Hermeneutics

I hope its not a problem that I put another post up here. I certainly don’t want to dominate the discussions, but no one has added anything, so I thought I would raise another issue: Biblical hermeneutics. First of all, though, I wanted to recommend a web page with a lot of good looking articles on the topic: http://www.bible-researcher.com/links16.html

I was raised a dispensationalist, following a literal, historical, grammatical method of interpretation. However, several things have shaken my confidence in that method.

First off, in every Evangelical class on hermeneutics, the teacher takes an opportunity to talk about how the church fathers were nice guys and all, but that when it came to hermeneutics, they simply allegorized. This allegorization is understood to mean that when they read the text, the fathers simply found whatever they happened to be thinking about at the time, whether it was Jesus, Mary, baptism, or whatever they were thought might be good for lunch. However, I had a difficult time believing that we could dismiss the Patristic method interpretation that easily. Surely they must have had a reason.

The second thing that shook my confidence in a strict literal historical method of interpretation was how the New Testament writers were interpreting the Old Testament. Matthew found Christ in Hosea 11:1 (“Out of Egypt I called my son”), and said that it was a fulfillment of Hosea’s prophecy. But according to a strict litreal, historical reading of Hosea 11:1, this verse does not refer to Jesus and is not even a prophecy about a future event. Hosea is clearly talking about Israel as a nation and the historical event of the Exodus. Paul also talks about allegory in his treatment of Sarah and Hagar, even using the word (Galatians 4:24).

I was unsatisfied with the two basic explanations given for this by my teachers. Either Matthew and Paul were not actually doing anything remotely similar to what the church fathers were doing (even though it sure seemed like it), or the New Testament writers were inspired, so that they can interpret the Bible that way. But since we are not inspired, we can’t intrepret that way.

But it seemed to me that the NT writers and the church fathers were interpreting in the same way. In fact, when the church fathers allegorized, they referred to the apostle Paul as their teacher in interpretation. And as to the second excuse, it seemed to me that the church fathers were correct to view the apostles as their teachers in hermeneutics. I could not see why inspiration should make the apostles’ method of hermeneutics off limits to us.

The passage that has challenged me a great deal is Luke 24:44-47. There Jesus says that his career on earth and the plan for this age was foretold in the Old Testament, information like the fact that Jesus would be in the grave for three days, and that forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in his name to all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem. Now where is that info in the Old Testament, read according to a strict literal historical reading?

You cannot find it if you are restricted to the literal historical grammatical method of interpretation. So that fact sent me back to the church fathers to understand why they did what they did. The basic idea is that God works according to patterns, and an allegorical or typological (I don’t feel like there is a qualitative difference between the two of these concepts) way of reading texts is the only way to unify the Old and New Testaments. As a way of summing up, I find that the medieval four-fold meaning method of interpretation is the only thing that makes any sense.

This issue is so big and (to me) important that it would not be possible to say everything in a single post. However, let me recommend an article and a book. David Steinmetz of Duke wrote an article about the superiority of the medieval method of interpretation, and his article can be found online here: http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/apr1980/v37-1-article2.htm

And Henri de Lubac wrote an incredible 4 volume tome called Medieval Exegesis. It is fantastic. I look forward to interaction on this.