Christ-centered reading

For one thing, seeing Christ as central compels us to always try to make sense of everyting we read in any part of scripture in light of our larger knowledge of who God is in Jesus Christ. We do not then read scripture devotionally to try to find tidbits there that are "meaningful to" or that "speak to" us, wherever we are in our personal subjective spiritual experiences. We do not read scripture as detached historians trying to judge its technical accuracy in recounting events. We do not read scripture as a vast collection of infallible propositions whose meanings and implications can be understood on their own particular terms. We only, always, and everywhere read scripture in view of its real subject matter: Jesus Christ...Thus, the great Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon (1834-92) wrote, "O you who open your Bibles and want to understand a text, the way to get into the meaning of a text is through the door, Christ."

Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2011), 98

Biblical Inerrancy and the Licona Controversy, Christian News

Christianity Today just wrote up a brief article concerning the controversy swirling around Michael Licona and his interpretation of Matthew 27:51-54 in his 700 page volume defending the historical, physical resurrection of Jesus, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach. You can read more about the controversy - as well as a critique of Licona's interpretation here: Biblical Inerrancy and the Licona Controversy, Christian News. Personally, it's sad that what is widely acknowledged (even by Licona's critics) to be a very capable, thorough, and orthodox work is being called into question simply because he offers a symbolic/apocalyptic interpretation of four verses from Matthew which have caused scholars to scratch their heads for years.

The issue, of course, is bigger than this particular text. The issue is has really become about Licona's committment to the innerancy of scripture and what it means to believe that scripture is "without error." Can a person hold to the inerrancy of scripture without adopting a rigid literalism regarding certain texts? The above article quotes the Chicago statement on inerrancy:

Article XVIII of the Chicago Statement makes this point with precision: “We
affirm that the text of the Scripture is to be interpreted by
grammatico-historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and
devices, and that Scripture is to interpret Scripture. We deny the legitimacy of
any treatment of the text or quest for sources lying behind it that leads to
relativizing, dehistoricizing, or discounting its teaching, or rejecting its
claims to authorship.” Furthermore, the Chicago Statement requires that “history
must be treated as history.”

But this quote highlights a problem faced regularly in our exegesis of an inerrant text. A committment to grammatico-historical exegesis requires that we do in fact take into account the literary forms and devices of scripture - including figurative or symbolic language. Most everyone would agree that Jehovah's Witnesses are not being faithful to the intent of scripture to take the number 144,000 literally in the book of Revelation. But it's pretty noncontroversial (in most circles) to identify the language of Revelation as largely symbolic. But what about other genres like the gospels?  Licona isn't questioning whether the text of Matthew 27 is true. He's questioning whether or not a literalistic interpretation is faithful to the text's intent. It's not as simple as saying, "I believe in inerrancy, so therefore, I believe the text to be literally true." The word "literally" has been smuggled into the definition and has had the effect of dramatically changing the definition. The bumper sticker cliche "The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it." may sound good to some. But it is not only naive, it also (ironically) undermines the authority of the text.  A committment to inerrancy actually calls us to study and discuss the literary meaning of a text not just the literal meaning of a text.  A committment to inerrancy calls us to robust and humble hermeneutics where Christians may actually disagree with how to take certain texts while agreeing theologically with each other about what scripture is. We simply disagree with the best way to understand it.

Maybe Licona's right and maybe he's wrong on this text.  But what this controversy reveals is the danger of a simplistic and overly literalistic understanding of inerrancy.  It is frightening that some are calling for him to be kicked out of the ETS simply because he doesn't walk lock-step (on this ONE text) with this rigid definition of inerrancy. My goodness. Is this all that it takes for us to disfellowship each other? Have mercy. (It's worth noting, by the way, that Licona is now rather agnostic about the text in question. He says that it may be literal or figurative. But apparently that's not good enough for some of his inquisitors.) I am committed to inerrancy, but it's no wonder that so many young theologians and students are so cynical about this whole issue in light of these types of witch hunts.

How do you say "balls of gold" in French? - Fiction - Salon.com

How do you say "balls of gold" in French? - Fiction - Salon.com

This is a nice article on the difficulties and subtleties of translating fiction while attempting to remain faithful to the author's intended meaning.

My favorite line: “You start with a text just like a musician starts with a composition, a work of music. And then your job is to play it for the listener so that they hear what the composer or the author intended. It takes a lot of practice to be able to do that.”

The Double-Love Hermeneutic

Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand it at all.  Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived, nor is he lying in any way...However...if he is deceived in an interpretation which builds up charity...he is deceived in the same way as a man who leaves a road by mistake but passes through a field to the same place toward which the road itself leads.

Augustine in On Christian Doctrine from Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement, 142

Romantic Hermeneutics

1. Deregionalization - Schleiermacher set out to develop a general hermeneutics that would apply to culturally significant texts regardless of their subject matter.  He sought to identify the general features of interpretation that were common to rather than distinctive of the various disciplines.

2. The Hermeneutical Circle - The notion that the parts always have to be interpreted in terms of the whole--and vice versa.

3. Psychologism - It begins with the assumption that language is primarily to be understood as the outer expression of the inner psychic life.  This hermeneutics is often labeled "romantic" because it shares this expressivism with the wider cultural traditions call romanticism.  The goal of interpretation, then, is to reverse the process of writing, to work back from the outer expression to the inner experience, to reconstruct, re-create, refeel, reexperience, relive that inner experience.

4. Objectivism - Dilthey is especially insistent that interpretation be "scientific" so that its findings may be "objective" and rise to the level of "universal validity."  The prestige and power of the natural sciences seem to suggest that rational respectability requires that the disciplines that relate to distinctly human meaning (Geisteswissenschaften, humanities, human sciences) must aspire to a comparable objectivity, especially against the possibility of some sort of historical relativism.

Westphal, Whose Community? Which Interpretation? (Kindle Ed.)

Humility in the Right Location

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition . . . [and] settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 31-32

John Calvin and Multiple Meanings

Scripture, they say, is fertile and thus bears multiple meanings. I acknowledge that Scripture is the most rich and inexhaustible fount of all wisdom. But I deny that its fertility consists in the various meanings which anyone may fasten to it at his pleasure. Therefore let us know that the true meaning of Scripture is the genuine and simple one [verum sensum scripturae, qui germanus et simplex], and let us embrace and hold it tightly. Let us not merely neglect as doubtful, but boldly set aside as deadly corruptions, those pretended expositions which lead us away from the literal sense.

From his commentary on Galatians in Greene-McCreight, K. (1999). Ad Litteram: How Augustine, Calvin, and Barth Read the "Plain Sense" of Genesis 1-3. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing. Pg. 97

Morality of Literary Understanding

...With regard to the moralityof literary understanding, Augustine advocates what is for him the prime hermeneutical virtue, namely, charity. This is a far cry fromt eh typical modern appraoch that puts a premium on distrust and suspicion, a strategy best exemplified perhaps by an essay by W.K. Clifford entitled "The Ethics of Belief." Clifford argues that it is immoral to believe something unless you first have sufficient evidence or proof: "To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." In contrast, Augustine's treatise On the Usefulness of Belief states that "nothing would remain stable in human society if we determined to believe nothing that we could not scientifically establish." With regard to reading, it "is most honorable to believe that an author was a good man, whose writings were inteded to benefit the human race and posterity." The first hermeneutic reflex, therefore, should be charity towards the author. If we come to a text believing that there is nothing in it, we are likely to go away as empty as we come. Augustine encourages readers to approach texts, paricularly the classics and especially the Scriptures, in the expectation that they contain something valuable and true...

...There is something in the text that is not of the reader's own making. The believing reader must not violate but venerate this "other." For readers come not only to knoweldge but also to self-knowledge when they allow the text to have its say. The interpretive virtues that I will commend throughout this work also figure among the cardinal virtues of Christian theology: faith, hope, love, and humility. These are the same virtues that make society possible. Life together is largely interpretation; good hermeneutics makes good neighbors. The Golden Rule, for hermeneutics and ethics alike, is to treat significant others--texts, persons, God--with love and respect.

Kevin Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 32

Messy Hermeneutics

Interpretation is not an exact science. Understanding--be it of God, works of art, ourselves, or others--is both messier and more provisional than explanations that work with causal laws. Why should this be so? Three reasons: 1) because what we're trying to understand is often singular and unique, 2) because meaning is a matter of seeing the parts in relation to larger wholes of which finite human interpreters have only partial glimpses, and 3) because interpreters often have vested interests for seeing things in one way rather than another and lack the requisite virtues to see things as they really are coram Deo (before God).

Kevin Vanhoozer, Everyday Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 36

"Natural" Readings

...What seems "ordinary" or "natural" as a reading of a particular biblical text may owe everything to habituation within a tradition (Think of the medieval reading of "repent" as "do penance"!) and nothing to actual awareness of what Paul was talking about. The legend that makes the point most strikingly is the Calvinist commentator who headed the story of Salome's dance and the Baptist's beheading as "the dangers of dancing." That seemed natural enough at the time.

N.T. Wright, Justification (Downers Grove: IVP, 2009), 83.

C.S. Lewis

"An author doesn't necessarily understand the meaning of his own story better than anyone else."

In a letter to professor Clyde S. Kilby about his novel Til We Have Faces. 10 Feb 1957

W.H. Lewis ed. The Letters of C.S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World Inc., 1966) 273.

Literal/Historical-Grammatical Summary

Meaning: In the text
Authority: The text (Author's Intended Meaning)
Question: What does the text say?

Homosexual Hermeneutics

The crux of the matter, it seems to me, is simply that the Bible has no sexual ethic. There is no biblical sex ethic. Instead, it exhibits a variety of sexual mores, some of which changed over the thousand year span of biblical history. Mores are unreflective customs accepted by a given community. Many of the practices that the Bible prohibits, we allow, and many that it allows, we prohibit. The Bible knows only a love ethic, which is constantly being brought to bear on whatever sexual mores are dominant in any given country, or culture, or period…Our moral task, then, is to apply Jesus’ love ethic to whatever sexual mores are prevalent in a given culture. This doesn’t mean everything goes. It means that everything is to be critiqued by Jesus’ love commandment…Approached from the point of view of the Spirit rather than the letter, the question ceases to be “What does Scripture command?” and becomes “What is the Word that the Spirit speaks to the churches now, in the light of Scripture, tradition, theology, and, yes, psychology, genetics, anthropology, and biology?” We can’t continue to build ethics on the basis of bad science.

Walter Wink, “Homosexuality and the Bible,” www.soulforce.org/article/homosexuality-bible-walter-wink, 9-10.

Emerging Church Hermeneutics

Our interpretations reveal less about God or the Bible than they do about ourselves. They reveal what we want to defend, what we want to attack, what we want to ignore, what we’re unwilling to question.

Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christian, 50.

Author's Intention

All we know of the author’s intention is what the author did express in the text, not what he planned to say but did not express. Our knowledge of the author’s plan (intention) is limited to the inspired text itself. So to speak of an intention which did not get expressed is to shift the locus of authority from the text to the author’s mind behind the text…Finally, the proper meaning of the intention of the author is the expressed meaning in the text. Just as we do not say that the beauty is behind the painting, so the hermeneutically discoverable meaning is not located behind the text in the author’s intention. Rather, the meaning is expressed in the text the way beauty is expressed in the pigments on the canvas of a painting. The misuse of the word intention, to stand for the purpose (why) of the author, rather than for the meaning (what) of the author, often leads to unorthodox conclusions.

Geisler in Zuck, Rightly Divided (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1996), 144.

Authority of Scripture

Once you can make scripture stand on its hind legs and dance a jig, it becomes a tame pet rather than a roaring lion. It is no longer “authoritative” in any strict sense; that is, it may be cited as though in “proof” of some point or other, but it is not leading the way, energizing the church with the fresh breath of God himself. The question must always be asked, whether scripture is being used to serve an existing theology or vice versa.

N.T. Wright, The Last Word (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2005), 70

Feminist Hermeneutics

We must be prepared to accept the reality of aspect of the Bible with which we disagree. An example is the masculo-centric language and general male chauvinist attitudes we find in the Bible. The Bible must not be forgiven at this point; it must be defeated…for the present we must be firm in our argument against such evils or limitations as they are found in the Bible, for example, refusing to use any such offending passages in liturgical expressions without rewording them into language that shows full appreciation for women as well as men.

J.L. Hardegree

Preunderstandings

If God has revealed truth in the Bible, then it seems reasonable also that He has made us capable of apprehending that truth, or at least some measure of it. Thus, though we inevitably bring preunderstandings to the texts we seek to interpret, this does not mean that we cannot apprehend the meaning they impart…Since we accept the Bible’s authority, we remain open to correction by its message. There are ways to verify interpretations or, at least, to validate some interpretive options as more likely than others. It is not a matter of simply throwing the dice. There is a wide variety of methods available to help us find what the original texts most likely meant to their initial readers. Every time we alter our preunderstanding as the result of our interaction with the text we demonstrate that the process has objective constraints, otherwise, no change would occur; we would remain forever entombed in our prior commitments.

Klein et al in Zuck, Rightly Divided (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1996), 80-81.

Common Sense Hermeneutics

If God has implanted in our rational nature the fundamental principles of the hermeneutical art, then we may reasonably suppose that when He addresses a revelation to us, He intends and expects that we shall interpret it in accordance with the laws of that nature which He has given us.

Stuart in Roy Zuck, Rightly Divided (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1996), 57.

Common Sense Hermeneutics

The principles of interpretation, as to their substantial and essential elements, are no invention of man, no product of his effort and learned skill. No, they can scarcely be said with truth to have been discovered by him. They are coeval with our nature. They were known to the antediluvians. They were practiced upon in the garden of Eden by the progenitors of our race. Ever since man was created and endowed with the powers of speech, and made a communicative, social being, he has had occasion to practice upon the principles of interpretation and has actually done so…Interpretation, then, in its basic or fundamental principles, is a native art, if I may so speak. It is coeval with the power of uttering words. It is of course a universal art; it is common to all nations, barbarous as well as civilized.

Stuart in Roy Zuck, Rightly Divided (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1996), 54.