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October 1 - October 27, 2024
Sound doctrine and true worship alike depend on reading the Bible rightly and on responding rightly to what we read.
the Bible is God’s word—a divine address, a use of language to establish personal relationship—then biblical interpretation is our listening and answering speech.
If Scripture is the lifeblood of the church, biblical interpretation is its circulation system: translation, preaching, commentary, lived tradition—all are forms of biblical interpretation.
literal sense,
For centuries there was widespread agreement that the basis for right reading, theological interpretation, and doctrinal development was the Bible’s literal sense.
reading rightly is in the eye of the beholder.
By way of contrast, reading well suggests a centered-set picture of interpretation, in which a particular reading may be closer or further from whatever makes reading right.
I propose judging the rightness of critical methods by the kind of theological readings, readers, and reading cultures they beget.15
I define a bad exegetical method as one that forbids, forestalls, or frustrates any theological reading of the Bible, and a good exegetical method as one that is open to, facilitates, or necessitates some kind of
theological r...
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According to my experiment—a theological criticism of interpretive methods—the criteria for interpretive goodness are a function not of general hermeneutics, literary criticism, or philosophy, but of doing justice to what the Bible ultimately is and is for: a divine address, mediated by and fixed in human writing, for the sake of human transformation.
It has become commonplace to hear that the Bible “is written for us, but not to us.”
Robert Morgan and John Barton compare the Bible to a corpse: “Texts, like dead men and women, have no rights, no aims, no interests. They can be used in whatever way readers or interpreters choose.”
Viewing the text as discourse, fixed in writing, enables interpreters to do justice to what the text is: something
God personally says and does. What is divine about the Bible is not the words, which are fully human—there is nothing heavenly about Hebrew and Greek—but the discourse. God speaks—and in speaking performs communicative acts—in and through the human discourse, without suppressing or manipulating the cognitive and communicative capacities of the human authors.
The Bible is God’s word not merely because it contains supernaturally revealed information, but because its human words are the vehicle for a variety of divine speech acts.
The promise is the paradigmatic speech act. Unlike statements, a promise does not describe something but commits the speaker to doing something: “When God promises something happens, and the covenant gives substance to this.”
eternal covenant
According to Luther, “The chief topic of all of Holy Scripture is to know and comprehend God as the one who promises.”
The last surprise, so big that it took time for the apostles to wrap their minds around it, was that the promise was not for Jews only but also for the Gentiles—hence the reference to “better promises” (Heb
What Scripture is ultimately for is enabling communion—covenant fellowship with the triune God who bespoke it and about whom it bespeaks.
Our experiment subverts this assumption: it is the biblical text that awakens slumbering readers to the reality of God, and to themselves before God.
In informing us, the Bible also questions us—places us before God, renders us accountable to God. To read Scripture for its divine address is to approach a holy place; it is to climb with Moses to meet God.
Reading the Bible involves “a readiness to be addressed and confronted.”56 The biblical interpreter is one who stands under the text, not over it (cf. Neh 8:4–5):
Responding to God’s word has been, and always will be, an existentially fraught affair.
To read the Bible theologically is to have one’s politics, agenda, and identity—one’s very sense of self—stripped bare before the text: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb” (Job 1:21).
“My acts become the best commentary, the best gloss, the most rigorous explication of these luminous words that God has given me the grace to be able to gather into my soul and my voice.”
A “mere Christian” hermeneutic focuses on the things for which all Bible readers are accountable, regardless of their particular interests, contexts, methods, traditions, interpretive communities, or scholarly degrees.
Interpreters are prone to misread in one of two ways, each equally deadly. The one partakes of pride, the other sloth.70 Prideful readers use biblical texts to promote their own views and voices rather than those of the text.
The
Hermeneutics is the art and science of interpretation—the study of the principles and practices necessary for textual understanding.
Biblical hermeneutics is not rocket but theological science; the Bible is not a manual for going to the heavens but a story about heaven coming down to earth.
Christian interpreters must not worship other gods in the high places of interpretation theory. This is a book about reading the Bible theologically—and thinking theologically about Bible reading.
My ultimate concern, then, is with reforming churches and seminaries so that they become the kind of reading cultures that can form readers to inhabit the strange new world that has been brought into being by the gospel of Jesus Christ.
This book is for those who, like me, care about biblical literacy and are concerned about the conflict of biblical interpretations. It is for those who, like me, are puzzled about the nature and method of literal interpretation. It is for those who, like me, want to live under the lordship of Christ in every area of their lives, including their study of the Bible.
The chapters in part 1 set the stage by introducing several key issues pertaining to reading the Bible theologically. In particular, I examine the longstanding tension between two types of reading cultures, the one oriented more to the letter (and literal sense), the other to Spirit (and spiritual sense). But we begin with reading cultures, biblical literacy, and the aim of reading.
As a historian of doctrine, Pelikan’s primary interest was “the fundamental problem of the relation between the authority of the original text and the authority of the developing doctrine in the ongoing life and history of the community.”
The Bible, like the Constitution, is the founding document of a historic community—the people of God—whose members are
citizens of a “holy nation”
Legalistic interpretations of first-century Jewish culture failed to capture the true meaning of the Mosaic law. God’s treasured possession had become not a holy but a hypocritical nation whose corporate life testified to their misunderstanding of their constitutional text, as Jesus made clear:
A Christian culture, viewed theologically, is more than a this-worldly phenomenon. It is not a merely human project but a work of the Son and Spirit, God’s “two hands.” It is a human response to a divine address that interrupts the old way of doing things, as did the voice of the risen Jesus when he stopped a young man in his tracks, saying, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4).
Christian hermeneutics is about reading the Bible in that peculiar eschatological space that defines and generates Christian culture: the presence of Christ in the power of his Spirit. Reading the Bible rightly—as what it is, the word of God—thus involves a reading culture created and sustained by the word of God.
We will never be able to sympathize with patristic or medieval interpreters, or even read them correctly, unless and until we appreciate their concern to read Scripture in ways
The highest degree of hermeneutical education, the grad school of interpretation as it were, is the level of the “spirit” and involves discerning spiritual truths.
One of the most significant, yet least appreciated features, of this patristic synthesis was “that it provided a literature which shaped Christian discourse and fed the Christian imagination
In the ancient world, “to be educated . . . was to be a reader.
Good exegesis required the reader’s moral and spiritual formation, not simply choosing the right method.
Learning and, specifically, reading, are both simply forms of a search for Christ the Remedy, Christ the Example and Form which fallen humanity, which has lost it, hopes to recover.”31
To be “re-formed,” in this context, means being rebuilt in the image of Christ, conformed to his form, largely by repairing the soul through an apprenticeship to Scripture.
Can biblical interpretation change the world? Yes, because it already has. The
