Posts
Chapter Four, “Engaging the hermeneutical challenge”, looks, not surprisingly, at several hermeneutical challenges.
1. “The form of Scripture is not a dispensable shell.” Literary form and genre do matter. Letters should be read differently than poem which require a different sort of reading than history or law. (Note: Thompson prefers the word “reading” instead of “interpretation” because it is less overlain with the complexities of theorists. After all, people can read well without studying a theory behind reading.)
2. “The words of Scripture may refer but reference does not exhaust their function.” There is a big debate in literary circles about whether language is performative or declarative. That is, do words refer to things or do words do things? Clearly, the Bible sees itself as doing both. Scripture refers to actual events and truths, but it also comforts, prods, and even brings new life.
3. “Reading takes place in a context (and so does hermeneutical theorizing!).” Yes, we do read texts from a particular location and as a particular people. We are not neutral readers. But we are not incompetent either, and neither is God. Our filters can distort the message of Scripture, but they don’t so of necessity. Spiritual people can understand spiritual truths (1 Cor. 2:13).
4. “Critical methods have brought significant gains but at a cost.” We can all benefit from the advances in biblical scholarship over the past few hundred years, but our benefit will not be a spiritual one if do not take the Scripture on its own terms and listen to it as the authoritative word of God. The problem with critical methodology is that it often brings a whole host of unbelieving assumptions to the text.
5. “The misuse of Scripture in the interests of personal or corporate power is not simply hypothetical.” In other words, we’ve screwed up the Bible before and probably will again.
After accepting these five challenges and learning from them, Thompson protests against the more extreme elements inherent in them. In so doing he make three points.
First, we believe in God. If God is the author of the Scriptures, as Christians believe, then no matter how much we may give up on hearing the text rightly, the Author has not given up on being heard.
Second, the Bible is not just another text. To give but one example, as Christians we believe the Bible is inspired as no other book is and as such affords us the same Spirit to help us understand it.
Third, despite the changes in culture and language from the biblical text to our time, there are two constants that cannot be overlooked: 1) God’s character and purposes are still the same, and 2) the human need for forgiveness and a Savior are still the same. These constants anchor our interpretative vessels amidst the downward pull of the hermeneutical spiral.
Here’s the point:
The Christian confession of the clarity of Scripture is an aspect of faith in God. Christians approach this text with confidence that its meaning is accessible to the ploughboy as well as the scholar, because the God who is able to make himself known, and is determined to do so, has given them both this text. Without reservation we acknowledge that this book is genuinely the work of those human authors who in various ways produced it. It is always and ever a piece of human communication, using all the structures and conventions of human written discourse. Its origins can properly be traced to particular historical situations or locations. Yet at the same time, without compromise in either direction, these texts come to us as divine discourse, as the word of God. These words are themselves God’s self-revelation in the world. In them he presents his Son to us. By them he gathers his people and brings about his ancient intention. God’s self-communication is not more distorted by its expression in human words than his compassion is distorted by its expression in human flesh. To put this another way, the ultimate guarantee that God’s word will be heard and understood, that it will achieve the purpose for which it was spoken and written, is the power and goodness of God himself. In this sense, a conviction that Scripture is clear is something believers bring to their reading of the Bible.
