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COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICS

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Table of Contents

A Postmodernist’s Creed 3

Biblical Inerrancy Statements 5

Lectio Divina (Holy Reading) 8

Hermeneutics and the Meditative Use of 10

Compiled by Professor Christopher Ullman – Christian Life College1


Scripture: The Case for a Baptized Imagination

The Bible: Why This Book? 24

Why So Many Translations? 36

The Holy Spirit and Hermeneutics 45



A POSTMODERNIST’S CREED“Nothing is certain.”

“Nobody knows anything for sure.”

“Everything ought to be doubted.”

“What is true for you may not be true for me.”

1. “Nothing is certain.”

Is this statement certain?

a. If so, it contradicts itself, since one thing is certain: that nothing is certain.

b. If this statement isn’t certain, why is it stated in such certain terms?

• It’s wording doesn’t convey a sense of uncertainty about its truth. The postmodernist apparently is certain about this. See a.

c. Either way, I must conclude that this statement is false.

2. “Nobody knows anything for sure.”

Can I know this for sure?

a. If I can know this for sure, then the statement contradicts itself.

b. If I can’t know this for sure, then why is it stated so surely, in such forceful, confident language?

• It seems as if the postmodernist believes this to be a certainty. See a.

c. Either way, I must conclude that this statement also is false.

3. “Everything ought to be doubted.”

Does this include the statement, “Everything ought to be doubted?”

a. `If it does include the statement “Everything must be doubted,” then I must doubt that everything ought to be doubted.

• I will either end up rejecting the statement or accepting it.

If I refuse to doubt the above statement, I will be creating a “DO NOT DOUBT!” box.


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICS If I decide to doubt the above statement,

– What criterion will I use to determine if the statement can survive my doubting process, and become a certainty?

• Choosing any criterion establishes something objective that cannot be doubted.

• This refutes the above statement.

4. “What’s true for you may not be true for me.”

Obviously, this statement must apply to itself, as well as to all other truth claims.

– If so, then the above statement is true for you, but not necessarily for me.

– So, if it’s not true for me, then I must be open to the idea that some things that are true for you are also true for me.

• There must be a jointly held “truth box” we both can access.

• How we decide what belongs in it requires criteria we can both agree about.

• The criteria become some things that are both true for you and true for me, and for everyone.

– This means the statement above is false.

5. Self-referential Incoherence

This occurs when a statement cannot be true if it is applied to itself.

All four of the Postmodernist’s Creed truth claims are this way.

– The only way they can be true is if they are false.

– This results in a self-contradicting set of beliefs.

The Law of Noncontradiction is essential to rationality.

– Therefore, the Postmodern Creed is irrational.



BIBLICAL INERRANCY STATEMENTSSUMMARY STATEMENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL ON BIBLICAL INERRANCY:

1. God, who is Himself Truth and speaks truth only, has inspired Holy Scripture in order thereby to reveal Himself to lost mankind through Jesus Christ as Creator and Lord, Redeemer and Judge. Holy Scripture is God's witness to Himself.

2. Holy Scripture, being God's own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: It is to be believed, as God's instruction, in all that it affirms; obeyed, as God's command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God's pledge, in all that it promises.

3. The Holy Spirit, Scripture's divine Author, both authenticates it to us by His inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning.

4. Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God's acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, that in its witness to God's saving grace in individual lives.

5. The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible's own; and such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the Church.

-From "The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy," JETS 21/4 (December 1978) 289-296 THE REASONS TO BELIEVE ORGANIZATION STATEMENT1

We believe the Bible (the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments) is the Word of God, written. As a "God-breathed" revelation, it is thus verbally inspired and completely without error (historically, scientifically, morally, and spiritually) in its original writings. While God the Holy Spirit supernaturally superintended the writing of the Bible, that writing nevertheless reflects the words and literary styles of its individual human authors. Scripture reveals the being, nature, and character of God, the nature of God's creation, and especially His will for the salvation of human beings through Jesus Christ. The Bible is therefore our supreme and final authority in all matters that it addresses.

1 http://www.reasons.org/about/sof.shtml


http://www.reasons.org/about/sof.shtml


INERRANCY STATEMENT OF THE EVANGELICAL PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY:

"The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written, and is therefore inerrant in the originals."

-From membership affirmation form, 3/15/97

TALBOT SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY2

"The Bible, consisting of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, is the Word of God, a supernaturally given revelation from God Himself, concerning Himself, His being, nature, character, will and purposes; and concerning man, his nature, need and duty and destiny. The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are without error or misstatement in their moral and spiritual teaching and record of historical facts. They are without error or defect of any kind."

CONSERVATIVE BAPTIST ASSOCIATION OF THE PHILIPPINES3

We affirm that the Bible, consisting of 66 canonical books, is the Word of God written without error in the original manuscripts.

We affirm, furthermore, that— 1. Moses wrote the Pentateuch (Genesis to Deuteronomy)2. Adam and Eve are the first man and woman God created3. The prophet Jonah is an historical person4. Daniel the Prophet actually lived and wrote his prophecy during the times of

Nebuchadnezzar and Darius5. The Book of Isaiah in its entirety was written by the Prophet Isaiah who lived in the 8th

century before Christ6. The Gospels are authentic and accurate accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

Additional clarifications on the position presented to the delegates: 1. Although we affirm the hermeneutical necessity and value of biblical criticism, we find it

objectionable that the most common conclusions espoused by some scholars run contrary to these which we list and consider indispensable to our position on biblical inerrancy.

2. This action implies that CBAP is prepared to make its cooperative efforts with individuals and institutions to be contingent upon this stance on the doctrine of the Bible. While we endorse teaching the depth and breadth of biblical criticism as academic freedom, we disapprove conclusions contrary to the particulars cited above as doctrinal infidelity.

GENERAL COUNCIL OF THE ASSEMBLIES OF GOD4

The Inerrancy Of ScriptureWe believe the Bible is the Word of God written; it is the revelation of the truths of God conveyed by inspiration through His servants to us. As such, it is infallible and without error.

2 http://www.talbot.edu/about/biblical_inerrancy.cfm 3 http://www.cbphilippines.org/cbphil/inerrancy.html 4 http://www.ag.org/top/beliefs/position_papers/4175_inerrancy.cfm


http://www.ag.org/top/beliefs/position_papers/4175_inerrancy.cfm

http://www.cbphilippines.org/cbphil/inerrancy.html

http://www.talbot.edu/about/biblical_inerrancy.cfm

COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSImplications Of Statement

1. We refer to original autographs. While the science of textual criticism assures us of a trustworthy text, inerrancy can be claimed only for the original writings (Jeremiah 36:2 [KJV/NIV]).

2. We conceive the Bible to be in actuality the very Word of God. The divine Author prompted the original thought in the mind of the writers (Amos 3:8 [KJV/NIV]); He then guided their choice of words to express such thoughts (Exodus 4:12,15 [KJV/NIV]); and, lastly, He illumines the mind of the reader of such words in a way that the reader potentially may comprehend the same truth as was originally in the mind of the writer (1 Corinthians 2:12; Ephesians 1:17,18 [KJV/NIV]). Thus, both thought and language are revelatory and inspired.

3. We understand inspiration to mean that special act of the Holy Spirit by which He guided the writers of the Scriptures. Such superintendency made full allowance for the divergent backgrounds, abilities, and personalities of the writers, and applies to all they wrote as it is found in the canon of Scripture.

4. We define inerrancy as meaning "exempt from error" and infallibility as a near synonym meaning "incapable of error, certain". If there is any difference in the shade of meaning between the two terms, inerrancy emphasizes the truthfulness of Scripture, while infallibility emphasizes the trustworthiness of Scripture. Such inerrancy and infallibility apply to all of Scripture and include both revelational inerrancy and factual inerrancy. It is truth (2 Samuel 7:28; Psalm 119:43,160; John 17:17,19; Colossians 1:5 [KJV/NIV]).


http://www.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language=English&version=NIV&passage=2+Samuel+7:28%3B+Psalm+119:43%2C160%3B+John+17:17%2C19%3B+Colossians+1:5&search=&showxref=yep&showfn=yep

http://www.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language=English&version=KJV&passage=2+Samuel+7:28%3B+Psalm+119:43%2C160%3B+John+17:17%2C19%3B+Colossians+1:5&search=&showxref=yep&showfn=yep

http://www.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language=English&version=NIV&passage=1+Corinthians+2:12%3B+Ephesians+1:17%2C18&search=&showxref=yep&showfn=yep

http://www.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language=English&version=KJV&passage=1+Corinthians+2:12%3B+Ephesians+1:17%2C18&search=&showxref=yep&showfn=yep

http://www.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language=English&version=NIV&passage=Exodus+4:12%2C15&search=&showxref=yep&showfn=yep

http://www.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language=English&version=KJV&passage=Exodus+4:12%2C15&search=&showxref=yep&showfn=yep

http://www.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language=English&version=NIV&passage=Amos+3:8&search=&showxref=yep&showfn=yep

http://www.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language=English&version=KJV&passage=Amos+3:8&search=&showxref=yep&showfn=yep

http://www.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language=English&version=NIV&passage=Jeremiah+36:2&search=&showxref=yep&showfn=yep

http://www.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language=English&version=KJV&passage=Jeremiah+36:2&search=&showxref=yep&showfn=yep


Lectio Divina (Holy Reading)5

Regular reading of the Bible extends the breadth of our familiarity with Scripture. In 'holy reading' we absorb the Word in depth.

Spend a few minutes settling down and pray that your heart may be opened and receptive to the gift God knows you need today. Only the Breath, the Spirit of God, can bring the word to life. Let your own breathing become more deep-seated, gentler, from lower down, as you invite the Spirit to pray in you afresh.

Begin reading at the place you have previously chosen, and read on very slowly indeed with an open mind. Don't study the text, just read it slowly, aloud if you find that helpful. This is the lectio, or reading.

When a particular sentence or phrase or single word "lights up" or "rings a bell," seems striking or inviting, put the Bible down. Resist the temptation to go on, and do not start thinking up reasons why the phrase has claimed your attention. Here the reading stops and the meditation begins, the absorption through repetition.6 So, for example, you might be reading the tenth chapter of John's gospel where Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd. As you come to verse 14, these words seem to have a special allure, "I know my own, and my own know me." This is the verse you now meditate with.

Gently repeat this phrase or word again and again within the heart. Don't project them outward. Let the repetition be gentle and not mechanical. There is no need to conjure up any mental picture to accompany the words or to try to make yourself feel any particular emotion as you speak them. Resist the temptation to force particular lessons or meanings from the words. You know what the word means well enough; the repetition is to allow you to savour and relish them at an intuitive level. After some time you may find a longer sentence or phrase has shortened itself to a single word. Gradually allow yourself to be absorbed in the word. So, "Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so I send you," might become distilled into the single word "peace" (John 20:21).

In time you will become aware of an impression that the words have made on you. They have evoked a particular feeling or attitude. When you have become aware of this there is no need to prolong the repetition. Now is the time for the praying of your response.

Express to God in the simplest way the impression the words have made on you. You may want to thank God for the gift they convey, ask the questions they have stirred in you, put into words the longings and needs they have brought up. Keep it simple, praying

5 Adapted from http://home.global.co.za/~stevel/lectio.htm (accessed on 9/13/04), and http://www.clubi.ie/shalom/lectio/method.html (accessed on 9/13/04).6 "Repetition is the soul of genuine lectio. It is a right brain activity; we do not grasp the entire content immediately but in a circular manner. We read and advance, then we go back and read again. With each repetition, something new may strike us... It takes time for us to become attuned to the subtle rhythms of a particular writing; the more we can slow down our reading, the more likely it is that we will catch sight of something unexpected."


http://www.clubi.ie/shalom/lectio/method.html

http://home.global.co.za/~stevel/lectio.htm

COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSspontaneously. Or you may want to respond by remaining in loving silence in the presence of God, appreciating the grace or attitude the word of scripture has instilled. Your prayer may move into contemplation, a simple being in Christ with God in which all you are aware of is that you are being attracted towards God like the needle of a compass finding the north.

After some time you will not be able to sustain your spontaneous praying or state of loving awareness. Distractions set in. You may bring the prayer time to a close with thanksgiving or by reciting the Lord's Prayer. If you have time and opportunity, you may feel drawn to begin the process again by returning to the Scripture. Begin at the point where you left off and continue with the reading expecting to be touched again by another word.

A word about repeating the phrase. There should be nothing artificial and mechanically regular about it. The words of an ancient monk teaching about the "Jesus prayer," in which the name of Jesus is repeated many times, are helpful. The repetition "may be likened to the beating of wings by which a bird rises into the air. It must never be boring and forced, or hurried, or in the nature of flapping. It must be gentle, easy and - let us give to this word its deepest meaning - graceful. When the bird has reached the desired height it glides in its flight, and only beats its wings from time to time in order to stay in the air ... The repetition will only be resumed when other thoughts threaten to crowd out the thought of Jesus. Then the invocation will start again in order to gain fresh impetus."

Lectio divina is not only a means of discovering something about God; it also helps us to understand our selves. It is not the alienating absorption of a message that is foreign or hostile to us or to our deepest aspirations. It is the surprising conclusion that our most authentic level of being is mirrored in the Scriptures. What is most intimate to our existence as persons is nourished and nurtured by God's Word.



Hermeneutics and the Meditative Use of Scripture: The Case for a Baptized Imagination

By Glenn Scorgie7

That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized (C. S. Lewis)

INTRODUCTION

Bible-centeredness is one of the defining and most celebrated features of the evangelical tradition. To a significant degree evangelical identity revolves around the central place we give to the Scriptures. Historically we have been very much a people of the Book. We confess that the Bible is unique among pieces of literature, for it is God-breathed--divinely-inspired, and therefore infallible (unable to fail), inerrant (without error) and supremely authoritative (possessing the right to compel assent). We acknowledge its power, and so we preach the Word (2 Tim. 4:12) counting on its penetrating force as the sword of the Spirit (Heb. 4:12).

But one quickly discovers that to hold the Bible in such a prominent place is no guarantee that the way we treat it and use it will always be appropriate. In fact, all too often just the opposite is the case. We are embarrassed at the prevalence of magical approaches to Scripture that bear more resemblance than we would like to the superstitious oracular and divining practices of the world's primal religions. We have squirmed when fellow-evangelicals have treated the Bible as a volume of encoded secrets about the future that require esoteric and even mathematical deciphering. It has given us headaches to attend home Bible studies at which every random and arbitrary interpretation of a passage put forward by participants is affirmed and validated as a stroke of genius.

And so saner heads among us have taken seriously the Scripture's own challenge to rightly divide the Word of Truth (2 Tim. 2:15), as the older King James Version put it, or, as the New International Version now translates the phrase, to correctly handle the Word of Truth. We evangelicals have worked hard to develop responsible ways of interpreting the Bible. We do not want to be victims of dangerous subjectivity and misleading judgments. For responsible evangelical scholars this has meant attempting as best we can to grasp the original authors' intended meanings, an effort that has in turn involved embracing historical-grammatical methods of exegesis and hermeneutics. And over the years we have taken ownership of a rather sophisticated apparatus of scholarly methods and lexical tools to help us with this. Through all of this the thing we have vilified most, and been most opposed to, has been subjective interpretations of Scripture.

Subjectivism has challenged us in different forms, and we have done our best to remain resilient each time. Despite a considerable challenge in the twentieth century from the Neo-Orthodox approach to Scripture, evangelicals held to the conviction that whatever God might say to a receptive reader of Scripture it must be tethered to the propositional content of the biblical text itself. More recently, evangelicals have responded to deconstructionism, the literary expression

7 http://people.bethel.edu/~gscorgie/articles/hermeneutics_med_use_of_script.htm


http://people.bethel.edu/~gscorgie/articles/hermeneutics_med_use_of_script.htm

COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSof postmodernism, according to which meaning resides only in the reader's creative construction of meaning rather than in the text itself. Generally evangelicals have inclined in literary matters to submit to something like what renowned Christian apologist C. S. Lewis once vividly described as the rough, male taste of reality, not made by us, or, indeed, for us, but hitting us in the face.

LIMITS OF THE HISTORICAL-GRAMMATICAL METHOD OF INTERPRETATION

Despite its laudable achievements this well-intentioned approach, which has generally been marketed as the approach to Scripture, has not by itself been serving the church as well as one might hope. It is not failing because there is anything intrinsically wrong with either the methodological principles it advocates or the central importance it attaches to discerning the biblical writers' original authorial intentions. Rather, this prevailing evangelical approach to hermeneutics may be damaging the vitality of the church because of what it either completely ignores, deliberately under-estimates, or cavalierly dismisses as of peripheral concern. I am thinking in particular of the deficiencies of evangelical hermeneutics in the three crucial areas of personal formation, practical application, and the facilitation of direct encounter with God. I need to make clear that I am not suggesting that the historical-grammatical method be discarded or replaced; I am thinking more in terms of major supplementation and expansion. Its hegemonic status is the problematic issue in my mind, for the reasons just mentioned: namely, its formational, practical and religious deficiencies.

1. Personal Formation

In the first place, and inasmuch as it is almost completely absorbed with the task of establishing intellectually valid inferences from the biblical text, standard evangelical hermeneutics fails to provide any substantive resources for meeting the challenge of changing readers' lives. This is its formational deficiency.

2. Practical Application

Secondly, evangelical hermeneutics can often bring the reader to the point of a pretty decent grasp of what a particular text meant in its original historical and culturally-conditioned context. But it flounders seriously when it comes to the challenge of moving from what it meant to what it may signify now in the present tense. Too often readers rest content with a feeling that they know what the text meant, and are not so concerned to move from this penultimate stage to consider what the text means for them. This space between the past and the present is a gaping chasm that simply cannot be bridged by direct, linear thought. This is the practical deficiency of the prevailing approach to hermeneutics.

3. Encounter With God

In addition to these deficiencies, there is also the fact that the reader's relationship to the text takes precedence over the reader's relationship to the living voice of God. The reader-scholar is the active miner whose vigorous efforts are the means by which the valuable ore is raised to the surface. It is the responsibility of the student of Scripture to locate and squeeze truth from the text. God is readily acknowledged as the original supervising author of the text, and his aid is now solicited to empower the exegetical miner to do his or her investigative job well. The need


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSfor guidance in making edifying connections between text and application is readily acknowledged as well. But for all of this God is essentially the behind-the-scenes source of empowerment rather than a direct and personal dialogue partner with the reader. J. I. Packer made an important polemic point in his book God Has Spoken, but the use in the title of the past-tense of the verb to speak highlights the sense of distance felt by many evangelical souls.

Various historians have pointed out that the roots of this orientation to Scripture lie in an evangelical appropriation of certain Enlightenment assumptions about knowledge and induction, and the adaptation of this scientific methodology to the study of Scripture. We catch the flavor of this mind-set in the words of nineteenth century Princeton theological giant Charles Hodge:

The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches . . . . The duty of the Christian theologian is to ascertain, collect, and combine all the facts which God has revealed concerning himself and our relation to him. These facts are all in the Bible.

Robert Stein probably speaks for many contemporary evangelical scholars when he argues that Christians with the Spirit of God are unlikely to have any advantage of insight over non-Christians laboring without the Spirit of God when it comes to unpacking the meaning of a biblical text. Hermeneutics is a scholarly challenge that may be met equally well without any special grace of illumination. God is not a central player in the game; at best He is a silent enabler of the serious pursuer of truth. And so there is still a hunger for the God who speaks. This is the religious deficiency of our approach to Scripture.

CLASSIC EVANGELICAL PIETY

A crucially-important dimension of the evangelical heritage is at stake on this third point in particular. The evangelical tradition has always emphasized and celebrated the privilege of a personal experience of the living God. Perhaps there is no more distinctively evangelical phrase than a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. As James Houston, the founding principal and long-time professor of spiritual theology at Regent College, has put the matter, the essence of our Christian experience is a transforming friendship with God through Jesus Christ. Henry Blackaby, in his popular texts and workbooks, has described it even more simply as experiencing God.

Useful and important for its many strengths as the prevailing evangelical understanding of hermeneutics is, it is clearly leaving the heart longing for something more. And rightly so. For surely the Scriptures are more than a quarry from which we dig propositional information. There must be more to how we handle the Bible than scooping up information from it with our heavy-duty exegetical equipment, and then dumping it into the rail-cars of term papers, sermons and articles to be shipped off around the world. Those saints that have been endued with a spirit of holy dissatisfaction have always prayed instead: Lord, speak to me, that I may speak, in living echoes of Thy tone. Make my reading of Scripture personal. Make it part of my transforming friendship with you.

This is evidently what God wants to do, and certainly one of the purposes for which the Scriptures were designed. Evangelical Christians have always recognized that the inspired


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSScriptures are the chief instrumental means by which God communicates with us in a direct and intensely personal fashion. It is the main vehicle for the voice of God as it penetrates from eternity like a shaft of laser light. As an eternal voice, it retains the quality of eternity itself. It is always living and in the present tense. This living, evangelical approach to Scripture has long been celebrated in our hymnody: Beyond the sacred page, I see Thee, Lord; My spirit pants for Thee, O Living Word. These lyrical phrases perfectly express the pattern of going to the Word, not as an end in itself, but so that through it we connect with God.

A. W. Tozer's classic The Pursuit of God eloquently describes the evangelical soul's desire to hear God speak in the present tense and personally. It is the nature of God to speak, suggests Tozer: Self-expression is inherent in the God-head. And it is this present Voice which makes the written Word all-powerful. Otherwise it would lie locked in slumber within the covers of a book. He continues: That God is here and that He is speaking these truths are back of all other Bible truths. In this vein Tozer concludes with a prayer that includes the following: Let me get used to the sound of Thy Voice, that its tones may be familiar when the sounds of earth die away and the only sound will be the music of Thy speaking Voice. In my opinion Tozer's vision embodies all that Neo-Orthodox theologian Karl Barth dreamed of, and more, and manages to do this while keeping the orthodox doctrine of Scripture intact.

THE SPIRITUAL READING OF SCRIPTURE

The spiritual instincts of the people of God cannot be satisfied for long with a hermeneutical approach that minimizes personal formation, fades out when it comes to making practical applications, and by itself fails to connect the reader directly to God in deeper and more meaningful ways. Consequently the evangelical community is being drawn increasingly to an alternative approach to Scripture, which is not really new but a resuscitation of a venerable tradition of encountering the Word. By this I mean the approach to Scripture advocated by such prominent contemporary writers on Christian spirituality as Richard Foster, Robert Mulholland, Dallas Willard, Simon Chan and Marjorie Thompson.

This approach goes by a number of names. Occasionally it has been called a meditative approach to Scripture. Sometimes it is known as the spiritual reading of Scripture. Either designation is legitimate. But because the word meditation has connotations of Buddhist or Hindu notions of completely emptying one's mind (which is actually the opposite of biblical meditation as described in Psalm 1 and elsewhere), it may be best instead to refer to this approach as the spiritual reading of Scripture. By either designation this approach to Scripture, which historically took a fairly set form in the Benedictine tradition of Lectio Divina (lit., Spiritual Reading), is characterized by a slow and reflective treatment of the text.

Support for spiritual reading comes from numerous Roman Catholic writers. Less well-known, perhaps is the endorsement it has received from great Protestant leaders like Martin Luther in the 1500s and the English Puritans of the 1600s. One such Puritan, Richard Greenham, wrote: To read and not to meditate is unfruitful; to meditate and not to read [the Bible] is dangerous. What is particularly important for our purposes here is that the meditative reading of Scripture addresses each of the deficiencies of the prevailing evangelical approach to hermeneutics.

The meditative approach to Scripture is rooted first of all in pastoral concern and the associated awareness that it is all too easy, as Calvin put it, for truth to merely flit about in the brain and


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSnever take deep root in the heart. Whenever this happens it is not just unfortunate; it is potentially dangerous. For as Lutheran theologian and preacher Helmut Thielicke has pointed out, there is spiritual danger whenever head-knowledge outdistances soul-growth. Such distance is the fertile breeding ground for all sorts of inauthenticity and even hypocrisy. So the literature on spiritual reading is full of the imagery of slow rumination. The Anglican Prayer Book includes a prayer that we may inwardly digest God's word. This is not always easy. As Macrina Wiederkehr has observed, We do not always realize what a radical suggestion it is for us to read to be formed and transformed rather than to gather information. We are information seekers. We love to cover territory.

Spiritual reading, by contrast, is designed to encourage longer and more accurate retention of truth. And through it we enter into the text and the text then enters into us. It is an important key to the elusive desideratum (something desired as a necessity )of personal wholeness and integration. We may be very learned and still remain unchanged until the truth actually begins to alter the default settings of our mind and character. The first great value of meditation is that it is an aid to internalization of the truth. As Peter Toon describes its function, spiritual reading is a particular way of receiving the revealed and dynamic Word of God into the heart from the mind so as to direct the will in the ways of God's guidance. It is profoundly formational.

The spiritual or meditative reading of Scripture also addresses our other two concerns. First, it creates a context in which it is more possible to develop creative connections between the text and the reader's own life and immediate context. This is actually consonant with more recent perception that meaning is not so much embedded in the text as it is discovered in the interplay between the text and the reader's own reality in other words, in the dynamic intersection of these two horizons. In the twentieth century it was the German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, particularly in his book Meditating on the Word, so forcefully criticized the common way in which sermon-building preachers deflect away the message of the Bible from themselves. Do not ask how you should tell it to others, he urges, but ask what it tells you. It is therefore important that we keep from always reading for functional purposes. To do so is to indulge what Simon Chan calls our pragmatic reflex, something that makes it almost impossible to listen to what God may be saying to us. The spiritual reading of Scripture addresses this issue.

Finally, through its posture of silent, attentive listening, the meditative approach opens the reader up to the quiet voice of God and impressions from on high. It sets a tone of humility and receptivity, rather than a tone of assertiveness and control. Admittedly it is a difficult, anxious and risky business to wait for God to speak through the text to us. Yet we cannot demand that God speak to us. At best we can create the conditions in which God may choose to speak.

Again, Bonhoeffer was among those who commended the meditative use of Scripture. He identifies at least two reasons for such practice. The first is to enable us to achieve a degree of internalization of truth not otherwise possible. The goal here, he explains, is not to discover new thoughts, but to let familiar or neglected truths penetrate and dwell within us. Bonhoeffer's second reason for endorsing the spiritual approach to Scripture is that it is a way to wait for the Word to address us personally. And in Life Together, his little classic on Christian community, he links a capacity for listening to God with our ability to hear our fellow human beings. He who can no longer listen to his brother will soon be no longer listening to God either, Bonhoeffer says. He will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God too.


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSA much more recent endorsement of this approach comes from a conservative evangelical with impeccable credentials and one not known for mushy-headedness. Walter Martin, author of Kingdom of the Cults, published an article in Moody Monthly entitled “Meditation as God Intended.” In it Martin quotes the Joshua 1:8 exhortation to meditate on the Book of the Law day and night. He then observes that since the heart of our spirituality is relationship with God, two-way conversation and communication is of its essence. There is a logic to Christians turning their attention to where God has spoken and, we believe, God will continue to speak from His vantage point beyond time and tenses.

EVANGELICAL HESITANCY ABOUT SPIRITUAL READING OF SCRIPTUREHere in a sense we have two competing approaches to Scripture, the historical-grammatical and the meditative, each of which can make a legitimate claim to representing a dimension of the evangelical ethos and tradition. My concern is that they not be left as polarized options for evangelicals, lest the evangelical community move into the postmodern era as a divided community. With reference to the Bible, this community must not become, to borrow a famous description of the English and French in Canada, two nations warring in the bosom of a single state. To achieve the desired rapprochement (A reestablishing of cordial relations, as between two countries, and the state of reconciliation or of cordial relations). will require some movement on both sides.A number of factors continue to incline contemporary evangelicals to shy away from the spiritual reading of Scripture, despite the potentially-correcting features it offers. To begin with, we should all be sensitive to the control issues in our own hearts. In the hands of carnal Christians, of course, the historical-grammatical method can be pursued in the spirit of a relentless scientific researcher who is out to grasp the truth rather than humbly depend upon God to reveal it.

But there is something else and something bigger that may account for our hesitancy to move beyond traditional hermeneutics to this second stage of personal formation, practical application and direct encounter with the voice of God. It is our old, deep-seated fear that this is our old enemy of subjectivity returning to waylay us in another form. We continue to bear wounds from past experiences of biased and misleading interpretation. In particular we feel ambivalent about the prominence of the exercise of imagination in spiritual reading.

This emphasis on imagination implies that what the biblical text has to offer in itself is insufficient to complete the hermeneutical circle. It is another way of saying that there are additional factors or components that are necessary to make applications and to make connections with God. And the reader must reach up toward these things through the gift of imagination, which is the cognitive means by which that which is not yet or not known is first brought into being. Imagination is the human side; to identify its vision and message as God's voice is faith's interpretation of apprehension of truth.

Indeed imagination is critical to all three important functions of the meditative use of Scripture. The recommended methods for internalizing biblical truth include, for example, creatively visualizing oneself in the midst of a Gospel narrative, and imagining how the Sea of Galilee might smell in the early dawn. And while we are accustomed to this sort of thing in sermons, we are not altogether comfortable with it in our direct handling of the Scriptures.


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSYet this point is in fact the least of our worries. Marjorie Thompson refers to the second function when she writes: The mind work of meditation moves us to reflection on where we are in the text. Active imagination can sometimes help us find connections between our life stories and the great story of God's redemptive work. Where we see the specter of subjectivism most clearly is in the use of imagination to make connections between the text and one's personal life, and in drawing conclusions about whether and what God may be speaking directly to one's soul. In the language of Shakespeare, what dreams may come must give us pause. We fear the risk of false messages from our own souls, and even the possibility on occasion of deliberate and suggestive deceptions by evil powers.

And so evangelicals tend to be alarmed by the word imagination. It seems to connote the imaginary, the fanciful, the delusional, the false. We contrast imagination with reality. We recall the Bible's reference to vain imaginations (Romans 1:21, KJV; the NIV translates this as vain thinking), and are inclined to assume that the adjective vain applies to all expressions of imagination.

But in fact imagination has good connotations. It was the eloquent preacher and churchman of the 19th century Scottish Free Kirk Alexander Whyte who spoke of the splendid resources of the Christian imagination. Inventors are gifted with imagination. A successful engineer can use his imagination to come up with a creative solution to a previously unsolved problem. We describe an ineffective sports team's offense, or a boring musical performance, as unimaginative. In doing so we are indicating that imagination is really the gift of making fresh and creative connections, of seeing certain things in our minds. Without imagination we can never recognize possibilities. Without imagination we are doomed to plodding along in the same old ruts.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann argues that we must learn to read the Bible from the inside out to enter into the perspective of the community and writers who produced it. The information obtained through historical criticism is a foundation, but it is insufficient of itself. Historical imagination must be added. By this Brueggemann means the ability to extrapolate forward in a direction consistent with the past. He calls this imagination shaped by history. History and imagination, though they move in opposite directions, are linked. Without the historical parameters we have in view here, imagination mutates into undisciplined fantasy. On the other hand, when the historical imagination is brought into play stories like the Exodus and the provision of manna come to serve as perennial prisms through which the people of God understand their unfolding life experience.

The spiritual reading of Scripture goes beyond what the text says to what the text means in our context and what specifically God may be saying to us through it. The scholarly approach to Scripture carries us as far as the first stage to understanding what the text says. But scholarship cannot take us into the second and third stages all by itself. The linkage between what a text, composed perhaps two thousand or more years ago in the ancient Near East, meant at the time and what it signifies to a reader's personal situation at the dawn of the third millennium, is not according to some fixed, logical circuitry. It is not a matter of simply connecting the dots. Like it or not, making these linkages necessarily involves a subjective dimension. We require the Holy Spirit's guidance as we venture out beyond the text's historical context to its present-day application to us. This is uncharted territory, but it is a sure and necessary way to infuse our


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSotherwise pedestrian approaches to the biblical text with a spirit of awe and wonder. Our main point, though, is that the process involves imagination.

THE BAPTIZED IMAGINATION

When the Puritan Richard Greenham said, as quoted earlier, that to meditate and not to read is dangerous, he highlighted the very legitimate concern that an undisciplined imagination could easily delude us and lead us astray as we meditate. Once detached from the bracing reality-check provided by the biblical text a healthy slap in the face when we wander off there is no telling where we might end up, what wacky conclusions we might draw, or even how much the Devil might manipulate our impressionable minds. These are legitimate concerns, and valid points of caution to raise. Our imaginations, cut adrift from scriptural anchors, are unreliable and deceptive guides indeed. This leads us to the key. The gift of imagination that God uses is an imagination that has been shaped by the biblical tradition of truth, and functions within the parameters of this body of revelation. As Peter Toon says: Meditation, as it were, sits on the shoulders of faithful and reverent study.

In Surprised by Joy, the autobiography of his childhood and early years, C. S. Lewis describes the early development of his prodigious love of reading and creative writing. His cultivated imagination devoured literature, but for some time it was not stimulated or touched at all by Christian thought and the Christian vision of reality. It was through an encounter with the Scottish Christian novelist George MacDonald, and his book with the odd title of Phantastes, a Faerie Romance, that his own remarkably fertile imagination was, in Lewis's word, baptized. This rich image seems to signify that of baptism to mean that Lewis's mind was immersed in the Christian way of thinking so that he began to see all of life through this profoundly re-orienting filter. Thereafter his imagination would be forever both stimulated by and tethered to the richness of biblical narrative, doctrine, language and symbol. Both functions were and remain crucial the stimulation provided by the Christian way of seeing and the restraints necessarily implied by this particular lens on reality.

The baptized imagination may be thought of as a biblically-informed predisposition. Lewis seems to mean that by allowing his imagination to be baptized he died to his right to autonomous thinking and moved his entire thought-life underneath the umbrella of a communal quest for truth and a Christian construct of conviction. This move was simultaneously both expanding and restricting. Powerful Christian themes, symbols, imagery and narratives now fueled his thought-life with a new richness and connected him to a profound reality otherwise unknowable. At the same time it placed restrictions on what he could seriously consider to be true, good and beautiful. The truly baptized or converted imagination is not less creative than before. Just the opposite is true. But it is now a more useful and constructive imagination, because it is tethered to the truth.



THE BAPTIZED IMAGINATION AS GESTALT8

The typical evangelical practitioner of the standard historical-grammatical approach to Scripture seldom has any objection to the meditative use of Scripture, as long as this is strictly understood as a second step following after the first non-negotiable step of doing rigorous and responsible hermeneutical ground-work. No pietistic evasions of or short-cuts around this hermeneutical activity are to be allowed.

What I am about to suggest is the most tentative and perhaps the most questionable idea in this paper. I am saying that we should be slower to criticize those saints who utilize a meditative approach to Scripture and neglect in some cases to engage penultimately in rigorous hermeneutical analysis of the particular text in question. As we all know, a good portion of the Bible is quite perspicuous; that is to say, it may be readily apprehended without access to such special knowledge as may be controlled and dispensed by an intellectual elite. On this point there will be much agreement amongst us.

But what about those instances when the authorial intent of a passage is not so self-evident, and readers devoid of scholarly counsel may be particularly vulnerable to drawing invalid inferences from the text before them? The danger is real, of course, but there is a legitimate alternative or supplement to the inductive approach to a biblical text, and I call it the gestalt approach. The word gestalt comes from the field of psychology, and connotes a sense of the whole of a structure that is absent from any of the parts that constitute it. In applying this term to an approach to Scripture, I mean to suggest an approach in which the words and phrases of the text trigger a wide variety of cognitive connections and ideas. They stimulate all sorts of neural networking and instinctive cross-referencing activities. The dynamics are in fact similar to those operating in the use of religious symbols, where encounters with the symbol can be highly evocative and multi-layered. According to this approach Scripture evokes or triggers a consciousness of truth in a manner similar to that of religious symbols or icons.

Here readers do not so much discover the truth by inferring it from the text; rather, the text triggers apprehensions of insight already latent in the readers' minds by reason of their previous encounters with truth. Obviously one key to the validity of readers' conclusions will be the degree to which their imaginations have already been baptized, so that they instinctively entertain only those possibilities compatible with their prior and intuitive grasp of Christian truth as a whole. To borrow a concept popularized by scholars as Thomas Kuhn and Peter Berger, the contours of the disciplined Christian mind serve as a kind of paradigm or plausibility structure that will determine which inferences the reader will feel comfortable drawing from a specific text.

In short, I am not trying to introduce a new approach to Scripture. I am simply describing an approach already pervasive in evangelical piety, and giving it a more cautious endorsement, within limits, than we are sometimes inclined to grant. The benefits of such careful validation are to protect us from setting up unfair scholarly barriers to meaningful lay access to Scripture, and to turn our attention back to the more urgent task of cultivating thoroughly baptized minds and imaginations. This is none other than the quest for an overall grasp of biblical truth. The

8 Gestalt: a configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that it cannot be described merely as a sum of its parts


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSformation of the reader's over-arching gestalt will always be at least as important as fine-tuning their exegetical approach to any given text.

CONCLUSION

As evangelicals we have not always sufficiently acknowledged the vital role of imagination, which is none other than the contemplation of possibilities not already explicit. It is a capacity that is part of the image of God in us a modest reflection in humanity of the Creator's own power to bring into being out of nothing that which is not yet. But for this to function reliably we face the continuing challenge of cultivating a baptized imagination. The task of the church is continually to enculturate believers into the culture of the Christian faith an intentional traditioning of persons in the Christian ways of heart and mind. Walter Brueggemann calls for the deliberate construction, in these postmodern times, of a counterworld of evangelical imagination. Thus, he says, the minister must think not of one Sunday or one text as an exercise in totalism,' but each text and each textual offer [as] a small piece of a larger possibility that will only slowly surface, in ways unhurried.

Evangelical scholarship has generally been sensitive to an important matter of theological methodology, namely, how we should move from biblical text to doctrinal conclusions. And rightly so. But here in a sense we are concerned about the converse, about that which reverses the sequence of cause and effect. It is equally true that our imaginations, shaped by previous perceptions of truth, will influence our subsequent interpretations of Scripture. Text and baptized imagination spiral upwards in a symbiotic relationship. The term science of hermeneutics perhaps suggests an unrealistic degree of interpreter control and linear deduction, and therefore a truncated vision of the task of biblical interpretation. Instead we need to validate both hermeneutics and spiritual reading, and widen our conception of the interpretive task to embrace both activities.

Finally, one of our goals in the evangelical church and its various institutions should be the fostering of an integration of academic study of Scripture with a vibrant spirituality. But we are coming to realize that it is much easier to set such a goal than to achieve it. There continues to be a perceived dissonance in approaches to Scripture between formal evangelical hermeneutics and the active listening encouraged by the meditative tradition. As long as these two remain in conflict, and are not brought together in a more healthy creative tension, the best that churches and seminaries can do is offer an equitable number of biblical studies courses on the one side and spiritual formation courses on the other and hope for positive outcomes. Laypersons and students are still left to do the best they can to integrate these disconnected pieces of the puzzle. Often the result is an unfortunate kind of Christian schizophrenia. My argument has been that we can move toward a more satisfactory resolution of this problem through the affirmation and cultivation of a baptized imagination.

ENDNOTES

1. Any attempt like this at interdisciplinary integration (in this case, between hermeneutics and spirituality) becomes quite intimidating because the author is automatically reduced to an amateur commentator on most matters he or she presumes to address. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the students and faculty of the Biblical Seminary of the Philippines, an evangelical Chinese institution in Manila, in July of 1999.


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICS2. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955),

181..David Bebbington, in Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 2-19, lists Bible-centeredness along with cross-centeredness, conversion-centeredness and evangelistic activism; compare Roger Olson, “The Future of Evangelical Theology,” Christianity Today, 9 February 1998, 40.

3. A popular movie entitled The Omega Code (1999) recently exposed the American public to just such a numerological approach to the biblical text. Produced by Good Times Entertainment, with Hal Lindsey serving as prophecy advisor to the director, this movie implies that properly-decoded prophecy contains the blue-print for the future. It is obviously a film adaptation of Michael Drosnin's quite incredible book The Bible Code (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1997); for an evangelical analysis and critique see J. Paul Tanner, Decoding the >Bible Code,' Bibliotheca Sacra 157 (2000): 141-159.

4. Works like Bernard Ramm, Protestant Biblical Interpretation, 3d ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1970); J. Robertson McQuilkin, Understanding and Applying the Bible (Chicago: Moody, 1992); Gordon Fee & Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1993); William W. Klein & others, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Dallas: Word, 1993); Robert H. Stein, Playing By the Rules: A Basic Guide to Interpreting the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994); and Walter Kaiser & Moises Silva, An Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994) come to mind. This evangelical corpus reflects the strong influence of E. D. Hirsch, Jr. and his seminal work on hermeneutics, entitled Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). A more synthetic approach is to be found in works like Anthony C. Thiselton, Two Horizons (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980) and Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP, 1991).

5. The Neo-Orthodox position is represented by Emil Brunner, Truth as Encounter, 2d ed (London: SCM, 1964), with a representative evangelical response from J. I. Packer, God Has Spoken, 2d ed. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1979), 80-82.

6. For an evangelical response to the Deconstructionist agenda, see Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in this Text? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998).

7. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London & Glasgow: Fontana, 1940), 13. 8. Packer's book itself, however, concludes with a chapter entitled God's Word Heard, which

urges the reader to step into the Bible with the aid of the Spirit (God Has Spoken [Downers Grove: IVP, 1979], 133.

9. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952; orig. 1872- 1873), 1:10-11; quoted by Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 98. For a summary of Enlightenment influence on Dispensational hermeneutics specifically, see George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 55-62.

10. Stein, Playing by the Rules, 69-71. Clark Pinnock makes a telling point when he observes that we have to go back almost three centuries to the Puritans to find a decent evangelical treatment of the doctrine of illumination. Is it not naive, he asks, to think that one can master hermeneutics without paying attention to the Spirit and to the second horizon? It is apparent, he concludes, that evangelical scholars are more interested in inspiration than illumination and in the first than in the second horizon (Pinnock, AThe Role of the Holy Spirit in Interpretation, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society [December 1993]: 491-492). Perhaps there is evidence of Pinnock's thesis in a recent article written as a corrective to postmodern influences on evangelical methods of applying biblical teaching to the contemporary context. The Spirit's role simply does not come up. See R. McQuilkin & B. Mullen, The Impact of Postmodern Thinking on Evangelical Hermeneutics, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (March 1997): 76-82.

11. For a profound exposition of this as the essence of Christian spirituality and prayer see James M. Houston, The Transforming Friendship (Oxford: Lion, 1989). To appeal more to an American audience the book was later retitled The Transforming Power of Prayer (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1996).

12. Henry Blackaby, Experiencing God (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1994). 13. M. Lathbury & A. Groves, Break Thou the Bread of Life, Hymns of the Christian Life


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICS(Camp Hill, PA: Christian Publications, 1978), 411.

14. See especially The Speaking Voice, chapter 7 of The Pursuit of God (Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publications, 1948).

15. Tozer, The Pursuit of God, 73-75, 83. 16. I refer briefly to these developments in Yearning for God: The Potential and Poverty of the

Catholic Spirituality of Francis de Sales, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 41, no. 3 (September 1998): 439-453. Compare M. Robert Mulholland, Jr., Shaped by the Word: The Power of Scripture in Spiritual Formation (Nashville, TN: Upper Room, 1985).

17. Traditional Lectio Divina involves four sequential steps: Lectio (reading), Meditatio (meditation), Oratio (verbalized response) and Meditatio (meditation) (Marjorie Thompson, Soulfeast: An Invitation to the Christian Spiritual Life [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995], 22-25).

18. Quoted by Simon Chan, Spiritual Theology (Downers Grove: IVP, 1998), 158. 19. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.2.36. 20. Helmut Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962),

10-12.21. Quoted by Thompson, Soulfeast, 18. 22. In a sense this is an application to Scripture of an approach often advocated in relation to

literature generally as one that can be calculated to encourage longer and more accurate retention, deeper levels of internalization, and a more holistic appropriation of the particular truths being conveyed. See James Sire, How to Read Slowly (Downers Grove: IVP, 1978). It was his grasp of these dynamics that led Dawson Trotman to develop systematic memorization of and meditation on Scripture as a foundation for discipleship in the Navigators tradition. See Dictionary of Christianity in America, s. v. Navigators, The.

23. Peter Toon, From Mind to Heart: Christian Meditation Today (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987), 10. Walter Wink agrees: The goal of the Bible study is not merely understanding or even new insights, but incarnating the Word, enfleshing it, getting it into the substance of our living (Transforming Bible Study, 2d ed. [Nashville: Abingdon, 1989], 12; compare Chan, Spiritual Theology, 166-167).

24. Quoted by Chan, Spiritual Theology, 170-171. 25. Ibid., 162-163. 26. Ibid., 162-163; Richard Foster, Prayer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992), 150-152. 27. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1954), 83. 28. Ibid., 83, 98. 29. Walter Martin, Meditation as God Intended, Moody Monthly (December 1986): 34-37. 30. The Canadian Encyclopedia, s. v. Durham Report. 31. The subversive potential of the truly free imagination is described and celebrated in Walter

Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978): Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal [establishment] consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist (45).

32. Thompson, Soulfeast, 23. 33. Quoted by Foster, 154. John Goldingay concurs: Modern study of Scripture has entrusted the

task of interpretation to our reason. In its own nature Scripture is as concerned with the imagination and the will and it is people who bring their imaginations and wills to it who are most likely to indulge in productive dialogue with it(APostmodernizing Eve and Adam: Can't I Have My Apricot as Well as Eating It?, in The World of Genesis: Persons, Places, Perspectives, ed. Philip Davies & David Clines [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998], 58).

34. Walter Brueggemann, The Bible Makes Sense (Atlanta: John Knox, 1977), 32-40. This line of thinking leads Brueggemann to suggest that the two special mandates of the church are fidelity and vitality (Ibid., 147).

35. See Glen Scorgie, Wonder and the Revitalization of Evangelical Theology, Crux 26.4 (l990): l9-25.

36. Peter Toon, From Mind to Heart: Christian Meditation Today (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987), 15-16.


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICS37. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 181. Compare Mineko Honda, The Imaginative World of C. S.

Lewis: A Way to Participate in Reality (Landham, MD: University Press of America, 2000). In the same spirit Eugene Peterson describes his personal approach to the Book of Revelation in these terms: I have submitted my pastoral imagination to St. John's theological poetry (Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988], xii).

38. New Dictionary of Christian Ethics and Pastoral Theology, s. v. Gestalt Therapy. 39. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3d ed. (Chicago & London:

University of Chicago Press, 1996); Peter S. Berger, The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969) and especially Berger & Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966).

40. There is no indication that the topic is going to fade either; see Garrett Green, Theology, Interpretation and Imagination: The Crisis of Interpretation at the End of Modernity (Cambridge, UK & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

41. Walter Brueggemann, Texts Under Negotiation: The Bible and Postmodern Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 27.

42. The significance of this issue is explored in Joel Green & Max Turner, ed., Between Two Horizons: Spanning New Testament Studies and Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).

43. Any attempt like this at interdisciplinary integration (in this case, between hermeneutics and spirituality) becomes quite intimidating because the author is automatically reduced to an amateur commentator on most matters he or she presumes to address. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the students and faculty of the Biblical Seminary of the Philippines, an evangelical Chinese institution in Manila, in July of 1999.

44. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life



THE BIBLE: WHY THIS BOOK? A Study in Bibliology

Many books have the distinction of being called holy books: The Koran, The Hindu Vedas, The Book of Mormon. The Sayings of Confucius, The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path of Buddhism, and a variety of New Age "prophets," to name a few, all stake claims to being divinely inspired writings.

Yes No¨ ¨ Are you justified in believing that the Bible is the only true Word of God? ¨ ¨ Can you defend your belief in the inerrancy of Scriptures?¨ ¨ Are there fulfilled prophecies of actual events in history which you could share with unbelievers which would help convince them that the Bible is God's Word for them?

¨ ¨ Do you know how the authenticity of the Bible compares with other works of antiquity, such as Homer's Iliad and Caesar's Gallic Wars?

¨ ¨ Do you know about the process by which the people of God recognized that our 66 books were given from above to constitute the complete and authoritative Scriptures?

¨ ¨ Does the effect of this holy book (the Bible) upon its followers compare favorably with the effect of other holy books upon their followers?

¨ ¨ Do you have something more than a strongly held opinion to anchor your faith in the Bible?

I. In these last days, everything that can be shaken will be shaken, and that which remains standing will be that which is built upon a firm foundation (Heb. 12:27, Mt. 7:24). Building on that rock is placing our faith in and obedience to the person of Jesus Christ, as revealed in the Bible. Moreover, setting apart Christ as Lord involves always being "prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have" (1 Peter 3:15). Faith in Christ has led believers in the past to prepare to give an answer, and they have found a wealth of evidence to support their faith. UGod has never disappointed the humble seeker of reasons. May the Holy Spirit guide us also into all truth as we expectantly look for reasons for the hope that we have!

II. Five things that the Bible tells us God cannot do:God _________________________________________________ .

Titus 1:2 + Hebrews 6:18God _________________________________________________ .

2 Tim. 2:13God _________________________________________________ .

James 1:13God _________________________________________________ .

Isaiah 1:13and God _________________________________________________ .


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICS1 Samuel 2:3Job 37:16Isaiah 40:13-14Isaiah 40:28Isaiah 46:10 + Acts 15:18Jeremiah 23:24 + Psalm 139:1-6;16Matthew 11:21 + 24:22 + Luke 22:67-68 + Jeremiah 38:17-18Hebrews 4:131 John 3:20

II. He cannot ______________ , but we must.Genesis 3:6Deut. 18:10-111 Samuel 28Psalm 19:2Romans 1:19-20Romans 2:14-15Deut. 31:9-13, 24 + Deut. 32:45-47Romans 15:4 + 1 Cor. 10:6Proverbs 1:7Col. 2:2-3

III. Knowledge from God is a survival need!2 Peter 1:3-4

Proverbs 29:18 - Where there is no ____________, the people cast off restraint; but blessed is he who keeps the law. {Where there is no vision the people perish (KJV).}Hosea 4:6 & 14- My people are destroyed from lack of ______________ . . . a people without ____________________ will come to ruin!

Humanity's utter survival needs are met by God's Word:Psalm 119:92 - If your law had not been my delight, I would have _______________ in my affliction. I will never forget your precepts, for by them you have ___________________ ________ _______________.2 Peter 1:3-4 - Everything we need for ___________ and godliness through our ____________________ of him who has called us by his own glory and goodness. . . . Through his very great and precious ________________ you may participate in the divine nature . . .

We live because of His Word, but other nations have ceased to exist because of His Word, even though they were marvelously rich and secure.

Fulfilled Prophecy #1: Ezekiel 26:3-12, 14, 18 -- Tyre, the strong city which perished as predicted

Just a regular siege, like so many others of cities in the ancient Middle East, exceptvs. 4 - I will scrape away her rubble and make her a bare rock


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSvs. 5 - she will become a place to spread the fishnets vs. 12 - they will throw your stones, lumber and rubble into the seavs. 14 - you will never be rebuiltvs. 18 - the islands in the sea are terrified at your collapseFor 13 years (585-572 B.C.), Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, laid siege to the rich city-state Tyre. He succeeded in taking the mainland city, but without a fleet, he could not take the island city, where all the booty had been relocated. He left the mainland city in ruins.240 years later, a conqueror of a different nation (vs.3) came through the area with his armies. He was none other than the Macedonian Alexander the Great. He called upon the island city of Tyre to open its gates to him, but they refused. So he came up with a plan: he would build a causeway 200 feet wide and a half-mile long out to the island from the mainland. What would he use for material? He used the stones, lumber and rubble left over from Nebuchadnezzar's angry but fruitless destruction of the mainland city of Tyre! After a valiant struggle, the island city of Tyre, like its mainland counterpart, fell to the conqueror.At the ancient site of Tyre has an abundant freshwater source, the springs of Ras-el-ain which supply 10 million gallons of water daily, the location is still a place for the fishermen to spread their nets out, and remains uninhabited.

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INSPIRATION

2 Timothy 3:16 - All Scripture is ______________, and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.

2 Peter 1:21 - For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from ____ as they were carried along by the ___________ _____________.

Combining the two great NT scriptures on inspiration, we find that the Bible is inspired in the sense that 1. Spirit-moved men wrote 2. God-breathed words 3. which are divinely authoritative for Christian faith and practice.

Revelation, Inspiration & Illumination• Revelation is

– Objective Disclosure– The Fact of Divine Communication

• Inspiration is – Mediative Procedure– The Means of Divine Communication

• Illumination is – Spiritual reception– The Gift of Understanding the Divine Communication


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSThe Divine Causality (the Prime Mover) used the Prophetic Agency (humans as instruments) to produce Written Authority (the inspired scriptures).

MORE ABOUT WHAT INSPIRATION IS NOT, AND ABOUT WHAT INSPIRATION IS . . .

When we say the Bible is inspired by God, we are giving the term "inspired" a precise technical meaning.BIBLICAL INSPIRATION IS NOT:1. Revelation2. Illumination3. Eloquence4. Inventiveness5. Creativity6. Enhanced insight7. Achievement of a previously unreached level

The first of these only God can do, and He does it without man's cooperation in the slightest (De. 29:29, Dan. 2:27-30).The second comes from the Holy Spirit, acting upon our minds to enable us to receive the communication of God (John 16:13, 1 Cor. 2:12-16). The final five are wonderful yet purely natural capacities of humans, created in the image of the Great Communicator, the Inventor of inventors and the Master Creator. 8. Dictation (except where specifically noted: e.g., Ex. 31:18)9. Inspired "copies" - Only the autographs are inspired.

Some evidence of minor scribal errors existed in translations of the past:-2 Ki. 8:26 vs. 2 Chr. 22:2-1 Ki. 4:26 vs. 2 Chr. 9:25-2 Ki. 24: 8-16 vs. 2 Chr. 36:9-10Modern translations based on more complete and older manuscripts have resolved these difficulties. Textual criticism has given us a Bible that is at least 99.9% textually accurate. For all practical purposes, our present-day Bibles are accurate transmissions of the the original inspired Word of God.

10. Divine sanction of every idea found in the Bible - (Gen. 3:4, Job 2:9 & Ec. 3:19-20, for example). We can be sure that every word in the Bible is inspired to be there, but we cannot say that every word of the Bible is errorless. There is bad advice from carnal people and evil spirits in the Bible, but it is clear from the context when it appears.

INSPIRATION IS:1. Verbal (2 Ti. 3:16, Ex. 24:4, Je. 26:2, Mt. 5:18, Gal. 3:16, Re. 22: 18-19)2. Plenary, or full (2 Ti. 3:16, Ro. 15:4)3. Authoritative (Mt. 4:4,7,10, Mk. 11:17, Jn. 10:35)4. Applicable to the New as well as the Old Testament (1 Ti. 5:18, 2 Pe. 3:16, Ep.2:20, 3:5, 2 Pe. 1:20)5. A result of individual literary styles and faithful extra-Biblical sources (Jos. 10:13, Jude 14, Acts 17:28, Pr. 25:1, Lk. 1:1-4)


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICS6. The source of Biblical inerrancy (see prior handout on inerrancy).

Fulfilled prophecy #2: Eze. 28:22-23 -- Sidon, the Surviving Sister-City of TyreDate of prophecy: 592-570 B.C.Plague and blood flowing in the streets - vs. 23Sword against her on every side - vs. 23(No mention of her destruction) Located 20 miles north of Tyre on the coast, for 700 years into the fourth century B.C. it existed in subordination to the great queen of the Mediterranean, Tyre. Twenty-eight years before Tyre fell to Alexander the Great in 333 B.C., Sidon tried to free itself from Persian domination, and would have succeeded if her own king had not betrayed her to save his life. As the Persians approached upon the now defenseless city, 40,000 people shut themselves in their own homes, set fire to their houses and perished in the flames rather than submit to the torture of their enemies, but the city survived.Repeatedly blood has flowed in the streets, Sidon has been surrounded by enemies, and the slain have fallen within her. The city has been conquered and destroyed repeatedly, only to be built again. Its citizens have been bbutchered and houses razed time after time. During the Crusades, it was taken and retaken again and again by opposing forces, three times by the Crusaders and three times by the Moslems. It has been the scene of conflicts between the Druses and the Turks, and between the Turks and the French. In 1840, Sidon was bombarded by the combined fleets of England, France and Turkey. It has had one of the goriest histories of any city on Earth.Yet it still survives . . .Who could have predicted that Sidon would survive, to be rebuilt repeatedly while suffering harrowing violence, and that Tyre would be destroyed, never again to arise?* It is due to the peculiar person known as the prophet in Israel's history that the Old Testament exists, and that such astonishing prophecies could take place hundreds of years in advance of the actual occurrences.What was a "prophet?" If we can understand this, we will have the key to the inspiration of the Old Testament.Man of God, servant of the Lord, messenger of the Lord, seer, man of the Spirit, watchman, held to the higest possible standards (a 100% accuracy rating): De. 18.I. THE OLD TESTAMENT PROPHET

* * Taken from Fulfilled Prophecies that Prove the Bible by George Davis (Philadelphia: The Million Testaments Campaign, 1931) and Evidence that Demands a Verdict (Revised Version) by Josh Mc Dowell (San Bernardino, CA: Here's Life Publishers, 1979).


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICS THE OLD TESTAMENT WAS WRITTEN BY PERSONS WHO CLAIMED TO BE DECLARING WHAT GOD HAD DISCLOSED TO THEM. PROOF COMES IN SEVERAL FORMS.1. Prophetic utterances were written - Jos. 1:8, Jos 24:26, Jer. 36:28, Is 8:1, Hab. 2:2, Dan. 9:2.2. The Old Testament writers were designated as prophets, either by title or by function - Amos 7:14, 2 Sa. 23:2, Acts 2:30, I Ki. 11:9, Num. 12:6, Mt. 24:15, De. 18:15, Ho. 12:13, De. 34:9, 1 Chr. 29:29.3. An official register of prophetic writings was kept - Jos. 24:26,1 Sa. 10:25, 1 Sa. 19:20, 2 Ki. 2:3, 1 Chr. 29:29, 2 Chr. 9:29, Eze. 13:9.

II. THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS CONTAIN NUMEROUS SPECIFIC CLAIMS TO BE INSPIRED.

BEYOND THE INDIVIDUAL CLAIMS FOR THE BOOKS TO BE INSPIRED, THERE ARE CLAIMS THAT THE 2 PARTS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT (THE LAW and THE PROPHETS) ARE INSPIRED IN THEIR ENTIRETY. 1. Inspiration of the Law - De. 1:3, Jos. 1:8, Jdg. 3:4, Ezr. 6:18, Jn. 10:34, 1 Co. 14:21, Mt. 5:18, etc.2. Inspiration of the Prophets - Zec. 7:12, Dan. 9:2, Ezr. 1:1 and 5:1, Mt. 26:56, Lk. 18:31, Lk. 24:25-27, etc. Lk. 24:44 is the only 3-part NT reference to the OT.*

III. HOW THE OLD TESTAMENT WRITINGS CAME TO BE COLLECTED TOGETHER TO FORM THE OLD TESTAMENT CANON OF SCRIPTURES1. Inspiration by God - See above references2. Recognition by individual persons of God - Ex. 24:3, Jos. 24:26, 1 Sa. 10:25, Dan. 9:2, Jn. 17:17.3. Collection and preservation by the people of God - De. 31:26, Ne. 9:14, 2 Ti. 3:16, Mt. 5:17.4. Meticulous copying procedures and material standards - The Talmudists and later on the Massoretes went to unheard-of lengths to be sure the manuscripts were authentic. . . . With the technology available to them, it is hard to imagine what further steps they could have taken to guarantee the accurate transmission of the sacred OT scriptures.

IV. HOW DO WE KNOW THAT THE OLD TESTAMENT CANON IS COMPLETE?1. 34 of the 39 books of our Old Testament received unanimous recognition by the great rabbis within the Jewish communities to whom these works were originally delivered.2. The other 5 (Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Ezekiel and Proverbs) were questioned at some time or another by some teacher within Judaism, but in the end the divine authority of each was vindicated.

Book ReasonSong of Solomon Its sensual characteristics

Ecclesiastes Its skepticismEsther Absence of the naming of GodEzekiel Some felt it was anti-Mosaic in some of its teachingProverbs Some apparent contradictions (e.g., 26:4-5)

* *Cf. Mt. 5:17-18, 22:40, Lk. 24:27, Ac. 13:15, 24:14.


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICS3. What about the Apocrypha?

These 15 books, purporting to be given by inspiration during the Intertestamental period, received some recognition during parts of the early Church period and Middle Ages. Augustine (354-430) and the Catholic Church's Council of Trent (1546) endorsed them. However, for the following reasons, they have been rejected from the OT canon:

-The Jewish community never accepted them as canonical.-They were not accepted by Jesus nor the NT writers.-Most of the Fathers of the Early Church rejected them.-No church council held them to be canonical until the late 300's.-Jerome strongly rejected them.-The Apocrypha does not claim to be prophetic.-It contains historical errors and heresies.-Nothing is added to Messianic truth.-No clear consensus within the Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox traditions as to how

the Apocrypha should be used, even if it is accepted on a par with Scripture.-Its acceptance by the Roman Catholic Church is viewed as largely political.

Fulfilled prophecy #3: Whatever happened to Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum?Mt. 11:20-24

-The three cities "repented not" when they heard the Lord's teaching.-Woes were pronounced upon them.-They were not to "remain."-No specifics were given as to how the cities were to be destroyed.-Tiberias, a city in the vicinity of these three locations, is not prophesied to be destroyed.

Facts from history:M-Earthquakes destroyed Capernaum in 400 A.D., and probably took out Chorazin and

Bethsaida, as well.M-The scenic site of Bethsaida was the planned location of a magnificent winter palace

for the king of Damascus, and for 15 years his workmen labored around 700 A.D. to make it happen, but then the king died (King Albalid), and it was never completed. It remains a mere ruins, covered by sand.

M-In Capernaum, after centuries of neglect, a man conceived of restoring the ancient synagogue in the city. A length of wall was re-erected, and some pillars were put in place, but then the architect suddenly died, and the project was forgotten.

M-There is now a well-identified mass of ruins (Tell Hum) in the area, and an ancient synagogue has been excavated, dating to the 3rd century A.D. M- Tiberias (John 6:23) is a city which has persisted from those days of Jesus, and though it has been partly destroyed several times it has always been rebuilt. After 19 centuries it is still standing and fluorishing.

Fulfilled prophecy #4: The walls that fell flat: JerichoJoshua 6:20

-"The wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city every man straight ahead, and took the city."


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSFact from history

M-During the excavations of Jericho in 1930-36, the archaeologist Garstang found something so strange that he prepared a statement and signed it and had two

other members of his team sign it: The walls fell outward so completely that the attackers would be able to clamber up and over their ruins into the city. City walls do not fall outwards, they fall inwards. Something extraordinary made these walls fall outward.

Fulfilled prophecy # 5: The Doom of Edom and its rock-city PetraIsa. 34: 6-7, 10, 13-15

-Edom will have a bloody history.-Trade with Edom will cease.-Edom will become a desolation.-Wild animals will inhabit the area.

Jer. 49:17-18-Spectators will be astonished.-It will never be populated again.

Eze. 25:13-14-It will be conquered by Israel.-It will be made desolate as far as the city of Teman to Dedan.

Eze. 35:5-7-Given over to bloodshed.-Transportation through the area will cease.

Facts from history (read from Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict)

Fulfilled prophecy #6: Desolate Palestine to become a Garden of EdenLev. 26: 31-33

-The cities will be laid waste.-The sanctuaries will be desolate.-The people will not be exterminated, but will be scattered amongh the nations and

chased by the sword.Eze. 36:33-35

-The wastes shall be rebuilt.-The desolate land shall be retilled.-The fertility of this once-desolate land will be astonishing, like that of the Garden

of Eden.

THREE ASPECTS INVOLVED IN UNDERSTANDING HOW WE GOT THE BIBLE:

INSPIRATION as a major heading includes the initial revelation of God's Word, done by God himself, and the initial recording of the revelation, done by holy men of God moved along by the Holy Spirit.

CANONIZATION deals with issues like genuineness and authenticity.To determine the genuineness of a particular document, the Jewish rabbis (OT) and the Church Fathers (NT) looked for answers to questions like: 1. Was it really written by the person it claims to be written by?


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICS2. When was it written?3. Was it actually delivered to the people or person to whom it was addressed?

To determine the authenticity of a particular document, the Jewish rabbis (OT) and the Church Fathers (NT) looked for answers to questions like:

1. Does it demonstrate the characteristics of the other works we know to be inspired?2. Was it received as an inspired work by the initial people to whom it was addressed?3. Was it written by an eyewitness of the resurrected Jesus Christ or by one who was

received by the apostles? (NT only)4. Does it contradict previous inspired works?5. Is the work authoritative? Does it claim to be the Word of God?

Note: the first official Jewish canon of the OT appeared around 400 B.C, and the first official Church canon was issued at the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D.(Textual critics and other theologians can retrace the steps of canonization today, to better understand our canon of Scripture.)

TRANSMISSION deals with how the work was copied and passed down over the years.Textual crtitics look at issues such as the number of extant (existing) manuscripts we have, their quality, and the duration of time that elapsed between the autograph and the earliest manuscripts. ×Factors that determine the age of a manuscript include

1. The material that was used.2. The letter size and form3. Punctuation marks4. Text divisions.5. Ornamentation6. The color of the ink7. The texture and color of the parchment

×Some of the most famous OT manuscripts : Dead Sea Scrolls (300 B.C. - 68 A.D.): contents of an Essene library containing 600

manuscripts Cairo Geneza fragments (500-800 A.D.) Cairo Codex (895 A.D.): former and latter prophets Leningrad Codex of the Prophets (916 A.D.): Isaiah Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the twelve

minor prophets Aleppo Codex (930 A.D.): originally, all of the OT. Some has been lost. British Museum Codex (950 A.D.): Gen. 39:20 - De. 1:33 Codex Babylonicus Petropalitanus of Leningrad (1008 A.D.): entire OT

(Note: It should be recalled that the absence of large numbers of ancient manuscripts of the OT should not be viewed as a weakness, considering the following factors:


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICS The copying rituals and regulations of the Talmudists and of the Massoretes were so

rigorous as to render each new manuscript a carbon-copy of its predecessor, which was then required to be destroyed.

The Israelites were subject to the ravages of deportation and foreign domination. From 1800 B.C. -1948 A.D., for example, Jerusalem was conquered 47 times.)

×Some of the most famous NT manuscripts : John Rylands MS (130 A.D.): portions of John 18:31-33, 37-38 Diatessaron (160 A.D.): a portion of a harmony of the gospels Bodmer Papyrus II (175-225 A.D.): Jude, 1 & 2 Peter, Luke & John Chester Beatty Papyri (200 A.D.): most of the NT Codex Vaticanus (325-350 A.D.): contains most of the OT (LXX) and all of the NT Codex Ephraemi (345 A.D.): All of OT & NT, but portions were erased to make room

for sermons by Ephraem, a preacher Codex Sinaiticus (350 A.D.): half of the OT (LXX), all of the the NT except Mk. 16:9-

20 & John 7:58-8:11) Codex Alexandrinus (400 A.D.) Codex Washingtonianus (late 4th or early 5th century A.D.): Four gospels, portions of

NT & OT Codex Bezae (450-550 A.D.): bilingual MS of large sections of NT Codex Claromontanus (500's A.D.): bilingual MS of the Pauline epistles

×Some of the most famous early translations: Samaritan Pentateuch (5th century B.C.) Greek Septuagint [LXX] (285-246 B.C.): entire OT text Old Syriac version (4th century A.D.): entire NT text Syriac Peshitta (150-250 A.D.): entire NT text Old Latin (4th century A.D.): entire NT text Latin Vulgate (384 A.D.): entire NT text Sahidic : a Coptic translation (Early 3rd century A.D.): entire NT text Gothic (4th century A.D.): entire NT text Armenian (400 A.D.): entire NT text Georgian (5th century A.D.): entire NT text Ethiopic (6th century): entire NT text Nubian (6th century)

×Other Witnesses to the NT Ostraca [broken pieces of pottery used by poor people as writing materials] Inscriptions from pillars, coins and monuments Lectionaries [church-service books used as manuals] containing most of the gospels, Acts

and some epistles Writings of the early Church Fathers (to 400 A.D.): all but 11 verses of the NT and 17 of

the verses of the whole Bible can be reconstructed from their writings!

A COMPILATION OF EVIDENCES FOR THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE



1. No illustrations of contradictions have been successfully defended as contradictions.2. There is a remarkable unity of theme, throughout 66 books written over 1600 years by 40 different writers on 3 continents in 3 languages.3. The Holy Spirit testifies to our hearts when we read it.4. Its exposure of the essential human condition is convincing.5. Prophetic integrity: prophets had to have a 100% accuracy factor (Deuteronomy 18:22).

6. Scientific integrity: its discussions of origins, culture, language, zoological and botanical and medical data, geology, etc., have been successfully defended.

7. The characters of the people who accept it have been changed, radically and repeatedly, beyond serious question.

8. The integrity of Jesus Christ is on the line, as he attested to the inspiration of the OT and of the NT to be written by the apostles and those who knew them.9. The integrity of the Bible writers is exceptional. Many of them suffered terribly for what they wrote, but they defended their work, often to the death.10. The impartiality of the reporting: Noah's drunkenness, Moses's anger, David's

adultery, Peter's cowardice, John's vindictiveness and ambition, etc.: the Bible's portrayal of humanity "warts and all" is complete.

11. The Bible has inspired academic disciplines and artistic endeavors throughout its history.12. The books of the Bible have an interlocking interdependence, making the entire Bible a tapestry all of one fabric. Pull one thread and it all comes unraveled; discard one portion and there's no place to stop. It constitutes an all-or-nothing work.13. It furnishes exemplary moral and legal codes, used successfully by individuals, societies

and governments for centuries.

14. It is a perennial best-seller.15. It is universal in appeal and distribution. Over 3 billion copies (and counting) have been

published, in over 1200 languages.

16. Written languages have been invented for scores of tribes for the express purpose of giving them God's Word in their own language. No other book comes close to this kind of demand.

WHAT ABOUT THE 'HOLY' BOOKS OF OTHER RELIGIONS?Buddhism - The Suttas, etc.Hinduism - The Vedas, etc.Islam - The Koran (Qu'ran)Shintoism - No accepted canon, but Kojiki and Nihon-Shoki are usedMormons - The Book of Mormon, along with the BibleJehovah's Witnesses - The New World Translation of the Bible, etc.New Age cults rely upon the writings of Edgar Cayce, Whitney Streiber, Hindu books, etc.

1. First of all, we can appreciate the value of many of these books, for the wisdom contained in them. Each was written by human beings created in the image of God (Genesis 1: 26-27)


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICS2. Secondly, we have learned from history that tolerance of religious diversity and freedom of worship is important.

3. However, it is one thing to tolerate other religions. It is another thing to abandon all critical thinking and assume that all religions are simply different ways of getting to the same God.

WHY?1. Each religious tradition has things its founders and adherents are against, as well as

things its founders and adherents are for. Christianity is not alone in its reaction against the prevailing religions at the time of its founding.For example,

Hebrew prophets - against Canaanite idolatry Mohammed - against Arab polytheism Buddha - against the eternal soul (atman) teachings of Hinduism Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism) - against contemporary Christianity of the

1800's Pastor Russell - against contemporary Christianity of his day At the time of the early Church, Christians were martyred for being "atheists," as

they refused to worship or acknowledge the deity of the emperor or of the Pantheon of Roman gods and goddesses.

The practice of Christianity requires its adherents to abandon all other religious hopes and cling solely to Jesus Christ, as the one and only way of salvation. (Isa. 59:6, Jn. 3:14, 6:35, 6:68, 8:24, Acts 4:12, 1 Co 3:11)Embodied in each of the major religious traditions, there is an essential intolerance of the distinctive formal teachings and truth claims of other religions . Otherwise, what reason can be given for listening to them, if they are not better than that which was in place before?

It is, therefore, historically valid and accurate to teach that each religion lays claim to be the superior religion, worthy of being followed. Christianity is neither unique nor out of place in being exclusive.

2. The differing religious books make differing truth claims. When listed and studied, it is clear that these truth claims are mutually exclusive. There is a basic law of thought known as the Law of Contradiction, which states simply that A non-A. One must abandon all rationality to accept that some thing is equal to that which it is not, or that a specific teaching is equal to that which is its opposite. So, we will find in each of the religious traditions statements which, if they are acknowledged as true, require the abandonment of fundamental Biblical teachings.Some examples:

In Zen Buddhist literature, there is an ancient poem:"If you want to get to the plain truthBe not concerned with right and wrong.The conflict between right and wrongIs the sickness of the mind."

Hinduism teaches that it is appointed unto man many times to die, and after each of those deaths there is a judgment of sorts, followed by re-entry into the world of the living in a different form.


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICS Buddha taught that the means to remove craving was by following a

religious/philosophic code. Mormons teach that Jesus is a created son of God. Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that Jesus did not rise bodily from the dead.

To accept any of these individual religious traditions is to accept the truth claims made by it.Each religion can be defined by the ways in which they answer 3 questions:

A. What is the nature of the Ultimate or Transcendent Being who is to be worshipped by human beings?

B. What is the nature of the human predicament?C. What is the nature of salvation?

In answering these questions, each religion demonstrates its uniqueness, and each will have to state truth claims, some of which will be contradicted by the truth claims of some or all of the other religions.

3. Your challenge is to examine the truth claims of Jesus Christ and his followers, understand them in their fullness, and arrive at a settledness that, taken as a whole, the Bible does the best job of answering the fundamental questions. Once you have made that decision, fight the good fight of faith and defend the truths of the Bible, in the face of the pluralistic onslaught of the modern day.

SOME OF THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF THE PEOPLES WHO HAVE EMBRACED THE BIBLE1. Science2. The Constitution of the United States of America3. Medicine4. Language transcription and translation5. Hospitals6. Universities7. Charities8. Work ethic9. Capitalism10. Visual and auditory arts

Why So Many Translations?9

9 http://www.judeministries.org/Bible/whysomany.htm (Accessed 9.2003)


http://www.judeministries.org/Bible/whysomany.htm


So then, one might ask, why if all this is true, do we have differing interpretation of passages? Why do we have so many different Bible versions?

Does anyone here speak a foreign language? Does anyone here have a lot of contact with teenagers? For that matter, consider the problems of talking to someone in a completely differing line of work - "geeks" have a different set of slang phrases from medical doctors.

The problem of language lies in both the meaning of words and the use to which they are placed, their context. "To strike" means one thing in a fist fight, but something different in baseball or some other sports (strike the football with the foot, not with a bat), and yet "to strike" has still another meaning in a labor dispute.

If Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible as tradition holds, and if scholars' timelines are accurate, Moses wrote these books during the Exodus which occurred between approximately 1445 BC and 1405 BC, that is, almost 3500 years ago. What kinds of "slang" did they have then? How much of it consider some of the archaic problems of the King James:

charity in 1 Corinthians 13 means "love" bowels in Philippians 1:8; 2:1; Colossians 3:12 means tender mercies or tenderhearted

affections

What about today's slang, how will it be viewed a thousand years from now (assuming Christ tarries that long)? As my daughter would say, cool man.

This is where historical, cultural, and ancient language studies play such an important role in our understanding of the Scriptures.

Formal versus Dynamic

So then, how do translators approach these problems? This is part of the issue which leads to multiple versions. Most people today, if asked what makes for a faithful translation of the Bible would say that it should be a word-for-word account. If the original has a noun, one would expect a noun. If the original had sixteen words, they expect to see sixteen words in the translated sentence. This is call "formal equivalence." The King James, the American Standard, and the New American Standard versions are the translations which come closest to this ideal.

At the other end of the spectrum is the dynamic equivalence or phrase-for-phrase translation. If my daughter wrote her phrase "cool man," a translator using the formal equivalence approach might translate it as a cool or cold man. But one using the dynamic approach would use words meaning neat or awesome or ok, depending upon the context. The dynamic equivalence approach is not so much concerned about the grammatical form of the original language as it is about the meaning of the original. This approach is, by nature, more interpretive, but it is easier to understand. To a great extent the NIV is a dynamic equivalent translation, although the New English Bible is a better example.


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSIn reality, no translation can be completely formal or dynamic. For example, in the King James, the Hebrew in places such as Psalm 76:7 and 1 Kings 11:96 and 17:18 literally reads "God's nostrils enlarged." KJV translates this phrase as "God became angry," an example of dynamic equivalence. Another example from the KJV is found in the New Testament, where in Matthew 1:18. Here the KJV tells us "Mary was found to be with child." The Greek actually reads "Mary was having it in the belly!" Paul writes in his letter (Romans 6:2; 7:7) "God forbid!" Literally the phrase in the Greek means "May it never be!" Neither the Greek for "God" or for "forbid" appears in any of the texts.

So these differences in interpretative philosophy help to dictate the manner in which a version is generally written. The formal equivalence translation lets the reader interpret for himself. Often the average reader does not have the background or tools to interpret accurately. This results in poor understanding of some passages. On the other hand, a dynamic translation is usually clear and understandable, but if the translators missed the point of the original, whether intentionally or unintentionally, a foreign or poor interpretation will result. In my opinion, the New English Bible is an example of this problem. Here the philosophy and theology of the Church of Scotland greatly influenced the views on many passages, although it is written in beautiful, poetic language. At the extreme, the New World Translation of the Jehovah Witnesses is an example of theological doctrine at work in a dynamic translation. They, rather than writing their own "addition" to God's Word like many other cults, simply reinterpreted passages to fit their incorrect views.

The difference in philosophy is not the only reason for the significant increase in Bible versions over the past 50-to-100 years. 1881 is the year of break point in the issue of Bible translations.

History of the Bible

We have already noted that the Bible was written by at least 40 authors over a period of some 1600 years. These authors came from different backgrounds and levels of learning. They performed a variety of different tasks while they lived. Yet, they all had two things in common. They shared a deep love of God and they faithful recorded His Words.

The original manuscripts of the Bible were written in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. None of the original manuscripts exist today. The Jewish nation so revered the Holy Writing that as the scrolls wore out, they were buried so the Nation would not desecrate God's Word. Further, God knows that man would turn the scrolls themselves into idols. So, God under took to direct man's steps so that no original copies were preserved. God's Word even provides an example of this type of behavior.

Remember in the wilderness during the Exodus, the nation complained and God sent poisonous snakes into the camp (Numbers 21:1-9)? God then directed Moses to make a bronze or brass serpent and place it on a pole in the middle of the camp. They who were bit by the snakes had only to look up at this figure to be cured. This, of course, is a prefigure of Christ and His healing work on the Cross (John 3:14). But did you ever wonder what became of that brass serpent?

Read from 2 Kings 18:4:He removed the high places and broke the sacred pillars, cut down the wooden image and


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COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSbroke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made; for until those days the children of Israel burned incense to it, and called it Nehushtan. NKJV

The underlying text on which the King James Version is translated was compiled by Erasmus. He had access to only a half dozen or so manuscripts, none of which were complete. In fact, in places, the combined manuscripts were incomplete, such as Revelation 22:19 or 1 John 5:7-8. So here, Erasmus turned to the Latin New Testament. He translated the Latin back into Greek which the translation committee formed under King James of England then translated into English.

"Erasmus' text went through five editions. Others took up where he left off, but essentially kept the text virtually the same. One of the editions of Theodore Beza, done in the late 1500s, constituted the text behind the King James NT. By 1550 the third edition of Stephanus' Greek text included in the margin textual variants from several witnesses, but the text was still largely that of Erasmus. By 1633 this text had gone through some more minor changes, but was stable enough that the edition published by the Elzevirs was called in the preface the "the text now received by all," or the Textus Receptus. Interestingly, this was more publishers' hype than consensus, for many if not most NT scholars had long noted the inherent weaknesses in this text. The text published was thus, even in the seventeenth century, more a text of convenience than one of conviction." (1)

It should be noted that the King James underwent some three published revisions. Erasmus' text as well as the text of the English translation contained scores of footnotes and marginal readings on possible alternative meanings and textual difficulties. Some of these were incorporated into subsequent revisions. So one might ask today, if as some say the King James is the only text, indeed inspired in itself, which revision is inspired?

The 1800s saw great discoveries of additional manuscripts. Today there exists over 24,000 New Testament manuscripts, of which over 5,300 are Greek. Compared to other ancient manuscripts, the weight of authority favors the accuracy and reliability of the Bible manuscripts. For example, only 643 copies of Homer's Iliad exist today. Homer wrote in about B.C. 900, but the most ancient manuscript dates only to B.C. 400. If one were to compare the manuscripts, noting differences, the Bible is 98-99% accurate, while the Iliad is only about 95% accurate. (2)

Two British scholars, Westcott and Hort, undertook a study of these manuscripts and in 1881 published their own text of the Greek New Testament. Their critical text was based upon a long string of preunderstandings about the original of various manuscripts.

What Westcott and Hort's study did was to prove that there were, generally speaking, families of texts. If two copies were made in Jerusalem, one being sent to Antioch and the other to Alexandria, Egypt, one could assume that each was identical. But then scribes in both locations copied and copied and recopied these texts. Over time, human errors were made. But the scribes in Antioch made different errors than the ones in Alexandria. Subsequent copies reflect these errors. Over the 1400 years before the printing press eliminated some of these problems, new family lines were created, i.e. copies sent to Rome were recopied with new errors being introduced. Westcott and Hort analyzed the manuscripts and assigned them to families. Rather than following the majority of manuscripts (number wise), they "recreated" the ancestors. Using a variety of assumptions as to how errors occurred, they created a set of rules for choosing between the variances in these ancestors. On this basis, it is clear that all of Erasmus' texts


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COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSbelonged to what Westcott and Hort called the Byzantine manuscript family or text. This text, according to the study, was itself probably a critical text created about 400 or 500 AD.

Today there are manuscripts of a much early age available for study to which Erasmus did not have access. One fragment of the gospel of John has been dated to 110-125 A.D. Since John wrote between 90-100 A.D., this is a very early copy, perhaps a first generation copy. Such close copies are unheard of when one looks at secular manuscripts. This just adds to the miracle of the survival and authentication of the Bible.

Which leads to the second important event, a discovery in 1885 by Adolf Deissman. His single volume, Bible Studies, revolutionized much critical thought. In this volume, Deissman discussed his reading of early Greek manuscripts - not biblical texts but letter, business contracts, receipts, marriage contracts. What Deissman conclude was that these papyri contained the common Greek language of the first century, the same vocabulary as is used in the New Testament! This is the first modern scholarly study of parallel language to the NT. It dispelled the view that the Greek of the NT was a language invented by the Holy Spirit. Since the NT is written in the language of the people, the people will be able to understand it.

For example, Christ's Words "It is finished" (John 19:30) is also found on receipts and means "paid in full!." The death on the Cross paid our sin debts in full. They were not just canceled or annulled but PAID IN FULL.

Also, words at which the KJV translators had merely guessed now had meaning. John 3:16's "only begotten" really means "one and only" or "unique."

Third are the philosophical influences - factors already discussed above in the concepts of presuppositions and preunderstandings.

These are the factors which have created an abundance of new translations of God's Holy Word. The modern critical texts used by most scholars for study are the result of pain staking work based, in the case of the NT, on the initial work of Westcott and Hort. For the OT, the manuscript is one based upon the Masorete text prepared over several hundred years between 400 AD and 1000 AD. This is the text which first added vowels to the Hebrew written language. The accuracy of this critical text has been attested to by the discovery of various manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Portions of all OT books but Esther have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The scrolls also help to verify the accuracy of the Septuagint. (3)

It should be noted that there are a group of scholars who would still use the "majority text," that is, the composite text prepared on nothing more than numbers. In the last decade a handful of scholars has risen in protest of textual criticism as normally practiced. In 1977 Pickering advocated that the wording of the New Testament autographs was faithfully represented in the majority of extant Greek manuscripts. This view had been argued in one form or another since John W. Burgon in 1883 sought to dismantle single-handedly the Westcott-Hort theory. To be sure, the Majority Text stands much closer to the Textus Receptus than it does to the critical text. According to this writer's count there are 6,577 differences between the Majority Text and the critical text. But that does not tell the whole story. Not by a long shot.



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COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSOne might note the following when discussing "errors" in the various manuscripts. "Out of the 150,000 variants, only 400 materially alter the sense. Among these no more than about 50 have real importance for any reason whatever; and even in the case of these 50, not one touches on any article of faith or any moral commandment not forcibly supported by other entirely clear passages, or by the teaching of the Bible as a whole. The Textus Receptus (Received Test) of Stephanus, Beza and Elzevir and our present versions teach exactly the same Christianity as the unical text of the Sinaiticus and the Vaticanus of the oldest manuscripts." (4)

1. Wallace, The Conspiracy , Page 1. 2. McDowell, Chapter 4, Pages 39ff. 3. Price 4. Pache, Page 193 . The Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are two of the oldest biblical manuscripts in existence. Unical texts are texts written solely in capital letters.

About the VersionsThis leads one to the ultimate question - Which translation is best?

The Holy Spirit is sovereign over even the worst translations. Even in extremely bias translations, all the major doctrines are present. The Spirit can use there threads to lead the sincere person to Jesus.

But, stay away from those prepared with an outright obvious sectarian view point (The New World Translation of the Jehovah's Witnesses). There is a corruption of doctrine in such versions. And, as a Bible for serious study, stay away from those prepared by individuals, Moffatt's, Weymouth's, J.B. Phillips, The Living Bible, Kenneth Wuest's Expanded Translation, the Berkley New Testament, or the more recent translation by Peterson, The Message, and Fox's translations of Genesis through Deuteronomy. These may make wonderful devotional Bibles or comparative translations, but they are not generally good for serious study. No one person can truly understand all of the spiritual nuances intended in God's Word and, therefore, their own presuppositions and preunderstandings will encumber such translations.

So, there is no single answer. Each translation has something to convey and bring to the table. The truly serious Bible student should have one of a formal equivalence translation and one of a dynamic translation. Two dynamic equivalence translations would be even better. Read all of them for better understanding of the Scriptures intent. Pray for the illumination of the Holy Spirit upon the passage.

THE TRANSLATIONS

King James -(KJV) - formal equivalence, but the original has undergone three major revisions incorporating more than 100,000 changes. By the count of some there are over 300 words in the KJV which no longer mean what they meant in 1611.

New King James - (NKJV) - formal equivalence, prepared from the same manuscripts as the King James.

New International Version - (NIV) - dynamic equivalence, based upon a new translation of the manuscripts, not a revision (as is the NKJV, the RSV, NASB). It was prepared by an international committee of more than one hundred scholars whose stated goal was to produce a


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COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICStranslation midway between the literalness of a word-for-word and the looseness of a paraphrase. Most consider it the best phrase-for-phrase translation available today. The major flaw is that its language may be too simplistic. It is prepared from an "eclectic" manuscript, drawing upon several different manuscripts rather than a single critical text.

New American Standard - (NASB) - formal equivalence, probably the best word-for-word available today. This is also its biggest weakness in that in places it becomes stilted and wooden in its language. It uses the modern critical textual manuscripts as its basis.

American Standard Version - (ASV) - a formal equivalence, word-for-word translation, originally published by Goodspeed for the New Testament, with a small group of scholars publishing the Old Testament companion. When the New Testament portion was first published around 1923, it was highly criticized.

Revised Standard Version - (RSV) - formal equivalence, completed in 1952 and designed to be a revision of the KJV. It used the ancient manuscripts. The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) follows the same principle but is "gender-inclusive" in its approach. It is to be noted that the English Standard Version was the for runner of the American Standard Version. The Revised Standard was the initial revision of the English Standard Version. The NASB is the revision of the ASV and the NRSV is the further revision of the RSV. All, in the minds of the translating committees, were designed to be replacements for, and revisions of, the King James.

Note: The NASB exhibits three major differences from the RSV (and NRSV). First, its wording is less archaic. Second, its translators are more conservative theologically. Third, as mentioned, its language is wooden in places in an effort to adhere as closely to the wording of the original as possible.

New English Bible - (NEB) - completed in 1971 (the same general time frame as the NASB and slightly ahead of the NIV), this is a dynamic equivalence translation, but the biases of the translators (a joint committee, lead by the Church of Scotland) show in the text. The Revised English Bible (REB) follows the same pattern.

The Living Bible - (TLB and "The Living Bible") - the Living Bible is a paraphrase, not a translation. It represents the views of one person as to the meaning of the American Standard Version. It is, in essence, the work of one man paraphrasing the work of another sole translator edition (at least as to the NT). The Living Bible is easy to read and is a wonderful tool for first learning the Bible. It is not a study Bible. The New Living Translation is much more of a translation, the translators referring to the original language manuscripts during its preparation. The translation basis of the New Living Translation is dynamic equivalence

Good News Bible: Today's English Version - (TEV) - dynamic equivalence, published by the American Bible Society in 1966. It attempts to present the Scriptures in idiomatic, modern, simple language.

The Jerusalem Bible is an English effort based upon a French translation. The Bible was translated from the original languages, while its study notes are translated from French. In many places the translations are freer than its counterparts, such as the Revised Standard. The Jerusalem Bible was revised by the New Jerusalem Bible.


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSThe New American Bible is the first American Catholic Bible to be translated from the original manuscripts.

The Contemporary English Version - (CEV) - was first translated as a work for early youth. Its aim is to be a functional equivalence by determining the meanings of words and then expressing them in the most accurate and natural contemporary English.

The New Century Version - (NCV) - was originally published as the International Children's Bible. The adult version was originally called The Everyday Bible. Both versions emphasize simplicity and clarity of expression.

The Message - is a work by Eugene H. Peterson. This is an idiomatic English translation of the Scriptures and does not exist as a complete Bible.

New English Translation (or NET) - this is one "in the middle." It is brand new having been just completed (fall, 1998) and originally published solely on the Internet at www.bible.org. This site is one composed primarily of graduates of Dallas Theological Seminary. This Seminary has produced most of the critical studies on the manuscripts in the last half of this century. The NET is describe as more accurate than the NASB, more readable than the NIV, and more elegant than either. I personally have not yet read enough of it to have any opinion on the validity of this description.

The Amplified Bible - This is not really a translation or paraphrase, but a unique study tool. Based upon the KJV, RSV, and other similar manuscripts, The Amplified Bible has expanded on alternate word meanings, providing these alternate shades of difference right in the body of the text so that one does not have to resort to a lexicon or dictionary to find the various shades of difference in word usage.

Since this page was published, several new Bible translations have appeared on bookstore shelves. A few comments might be in order about these translations to help you understand them. In general, I find the new translations to be “good” but it appears they are driven by the desire of either a Christian community or a Christian publisher to have their own translations.

English Standard Version (ESV) is published by Crossway Books and is considered a literal or “formal equivalence” translation. “that seeks as far as possible to capture the precise wording of the original text and the personal style of each Bible writer. As such, its emphasis is on "word-for-word" correspondence, at the same time taking into account differences of grammar, syntax, and idiom between current literary English and the original languages. Thus it seeks to be transparent to the original text, letting the reader see as directly as possible the structure and meaning of the original.” I have read the ESV cover-to-cover and find it to be good translation. The website for this is http://www.gnpcb.org/home/esv/.

The New Living Translation (NLT -- originally mentioned above with The Living Bible) is a dynamic equivalent translation, that is, a thought-for-thought translation. It’s web site (www.newlivingtranslation.com) describes it as “In the New Living Translation, this is accomplished by translating entire thoughts (rather than just words) into natural, everyday English. The end result is a translation that is easy to read and understand and that accurately communicates the meaning of the original text.” With the adverse publicity being captured by


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COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSthe Today’s New International Version (see below), many churches who previously were using the NIV have switched to the NLT. I am currently reading through the NLT and find it to be a good translation that is easy to read. The concepts used in translation do not make this version acceptable as a primary study Bible, however, in my opinion.

Still an ongoing project is the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB). Published by Broadman & Holman Publishers, this work currently exists in a complete New Testament. It is described as a “fresh rendering of God's Word is translated directly from the original biblical languages with a reader-friendly style geared to contemporary English usage. The approach of combining accuracy and clarity makes the HCSB a translation that any reader can enjoy” (from http://www.broadmanholman.com/hcsb/default.asp). I have read the New Testament and find it acceptable.

Last, and most controversial, on this list of new translations, is Today’s New International Version (TNIV). Created by the International Bible Society, this translation is based upon the very popular NIV, but has been edited to make it, essentially, gender neutral in keeping with today’s culture. The information site for this version is http://www.tniv.info/. The other side of this story may be found at the TNIV Response Center (http://www.no-tniv.com/), a site dedicated to convincing the world this is an unacceptable version. While there are sufficient materials on both sites for you to draw your own conclusions, I have great personal difficulty in reconciling the orthodox statement of belief used on this translation with the changing of important terms in the original languages from feminine or masculine to a gender neutral term. This is not a true rendering of the original languages and therefore is contra to what I read as the statement of translation belief. The original Hebrew and Greek both have ample pronouns, and noun and verb endings whereby the original authors could have used gender neutral terms had they so desired. They chose, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit not to do so. It is not the place of culture to re-edit the writings because it better fits with someone’s view of the ways the world should operate. I would vote NO on the TNIV.

Some additional comments on the TNIV and the gender inclusive debate.

I noted above a separate problem being raised by the TNIV. Many churches fearing, I believe, that many in their congregation with associate the NIV with the TNIV controversy, thus, concluding that the NIV is a poor translation as well. As a result, many churches are moving away from the NIV. The current recommendations by “those who know” are to move to either the NLT or the ESV. While there may be some merit to this concern, I believe that each pastor needs to access the knowledge and understanding of his own congregation. Further, care needs to be exercised in deciding which version to use.

For what it is worth, my favorite study Bible is the New Scofield Study Bible. This is a King James Version modified by the editors to change those word which have lost their meaning or which were incorrectly translated by the KJV committee. The King James verbiage is given in the margin. At the same time, for daily use I am migrating toward perferring the New King James Version.

It is interesting to note that after some 1500 years of use, the Catholic Church moved away from the Latin Vulgate as its Bible. The New Jerusalem Bible appeared in 1966 and was based upon a French translation. The New American Bible is the first American Catholic Bible translated


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COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSfrom the original languages. Both of these are freer than a word-for-word translation, and in places reflect the theological views of the Roman Catholic Church.

As an aside, the major argument presented by that group known as the King James Only-ers is based upon changes to wording in places which "reduce" or eliminate the deity of Christ. While in the case of some individual passages this may appear to be true, on the whole, translations such as the NIV and NASB have made changes the other direction in many passages and, in the minds of many, have clearer language on Christ's deity than does the KJV. For anyone interested in pursuing this course of study, I might suggest The King James Only Controversy, by James R. White, Bethany House Publishers, 1995. A second, newer book is that written by Philip W. Comfort, Ph.D., who served on the translation committee for the New Living Translation. The book is entitled Essential Guide to Bible Versions, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2000.

For those who advocate the KJV only position, one might ask, how could this be the only true translation when it was had to be revised so extensively? And, what about all those other translations from Greek and Hebrew into Dutch, or German, or French or so on? Are they not accurate? White's work address many of the arguments put forth in publication which support KJV only. …

Sources For Further StudyComfort, Philip W., The Complete Guide to Bible Versions, Revised and Expanded, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1991, 1996.Herrick, Greg, The Adequacy of Scripture, Biblical Studies Press, 1997, electronic media, http://www.bible.org.Hubbard, Robert L., Jr., William W. Klein, & Craig L. Blomberg, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, Word Publishing, 1993Keathley, J. Hampton III, Bibliology: The Doctrine of the Written Word, Biblical Studies Press, 1997, electronic media, http://www.bible.org.Litke, Sid, Survey of Bible Doctrine: The Bible, Biblical Studies Press, 1998, electronic media, http://www.bible.org.McDowell, Josh, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Volume 1, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1972, 1979.Pache, Rene, The Inspiration & Authority of Scripture, The Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, 1969Price, Randall, Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Harvest House Publishers, 1996.Ryrie, Charles C., Basic Theology, Victor Books, 1987.Scofield, C.I., Editor, and E. Schuyler English, Editor, The New Scofield Reference Bible, Oxford University Press, 1967.Spurgeon, Charles Haddon, The Treasury of David, Volume 2, Thomas Nelson Inc., no date.Strauss, Lehman, We Can Trust The Bible, Biblical Studies Press, 1997, electronic media, http://www.bible.org.Wallace, Daniel B., Why So Many Versions?, Biblical Studies Press, 1997, electronic media, http://www.bible.org.Wallace, Daniel B., Why I Do Not Think the King James Bible is the Best Translation Available Today, Biblical Studies Press, 1997, electronic media, http://www.bible.org.Wallace, Daniel B. The Conspiracy Behind the New Bible Translations, Biblical Studies Press, 1996, electronic media, http://www.bible.org.







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The Holy Spirit and Hermeneutics10

by Daniel B. Wallace, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of New Testament Studies Dallas Theological Seminary

[email protected]

PrefaceThis brief essay is a preliminary attempt at articulating the role of the Holy Spirit in relation to the interpretation of Scripture. Criticisms and interactions are invited. (It must be kept in mind, however, that I am addressing evangelicals. Those with a different theological grid will, I am sure, find so much to criticize in this essay that they won’t know where to begin!)IntroductionThe relation of the Holy Spirit to hermeneutics is a hot issue among evangelicals today. On a popular level, there has always been a large misunderstanding about the Spirit’s role. Many Christians believe that if they simply pray, the Holy Spirit will give them the proper interpretation. Others are not so concerned about the interpretation of the text; rather, they are happy to see an idiosyncratic meaning of the text (“What this verse means to me. . .”). All of this is the doctrine of the priesthood of the believers run amok. Although each of us is responsible before God for understanding and applying the message of the Bible, this in no way means that a pooling of ignorance or a merely pietistic approach to Scripture meets the divine mandate. Surprisingly, there is also an increasingly large gap between conservative scholars. James De Young, for example, recently said that “when it comes to scholarly methods of interpreting the Bible, the Holy Spirit may as well be dead.”11 Why is there such a polarity? At least four reasons: (1) Because of the shift toward postmodernism (and thus, from rationalism and logic to experience as the norm for interpretation). (2) Because of the unwillingness to do hard study, as David F. Wells has expressed it. (3) Because evangelical thought has indeed imbibed too much in rationalism. (4) Because evangelicalism is moving toward postconservatism in which tolerance rather than conviction is the proper stance on many issues. Some Key Issues1. Any evangelical view of the Holy Spirit’s role in interpretation must be based on the text. The fundamental argument over this issue must wrestle with the major passages.2. Many non-evangelical (even, non-Christian) commentaries are among the best available in terms of lucidity, insight, and understanding of the biblical text. Conversely, many evangelical commentaries are among the worst available. Any view of the relation of the Holy Spirit to hermeneutics must wrestle honestly with this situation. The point for our purposes is this: understanding can take place even among non-believers. 3. It is important to articulate one’s position in such a way that we recognize the unique revelatory status of Scripture. That is, we must not say that the Spirit adds more revelation to the written Word. This denies the sufficiency of Scripture. Further, it renders such an interpretation non-falsifiable because then the Spirit’s added revelation is accessible to me only through you.

10 http://bible.org/article/holy-spirit-and-hermeneutics 11 James B. De Young, “The Holy Spirit—The Divine Exegete: How Shall We Be Able to Hear Him?” (Evangelical Theological Society national meeting, Jackson, Miss [11-21-96]) 1.


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COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSFinally, it comes perilously close to Barth’s neoorthodox position that the Bible becomes the Word of God in one’s experience. One can easily see how, in such a scenario, the Bible can be employed like the proverbial wax nose to mean anything the molder wants it to mean.Some Key PassagesA key passage for a theological issue is known as a crux interpretum. Such a text is a hinge on which one’s views depend. Chief among the hermeneutical cruces are two passages: 1 Cor 2:12-14 and 1 John 2:20, 27. I will not take time to wrestle with these in a detailed exegesis. But I will highlight the major problems and discuss them briefly.1 Cor 2:12-14This text reads as follows:

Greek: (12) hJmei'" deV ouj toV pneu'ma tou' kovsmou ejlavbomen ajllaV toV pneu'ma toV ejk tou' qeou', i{na eijdw'men taV uJpoV tou' qeou' carisqevnta hJmi'n: (13) a} kaiV lalou'men oujk ejn didaktoi'" ajnqrwpivnh" sofiva" lovgoi" ajll∆ ejn didaktoi'" pneuvmato", pneumatikoi'" pneumatikaV sugkrivnonte". (14) yucikoV" deV a[nqrwpo" ouj devcetai taV tou' pneuvmato" tou' qeou', mwriva gaVr aujtw'/ ejstin, kaiV ouj duvnatai gnw'nai, o{ti pneumatikw'" ajnakrivnetai:ESV: 12 Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. 13 And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.14 The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

Translations vary considerably, especially in v 13. But for purposes of brevity, the following may be regarded as representative:

RSV: (12) Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. (13) And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit. (14) The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

NIV: (12) We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. (13) This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. (14) The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.

ASV: (12) But we received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is from God; that we might know the things that were freely given to us of God. (13) Which things also we speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth; combining spiritual things with spiritual words. (14)


http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20John%202:27&version=ESV

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http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Cor%202:12-14&version=ESV

COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSNow the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged.

The key issues here are: (1) the meaning of the last clause of v 13 (viz., the referent of the two adjectives and the lexical force in this context of the participle); (2) in v 14: (a) in what sense the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit, and (b) whether the two clauses are parallel or appositional. Unpacking these issues a bit, here are some tentative conclusions: (1) verse 13 means either that Paul and his associates interpret spiritual things to spiritual people or something else (there are a variety of options here). Nevertheless, one key point to be made is this: one must not use such an oblique text as the fundamental prooftext of any view. Seek clearer passages to prove your point. (In the least, we can say that the NIV translation is probably incorrect based on the lexical field suggested in BAGD.)(2) In verse 14: (a) the natural person does not welcome spiritual truths. The verb devcomai fundamentally has this notion. It is more explicitly tied to the volition than is lambavnw. Thus, the natural person has a volitional problem when it comes to the gospel. (b) If the two clauses are appositional, then the natural person does not welcome spiritual truths and because of this he cannot fully grasp them. If the two clauses are parallel, then Paul is presenting two distinguishable but separate truths here: the natural person has a problem with volition and the natural person has a problem with comprehension. The simple kaiv that joins the two clauses would normally be unconvincing as an indicator of apposition (although an epexegetical kaiv is, of course, possible): prima facie, the two clauses of v 14 look to be parallel points. However, on behalf of apposition is the fact that Semitic parallels (such as synonymous or synthetic parallels) were often employed even in the New Testament; if Paul is doing so here, he may well have the notion of apposition in mind. The problem with this view is that ginwvskw is a rather vanilla term for “know” (in spite of the protestations of some). In other words, if this clause is in some sense appositional to the preceding, we might have expected another word, such as oi\da. The presence of ginwvskw seems to indicate that two separate notions are involved: the natural person does not properly understand revelation because of sin’s effects on his will and on his mind. This latter category involves the noetic effects of sin. Such a theological category is consistent with Paul and the NT. Sin affects our wills, emotions, and our minds.In sum, 1 Cor 2:12-14 is saying that the non-Christian will not accept spiritual truths and cannot understand them. These are two distinct though related concepts. Non-Christians do indeed plainly understand the gospel message at times; further, unbelieving exegetes do often offer valuable insights into the text. That is not disputed here. Paul’s point seems to be that the depths of God’s ways and God’s wisdom cannot even be touched by non-believers. There is a level to which they cannot attain.1 John 2:20, 27This text reads as follows:

Greek: (20) kaiV uJmei'" cri'sma e[cete ajpoV tou' aJgivou, kaiV oi[date pavnte". . . . (27) kaiV uJmei'" toV cri'sma o} ejlavbete ajp∆ aujtou' mevnei ejn uJmi'n, kaiV ouj creivan e[cete i{na ti" didavskh/ uJma'": ajll∆ wJ" toV aujtou' cri'sma didavskei uJma'"


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSperiV pavntwn, kaiV ajlhqev" ejstin kaiV oujk e[stin yeu'do", kaiV kaqwV" ejdivdaxen uJma'", mevnete ejn aujtw'/.

ESV: 20 But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge. … 27 But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie—just as it has taught you, abide in him.

The key elements in these verses are: (1) v 20: “you all know it” (i.e., you all know that you have an anointing from the Holy One); (2) v 27: (a) “you have no need that anyone should teach you” and (b) “his anointing teaches you concerning all things.”A few comments are in order: (1) This passage illustrates three of the most important rules of exegesis: CONTEXT, CONTEXT, CONTEXT. Only if we ignore the context can we construe a meaning that universalizes this text. (2) Verse 20 indicates that what the believers know by personal experience (oi\da) is their anointing. I take it that this is the inner witness of the Spirit: they recognize that the Spirit ministers to them in an immediate, non-discursive role, convincing them of their relationship to God (cf. Rom 8:16). (3) If the author is saying that no one should teach them anything at all, why then does he teach them in this letter? Surely, the immediate context suggests something different. (4) The anointing that teaches them about all things also needs to be contextualized. The author is contrasting these believers with heretics who have removed themselves from the believing community (cf. 2:19). The author stresses what these believers know: that Christ has come in the flesh, that he will come again, and that they are the children of God. He also stresses how these believers discern the essential truths of the faith: they have the Spirit of God. He is convinced that they will stay true to the faith—that they will abide (mevnw)— because “greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world” (4:4).Thus, on the one hand, 1 John 2:20, 27 does not indicate that the Holy Spirit circumvents the interpretive process. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit does work on our hearts, convincing us of the essential truths of the faith. One who does not have the Spirit of God cannot believe such truths and hence cannot know them experientially.The Relation of the Holy Spirit to InterpretationMy preliminary conclusions are offered here. I believe that there are at least seven or eight ways in which the Holy Spirit relates to interpretation. Many of these are overlapping; some folks might want to organize them differently.1. The Spirit’s work is primarily in the realm of conviction rather than cognition. At the same time, even this area needs some nuancing. One’s convictions do impact one’s perceptions. Thus, it seems that the Holy Spirit may be said to aid our interpretation, even if his role were limited to that of conviction. How?2. Experiential knowledge has a boomerang effect back on intellectual comprehension. In several areas, to the extent that an interpreter has experienced what is being proposed, he/she can comprehend it. For example, if someone has never been in love, he/she has a more difficult time understanding fully all that romance involves.3. To the extent that one is disobedient to Scripture, yet respects its authority (at least with his lips), he will twist the text. Cf. 2 Pet 3:15-16. Conversely, to the extent that one is obedient to Scripture, he/she will be in a better position to understand it and deal with it honestly.4. Sympathy to the biblical author opens up understanding. The most sympathetic exegete is the believer. An unsympathetic interpreter often misunderstands because of the lack of desire to


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSunderstand. This can easily be illustrated in the political arena. Those who are vigorous about the rightness of a particular party tend to villify all that is in the other party. Even among Christians there is often a “canon within a canon.” That is, some books/authors are respected more highly than others. To the extent that we do not cultivate sympathy for all the authors of Scripture we close ourselves to the full impact of their message.At the same time, if one is sympathetic to the divine author while ignoring the human author, several tensions in Scripture will be overlooked. Thus, ironically, when inerrancy is paraded along docetic bibliological lines (as it often is today), one’s interpretation is often more a defense of a supposed harmony than an honest investigation into an author’s meaning. Progressive revelation gets flattened out; human authors become mere stenographers. Tensions go unobserved, only to be raised as flat-out contradictions by those who do not have much sympathy for Scripture, leaving evangelicals in a position of having to do damage control. Recognizing the tensions in Scripture as well as the progress of revelation—and that the Bible is both a divine book and a very human book—avoids such problems.5. Those who embrace in principle a belief in the supernatural are in a better position to interpret both miracles and prophecy. These elements of Scripture simply cannot be treated adequately by non-believers. This goes beyond mere sympathy to world-view. If one steadfastly disbelieves that prophecy can take place, then he will have to explain the prophetic portions of Scripture as other than real predictions. They will either be discredited as unfulfilled or else treated as vaticinium ex eventu (or prophecy after the fact). Miracles also need to be rewritten so as to be demythologized. C. S. Lewis’ critique several decades ago still stands as a valid indictment against this treatment of Scripture: to treat Scripture—especially the NT—as full of fables presupposes a timeline that is demonstrably untrue. The gap from the time of the events to the telling of the tale is simply too short, finding no parallels in any purportedly historical literature. Lewis concludes that those who call the NT fable-filled have never really studied fables. Or as Vincent Taylor, the British NT scholar, noted, to regard the NT documents as full of myth presupposes that all the eyewitnesses must have vanished almost immediately after the events took place. In short, when it comes to miracles and prophecy, the believer is in a far better position to understand the message. This bears some similarities with Jesus’ indictment of the Sadducees for not embracing the resurrection: “You do not know the Scriptures or the power of God.”6. The inner witness of the Spirit (cf. Rom 8:16; 1 John 2:20, 27, etc.) is an important factor in both conviction and perception of the central truths of Scripture. From my tentative study, I would say that the Spirit’s witness is an immediate, non-discursive, supra-rational testimony of the truth of the central tenets of the faith. The Spirit convinces us of their truth in an extra-exegetical way. What exactly does he convince us of? Some of these things are: (1) our filial relationship to God; (2) the bodily resurrection of Christ; (3) the humanity of Christ; (4) the bodily return of Christ; (5) the deity of Christ; (6) the nature of salvation as a free gift from God. The Spirit’s testimony may, indeed, be broader than this. But how broad? It is doubtful that the Spirit bears witness to the time it took for God to create the universe, or whether dispensationalism or covenant theology is the better system, or whether inerrancy is true. I doubt that he bears witness to what form of church government is to be preferred, the role of women in leadership, or how to define spiritual gifts. There are so many matters in Scripture that are left for us to examine using the best of our rational and empirical resources! But this does not mean that we cannot come to some fairly firm conclusions about them. It does mean, however, that these are issues that are more peripheral than others regarding salvation. I do believe that these


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICS‘negotiables’ are important areas of investigation. Proper conclusions about many of them (but not all) are necessary for the health of the Church, but are not essential for the life of the Church. Three final comments on the inner witness of the Spirit: (1) That I have even offered a preliminary taxonomy of doctrine may be startling to some. The alternative is to view all doctrine as of equal importance. But this is problematic historically, exegetically, and spiritually. Such a ‘domino’ view of doctrine results either in unsupportable dogma coupled with smug arrogance, or a crashing of virtually all one’s doctrinal beliefs (because if one falls down, they all fall down). (2) That several areas are apparently not witnessed to by the Spirit does not mean that they are not important. Rather, it means both that the less central they are to salvation and to the health of the Church, the more freedom and tolerance we should allow to those who disagree with us. This requires a measure of humility in such matters—even on issues that are currently hot topics (such as spiritual gifts and the role of women in leadership). Part of the real challenge of grappling with these issues is to determine how much the health of the Church is impacted by our exegetical decisions. But the presentation of one’s findings must always be accompanied by a spirit of charity. Be careful not to elevate your own non-central beliefs to the first level of conviction that is reserved for those truths which the Spirit bears witness to. (3) The inner witness of the Spirit can be suppressed to a degree. One must keep a warm heart toward God (through prayer, worship, community, humility, obedience, etc.) and a nuanced vigilance over the preciousness of these central truths (through study of both the Scriptures and the history of the Church), in order to cultivate the apprehension of the Spirit’s inner witness. 7. General illumination is also an area in which the Spirit helps our interpretation. By general illumination I mean his work in helping us to understand any area of life and the world. This needs more exploration. In general, I believe that the Spirit helps us in clearing our minds as we wrestle with many things—from paying taxes, to finding car keys, to taking exams. Why would we exclude Scripture from this matrix? Certainly Scripture is not outside the purview of the Spirit’s general aid offered to believers. Admittedly, this area of investigation needs more work. My thoughts are merely preliminary.8. Corporate and historical illumination: Via the whole body of Christ—both in its current manifestation and throughout history—believers have come to understand God’s will and God’s Word better. We dare not elevate either consensus opinion or tradition to the status of infallible authority however! But such areas ought not to be relegated to disdain either. After all, the Holy Spirit did not start with you when he began teaching the Church; he’s been in this business for a few centuries.

* * *I conclude this paper with three caveats:1. Don’t view the limits of exegesis as the interpretation of a text. Ultimately, the goal of exegesis is not interpretation, but transformation.2. Don’t assume that because you pray, are spiritual, etc., that your interpretation is right. Laziness in the study is no excuse for a poor interpretation. Further, even if you are not lazy, an inaccessible interpretation must still be judged an improbable interpretation.3. Don’t isolate your study from your worship. Those in seminary especially should take very seriously the mandate for those who would be ministers of the Word: Study! Exposition that is not borne of hard study produces a warm fuzzy feeling that lacks substance. It is candy for the soul. At the same time, if your study is merely a cognitive exercise rather than a part of the worship you offer up to God, it will have a cold and heartless effect. Eating a rock may be a way


COURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSCOURSEPACK FOR HERMENEUTICSto get your daily minerals, but who would want to take their minerals in such an indigestable form?


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