Introduction to Biblical Interpretation

William W. Klein, Craig L. Blomberg, Robert L. Hubbard, Jr.

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780310524182
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Estudios bíblicos

Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, now in its third edition, is a classic hermeneutics textbook that sets forth concise, logical, and practical guidelines for discovering the truth in God's Word.

With updates and revisions throughout that keep pace with current scholarship, this book offers students the best and most up-to-date information needed to interpret Scripture.

Introduction to Biblical Interpretation:

• Defines and describes hermeneutics, the science of biblical interpretation
• Suggests effective methods to understand the meaning of the biblical text
• Surveys the literary, cultural, social, and historical issues that impact any text
• Evaluates both traditional and modern approaches to Bible interpretation
• Examines the reader's role as an interpreter of the text and helps identify what the reader brings to the text that could distort its message
• Tackles the problem of how to apply the Bible in valid and significant ways today
• Provides an extensive and revised annotated list of books that readers will find helpful in the practice of biblical interpretation

Used in college and seminary classrooms around the world, this volume is a trusted and valuable tool for students and other readers who desire to understand and apply the Bible.

Part I

THE TASK OF

INTERPRETATION

1

THE NEED FOR INTERPRETATION

Making sense of Scripture is an arduous and often puzzling task. We may readily explain what the Bible says, but have more difficulty in agreeing about what it means by what it says. And, often even more troublesome, modern Christians differ wildly on how the Bible’s words should influence their lives today, if at all. Consider some of the difficult tensions we face in this task:

• The Bible is God’s Word, yet it has come to us through human means. The commands of God appear to be absolute, yet they are set in such diverse historical contexts that we are hard-pressed to see how they can be universally normative.
• The divine message must be clear, yet many passages seem all too ambiguous.
• We acknowledge the crucial role of the Holy Spirit, yet scholarship is surely necessary to understand what the Spirit has inspired.
• The Scriptures present the message God wants us to hear, but that message is conveyed within a complex literary landscape with varied genres and over a huge span of time.
• Proper interpretation requires the interpreter’s personal freedom, yet that freedom comes with considerable risks of bias and distortion. Is there some role for an external, corporate authority?
• The objectivity of the biblical message seems essential to some readers, yet on the one hand presuppositions surely inject a degree of subjectivity into the interpretive process, while on the other postmodernity calls the very concept of objectivity into question.¹

Every student of the Bible could add his or her own list of troublesome and perplexing issues. How can we be successful in our attempts to understand the Scriptures correctly? We need a well-thought-out approach to interpreting the Bible. And that is precisely where hermeneutics comes in.

The meaning of this term can be ambiguous in current usage, so we need to explain the sense in which we will use it in this book. Hermeneutics describes the task of explaining the meaning of the Scriptures. The word derives from the Greek verb hermēneuō that means “to explain, interpret or to translate,” while the noun hermēneia means “interpretation” or “translation.” Using the verb, Luke informs us that Jesus explained to the two disciples on the Emmaus road what the Scriptures said about him (Luke 24:27). Paul uses the noun in 1 Corinthians 12:10 to refer to the gift of interpretation of tongues. In essence, then, hermeneutics involves interpreting or explaining. In fields like biblical studies or literature, it refers to the task of explaining the meaning of a piece of writing.²

Hermeneutics describes the principles people use to understand what something means, to comprehend what a message—written, oral, or visual—is endeavoring to communicate.

WHY HERMENEUTICS?

But what does hermeneutics have to do with reading and understanding the Bible? Haven’t God’s people through the millennia read and understood the Scriptures without recourse to hermeneutics? Actually, the answer to this second question is no. For though we might not always be conscious of it, unless certain things are in place we would not be able to comprehend anything.

Think of normal everyday life. We engage in conversations or read a book, and we unconsciously interpret and understand the meanings we hear or read. When we watch a television program, listen to a lecture, or read a blog or an article about a familiar subject in our own culture and language, we interpret intuitively and without consciously thinking of using methods. Though unaware of the process, we employ methods of interpretation that enable us to understand accurately. This explains why normal communication “works.” If there were no system, understanding would occur only randomly or occasionally, if at all.³

But is reading the Bible like this? Can we understand the Bible correctly merely by reading it? Some people are convinced that we can. One seminary professor tells how a distraught student once interrupted a seminar on principles for understanding the Bible. Fearful that he might have offended the student, the teacher asked if anything was wrong. Mournfully, the student responded, “I feel so sorry for you.”

“Why do you feel sorry for me?” The professor was perplexed.

“Because,” said the student, “it is so hard for you to understand the Bible. I just read it and God shows me the meaning.”

How Illumination of the Holy Spirit Helps Believers Understand Scripture

Convinces reader the Bible is true

Gives the ability to apprehend, not comprehend, the meaning

Leads to conviction that enables reader to embrace its meaning

Does the Holy Spirit tell people what the Bible means? While this approach to biblical interpretation may reflect a commendable confidence in God, it reveals a simplistic (and potentially dangerous) understanding of the illumination of the Holy Spirit and the clarity of Scripture—important issues that we will take up in due course. As we will argue, the role of the Spirit in understanding God’s Word is indispensable. The Spirit convinces God’s people of the truth of the biblical message and then convicts and enables them to live consistently with that truth. However, apart from extraordinarily rare and unusual circumstances, the Spirit does not inform readers of Scripture’s meaning. That is, the Spirit’s help does not replace the need to interpret biblical passages according to the principles of language communication.

Through the centuries, if people have correctly understood God’s Word, it is because they have employed proper principles and methods of interpretation. That does not mean, of course, that they all had “formal” biblical training. Rather, they were good readers—they used common sense and had enough background to read accurately. Equally, others seriously misunderstood what the Bible meant, sometimes with lamentable results. What this book aspires to do, then, is to uncover and explain what makes a “good reader” and to provide the principles to enable Bible readers to read accurately while avoiding mistakes.

The need for such principles becomes more obvious when one is in an unfamiliar domain—such as a lecture on astrophysics or with a highly technical legal document. Terms, allusions, and concepts are strange and perhaps incomprehensible. We immediately perceive a need for help in deciphering the message. How are we to make sense of antiquarks, the weak anthropic principle, or neutrinos? Who can tell us how to distinguish a habeas corpus from a corpus delicti? We cannot simply make up our own meanings, or merely ask a random person who might be nearby. We need the help of specialized resources or an expert. Taking a physics class might help in the first situation, while consulting a lawyer would be helpful in the second.⁴

At times understanding even the most straightforward communication is not so clear-cut. For example, to understand a father’s statement to his daughter, “You will be home by midnight, won’t you?” will probably require decoding various cues beyond the simple meanings of individual words. To determine whether this is an inquiry, an assumption, or a command will require a careful analysis of the entire situation. How much more complicated this task is when one seeks to make sense of an ancient text written by people in centuries past! What does Genesis 1:2 have in mind when it says, “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was all over the surface of the deep . . .?” What did Jesus mean when he said, “. . . for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long” (Matt 25:3)? We might kindly ask the distraught student mentioned above, “Will the Holy Spirit tell you what phylacteries are, or must you use some source to supply the meaning?” The great distances of time and culture between those ancient writers and us require some bridges if we are to gain understanding.

But beyond the meaning of the text itself (what it meant in the original context for authors and recipients), faithful biblical readers also want to know the significance of that text for themselves. They ask, “What is this text saying to me and what difference should it make in my life, if any?”

If the goal is correct understanding of communication, we need an approach and methods that are appropriate to the task. Hermeneutics provides the means for understanding the Scriptures and for applying that meaning responsibly. To avoid interpretation that is arbitrary, erroneous, or that simply suits personal whim, the reader needs methods and principles for guidance. A deliberate procedure to interpret based on sensible and agreed-upon principles becomes the best guarantee that an interpretation will be accurate. When we consciously set out to discover and employ such principles, we explore hermeneutics—biblical interpretation.⁵ Thus, the basic goal of this book will be to establish, explain, and demonstrate guidelines and methods to guide those who want to understand and apply Scripture correctly.

HERMENEUTICS DEFINED

The Art and Science of Interpretation

Interpretation is not either an art or a science; it is both an art and a science. Every form of communication uses “codes” of some sort—cues in sounds, spelling, tone of voice, etc.—to convey meaning. We use rules, principles, methods, and tactics to “decode” messages we hear, see, or read. Yet, human communication cannot be reduced solely to quantifiable and precise rules. No mechanical system of rules will ever help one understand correctly all the implications or nuances in the three words “I love you” as spoken by a teenage girl to her boyfriend, a husband to his wife of twenty-five years, a mother to her child, or an aging baby boomer to his mint-condition ’57 Chevy. This is where the “art” of interpretation enters in. Adults may think they understand the words “awesome,” “sweet,” or “dude”⁶ (or any popular teenage word), but without knowing the codes of a specific youth subculture, they may be wide of the mark. Similarly, youth may find words of their grandparents like “far out” or “smashing”—words common in their youth—unintelligible.

In light of this, how much more must modern biblical interpreters seek to bridge the linguistic, historical, social, and cultural gaps that exist between the ancient and modern worlds so that they may understand what texts mean? We assume that people communicate in order to be understood, and this includes the authors of the Scriptures. Hermeneutics provides a strategy that will enable us to understand the meaning and significance of what an author or speaker intended to communicate.

Are we presuming that there is only one possible meaning of a text or utterance and that our goal is to understand the author’s intention in writing that text? Alas, an answer to this question is not so simple. Perhaps, given a specific text, we must ask whether it has only one correct meaning or whether it may accommodate several or many possible meanings (perhaps at different levels). On one end of the spectrum, some say that the only correct meaning of a text is that single meaning the original author intended it to have.⁷ On the other end stand those who argue that meaning is a function of readers, not authors, and that any text’s meaning depends upon the readers’ perception of it.⁸ Readers, they say, actually “create” the meaning of a text in the process of reading it. Between the two poles stand other options. Perhaps meaning resides independently in the texts themselves, regardless of what the author meant or of what later readers understand from them. Or perhaps meaning results from some dynamic, complex dialogue between a reader and a text. These issues are crucial because our definition of the task of hermeneutics will depend on our answer to where meaning resides—in the author’s mind, in the text, in the mind of the reader, or in some combination of these. We will return to these questions in the chapters that follow.

The Role of the Interpreter

What role does the interp...