Navigating the Crisis of Biblical Interpretation

There's a sense in which interpreting the Bible is an art. Maybe even it would be better to call it a science, but for a moment at least, let's stick with the analogy of art. I think of the category of art because of the problems that we've all been able to recognize in twentieth century culture of a new wave of art that has swept across the landscape of our culture, and in many cases bringing a sense of confusion and chaos. [00:00:56]

And one of the questions that the art critic is interested in, and the layman as well when he visits an art gallery or sees a painting in "Time" magazine, is what is the meaning of this painting? Or what is the sculptor trying to say with his latest masterpiece? And we went through a period of art in the last twenty-five years where there was kind of a freewheeling artistic expression where the artist was asked, "What did you mean by your painting?" and his response was, "I meant whatever you find in it." [00:02:49]

Now that has provoked a kind of crisis in the field of biblical understanding because in that approach to art, if we would transfer it to the Bible, would leave us with no guidelines of objectivity, no rules by which we can discover an objective meaning. Now remember the framework that I'm working on here is the assertion that I've made that there is in fact only one ultimately correct meaning to Scripture, an objective meaning, and it's the meaning that the author of Scripture had in mind. [00:04:08]

Now if we take that view of the Bible, that there is an objective meaning, then we need to look at the Bible and the whole business of interpreting the Bible not only as an art, but as a science. And in fact, there is a science, an academic discipline, a particular subdivision of theology that is exclusively concerned for looking at the scientific rules and methods and principles that ought to govern our attempts to interpret the Scripture. [00:05:33]

Now there is a sense in which the science of biblical interpretation has provoked a major, very major and serious crisis for the church. Now when theologians discuss this crisis, they talk about it in terms of a technical word for it, which is the word "hermeneutics." Some of you perhaps have never even heard the word; other ones, you'll let it fall off your lips very casually in normal conversation -- the hermeneutical problem here, and so on -- and you may be very knowledgeable of the disputes that are involved in that field. [00:07:19]

And so-called nineteenth century liberalism had its own kind of crisis. It came to the conclusion that the simple natural elements of the biblical content were no longer believable in a modern, industrialized, scientific world, and that if we were to extract anything from the Bible of lasting value, of contemporary value, we had to de super-naturalize the New Testament and the Old Testament, and so there was, in effect, a crisis of belief. [00:10:46]

But these were people who controlled major theological seminaries, colleges, universities, and they had at their disposal vast memberships in large church groups; in fact, in some cases, entire denominations, and they say, "Wait a minute, the church is an institution that still has a very significant impact on the culture, and we have this following. Why should we just close the doors of the church and turn them into museums, why should we just jettison Christianity? [00:12:13]

Now the second method which was developed in the nineteenth century was called the Religious-Historical Method, the religious-historical method. Now that represented an approach to Scripture that grew out of a whole sweeping movement of philosophy and changing of thinking and method that was characteristic of the nineteenth century. If there was a buzz word in nineteenth century intellectual thought, it was the word, "evolution." [00:19:54]

The third one and the one that is most influential in our day, I'm going to call broadly the existential school of thought. The existential school of thought, which has given us the so-called new hermeneutic says that we're not really interested in the original historical situation because it doesn't relate to us today. What we need is a theology that is timeless, that is not bound to the first century or even bound to the twentieth century, but transcends that all, that redemption is something that doesn't happen along historical lines, but it happens vertically, directly from above. [00:25:08]

The governing principle of constitutionality has become consistent with contemporary community standards, which change and change and change because we've brought into a view of relativism. There are no absolutes, there are no abiding principles, and if that's the case, then the Constitution itself can no longer function as an objective foundational guide for future behavior, and so you can actually change the Constitution not by a constitutional amendment but by simply reinterpreting it. [00:28:00]

That's the kind of crisis we have in the Christian faith, in the Christian church, and that's why the science of hermeneutics is vital, because if the new hermeneutic prevails, then we will have a Jesus who is not the same yesterday, today, and forever, but a Jesus who goes through as many changes as the theologians who are interpreting Him. [00:28:52]

We're going to be searching for an objective method, and we're going to be examining ways to establish it throughout the rest of this course. [00:29:22]