeschichte for Anglophone interpreters, arguing that trained readers should neither ignore nor absolutize tradition but learn to interrogate it—both receiving and reforming it under Scripture’s pressure (Thiselton, 2009). On the exegetical side, Ulrich Luz set the bar: in his multi-volume Matthew commentary, each pericope includes a substantial Wirkungsgeschichte section tracing the text’s effects in theology, liturgy, art, and politics—from patristic sermons to modern social movements (Luz, 2007). Complementary to such work, handbooks and series dedicated to reception history—most notably The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible—have given the field both breadth and method (Lieb, Mason, & Roberts, 2011). In New Testament studies, Markus Bockmuehl pressed for a “living memory” approach: begin not only with ancient contexts but also with early Christian use and practice, because the earliest receptions often track what the texts were written to do (Bockmuehl, 2006).

Two clarifications help at the outset. First, Wirkungsgeschichte vs. Rezeptionsgeschichte. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but they carry different accents. Wirkungsgeschichte (history of effects) is the broader hermeneutical claim that interpretation is always conditioned by the tradition’s impact and that one should study those impacts. Rezeptionsgeschichte (reception history) is often used for the more descriptive mapping of how a text has been received across time—in sermons and commentaries, art and music, politics and law (Lieb et al., 2011). Second, Wirkungsgeschichte is not a license for relativism. Precisely because tradition shapes us, we must test the tradition: not all effects are salutary; some are idolatrous. The point is not to canonize the history of interpretation, but to reckon with it responsibly.

2. Method: How to Do Wirkungsgeschichte as Part of Exegesis

In practice, integrating Wirkungsgeschichte into exegesis involves four interlocking moves. First, you pursue diachronic mapping. For a given passage, you reconstruct its major waypoints: patristic exegesis (Greek and Latin), key medieval interpretations (scholastic and monastic), Reformation-era disputes, early modern developments, modern scholarly turns, and global readings. You attend not only to commentaries but also to liturgy (lectionaries; collects), art and music (iconography; hymnody), law and politics (edicts; manifestos), and devotion (spiritualities; catechisms). Luz’s commentaries exemplify the genre; Blackwell’s “Through the Centuries” volumes (e.g., on Isaiah) do so for particular books (Luz, 2007; Sawyer, 1996).

Second, you cultivate genealogical awareness. You learn to ask why certain readings took hold. What institutional interests, philosophical assumptions, or cultural anxieties drove them? How did prior readings reposition later ones? This genealogical work is interpretive: it seeks explanation of interpretive trajectories, not just their cataloging.

Third, you practice critical reception. You make judgments about the effects you have traced. A reading that empowered the oppressed or that opened new vistas of holiness may have a prima facie claim on our attention; a reading that baptized injustice calls for repentance and correction. This critical posture is fully compatible with Gadamer: to belong to a tradition is also to argue within it (Gadamer, 2004; Thiselton, 2009).

Fourth, you return to the text itself with fresh eyes. Wirkungsgeschichte is not an end in itself. Its function is to sharpen exegesis: to expose blind spots, to retrieve neglected possibilities, to warn against well-worn ruts, and to enrich theological judgment. In effect, you allow the text to speak through a chorus of prior hearings, while you discern—not without risk—what the Spirit is saying to the churches now.

3. Case Studies: When the History of Effects Changes the Reading

3.1 “Turn the Other Cheek”: Matthew 5:38–48 in Ethics, Liturgy, and Politics

Exegesis begins with the text’s argument: Jesus places his antitheses not against Torah as divine will but against narrow construals of its intent. In the case of retaliation, lex talionis (“an eye for an eye”) was a legal principle of proportionality limiting vengeance; Jesus radicalizes the principle toward nonretaliatory generosity. He gives vivid examples—insult (the slap on the right cheek), litigation (cloak and tunic), coercive labor (the extra mile)—and culminates in the command to love enemies and pray for persecutors, grounded in the Father’s indiscriminate generosity (Matt 5:44–45).

Wirkungsgeschichte shows how explosive these verses have been. In the patristic period, interpreters wrestled with the relationship between literal obedience and wise application. Augustine, for instance, framed enemy-love within a broader virtue account in which the wise sometimes resist evil to protect the weak, while still forbearing for personal wrongs. In monastic traditions, the text fed a spirituality of patience—a training in meekness that matched the beatitudes. In medieval canon law, the verses were often read as counsels of perfection for the religious, not strict commands for rulers—a compartmentalization with far-reaching political effects (Luz, 2007).

The Reformation reopened the question. Luther’s two-kingdoms doctrine located enemy-love primarily in the sphere of the Christian person, while allowing the magistrate to wield the sword. Anabaptists refused that split, insisting on nonviolence as a corporate norm. Early modern state churches often domesticated the text, using Romans 13 (we will return to this) to trump the Sermon in matters of coercion. In the modern era, a surprisingly potent Wirkung came through Leo Tolstoy’s reading of the Sermon, which catalyzed Gandhi’s satyagraha, which in turn influenced Martin Luther King Jr. The text’s effect thus crossed confessional and even religious boundaries, producing new forms of nonviolent resistance that have profoundly marked global politics (Luz, 2007).

Seeing this history alters exegesis in at least three ways. First, it warns against the easy domestication of the Sermon—every epoch has found clever ways to blunt its edge. Second, it makes available tested practices that give the text social flesh: celled communities of nonviolence; trained habits of enemy-prayer; liturgies that rehearse forgiveness. Third, it complicates tidy theories: the tradition shows legitimate debate about the limits of nonretaliation in public justice. Wirkungsgeschichte does not settle that debate; it supplies the materials and constraints for a responsible one.

3.2 “Let Every Person Be Subject”: Romans 13:1–7 in Church and State

Few texts have had a more ambivalent Wirkung than Paul’s exhortation to be “subject to the governing authorities.” Exegetically, the paragraph belongs within Romans 12–13, where Paul sketches a cruciform ethic of nonconformity, mutual love, and peaceable living. Theologically, the passage declares that authority is from God for the good; resistance to the good order is resistance to God; rulers are to reward good and punish evil; taxes and honor are due.

Reception reveals both the text’s service to justice and its abuse. In the patristic and medieval worlds, Romans 13 underwrote a theology of order that checked anarchic violence and sacralized civic duty. Yet it also fed caesaropapist tendencies and furnished prooftexts for overreach. In the Reformation, the passage became a battlefield: Magisterial Reformers invoked it to condemn the Peasants’ War; radical movements appealed to higher obedience to God, challenging tyrants. In modern times, regimes have mobilized Romans 13 to demand compliance with oppression, while reformers have appealed to the same canon to resist unjust rule by invoking God’s prior claim and the text’s own telos—the good—as the criterion for obedience. The same Wirkung performed opposite functions, depending on which parts of the paragraph communities allowed to have normative weight (Thiselton, 2009).

Two hermeneutical lessons arise. First, Wirkungsgeschichte urges a canonical control: Romans 13 must be heard with Acts’ narrative of apostolic civil disobedience, with Revelation’s unmasking of beastly empire, and with the Sermon’s enemy-love. Second, it urges a teleological reading: Paul’s commendation of authority is not a blank check but a description of its vocation for good; when authority turns predator, the logic of the paragraph—together with the wider canon—supports principled noncompliance. Knowing how Romans 13 has been used and misused equips you to argue this point with pastoral and political specificity.

3.3 “Out of Egypt I Called My Son”: Hosea 11:1 in Matthew’s Figural World

Matthew’s use of Hosea 11:1 has been endlessly debated. Historically, Hosea refers to Israel as God’s son called from Egypt; Matthew applies the sentence figural­ly to Jesus’ return from Egypt. Modern historical critics have sometimes accused Matthew of prooftexting, wrenching Hosea from context. Wirkungsgeschichte, especially as Luz models it, shows how the church has long inhabited Matthew’s figural world and how that habit has formed Christian identity. Liturgy, lectionary, and catechesis have taught readers to see Jesus as recapitulating Israel’s story—out of Egypt, through water, into the wilderness, up a mountain to receive and deliver the true Torah (Luz, 2007). The text’s effect has been to shape a canonical imagination in which Israel’s Scripture is not negated but fulfilled by transfiguration.

Knowing this reception history sharpens exegesis. It encourages you to read Matthew 2–4 as hypertext (in Genette’s sense), a narrative that retells the exodus and wilderness to disclose who Jesus is (Genette, 1997; Hays, 2016). It warns against a flattened historicism that cannot recognize figuration as a legitimate biblical mode. It also cautions against a supersessionism that erases Israel. Well-trained reception attends both to Hosea’s original drama of covenantal love and to Matthew’s Christological claim, and it teaches students to hold both together.

3.4 The Song of Songs: Allegory, Erotics, and Devotion

The Song of Songs is a quintessential test case for Wirkungsgeschichte. The plain sense celebrates eros in richly sensuous poetry. Yet the dominant premodern reception was allegorical: the Song was read as a drama between God and Israel (Jewish) or Christ and the Church/Soul (Christian), nourishing mystical traditions at their deepest wells. The allegorical Wirkung generated a library of sermons (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Bernard of Clairvaux), an iconography of bride spirituality, and forms of devotion that sought a nuptial union with God. In the modern period, philological recovery of the Song’s literal register—its garden imagery, its mutual desire—liberated readings that honored embodied love and marital joy and that challenged prudish or misogynist piety. More recent feminist receptions have celebrated the Song’s female voice and agency, while warning against devotional uses that reinscribe passivity for women (Lieb et al., 2011).

This reception train disciplines exegesis. It guards against prematurely privatizing the Song as merely erotic lyric—its canonical placement and devotional Wirkung are facts any theological reading must address. At the same time, it chastens over-spiritualized allegory detached from the text’s embodied imagery. A wise reading learns from both: the Song is a theological celebration of embodied desire that anticipates and figures God’s covenantal love without collapsing one into the other.

3.5 Isaiah 53: The Suffering Servant Through the Centuries

If any Old Testament text has generated a massive Wirkungsgeschichte across synagogue and church, it is Isaiah 52:13–53:12. Jewish receptions have been diverse: the servant as Israel, as a righteous remnant, as a prophetic figure; Christian receptions, early and late, have read the poem as prophecy of Christ’s passion. The text’s effects are visible in patristic catechesis, in medieval passion devotion, in Handel’s Messiah, in modern atonement debates, and in art and hymnody across cultures. John F. A. Sawyer’s appropriately titled The Fifth Gospel tracks how Isaiah shaped Christian imagination—sometimes to helpfully center cruciform faith, sometimes to fuel anti-Jewish polemic that must be repudiated (Sawyer, 1996). Reception-aware exegesis learns both a habit of figural piety and a warning about how powerful texts can be turned into weapons against living neighbors.

3.6 The Open Ending of Mark: Text, Tradition, and the Church’s Voice

As noted in the previous chapter, the earliest witnesses to Mark end at 16:8. Yet the history of effects includes the church’s tendency to read Mark with the Easter appearances of Matthew, Luke, and John—indeed, the liturgy hardly ever lets Mark’s open ending stand alone. The longer ending of Mark (16:9–20) is itself a Wirkung: a textual attempt to provide the narrative closure the wider canon supplied. Reception history here clarifies the pastorally and theologically appropriate move: honor the textual evidence—teach 16:8 as Mark’s likely end—but also honor the canonical ensemble through which the church has confessed Easter faith. Wirkungsgeschichte disciplines both desires, the critical and the confessional, so that neither silences the other (Thiselton, 2009; Bockmuehl, 2006).

4. What Wirkungsgeschichte Gives—and Where It Can Mislead

The gains are substantive. First, Wirkungsgeschichte expands the archive. It trains you to treat hymnody, icons, sermons, and civic uses of Scripture as data for exegesis, not as curiosities. Second, it forms virtues of humility and charity. You will regularly discover that earlier readers saw things you have overlooked; you will also learn to critique what they could not see—sometimes because they were captive to their age’s sins. Third, it makes exegesis ecclesial and public. You are not just explaining ancient sentences; you are participating in a living conversation that has shaped saints and cities, martyrs and movements.

There are real risks. Reception can turn into antiquarianism, a parade of interesting uses with no normative judgment. Or it can become triumphalism, baptizing “the tradition” as if it were a single, univocal thing, thereby foreclosing reform. Or it can license presentism, cherry-picking past voices that confirm our current program. The antidotes are methodological. Keep returning to the text itself; use canon as a horizon that both permits and checks figural play; insist on ethical criteria in reception—what protected the vulnerable and told the truth about God and neighbor has prima facie claim—and be explicit about your theological commitments and the community within which you read (Gadamer, 2004; Thiselton, 2009; Lieb et al., 2011).

5. Practicing Wirkungsgeschichte: Tools and Tactics for Doctoral Work

In concrete terms, doctoral students should develop research habits that make reception integral to their workflow. When you choose a pericope, sketch a timeline of its use across five or six eras. Read at least one patristic witness, one medieval (scholastic or monastic), one Reformation (from different sides if relevant), and two or three modern and global readings. Consult liturgy—where is this text appointed? What prayers accompany it? Look at art—what scenes are favored? What is omitted? Listen to music—what hymns and oratorios have carried this text to the bloodstream of the faithful? Then, in writing your exegesis, create a dialogue: show how these effects constrain or stimulate your reading; name which receptions you receive and why; which you reject and why; and how your proposals might themselves be accountable to the church’s future reception.

Two meta-cautions: first, be curatorial. The history of effects is vast; your goal is not exhaustive catalog but representative depth. Second, be bilingual—able to speak both the language of historical criticism and the language of theological judgment. Wirkungsgeschichte is not a replacement for either; it is a way to hold them together.

6. Worked Dossier: The Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55) as a Lens

One brief dossier will show how the method works. Begin with the text. Mary’s song is a tapestry of biblical echoes (Hannah’s song; psalms of reversal), structured as blessing and proclamation: God casts down the mighty, lifts the lowly, fills the hungry, and sends the rich away empty. Its theology is covenantal and eschatological—mercy to Abraham’s seed, now happening in Mary’s womb.

Trace the effects. In patristic and medieval piety, the Magnificat became a daily canticle (Vespers), forming a people whose evening voice is the voice of a poor woman announcing the reversal of the world. In monastic exegesis, its pairing with Hannah’s song schooled readers in figural hearing. In the Reformation, it became a site of Marian debates yet remained in Lutheran and Anglican liturgies, showing how Wirkung can transcend polemic. In modern liberation receptions, the song became a banner for the poor; in certain authoritarian contexts, its public recitation was even curtailed because of its subversive force. In art and music, the Magnificat has amplified female agency and eschatological hope (Lieb et al., 2011; Bockmuehl, 2006).

Return to exegesis. Knowing this Wirkung presses two claims. First, you cannot responsibly read the song as a merely private devotion. Its canonical and liturgical use has trained the church to hear it as public theology—about divine justice enacted in history. Second, the tradition’s capacity to carry the song liturgically across confessional divides urges you to resist reductive readings that make it a partisan manifesto. Its effects have nourished both personal holiness and public courage; a wise reception-aware exegesis will show how the song does both.

7. Assignments: Training Reception into Your Craft

Because Wirkungsgeschichte is a habit, not simply a concept, this course asks you to practice it with rigor. Choose a passage central to your research area—Genesis 22, Psalm 22, Isaiah 53, Matthew 16:13–20, John 20:24–29, Romans 13, Revelation 12—and produce a reception dossier that moves across at least five eras and three media (commentary, liturgy, art/music). Situate each reception in its context; assess its theological and ethical fruit; and integrate your findings into a final exegetical essay in which reception does not sit in a separate section but conditions your argument from start to finish.

In a second exercise, select one non-commentary medium—for example, a major hymn or oratorio, a visual cycle, or a legal/political text—and analyze how it construes the passage’s meaning and propagates that construal. For instance, how does Messiah teach Isaiah 40 and 53? How does an icon of the Transfiguration teach Luke 9? How did a confessional document deploy Romans 3 or Galatians 2, and with what ecclesial effects?

Finally, write a methodological reflection (2,000–2,500 words) naming your default interpretive tradition(s), their strengths and blind spots, and the virtues and vices you have observed in their use of Scripture. Articulate concrete pledges for your own work: which receptions will you consciously attend to? Which will you resist, and on what grounds? How will you make your exegesis accountable to the global church’s voices and to communities outside the academy?

Conclusion: Reading with the Living and the Dead

Wirkungsgeschichte is the discipline of reading Scripture with the living and the dead. It is a confession that God’s Word has already worked—to save and to judge, to heal and sometimes, by our sin, to harden—and that those workings rightly bear on how we read now. For doctoral exegetes, it is also a summons to courage. You will discover effects that grieve you: texts pressed into the service of oppression; saints who could not see what seems obvious to you. Do not look away. Learn what those patterns teach about sin’s tenacity and the need for constant reform. You will also discover effects that humble and gladden: readings that open the text like a window; practices that embody its music; martyrs and mothers and artisans whose lives were shaped by this very pericope. Receive those gifts with gratitude, and let them tutor your imagination.

In the end, Wirkungsgeschichte returns you to the text with fuller company and sharper ears. You will still parse verbs, trace syntax, and weigh arguments; you will still map sources and argue about redaction. But you will do so as one who knows that meaning is not only what a sentence might have meant in an ancient street but also what it has already done in the long obedience of the church. That knowledge is not a burden. It is a gift—an invitation to take your place in the conversation with reverence, clarity, and hope.

References

Bockmuehl, M. (2006). Seeing the word: Refocusing New Testament study. Baker Academic.

Gadamer, H.-G. (2004). Truth and method (2nd rev. ed., J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 1960)

Genette, G. (1997). Palimpsests: Literature in the second degree (C. Newman & C. Doubinsky, Trans.). University of Nebraska Press.

Hays, R. B. (2016). Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels. Baylor University Press.

Jauss, H. R. (1982). Toward an aesthetic of reception (T. Bahti, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.

Lieb, M., Mason, E., & Roberts, J. (Eds.). (2011). The Oxford handbook of the reception history of the Bible. Oxford University Press.

Luz, U. (2007). Matthew 1–7: A commentary (J. E. Crouch, Trans.). Fortress Press.

Sawyer, J. F. A. (1996). The fifth gospel: Isaiah in the history of Christianity. Cambridge University Press.

Thiselton, A. C. (2009). Hermeneutics: An introduction. Wm. B. Eerdmans.