Hermeneutic of Love

Whoever, therefore, thinks 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 them at all.

Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, in George Montague, Understanding the Bible, 47

Exegesis is a dust cloth...

But, inconvenient or not, we are stuck with the necessity of exegesis. We have a written word to read and attend to. It is God's word, or so we believe, and we had better get it right. Exegesis is the care we give to getting the words right. Exegesis is foundational to Christian spirituality. Foundations disappear from view as a building is constructed, but if the builders don't build a solid foundation, their building doesn't last long.

Because we speak our language so casually, it is easy to fall into the habit of treating it casually. But language is persistently difficult to understand. We spend our early lives leaning the language, and just when we think we have it mastered our spouse says, "You don't understand a thing I'm saying, do you?" We teach our children to talk, and just about the time we think they might be getting it, they quit talking to us; and when we overhear them talking to their friends, we find we can't understand more than one out of every eight or nine words they say. A close relationship doesn't guarentee understanding. A long affection doesn't guarantee understanding. In fact, the closer we are to another and the more intimate our relations, the more care we must exercise to hear accurately, to understand thoroughly, to answer appropriately.

Which is to say, the more "spiritual" we become, the more care we must give to exegesis. The more mature we become in the Christian faith, the more exegetically rigorous we must become. THis is not a task from which we graduate. These words given to us in our Spiritures are constantly getting overlaid with personal preferences, cultural assumptions, sin distortions, and ignorant guesses and pollute the text. The pollutants are always in the air, gathering dust on our Bibles, corroding our use of the language, especially the language of faith. Exegesis is a dust cloth, a scrub brush, or even a Q-tip for keeping the words clean.

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book, 53

Eating the Word

Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body. Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus' name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book, page 18

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.

Community Hermeneutics

Reading within community occurs as we approach the text conscious that we are participants in the one faith community that spans the ages. This consciousness involves recognizing the theological heritage within which we stand as contemporary readers of the text. Because we come to the text as participants in a trajectory of faith--because we come as those who seek to understand the whole of scripture as the instrumentality of the Spirit's speaking to us--we do well to keep in view what the church through the ages has considered this biblical "whole" to be.

Stanley Grenz and John Franke, Beyond Foundationalism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 91.

Subjective Reading

Biblical scholars have been slow to awaken from the dream in which positivist science occupies a space apart from interests and values, to awaken to the realization that our representations of and discourse about what the text meant and how it means are inseparable from what we want it to mean, from how we will it to mean.

George Aichele in Grenz, Beyond Foundationalism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 85.

Illumination and Subjectivity

A theology of Word and Spirit need not lapse into subjectivism, however. What leads to subjectivism is the articulation of such as theology in the context of a basically individualistic understanding of the event of revelation. In other words, the problem of subjectivism arises only when we mistakenly place the individual ahead of the community...We, in turn, acknowledge individually that the Bible is scripture because we participate in this listening and confessing people. And it is this corporate confession of the Bible as scripture taht forms the context for our hearing the Spirit voice in its pages as well. Our participation in the Spirit-illumined congregation facilitates our personal experience of the Spirit's illuminating work.

Stanley Grenz and John Franke, Beyond Foundationalism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 68