Existential Summary

Meaning: In our encounter with the text
Authority: Authenticity/experience
Question: What is the decision called for?

Feminist Hermeneutics

Fiorenza makes it clear that the point of departure is not the bible as normative authority. Rather, women’s experience and their struggle for liberation becomes the locus of authority. The canon is not the Bible but the struggle. The Bible becomes a prototype, or what she calls a formative root model, from which examples and insights are taken that explain one’s struggle to find one’s place and to find solidarity with those women that are recounted in the biblical religion. Fiorenza stresses with power and pointedness the fact that all interpretation of the Bible has come from an advocacy point of view, whether that advocacy happens to be patriarchal or feminist or, I might add, black, Asian, Reformed, Wesleyan, liberal or evangelical. Fiorenza wants to argue in reconstructing her feminist hermeneutic that everyone has an advocacy position in the interpretation of the Bible. She wants to make clear what hers is and challenges all others to do the same.

David M. Scholer, “Feminist Hermeneutics and Evangelical Biblical Interpretation,” Evangelical Review of Theology 1 (January 1991): 309.

Pentecostal Hermeneutics

If the church had a more dynamic sense of God’s inspiration in the twentieth century, it would be more effective in its witness and outreach. It is well and good to protect the distinctiveness of the Bible, but to think only in terms of its inspiration as absolutely different in kind from inspiration in our time is too high a price to pay. Christians today need to have the same sense of being God-motivated and God-sent as did the biblical writers and interpreters. In a genuine sense, the difficulty of interpreting God’s record of revelation to this complex age requires as much of God’s inbreathing and wisdom as did the process of interpretation in the biblical periods.

Dewey Beegle, Scripture, Tradition, and Infallibility (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973), 309.

Pentecostal Hermeneutics

It may confidently be anticipated, as the present apostasy increases, that Christ will manifest His deity and lordship in increasing measure through miracle-signs, including healings. We are not to say, therefore, that the word is sufficient.

Henry Frost, Miraculous Healing (New York: Revell, 1939), 109-110.

Pentecostal Hermeneutics

Pentecostals, in spite of some of their excesses, are frequently praised for recapturing for the church her joyful radiance, missionary enthusiasm, and life in the Spirit. But they are at the same time noted for bad hermeneutics…First, their attitude toward Scripture regularly has included a general disregard for scientific exegesis and carefully thought-out hermeneutics. In fact, hermeneutics has simply not been a Pentecostal thing. Scripture is the Word of God and is to be obeyed. In place of scientific hermeneutics there developed a kind of pragmatic hermeneutics—obey what should be taken literally; spiritualize, allegorize, or devotionalize the rest…Secondly, it is probably fair—and important—to note that in general the Pentecostals’ experience has preceded their hermeneutics. In a sense, the Pentecostal tends to exegete his experience.

Gordon Fee, “Hermeneutics and Historical Precedent—A Major Problem in Pentecostal Hermeneutics” in Russell P. Spittler, ed., Perspectives on the New Pentecostalism (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1976), 119-122.

Neo-Orthodoxy

The neo-orthodox view is that the Bible is a fallible human book. Nevertheless, it is the instrument of God’s revelation to us, for it is a record of God’s personal revelation in Christ. Revelation, however, is personal; the Bible is not a verbally inspired revelation from God. It is merely an errant human means through which one can encounter the personal revelation who is Christ. In itself it is not the Word of God; at best, the Bible only becomes the Word of God to the individual when he encounters Christ through it.

Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible (Chicago: Moody, 1986), 175.

Homosexual Hermeneutics

It feels particularly appropriate that I should be writing this article during Holy Week, because coming out of the closet has been a resurrection experience. Every time the stone of fear is rolled away, and I can step out of the shadows of invisibility and silence into the light of daring to be seen and known and heard as a lesbian, I know once again in my bones that resurrection is real…No amount of teaching, preaching, or theologizing will convince me of the reality of the resurrection unless I have walked into the valley of the shadow of death and experienced a presence that did not let me go…I studied every Pauline passage in depth, wanting to believe that Paul was being misinterpreted by these students. While I believe there was some misinterpretation, I also concluded that I could not make Paul say everything I wanted him to say…Having come to this conclusion, I lost neither my fervor for biblical study nor my love of scripture. I was, however, both forced and freed to adopt a new hermeneutic. With a feminist hermeneutic, I did not stop with the question, “What does the Bible say about women?” but moved on to ask, “What do women have to tell us about the Bible?” I came to similar conclusions with regard to homosexuality and the Bible.

Melanie Morrison, “A Love that Won’t Let Go,” Sojourners, July 1991.

The Role of Experience in Interpretation

What we must never be encouraged to do, although all of us are guilty of it over and over, is to force Scripture to fit our experience. Our experience is too small; it’s like trying to put the ocean into a thimble. What we want is to fit into the world revealed by scripture, to swim in this vast ocean.”

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 68.

The Role of Experience in Interpretation

The emphasis on Baalism was on psychological relatedness and subjective experience…The transcendence of the deity was overcome in the ecstasy of feeling…Baalism is worship reduced to the spiritual stature of the worshiper. Its canons are that it should be interesting, relevant, and exciting…Yahwism established a form of worship which was centered in the proclamation of the word of the covenant God. The appeal was made to the will. Man’s rational intelligence was roused to attention as he was called upon to respond as a person to the will of God. In Yahwism something was said—words which called men to serve, love, obey, act responsibly, decide…The distinction between the worship of Baal and the worship of Yahweh is a distinction between approaching the will of the covenant God which could be understood and known and obeyed, and the blind life-force in nature which could only be felt, absorbed, and imitated.

Eugene Peterson, “Baalism and Yahwism Updated,” Theology for Today (July 1972), 139-141.

The Role of Experience in Interpretation

Experience alone is too flimsy a base on which to rest the Christian system. The mere fact that a psychological event has taken place in one’s brain cannot establish the truthfulness of the gospel…Religious sensation by itself can only prove itself…However unique an experience may be, it is capable of a number of radically differing interpretations. It may be only an encounter with one’s own subconscious. Those who place all their emphasis on a subjective validating process…eventually reduce the content of revelation and fit it to their taste. The central thing becomes that which comes across to me, rather than what God has done and spoken. The reason some theologians favor the use of drugs to heighten religious perception is patent. Whenever the existential cart is put before the historical horse, theology becomes a synthesis of human superstitions, and putting LSD into the communion wine is fair play!

Clark Pinnock, Set Forth Your Case (Chicago: Moody, 1967), 69-70.