This is an excellent essay connecting the dots between those who hold a nominalist metaphysic and the way they interpret scripture:
Hermeneutics: My First Step into the Catholic Church – Part II, On Metaphysics
One
interesting consequence of Ockham’s teaching is that nominalists tend to be
literalist, legalistic, and fideist. If
you deny universal law, then you must resort to the literal and specific
meaning of only one particular thing or only one particular statement alone and
without wider applicability. This often has arbitrary results. If you
deny the correlation between reason and revelation, then the laws of revelation
are less subject to being questioned. There are no universal standards by which
to judge. You cannot, in fact, expect such laws to necessarily hold up to
a reasoning or questioning process, because such laws are based upon God’s mere
arbitrary Will rather than upon any knowledge or reason. If you reject the
notion that anything coherent exists in the mind of God that corresponds to the
material creation of God, then man’s knowledge must really depend upon a sort
of blind faith that must simply be accepted without reasoning. This is because
most reasoning and questioning, by its very nature, implies universal
applicability.
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Hans Boersma, in his 2017 book, Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church, points out how modern Christians “often treat biblical interpretation as a relatively value-free endeavor, as something we’re equipped to do once we’ve acquired both the proper tools (biblical languages, an understanding of how grammar and syntax work, the ability to navigate concordances and computer programs, etc.) and a solid understanding of the right method (establishing the original text and translating it, determining authorship and original audience, studying historical and cultural context, figuring out the literary genre of the passage, and looking for themes and applicability).” But it is important to understand that this is a recent view and it is not how ancient Christian believers, teachers, theologians, and commentators interpreted Scripture through the first fifteen hundred years of church history.
The modern view focuses entirely upon method. You have to get the method right, and you can then get the “meaning extraction” right. “In other words,” as Boersma demonstrates, “the assumption is that the way to read the Bible is by following certain exegetical rules, which in turn are not affected by the way we think of how God and the world relate to each other. Metaphysics, on this assumption, doesn’t affect interpretation.”
So what do we do with this assumption? If metaphysics does affect one’s interpretation of Scripture, then we better have a coherent and properly working metaphysic.----------------------------
If you believe that words are just names that are arbitrarily assigned to things, that things do not mean or signify anything greater than their own particular existences, and that meaning is only contained within our minds and languages and not within physical reality itself, then you will not be able to help interpreting Scripture as a nominalist interprets the language of a text. However, if you believe that things do mean or symbolize something more than their own individual particulars, that meaning is both inside and outside our own minds and languages, that physical reality is endowed with its own meanings, then you will interpret Scripture quite differently.
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