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February 7 - August 17, 2025
Similarly, being biblical means speaking, thinking, and acting in accordance with the Scriptures, and literal means reading in accordance with the letter. Sadly, many people, including confessing Christians, have lost the ability to discern (or even discuss) whether a particular idea or practice is warranted by Scripture—or to define what literal means.
Simply holding a “high” view of Scripture is no guarantee that one’s interpretation will be sound.
What primarily makes reading the Bible like reading other books is that both have human creatures as their authors; what makes reading the Bible unlike reading other books is that its primary author is God.
Archaeology, philology, and literary criticism all have a place, but finally they are but stations on the way to the cross.
Sound doctrine and true worship alike depend on reading the Bible rightly and on responding rightly to what we read.
My aim in this book is to “save” the literal, in part by providing a richer and more theologically adequate definition.
Unlike the human authors of Scripture who are dead and buried, then, the risen Christ is alive—communicatively present and active.
The Bible is the medium of divine address.
As we shall see, the Spirit does not change the meaning of the words but revoices, reactivates, and resituates the discourse in and for a new redemptive-historical context.
The Bible is discourse: something (the sense) someone (the author) says (the predication) to someone (the addressee) about something (the referent) in some way (the genre) at some time (the occasion) for some purpose (the telos).
What Scripture is, the voice of God, enables what it does: “I the LORD have spoken; I will accomplish it” (Ezek 17:24 NRSV).
To read the Bible theologically is to adopt a certain posture before the text.
The biblical interpreter is one who stands under the text, not over it (cf. Neh 8:4–5):
We best read the Bible theologically, before God, by adopting the posture of prayer: on our knees.
In reading Scripture, a biblical interpreter locates herself coram Deo
The conflict of scholarly interpretations provides, for some, the perfect excuse for not rallying to God’s cause, to defer ever having to answer the divine address.
In speaking of “mere Christian hermeneutics” I have in mind what all Spirit-illumined readers have in common regardless of the differences in their particular exegetical methodologies.
Praying the Psalms and the rest of Scripture helps us attend and conform to what is real: the will of God expressed in the word of God.87
Jesus’ transfiguration is an underappreciated hermeneutical resource,
What earlier generations called the spiritual sense is, according to the view set forth here, the “transfigural” sense, namely, the glory of the literal sense.
To see Christ in the letter is not to see something “other” in the text, as in “allegorical” interpretation; rather, it is to see “how much more” there is to the literal referent.
It was such hermeneutical differences that led the Jewish authorities to seek to kill Jesus, for his way of reading the Scriptures challenged and subverted religious conventions, in particular, Jewish interpretive authority.
What other kinds of attention to the letter of the text are necessary to do justice to the Bible as the word of God in human words? The present book is an extended answer to this important question.
Most churchgoing Christians have no inkling that biblical scholars and theologians speak different languages, have different interpretive interests, or inhabit different reading cultures, yet it is true. Their fields have become distinct specializations, each with its own journals, jargon, degree programs, and professional societies.
We must agree, in other words, that God’s mighty acts in history burst the immanent frame wide open.
The idea of a “frame of reference” is conspicuous by its absence from most hermeneutic textbooks, yet its influence is enormous and undeniable.
Christ is both the ultimate speaker and referent of the text, and it requires theological interpretation to articulate how this is so.
Everything depends on who is doing what with biblical words. Who, in the final analysis, is the author of the Bible?
Acknowledging the Bible as divine discourse supplies the missing link between canonical intention and literality.
Trans-figural interpretation follows the way God makes the biblical words run and figures fly: beyond the human authorial intent, through history, across the canon, and from their original to their ultimate referents.
We must qualify catholicity by reformed, by which I mean that set of emphases shared by the Protestant Reformers, including loving and obedient attention to the letter of the biblical text (grammar), the importance of divine authorship (figuration), canonical context (Scripture interprets Scripture), Christ-centered redemptive history, and a willingness to have one’s interpretation challenged and, if need be, corrected by the text (semper reformanda).
Transfigural interpretation involves a different way of seeing, hearing, and reading than that afforded by earthly frames of reference.
Readers struggle with texts and other readers but ultimately with themselves before God.
In the final analysis, the most important context for spiritual interpretation is the reader’s context of being addressed by the living God.
A haughty hermeneutical spirit goes before interpretive de(con)struction.
McCaulley does what I wish all readers who inhabit their particular contexts would do. He realizes there is “a difference between acknowledging the social location of interpretation and letting said location eclipse the text itself.”
To read the Bible well is ultimately to have oneself—one’s false self and idolatrous ideologies—called into question.
Spiritual interpretation has rather to do with the special hermeneutical circle that acknowledges the necessity of sanctification for reading Scripture rightly and the way in which reading Scripture rightly contributes to our sanctification.
To read the Bible theologically requires resources beyond those of general hermeneutics, beyond even the secular interpretive virtues. In the final analysis, reading the Bible rightly requires the theological interpretive virtues—faith, hope, and love—and a theological frame of reference.
How then shall we—biblical scholars, theologians, clergy, and laypeople—read? The answer involves more than following a step-by-step how-to manual. Exegetical procedures are helpful, but they can also give readers the impression that they are in control of the process. Not so. The most important qualification for biblical interpretation, and the Christian reader’s primary vocation, is to be “canonically aware and redemptively responsible”43—alert to the purpose of Scripture as a whole and prepared to answer the divine summons to follow the words where they lead. More than knowing exegetical
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Mere Christian hermeneutics is ultimately a vision for forming reading cultures that, in turn, form readers who can bear witness to the light by proclaiming the excellencies of him who called us into his marvelous light (1 Pet 2:9). Such witness continues until that day, anticipated by Jesus’ transfiguration, when the city of light “will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light”
