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Toward Understanding the Bible: Hermeneutics for Lay People
"" [T]his work is offered in the hope that it will help those seeking biblical answers for today's problems to find a coherent and consistent way of using the biblical text. . . ""Hermeneutics . . . is not so interested in the specific explanation of individual passages, but in a more general way with the object or goal of exegesis. If in exegesis the aim is to discover the meaning of a passage, how will we tell when we have gotten this? In this essay we see that the task of hermeneutics is to teach us how we may tell a valid explanation from an invalid one--what constitutes a correct understanding of a passage. -- from the Introduction
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First published January 1, 1978
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July 1, 2009
Perry Yoder, the author of this book, was one of my teachers in college; so I knew him personally as an intelligent and dedicated Christian scholar. This particular book, however, is not written for scholars with specialized educations; it's written for the ordinary Christian in the pew who takes the Bible seriously and wants to study it the way it was intended to be. Yoder puts the basic concepts necessary for doing that in simple, everyday language, at a length that's compact and easily read, and with a prose style that's witty and engaging. (The various cartoon drawings help to make his points in an amusing way.) Although the author is a Mennonite, the viewpoint of the book is not narrowly denominational.
One of the most important points made here is the distinction between the original meaning and the modern significance of any particular part of the Bible: that is, between the immediate, lexical and historical-grammatical intent of the passage within the context that the original writer and readers operated in, and the application of that truth to the different, present context. (The meaning is objective and never changes, and it is communicated in a verbal fashion that is interpretable by the same intellectual linguistic process --which can't be magically or mystically bypassed, even if we think that would be more convenient-- as any other verbal communication. The modern significance is always conditioned by the situation --but that doesn't mean it's whatever we want it to be; rather, it's whatever God and the original writer(s) would objectively want it to be in these circumstances. Discerning the significance can be a subjective, or more subjective process; and it's at this stage --NOT the earlier one-- where the supernatural guidance of the Holy Spirit is crucial to our getting it right. In other words, the Holy Spirit won't magically tell you the meaning of a Greek word you're too lazy to look up --but will impress on your heart a conviction about, say, how other human beings should be treated.) Another valuable aspect of the discussion is the identification of "games people play with the Bible:" the numerous intellectually dishonest games we use to pretend to be finding a meaning in the Bible that we decided beforehand that we WANT to find.
One of the most important points made here is the distinction between the original meaning and the modern significance of any particular part of the Bible: that is, between the immediate, lexical and historical-grammatical intent of the passage within the context that the original writer and readers operated in, and the application of that truth to the different, present context. (The meaning is objective and never changes, and it is communicated in a verbal fashion that is interpretable by the same intellectual linguistic process --which can't be magically or mystically bypassed, even if we think that would be more convenient-- as any other verbal communication. The modern significance is always conditioned by the situation --but that doesn't mean it's whatever we want it to be; rather, it's whatever God and the original writer(s) would objectively want it to be in these circumstances. Discerning the significance can be a subjective, or more subjective process; and it's at this stage --NOT the earlier one-- where the supernatural guidance of the Holy Spirit is crucial to our getting it right. In other words, the Holy Spirit won't magically tell you the meaning of a Greek word you're too lazy to look up --but will impress on your heart a conviction about, say, how other human beings should be treated.) Another valuable aspect of the discussion is the identification of "games people play with the Bible:" the numerous intellectually dishonest games we use to pretend to be finding a meaning in the Bible that we decided beforehand that we WANT to find.
Displaying 1 of 1 review