We live in a church era where the common mantra is "you have your interpretation and I have my interpretation and no one can know for sure so lets just all take our bats and go home". It has become our own version of "pleading the fifth". Statements like this (and I have heard many "church leaders" say words to this effect) make their own doctrinal allegiance to the authority of Scripture as useless and meaningless. Such claims amount to nothing less than a denial of the inerrancy, infallibility, and sufficiency of Scripture itself.
The Apostle Paul wrote that “God is not the author of
confusion” (1 Corinthians 14:33a) and this would certainly be consistent with
Him giving fallen men a written revelation of Himself. It becomes one of the
many ways that a Holy and Righteous God stoops down to sinful and fallen men. Professor Matt Waymeyer of "The Master's Seminary" writes:
Because the Bible was given to reveal truth rather than
conceal it, the interpreter must assume the overall clarity of God’s Word.
Often referred to as the perspicuity of Scripture, this means that the divine
intention of the Bible was/is basically clear and comprehensible to its
original author, its original audience, and its contemporary readers. This is
not to say that all parts of Scripture are equally clear or that there are no
difficult passages to interpret (2 Pet 3:16), and this does not deny that later
revelation provides a fuller picture of the subject addressed in earlier
prophecy. But it does mean that the basic meaning of biblical prophecy was
intelligible and could be understood when it was originally revealed.
This perspicuity of God’s Holy Word became increasingly
undermined as can be seen even in the later stages of the New Testament with
the rise of Gnosticism and appeals to “secret knowledge” belonging to spiritual
elitists. We see this issue clearly raised in Jude’s Epistle when he unmasks
the modus operandi of these wolves that were infiltrating the body of Christ as
early as the first century AD:
Yet in like manner these people also, relying on their dreams, defile the
flesh, reject authority, and blaspheme the glorious ones. (Jude 8 ESV emphasis mine)
Even in Jude’s time we see false teachers who are making
claims of dreams that give them deeper knowledge. We see this today in the
Charismatic movement and especially within the Word Faith factions of that
movement. What is implied by this Gnostic knowledge? That the plain surface
meaning is not enough. They are saying that deeper, hidden knowledge is where true
spirituality is really at. And it continues into the present day unabated:
Joyce Meyer goes on to tell her hearers soon after this that they should not go looking in the Bible for this teaching on the atonement because they won't find it there. Joyce tells them that this special knowledge only comes through "personal revelation". Aside from the biblical fact that Joyce Meyer is unqualified (as a woman, see 1 Timothy 2-3) to stand in a pulpit, such ridiculous claims do not even warrant further debate.
The various factors of false teaching, refutation of false
teaching, theological agendas, and the need to harmonize difficult Scriptural
passages all impacted on the practice of hermeneutics in the early church era.
During the Patristic Period (A.D. 100-590) the early church fathers placed
great emphasis on allegorizing biblical passages. This was the “search for
hidden or secret meaning that underlies the actual words of a given text – a
meaning that is unrelated to the more obvious meaning of the text.” The
early church fathers also began to place greater value and emphasis on the
traditional interpretation of a passage being the correct one rather than
evaluating a traditional interpretation in the light of what the Scripture
says.
The Medieval Period (A.D. 590-1500) saw these ideas develop
further and really set the scene for what Roman Catholicism holds to in its
present form. Biblical students focused more on studying what the church
fathers had to say about any given portion of the biblical text and placed
almost no importance on exegeting the text itself. The Bible was no longer the
ultimate authority because that was now trumped by how church tradition
interpreted that Bible. And this tradition was primarily driven by
allegorization as church tradition continually found deeper (and more self serving)
meaning from texts that spoke plainly and differently to these “allegorical
innovations”.
The Reformation Period (1500-1650) was a revolution in the
handling of Scripture. With a renewed emphasis on the supreme authority of
Scripture (Sola Scriptura was their battle cry), the Reformers trashed Rome’s
“creative accounting” in favor of a plain reading of the biblical text in its
original languages. This was a pivotal moment in church history. Martin Luther
was the man who ignited the Reformation with his brazen defiance of Popes and
Roman religiosity. Luther maintained that Scripture was its own best
interpreter and that interpretation should be driven by this concept.
The period following the Reformation (1650-1800) saw the
rise of Pietism, and with it, an approach to interpretation focused on careful
grammatical-historical analysis of the Scriptures in their original languages.
They could see that the God of the Bible did not have a problem explaining
Himself and a natural reading of the text, in context, could yield
comprehensible results to the recipient when read in this natural way.
Rationalism was also on the rise at this time and elevated the human intellect
to the point where the Rationalists thought that Scripture needed to conform to
their reasoning, and the parts that refused were simply ignored or rejected.
During the Modern Period (1800-Present), rationalism gave
birth to what would become theological liberalism. The Higher-Critical Method
was brazen intellectual snobbery. These people cared nothing for the authority
of Scripture. Their interpretive focus avoided the pursuit of discovering what
God was saying through His Word, and instead focused on delusional attempts at
trying to explain the “editorial process” that caused Scripture to appear in
the form that they found it in.
The 20th Century gave rise to the Reader-Response
Method where the author of the text was not allowed into the discussion on what
the text was saying. These people considered it far more important to decide
what the text was saying to them. What fun can be had by reinterpreting
Reader-Response conclusions in even more fanciful and self serving ways at the
expense of their own self importance.
D.A. Carson wrote as far back as 1984 on this important
shift in the mode of attack on conservative evangelicalism when he said there
had been a change in the theological climate over the preceding four decades.
He wrote:
At the risk of oversimplification, one could argue that the generation of conservative Christians before the present one faced opponents who argued in effect that the Bible is not trustworthy, and only the ignorant or blind could claim it is. In the present generation, there are of course many voices that say the same thing; but there are new voices that loudly insist our real problem is hermeneutical and exegetical. (D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies p18)
This sounds ominously like the “emergent church” which would
begin to appear more than a decade after Carson penned those words. The enemy
within is far more dangerous than the enemy without. A Richard Dawkins who
rails on God, Christianity, and the Bible is an obvious enemy that we can see
coming well in advance. A Brian MacLaren, on the other hand, is a far more
dangerous threat because he masquerades as one of us and claims to uphold the
authority of Scripture all the while being hell-bent on redefining so much of
what it plainly says.
If we want to understand a book in the best possible way
then we need to ask the author exactly what he was saying. So too with
Scripture, we need to know the authorial intent if we are to interpret it
rightly. And Scripture is unique in that it has what we call Dual Authorship. If
I was to hand write you a letter with my finest Shepherd’s Conference fountain
pen, would you say that the letter was written by my fountain pen? Likewise,
throughout history, God has used special men as writing tools in His hand to
bring about His written revelation. Some of the distinctive qualities of these
human fountain pens are evident, but they are transcended by the divine voice
that speaks through them. Though this analogy is not a watertight analogy it can be somewhat helpful.
Throughout the Bible we see that its text regularly
presented as both the words of God and the words of man (2 Samuel 23:2, 1 Kings
14:18, 16:12, 16:34, 2 Kings 9:36, 14:25, 1 Chronicles 17:3, Jeremiah 1:9,
37:2, Zechariah 7:7,12, Luke 1:70, Acts 1:16, 2:16-17, 3:18,21, 4:25, 28:25,
Romans 1:1-2, 1 Corinthians 9:8-10, 14:37, Galatians 1:11-12, 1 Thessalonians
2:13, 4:8, 4:15, Hebrews 1:1, 1 Peter 1:10-12, 2 Peter 3:2, Rev 1:1-3). This
fact is most clearly nailed down in Paul’s second letter to Timothy and in
Peter’s second Epistle:
All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is
profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in
righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto
all good works. (2 Timothy 3:16-17 KJV)
Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is
of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the
will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. (2
Peter 1:20-21 KJV)
The fact of Dual Authorship has major implications for the
right practice of sound hermeneutics. Waymeyer explains this when he says that:
The dual authorship of Scripture ultimately forms the
foundation of Bible interpretation, for upon it rest five aspects of Scripture,
which, in turn, lead to specific principles for interpreting God’s Word. These
five aspects are the overall unity of Scripture, the overall clarity of
Scripture, the single meaning of Scripture, the contextual nature of Scripture,
and the human language of Scripture.
For this reason the Grammatical-Historical method of Bible
interpretation, with its emphasis on examining the context and interpreting the
content of the passage, has maintained a healthy following through the recent
centuries of hermeneutical turbulence. It is the “no brainer” approach to
interpreting the Bible because the God of the Bible has never had a problem
explaining Himself.
