4 articles in a row:
“That’s What It Says, but…” by Mike Riccardi
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the issue of proper, sound principles of interpretation of Scripture, and particularly how those principles relate to the relationship between the Old Testament and New Testament. Studying hermeneutics is a tricky issue, because, of course, the student of Scripture wants to adopt principles of interpretation that are in line with Scripture. But the question quickly surfaces: How can I derive my hermeneutics from Scripture if I first need a hermeneutic by which I approach Scripture? Isn’t it circular to attempt to interpret Scripture in search of how to interpret Scripture? As Professor Matt Waymeyer has cleverly quipped, it’s sort of like asking how it’s even possible to read Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book! Where do we start?
I’m not absolutely sure of all my conclusions yet, but I thought I’d present some of my thoughts. This is a little bit more heady than is probably acceptable for a blog post, but I promise I won’t make it a habit. But let me assure you that I think if there’s a topic that’s worthy of a little extra mental effort, hermeneutics is it, precisely because it is so foundational to how we approach and understand the Word of God. (If you’re interested, you might read Dan Phillips’ classic post on how hermeneutics proved to be a life or death issue for him.)
Scripture is God’s Communication
A fundamental assumption that we must work with is that all Scripture is God’s revelation to man. By means of His Word, God is speaking, or communicating, to human beings. I think this is pretty easily established by Scripture itself.
- The opening verse of Hebrews tells us that God spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and many ways (Heb 1:1). That is, the Old Testament is God’s speaking to man.
- The writer continues, “In these last days, He has spoken to us in His Son” (1:2). Christ is the ultimate revelation (Heb 1:3; John 14:9) or explanation (John 1:18) of the Father to mankind.
- Then, in His earthly ministry, the Son promised that He would send the Holy Spirit to bring to the Apostles’ remembrance all that He said (John 14:26). The product of this promise is the four Gospels, and thus the Gospels are God’s speaking to man in His Son.
- The Son also promised that the Spirit would guide them into all truth, revealing to them those things which they could not bear then (John 16:12–13). This is the rest of New Testament revelation, and thus Acts, the Epistles, and Revelation are God’s speaking to man in His Son.
To reiterate by way of summary, then, all of Scripture is God’s speaking, or His communicating to man. Therefore, if we’re going to honor and respect God’s revelation on its own terms—i.e., as communication—we must seek to understand it as we would aim to understand any other form of communication. That is to say, in the same way one desires to be understood in a way that neither adds to nor takes away from his words, we should afford that courtesy to the Biblical authors. This is often referred to as the hermeneutical Golden Rule: do unto authors as you would have them do unto you. In his book, Think,John Piper puts it like this:
At the root of [a] coherent worldview and the process of being rooted in the Bible is the hard work of understanding what an author intends to communicate. … When I write something, I generally have an idea that I would like others to grasp. If they construe my sentences in a way different from what I intend, then either I have written poorly or they have read poorly. Or both. But in either case, I am frustrated, because the aim of writing (except for liars and spies) is to be understood. So the aim of reading should ordinarily be to understand what the writer wants understood.[1]
We know that God does not inspire poor writing. We also know that neither He nor the biblical authors were liars or spies. So a fundamental aim of our reading the Bible is to understand what the original author wants understood. We must understand God’s Word through the original authors in a way that neither adds to nor subtracts from their words.
The Normal Sense
I believe the only logical conclusion to be reached from these truths—specifically, that Scripture is God’s revelation or communication to us with the intention of being understood—is that our default orientation to any passage of Scripture is to read it in the plain, normal sense. The old grammatical-historical axiom is valid: “When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense.”
Recently in a discussion about the parable of the ten virgins in Matthew 25, someone was speculating on whether or not the passage had anything to say about the doctrine of eternal security, or the perseverance of the saints. Her thought was that Scripture sometimes speaks of oil as being indicative of the Holy Spirit. And since the foolish virgins originally had some oil to keep their lamps burning, that they at one time had the Holy Spirit—and thus were to be considered saved—and then did not have the Holy Spirit—and thus were to be considered lost. Now, this is a rather extreme example, but at the root of this person’s many interpretive problems was simply the fact that in Matthew 25:1–13, oil just means oil. There’s no reason to go fishing for a deeper meaning behind Jesus’ choice of illustrations. The plain, normal sense of the words leads you to a proper understanding of Jesus’ point.
In his Biblical Hermeneutics, Milton Terry put it this way:
It is commonly assumed by universal sense of mankind that unless one designedly put forth a riddle, he will so speak as to convey his meaning as clearly as possible to others. Hence that meaning of a sentence which most readily suggests itself to a reader or hearer, is, in general, to be received as the true meaning, and that alone.[2]
I don’t believe, based on the passages above about Scripture being God’s communication to man, that God has designedly put forth a riddle. The perspicuity of Scripture keeps us from seeking a “deeper meaning” behind what God has clearly said through the Biblical authors.
Now, of course this does not mean, as is so often charged, that we must be committed to a wooden literalism that doesn’t allow for figures of speech. Understanding language in its plain, normal sense allows for someone to interpret a metaphor as a metaphor, hyperbole as hyperbole, sarcasm as sarcasm. If I say, “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse!” you shouldn’t start looking for a really big grill. But neither should you conclude that I have very inimical feelings toward all things equine. Given the conventions of language, you should understand that I’m using a common, agreed-upon figure of speech to emphasize my hunger.
And so, when Micah prophesies that the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2), we don’t need to find some symbolism about Messiah being Yahweh’s provision of spiritual nourishment from the “house of bread” (HT). We understand that that was a prophecy about the literal birthplace of Messiah. And yet at the same time, when Jesus says, “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life” (John 6:54), we understand that this was a figure of speech that pictured a greater reality (Lk 22:19–20).
So What?
Now, some of you—hopefully most of you—might be sitting there saying, “Tell me something I don’t know!” And you’d be right to feel that way. I haven’t said much that sound Biblical interpreters of various theological stripes would disagree with. At least, they wouldn’t disagree with it on paper. But when the implications of these principles get fleshed out, a lot of toes start to get stepped on. Especially in texts like Genesis 1–11, Ezekiel 40–48, and Revelation 6–20. But we’ll leave those issues for another time.
The main take-away from the above discussion is that, based on the conclusion that Scripture is God’s communication to man (Heb 1:1-3), one’s default approach to understanding any passage of Scripture is to understand it in its plain, normal sense. And if we were ever to deviate from that default sense (which is certainly sometimes warranted), the burden of proof is on us to show why that’s a legitimate move. And such evidence must be presented from the text and context of Scripture itself.
God has spoken. What a remarkable truth! And He has spoken to us. What a breathtaking reality! And He has spoken to us clearly. What a marvelous gift! How unfortunate it would be to take an infallible, inerrant, clear text of Scripture and preach error from it because we’ve sought to make it more complicated than it is.
[1] John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2010), 45.
[2] As quoted in Robert L. Thomas, Evangelical Hermeneutics: The New Versus the Old (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2003), 291.
Revealed or Concealed
In my last post, I tried to lay a foundation for an understanding of some ground-level issues relating to hermeneutics, or principles of interpretation of Scripture. Like I mentioned there, studying hermeneutics is rather tricky, because it seems circular to attempt to interpret Scripture in order to glean biblical principles of interpretation. You know, chicken or egg?
I suggested that the way out of this conundrum was to consider the nature of Scripture itself, particularly as defined in the opening verses of the book of Hebrews. From those verses we learned that God spoke, and thus Scripture is fundamentally communication. And based on that, the interpreter’s default orientation to the text is to understand it in its plain, normal sense, just like he does with other communication.
John MacArthur summarizes the point well:
Because God has revealed himself in an understandable, clear way, in keeping with the normal means of human language and communication, the student of Scripture can rightly interpret God’s message in the normal sense in which human language and communication is interpreted. Whether preaching poetry, prophecy, or Paul’s epistles, the student of Scripture is correct if he approaches Scripture with the confidence that God revealed it clearly, and he did so using the normal features of language.[1]
Scripture as Communication vs. New Testament Priority
Now, I also mentioned towards the end of the last post that those foundational principles are not earth-shattering to a faithful, Bible-believing Christian. But when those principles get fleshed out into practice, we do start to see some areas of disagreement. One particular area that is popular right now is how to interpret and understand the Old Testament, especially in relation to Christ and His coming. Some believe (based on what I think are shallow interpretations of Luke 24:27 and John 5:39) that one should find Christ in every verse of the Old Testament. One wonders what he should do if Jesus doesn’t seem to be there. Some respond that we should find Christ in every verse by reading the Old Testament through the lens of the New Testament. Some will go as far as to say that the meaning of any Old Testament text cannot be understood without the New Testament. In fact, it seems that this is the majority position among conservative biblical interpreters.
But I think that our previous study presents some problems for that position. What I mean is, to say that the Old Testament can’t be understood apart from the New—and that the New Testament sometimes reinterprets the Old such that the original recipients could not have understood the meaning—is to deny that the Old Testament succeeded as God’s revelation and communication to those to whom it was addressed. Remember: long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to the fathers by the prophets (Heb 1:1). He actually said something to them that was understandable to the faithful Israelite. But to suggest that the original audience could not have understood the intent of the author is to deny the perspicuity of the Old Testament. In that case, it was not light in any meaningful sense, despite the testimony of Psalm 19:8, Psalm 119:105, 130, and Proverbs 6:23. Rather than communicating, it obscured. Rather than revealing, it concealed.
In fact, holding this position would require one to admit the Old Testament did more than conceal. It misled and deceived. For example, throughout the Old Testament God continues to promise what could only legitimately be understood by the faithful Israelite as an earthly reign of Messiah with the nation restored to the land. Yet the majority of otherwise-theologically-sound, conservative evangelicals interpret such passages as God making spiritual promises to the Church, not physical promises to national Israel. Yet it is difficult for me to square such an approach to the text with the reality that Scripture is revealing instead of concealing. Professor Matt Waymeyer summarizes helpfully (see also page 7 here)[2]:
I find it very difficult, however, to accept a hermeneutical approach which insists that the original readers of the Old Testament were left in the dark (and even misled) regarding the true meaning of God’s promises in the Old Testament. This is an outright denial of the perspicuity of the Old Testament. In my understanding of the nature of Scripture, God’s intent was to reveal truth in His Word, not conceal it. I have a difficult time adopting a view that, says, in effect, that much of the Old Testament was intended to be an unsolvable mystery, at least until new light was provided hundreds of years later.
“Have You Not Read?”
Further, Jesus’ own comments seem to contradict the notion that the Old Testament can’t be rightly interpreted apart from the New Testament. His many interrogative indictments of, “Have you not read?” (Matt 12:5; 19:4; 22:31; Mark 12:10; Luke 6:3) demonstrate pretty clearly that He expected the Jews of His day to both (a) interpret the Old Testament on its own terms, since there was no New Testament revelation through which to interpret it; and (b) to interpret it properly, i.e., to understand its true intent.
In fact, this was the way in which the first New Testament believers were to examine this new teaching that Jesus and His Apostles were bringing. God, through Luke, commends the Bereans as more noble because they searched the Old Testament Scriptures to examine the truth claims Paul was making (Ac 17:11). Yet how could that be a noble—much less fruitful—endeavor if the true interpretation of the Old Testament couldn’t be understood without the New as an interpretive grid? Further, how could Paul, in defending himself against the accusations of the Jews, appeal to the fact that he had preached “nothing but what the Prophets and Moses said was going to take place” (Ac 26:22)? And wouldn’t we have to admit that Jesus was being too hard on the two men on the road to Emmaus when He said, “O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken!”? They should have simply said, “Take it easy, man. How can we understand all that the prophets have spoken? We don’t have the New Testament yet!”
And so it seems rather plain that both Jesus and Paul believed that the true intent of the Old Testament could be understood by interpreting the Old Testament on its own terms.
Honor Christ by Honoring the Text
Now, I’m not arguing that we should preach the Old Testament in a way that would make a contemporary Jewish person comfortable. We must certainly preach the Old Testament as Christian Scripture. But we don’t have to make it Christian Scripture by interpreting it non-contextually. It already is Christian Scripture on its own, because the Old Testament as a whole does indeed point to Jesus as the promised Messiah and King. My point is simply that we can see how all the promises of God find their “Yes” in Christ without twisting some of them beyond recognition. We can preach Christ in every sermon while acknowledging that He is not in every text. This doesn’t make us any less “Christocentric.” This is actually more honoring to Christ because, rather than implying that God has not spoken clearly or reading Christ into texts where He’s not (as if the OT just needed a little help), it respects all of God’s Word on its own terms, as His clear communication.
[1] John MacArthur, “Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth: A Study Method for Expository Preaching,” in Preach the Word: Essays on Expository Preaching: In Honor of R. Kent Hughes, eds. Leyland Ryken and Todd A. Wilson (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2007), 79.
[2] Many thanks to Matt Waymeyer, Paul Lamey, and company at Expository Thoughts for their excellent work on this topic. They have helped greatly to refine my thinking.
“Hermeneutics” (plural in form, but used with both singular and plural verbs) is the art and science of Biblical interpretation. It’s the set of rules, held consciously or not, that govern the way you read the Bible. You have a hermeneutical construct, I have a hermeneutical construct. It may be pretty darned good, it may be smelly-awful wretched, but you and I have one.
How one arrives at his hermeneutical position may very well be a chicken/egg conundrum. Does [your-favorite-reprobate’s-name-here] read his Bible the way he does because of his appalling lifestyle? Or does he have an appalling lifestyle because of the way he reads his Bible? Or is the relationship symbiotic, co-dependent?
In my case, doubtless there was symbiosis, but mostly it was the former. I was in a cult called Religious Science, or the Science of Mind. I won’t honor it with a link. I was New Age before New Age was cool. Back then we called it “New Thought,” though it was barely either. (If you’ve ever sung “Let There Be Peace On Earth,” you’ve sung a song cherished by that cult.)
It was your standard panentheistic Christian heresy, very like Christian Science except we weren’t so negative on seeing doctors. Fundamentally, Religious Science taught that God is in all things, and expresses Itself as and through all things. Therefore, we are all expressions of God, and all have within ourselves the Christ-consciousness. “Christ” is the principle of god-consciousness, the I AM, within everyone. Our goal in life was to harmonize our minds with God, and thus to manifest truth, love, joy, stuff.
Dizzy yet?
Now, like most American cults, Religious Science wants to get on the Jesus-bandwagon by mouthing great platitudes about Jesus, how He was a great prophet, a great teacher, a great mystic, the most perfect manifestation of God-consciousness to date. But Jesus was no different than we, and we can all live the same life.
Stay with me, I am going somewhere with this.
The Religious Scientist runs into the problem that Jesus did not say much that sounded like any of that.
And that’s where hermeneutics comes in. See (we said) the problem is that Christians have misunderstood and misrepresented Jesus all this time. They took His words too literally and shallowly, when really they had a deeper, spiritual meaning. When He said to pray, “Our Father,” He was saying that all without distinction are God’s children.
So what about Hell, sin, salvation? No problem; Hell is just the experience of being at seeming disharmony with the One Mind; sin are thoughts out of harmony with the One Mind; salvation is just reaffirming and manifesting your union with the Godhead. See?
Now, the tale of my conversion, and of why I am still a Christian, is a much longer yarn than I will untangle here, except to focus on one aspect: how the Holy Spirit used hermeneutics to convert and save me. (The fuller story is told starting here.)
I learned to read the Bible the Religious Science way from my pre-teen years. I looked for (and found) the “deeper meaning” that those idiot Christians and Jesus-Freaks kept stubbornly missing. It was a mindset, on the level of the reflexive.
But I did keep running into things that He said that jarred even my firmly-set grid. It created a slowly growing tension: on the one hand, we thought Jesus was the greatest Teacher and Prophet and Mystic who ever lived; on the other, He sure expressed Himself poorly sometimes! But never mind; we were always there to “help” Him.
The single greatest snag was John 14:6 — “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.'”
Sure sounds as if Jesus was saying what we Religious Scientists all denied: that no relationship with God is possible without a personal relationship with the person, the man, God incarnate, Jesus Christ.
But that isn’t what we thought He meant. It couldn’t be. It would destroy the whole foundation and superstructure. Here is how Ernest Holmes, founder of that cult, explains Jesus’ words: “We cannot come unto the Father Which art in Heaven except through our own nature.” So, what Jesus really meant was the precise opposite of what He seemed to be saying.
That worked fine for me, for a good long while.
But over the period of many months, the Spirit of God did a work on me, convicting me of sin, exposing to me my actual distance from actual God, my God-un-likeness, the multilevel trainwreck that was me.
When I combined the realizations that I basically had found a religion that told me what I wanted to hear, and that I myself wasn’t much better than a drooling idiot in the ways that mattered, it shook me to my foundations — and I started looking at Jesus anew. And I prayed, that God would show me the way to Himself, even if it meant that I had to become a Jesus Freak. (That was the worst thing I could think of at the time.) What did I have to do?
And again loomed John 14:6, giving me Jesus’ answer to my question.
This was the great Teacher, the great manifestation of God, Jesus, clearly laying out the only way I could come to God. But what did He mean? Did He mean that I was my own way to God (with Religious Science)? Or did He mean that I needed to believe in and know Him, Jesus, personally (with the Jesus Freaks)?
I had no idea, but at that point my very life was hinging on a hermeneutical question.
Here’s the line of thinking that the Spirit of God used to deliver me from the deceptive maze of mystical subjectivism.
I took the premise that Jesus was the greatest Teacher, and assumed that a good teacher is a good communicator. He says what he means; his words convey his meaning. He speaks to be understood by his audience.
So then I simply posed this question question to myself: “If Jesus had meant to say that each of us is, within himself, his own way to God, could He have said it more clearly?” To put it differently, do these words best express that thought? The candid, inescapable answer was an immediate No. In fact, if that had been what Jesus had meant to say, He could hardly have phrased it more poorly… in which case He wasn’t much of a teacher at all, let alone the greatest ever.
Then I asked myself this: “If Jesus had meant to say that He Himself personally is the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one can have a relationship with God apart from relating to Jesus Himself, could He have said that more clearly?” I was forced to admit that, in fact, that thought is exactly what these words most naturally express. (Later I was to learn that the Greek original underscores this very point all the more emphatically.)
That was a turning-point. I had to face the fact that Jesus did not believe what I believe. Jesus did not think God could be known as I thought He could be known.
And that, in turn, threw the question to the decisive fork in the road: who is more credible? Jesus, or me?
Had you said “Hermeneutics” to me at the time, I might have responded, “Herman-who?” Had you further said “Grammatico-historical exegesis,” I couldn’t even have managed that much. But that is precisely what was going on.
Now it’s well over thirty years later, I’ve taken classes in Hermeneutics on the master’s and doctoral level, read books and articles, written on the subject, fleshed out and used an array of principles of interpretation. But still that single method, that simple question (along with its implications), has resolved more knotty issues for me than any other. It’s why I’m an inerrantist. It’s why I’m a Calvinist. It is at the root of my core convictions. In fact, at bottom, in the hand of God it is why I am a Christian.
As I’ve fleshed it out, it is simply a formulation of Hebrews 1:1-2a. The Bible is God’s unfolding Word, and it is God’s Word to us. He speaks to be heard, and understood. Hence its meaning is not a matter for secret-club decoder-rings, arcane rituals, and secret councils composed of a different class. It is to be understood according to the normal canons of language.
Does that matter? It sure matters to me.
It’s what the Lord used to save me.
Decades ago I heard that Harold Camping and John Walvoord, then president of Dallas Theological Seminary, had conducted an on-air debate. Only recently, I found where it could be downloaded and heard online. The debate lasts nearly six hours, and I just finished listening last night.
The debate is interesting and instructive. The moderator, a gracious man, seems stylistically to be on a radio show from the 40s (the crackling sound quality heightens this effect as he speaks); his is an oddly florid tone. But Camping and Walvoord are both straightforward and to the point.
I could do a fairly accurate job of summarizing the six hours like this: for the most part…
- Walvoord keeps reading Scripture and saying “I think it means what it says”
- Camping keeps working his decoder-ring hermeneutics to make Scripture not mean what it says
And that’s pretty much it.
For instance, here’s a big clue: Listen for Camping repeatedly cautioning that we must read a passage “very carefully,” or admonishing that we must “let the Bible interpret itself” rather than being devoted to a particularly school “or consensus.” Sounds good? How can you argue against either?
Yet every time, these words signals that Camping is about to explain how Scripture doesn’t mean what it says. It means he is about to twist Scripture. He is about to bring together two things that have no bearing on each other, and make a bus bench in Ohio mean that a hamburger in California is really a cup of tea in England.
Figures; Camping also says that the whole Bible is in parables, and he says that it is is very difficult to understand. Perhaps his version of Hebrews 1:1 reads that God “spoke in incomprehensible code to the fathers by the prophets”?
Also interesting: a caller asks about not knowing the day or the hour, and Walvoord answers. Camping simply declines to answer, which is an exception. It looms large in light of his recent deadly error.
Now, this may sound as if I’m writing the next bit for effect, but it is literally true: around the third and start of the fourth hour, I was thinking very appreciatively about what gentlemen both Camping and Walvoord were, and I was anticipating praising both for their behavior — and then the fourth hour started. Camping became completely unhinged. He launched an absurd attack on premillennialism, listing off a dozen dire accusations, including that premillennialism distorts the Gospel, denies Christ’s kingship, denies Christ’s lordship, denies the Bible’s authority to explain itself, and a veritable pile of verbal manure.
Camping did not just crack in recent years. He’d already jumped the shark at this point.
Walvoord remained a gentleman in his response, more so than I would have. He said something like this: “My, that is a very impressive list of accusations. The only problem is that every one of them is false.” No kidding.
Ominous note. There was a very poignant moment at about five hours and thirteen minutes. In the course of his answer, John Walvoord warned against the slippery slope that is spiritualization. He observed that many heresies and much liberalism involved the spiritualization of the Bible. And then he said this: “Once you start spiritualizing, there is no telling where you are going to stop.”
He said this in front of Harold Camping who, decades later, after assuring people that the Bible guaranteed that Jesus would return to rapture His own on May 21, 2011, then said, “Oh yeah, about that — oops, sorry, it was actually a spiritual event.”
A second poignant note is that in his attempt at a response, Camping actually — I kid you not — alluded to the Biblical admonition against many people becoming teachers (James 3:1f.)! You can’t make this stuff up. If only Camping had heeded his own words.
Or listened to John Walvoord.
