I. Presuppositions
A. The Bible is the inerrant Word of God
A. Inerrancy: God so orchestrated the circumstances of the writing of Holy
Scripture that every word participates in its context to communicate
exactly and accurately what God intended to say. Since every word comes
from God, and is inspired, The Bible is inerrant. It is correct in what it
teaches and accurate in what it records.
A. There are two sets of laws for biblical interpretation:
1. Laws of human communication
2. Laws of the Holy Spirit
II. Two major concerns
A. The Bible is historical Skepticism
1. How can modern readers understand texts from centuries
ago?
2. Many people question the Bible's accuracy and authority
simply because it differs from how they view reality.
3. If the history of the Bible is at question, the Bible's
interpretation of the history is more so.
B. Problems with Historical Skepticism
1. Problems:
A. The Fallacy of the inscrutable past
B. The Fallacy of the homogenous past
A. First century Jews were legalistic
B. Jesus was a first century Jew
C. Therefore: Jesus was a legalist
A. The Fallacy of the homogeneous present-day
perspective
2. Rejoinders:
A. The Bible's message has continual relevance
B. Our contemporary world places the highest value
on empirical verification (the Bible records personal
testimony)
C. People DO understand the Bible
III. The Bible and Literature
A. The Text:
1. Methods and Movements
2. Allegorical and Literal
A. Allegorical interpretations originated in neo-
platonic thought centered mainly in Alexandria,
Egypt and look for the hidden meaning
B. Literalist understand the text to communicate
adequately
B. The Author:
1. A few focused entirely on the individual authors and used their
methodology to destroy the unity of the Bible
2. Some exegeted the author rather than the text and reached
impossible conclusions
3. Still others suggested their analysis of the author enabled
them to express what the author mean better than the author
himself did.
A. Problems with this
1. All we know is in the text itself
2. This assumes modern readers know more about the text than
ancient readers.
3. It disregards the issues develop carefully in the early church's
task of recognizing the canon.
A. The Text and Reader:
1. Bultmann believed that truth existed in thought before it was
objectified. Objects were only expressions of truth.
2. Gadamer held later that "all encounter with the language of
art is an encounter with an unfinished event and is itself part
of this event."
3. By the end of the 20th century man, if not most, interpreters
cared little for what the text meant. They cared greatly about
what the text means.
B. The Reader: Reader-Response theory-takes the reader's understanding as
normative in interpretation
A. Trends concerning interpretation of texts in general and the biblical text
in particular have evolved in this direction.
B. By and large, the current hermeneutical theories are subjective. Meaning
relates to personal experience, and experience both begins the textual
inquiry and ends it.
C. Therefore, the question still remains: Is there a normative message and
can we understand it?
IV. Can We Understand the Bible
A. Thesis: the Bible has a self-correcting mechanism so that readers can
understand its message accurately and adequately.
B. Concerning the TEXT
1. The Bible's message has never been broadly accepted
2. The Bible creates its own literary world (not creating reality
but recording what God does and says).
3. The message of the Bible is clarified by clear statement and
repetition
4. The Bible corrects the hermeneutical circle
C. Concerning the AUTHOR
1. We can redeem and retain the pursuit of the author's intent by
focusing on what the author intended in his writing
2. Understanding God's intent as author: Because the Bible
claims to be divine communication, it is also necessary to look
beyond the human author to the divine.
D. Concerning the READER
1. The reader's response does affect understanding but not the
meaning
2. The reader must take a proper response to the text
E.
