Interpretation

The word interpretation has gotten a bad rap in the church. Oftentimes, when you hear the word, it's used negatively or pejoratively. You hear people say, don't interpret it to me, just read it. Or sometimes you'll hear in a midst of a statement about scripture that people don't like, they'll say something like, that's just your interpretation. That first statement, don't interpret it, just read it. It assumes that the Bible does not require interpretation in the second. That's just your interpretation seems to assume that all interpretations are equally valid. As to the first, I think we need to understand that everyone in this room is engaged in many acts of interpretation every day. As a matter of fact, many acts of interpretation right now. People are interpreting my speech, my attitude, my body language, my clothing style, hand gestures, if I had any, facial expressions and on and on. And there's really nothing spooky or magical about it. The word interpretation only refers to the act of discerning the meaning of sensory stimuli. Human beings make tens of thousands of interpretations every day. Everything that comes into our field of vision, touch, smell, taste or hearing is interpreted. Now while all things must be interpreted, if they're going to be made sense of and related to our life experience, reading. Cyphering the meaning of written or drawn symbols is a particularly interpretive act, or should say that reading is especially interpretive in nature. And that includes reading the Bible. If we read the Bible, we will interpret. And Stuart, in their book, how to read the Bible for all its worth said this, quote, we invariably bring to the text all that we are with all our experiences, culture and prior understandings of words and ideas. Sometimes what we bring to the text unintentionally to be sure leads us astray, or else causes us to read all kinds of foreign ideas into the text. They go on and say that we can interpret well, we can interpret poorly, but interpret we will and interpret we must. How do we know that we're interpreting well? There are principles which guide faithful, biblical interpretation, and that's what we want to talk about this evening. But first, what about that second derogatory use of the word interpretation? That's just your interpretation. Is it possible that one person's interpretation of a text is superior to another's, or to put the question in maybe a bit more American egalitarian terms? Is it possible that one person's interpretation is as valid as in others? Well, it is somewhat natural that we would have different interpretations of things. In order to understand, make sense of and determine the meaning of things, we apply our accumulated experience in knowledge to every new experience. We understand the new thing by comparing it to and analyzing it in terms of the old things, those things we already know. The human mind, after all, is not a blank slate that the Bible writes its message upon. When we read, we engage the material. We cipher it through the matrix of our prior knowledge, our familiarity with the text, our expectations about the text, our traditions, whether those be confessional, ethnic, political, or education. The list is endless. So as no two people have had exactly the same lists of experiences, it's only natural that no two people see all of reality in exactly the same way. But are all interpretations equally valid? Do we all have equal right to claim to be true? Well, in things pertaining to the content and message of the Bible, many people say yes. Isn't it kind of rude, after all, to say that the Roman Catholics, or the Methodists, or Augustin, or the passage on the street, or Dr. Williams, are wrong in their interpretation of the text? Because human beings interpret realities in ways that are unique to different sets of experience, some have suggested that all interpretations of the Bible are equally valid, or equally true. Now what I've done is I've made a pretty sneaky move here, and I hope you've caught me, but it's one that's fairly common today. The first, or the first assumption, is that people are bound by their contexts, and they interpret reality through them. That's not a problem. That's an inescapable reality. But the second, however, is, and the second is this, that the relativity of personal context and perspective is the sole norm for interpretation and knowledge. It's very common today to allege that relativism is the necessary concomitance of our established relativity, that interpreters are subject to their experiences, necessitates that all truth claims are subjectivist. That's the claim. Subjectivism then means subjectivity, excuse me, let me reverse that. Subjectivity means subjectivism, and relativity means relativism. And what we're talking about here is, of course, postmodernism. Postmodernism has gone beyond the undeniable fact of our relativity, the relativity of human perception, to the ideological claim that relativity is normative. In other words, relativism is the only norm for meaning and truth. One's interpretation of a reality is true for them, and the only way, or the only thing that can falsify that interpretation, is that it fails to have a utilitarian or existential value for the one holding it. Another way we can get at this is to say that postmodern views of truth do not believe that there is a truth out there, external to the knower. Rather, truth is internal. It's even, we might call it an activity of the knower. We make truth. We make our truth. But something very close to postmodernism has been a reality for many years in evangelical circles. Postmodernism should not shock us. Postmodernism should not appear to be us, should not appear to us as being completely new. A commonly heard introduction to an interpretation of scripture that we hear in evangelical circles like this. What this text means to me is, this is the very thing that the Roman Catholic Church warned us about in the early 16th century when we broke away from the Mother Church. If you don't have the teaching magisterium of the church there, then every man will become his own interpreter. There will become as many churches as there are people reading scripture. And meaning and truth will become utterly individualized, utterly subjectivized. Well, my question is this, would we allow such relativism in other realms of human knowledge? Would we allow the same kind of relativism in other areas of thought that we evangelical seem to prize in our reading of scripture? If I sell you my old motorcycle, let's say you give me $250 for it. Can I take that $250 check down to the bank and demand $2,500 because I choose to interpret $250 for $2,500. That's what your check means to me. But wait a minute, the bank teller, she has her own interpretation of the check. She reads the check as saying, it's an instruction, it's telling her to empty out your bank account and to give all of the money to me. There's actually a problem with making individual experience, the arbiter of reality. Each one of us here at the bank, each one of us has our own interpretation. If we wish to affirm that such an approach to the Bible is okay, if we want to say that all interpretations are equally true, then we must also be willing to accept the other side of the equation. All interpretations of the text are equally false. If the Bible says everything, it's not saying anything. It's merely an occasion for our signing meaning. Now to accept multiple interpretations of a text as valid is to read the Bible in such a way that it's making no truth claims at all. It's to say that the Bible has nothing to do with reality. And again, it's only purpose is to offer us food for thought. Where interpretations of a text are contradictory, only one can be right. In fact, they may all be false, but only one can be correct. If you think about it, the argument that says that all interpretations of the Bible are equally valid ultimately comes from a skepticism about the Bible's ability to make truth claims about its ability to speak to reality. It seems to me that the Christian who accepts the Bible as the Word of God as the normative rule for faith in life, a sure word of redemption cannot accept such an argument. To confess the Bible as the Word of God is to confess that God reveals his will and his ways in the pages of Scripture. The Bible is, after all, revelation or communication, to suggest that we can't know its contents, to say that our relativity makes us perceptual no-nothings. It seems to me in effect to say that God is an incompetent or ineffective communicator. The problem of Scripture is not one of content but interpretation. Again, it's not God's problem. It's our problem. It's not the Word, but it is us that is relative. But I want to move here on to the issue of the role of presuppositions, Roman numerals 2, until the last century, until very recently in this century actually, interpreters of the Bible usually assumed that they were objective. People simply ignored the problem of presuppositions, at least their own presuppositions. Let me give you just one example here. This example comes from the reformed tradition. Francis Turerton, a 17th century reformed theologian, was a major thinker in the history of the tradition. His work in clinical theology is still in print and it was a standard textbook at places like Princeton Seminary, into the late 19th century. Turerton gives us a good example of the principle of presumed objectivism and an overextended use of the principle of clarity. Turerton assumed that the Bible is a completely perspicuous and rational book. The number perspicuous means clear. A proper employment of reason should elicit the proper meaning of the text. So all of it's there. Yet Turerton also understood from experience that Christians do not all share the same interpretation of every text. How is it possible that Christians can come to improper exegetical conclusions if the Bible is completely clear and rational? How is it that we do not agree? Well, first of all, he said that we might assume that people lack sufficient knowledge about the text, either at a linguistic or historical level. So what we need to do is give them more information, more knowledge, then they'll be able to see what the text clearly means. Second possibility, however, is that people, even those who possess sufficient knowledge, will remain intransigence against the clear meaning of the text. Their bias or biases will not allow them to see the truth. Now throughout this discussion Turerton assumed that he possessed the correct understanding of the text. He assumed that he was unbiased. You see it's the other person who either lacks sufficient knowledge or a proper attitude. He didn't even consider the fact that he might be biased. And this attitude has pretty well been the standard fair in Christian circles, both liberal and conservative. Liberals assumed that we conservative our confused and that they, the liberals, are objective. We conservatives assume our own objectivity and we assume that liberals have sold out to modern culture. Well the solution of course is that we must recognize that we all do have biases. We all have biases. Pre-understandings, commitments about the nature of things, the nature of scripture, the nature of human response, all of these shape are understandings of the text. Our confessional backgrounds and education, our personal frame of reference, our life experiences, all of these inform how we read the text. We need to be aware of that and we need to be willing to test those biases in terms of scripture itself. This means that as we read we should be asking ourselves whether we are exegeting or isolating. Exegesis is to read out to read what is there. Exegesis is to read into, to simply take our biases or presumptions or presuppositions and read those into the text. We would like to be there. Now I want to be clear here, it's not a matter of getting rid of presuppositions. In fact it's impossible to divest ourselves of all assumptions and presuppositions and pre-understandings. We all wear glasses of one kind or another in the interpretive process. We can't do otherwise. The question is whether the glasses we will wear have been borrowed and ground by scripture itself, whether they're true to the Bible, whether they've been polished by constant interaction with scripture, whether they can stand the test of scripture. Well the solution of course is that we must recognize that we all do have biases. We all have biases. Pre-understandings, commitments about the nature of things, the nature of scripture, the nature of human response, all of these shape are understandings of the text. Confessional backgrounds and education, our personal frame of reference, our life experiences, all of these inform how we read the text. We need to be aware of that and we need to be willing to test those biases in terms of scripture itself. This means that as we read we should be asking ourselves whether we are exegeding or isogeding. Exegesis is to read out to read what is there. Iso Jesus is to read into, to simply take our biases or presumptions or presuppositions and read those into the text. But let me emphasize here it's not a matter of getting rid of all presuppositions. Fact is it's impossible to divest ourselves of all presumptions, of all assumptions. We all wear glasses of one kind or another. And we can't do otherwise. The question is whether the glasses we wear are glasses that have been ground and polished by scripture. Whether they're true to scripture. You see presuppositions are not necessarily bad things. They're good things. It's simply a fallacy to think that the reader can operate without assumptions, theories, paradigms, presumptions or even prejudices. If you remember our discussion about the authority and inerrancy of scripture, we said that that led us to the conclusion that we should operate with a certain assumption. The assumption that the Bible is the faithfully inspired and inerrant word of God.

It seems to me that the task of an obedient reading of scripture is to bring our assumptions under the critical gaze of scripture itself. Not to seek to get rid of all assumptions, but to have our assumptions opened up, to have them brought under the gaze of scripture and its world picture. In that process of reading, the reader must be willing to have his or her preconceptions tempered, challenged, and wear necessary, even crushed, exploded. This process of bringing our worldview and our presumptions to scripture for the purpose of testing is sometimes called the hermeneutical circle. Is that term there for you on your outline? The idea of the hermeneutical circle is simply this. One can't read the Bible obediently unless one has the mind of Christ. But one can't get the mind of Christ unless you read the Bible. It sounds like catch 22, doesn't it? You see the very function of scripture is to give us the mind of Christ. You see, we don't come to the Bible only once we have a perfect view of things. If we wanted to hold such a view, we would actually deny scripture's function as a pair of spectacles. As we know Christ only as he addresses us through scripture, we come to know the mind of Christ, how to think redemptively about things only through scripture as well. The hermeneutical circle says, we begin where we are. We begin with scripture where we are. When we first come to the Bible, we come with all the baggage of our culture and our own sinfulness. I don't know about you, but I live in a secularist, humanistic, progressively scientific, egalitarian, and individualistic, capitalistic, and materialistic world. Further unconvinced that the world revolves around me and that whatever I think is right is right. And whatever I do is good and on and on. We all start there and we all come to scripture right there. This means that scripture will offend us right from the very beginning and will feel the sting of that offense. That breaks down our presuppositions, breaks down our allegiances and starts redirecting them. But our coming to see the world as God would have us see it through scripture. Like the rest of our sanctification is a lifelong process. It happens a little bit at a time. Each time I come back, and so I call it the hermeneutical circle. Each time I come back, there's a breaking down, a redirecting. With each new bit of insight, a bit more clarity. I get my materialism critiqued. I get my sexism critiqued. I get my racism critiqued. I get all my otherisms critiqued. My polytheism and on and on and on. Breaking, redirecting, breaking, redirecting. May I be so bold here as to suggest that should we ever get completely comfortable with the word of God. We've stopped listening because I'm just going to assume we all have some things that are going to need breaking and redirecting the rest of our lives. But again, in this breaking down, this breaking down of our presuppositions, we are not left without presuppositions. We're not left without a framework. You see, one way to address and to begin to correct our faulty presuppositions about reality is to intentionally choose a good set of presuppositions. And here our concern is presuppositions about the nature of reading and the character of scripture. And this brings us to Roman No. 3. Intentional presuppositions. And I mean that word intentional. We intentionally choose these presuppositions. And firstly here, reader presuppositions. Now when you read statements one and two there, those sound like fairly pedestrian realities. Number one, reading is an act of interpretation. And number two, reading is a dynamic activity in which the reader is actively engaged. And those may sound fairly pedestrian to us, but the fact of the matter is we live in a culture today that does not read. And in many ways, losing the ability to read. We are a video world. But video is a passive medium, a cool medium. All it asks is that you show up. It doesn't ask that you engage. It doesn't ask that you talk back. It doesn't ask that you address a certain way. It doesn't ask that you mind your manners. All it asks is that you sit there. What we find in TV is a minimum of analysis and exposition. And whatever is going on on television must be capable of being introduced and completely exposited by the time the next commercial role is around. Unlike that medium, unlike video, unlike television. Reading is work. I know that's the verboten word in our culture today. Reading is work. It takes commitment, time, study, brain power, and quite frankly some people are better at it than others. Reading is not a egalitarian. Knowing how to read and reading well is more than simply knowing the vocabulary and something about the patterns of grammar and syntax. You see, unlike television, reading asks the reader to ask interpretive questions of the text. If one does not ask the questions, all the knowledge of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax in the world will not produce the results, which readings intend to produce. When I taught at the college level, every semester I'd have this discussion with some student. A student would come into my office and say, I read the whole page or I read the whole essay or I read the whole chapter and I don't have an idea what it's saying. It made no sense to me. I then had the unpleasant task or duty of informing that student that even though they graduated from high school and got straight A's, they don't know how to read. Because they read text with which they spend as little time as possible in the same way that they read video, passively, cool, just sitting there. Reading is active, reading is hot media. It's about asking questions. What kind of text is this? That's a genre question. What's the author trying to say? That's an intention question. Where's the author going with this line of argument to structure question? What kind of response does the author expect from me? Response question. So reading, interpreting what's being communicated, is at a very fundamental level an issue of asking questions. Let's go to B here in our outline. And if you notice here, if you skip ahead, we're going to camp out at 3B for the rest of the night. Presuppositions about reading scripture. And the first one there we can do very quickly because we've already dealt with this two weeks ago. The Bible is the authoritative and reliable. That means inspired and inherent word of God. We work from the faith. Being a good interpreter, a sound interpreter means that we have a positive commitment to the text, rather than a negative dismissive or critical commitment. Because we've spent quite a bit of time with the issue of inspiration and narrancy, we're not going to take it up further at this point. We will develop the rest of these at much greater length. Number two, the Bible has a particular content. It kind of goes back to what we said at the top of the hour. God is saying something in scripture. Not nothing. The Bible is after all a revelation, a revealing of what would otherwise be unknown. Agnosticism will not do. A legitimate response to the biblical text is never ignorance. Or, gosh, I don't know. The Bible is about something. It has a content. But the question is how do we find that something? How do we find that content? We ask the right questions. And again, reading the Bible, like reading anything is an active reality. The meaning of scripture will not come up in muggus. Nor does it just wash over us in the quiet moments in which we're utterly passive and open to the spirit of God. We must seek to discover the truth that's there. I say again that good interpretations about asking the right questions. But of course, the ultimate question we all want to get to is, what is God saying to me in this text? What does the text mean for us? What is God's word for us today in this text? Those are legitimate questions. Unfortunately, we usually can't go straight to that question. You see, that was the mistake at the bank. You had your immediate interpretation. I had mine and the teller had hers. Each person asked what's the check mean to me. There were no controls on the interpretive process. It's difficult as it might be for our modern evangelical ears. The question, what does it mean to me is an inappropriate question. Scripture simply doesn't act that way or work that way. The individual does not control, decide the reality, the relevance, the meaning. The question is not, what does it mean to me? The first question is, what does it mean? Well, then how might we find a control? How can we introduce a control? Again, we do that by asking questions. We do that by asking the historical question. What did the author mean to say? This is the necessary starting point for interpretation. This question seeks to get at what is sometimes called authorial intent or authorial intention. What did the author mean to say? We all speak with intention. Thus, we might introduce the primary maxim of exegesis this way. A text cannot mean something contrary to what the author intended it to mean. A text cannot mean something contrary to what the author intended it to mean. Or, a state of more positively, the text means what the author meant to say. This maxim provides the objective control for biblical interpretation. Now, the truth of the matter is, we might be ineffective communicators. Again, more than once I've had students on a test come back to my office and say, I didn't mean to say that. It seems to me that that kind of assumption would be an improper attitude, however it takes towards the word of God, that he didn't mean to say that. You're going on a trip for a couple weeks and you have an aquarium. So you leave a note for your roommate or your spouse or your mom or whoever it is. The little note says, please feed the fish. And with that, you go off on your trip. When you return, you find your aquarium still there, the waters in the tank, the aerator still bubbling, but the fish, nowhere to be found. And you ask your roommate, what happened to your fish? Did you feed the fish? And your roommate said, yes, I fed the fish to the dog. Now, you have every right to kind of go ballistic here and ask how on earth anyone could get feed the fish to the dog from feed the fish. You didn't intend anything like to the dog from feed the fish. And there's no reason to even imagine how there's no way you could imagine that your roommate could get that from what you've said. There's no reason to think that they would should or could have taken your words to me and such a thing. And with that, we ask a second question of the text. What would the first audience, your roommate, how would they have understood the text? We hope we're asking the same question about a thorough intent, but now from the receiver side rather than the speaker side. How would those people who shared the same thought world, the same language base, the same cultural, historical, traditional particularities as the author, how would they have understood that word? Number three, we're in develops these ideas more in other points later. Number three, the Bible is a unified revelation. The Bible is God's word and thus it constitutes a unified revelation, a unified revelation of God's character, his will and his saving intention. The Bible is not a disjointed collection of words, but a single canon, the rule of faith and practice, and if you recall, we said that if we do not make that confession, then what we have is not the word of God at all, but it's a kind of best of album. Although the Bible was written in three languages, over a period of some 1500 years by many different human authors, and written in many different genres, the Bible is fundamentally one word for its chief author is God. Thus along with the question of authorial intent, what did Moses or Joshua intend to say, we might add this question, what is God, say? What does he intend to say? This question is answered by employing what the theological tradition since Augustine has called the analogy of scripture or the analogy of faith. I have to make a somewhat autobiographical confession here. Having done an academic master's degree in a dark route in theology before going to seminary and having done those first two degrees at decidedly liberal institutions, I was a bit in the dark when I first went to an evangelical seminary and my professors started talking about the analogy of scripture or the analogy of faith. I remember having to ask just exactly what the professor meant. I also remember feeling a bit sheepish about having to ask for a definition for a term which he used like it was second nature. You see, I had graduate degrees from really fancy schools. I should know this stuff. But then when the professor told me what he meant, I was no longer surprised. I was not surprised that I hadn't run into it in a liberal theological context because in that liberal context the analogy of scripture is dismissed. When the reformers broke with Rome and Rome warned them of what they were going to get, every man his own interpreter, every man his own church, they understood right from the very beginning that not only was it important to put the Bible in every person's hand, but it was also very important to develop principles of interpretation, and the first principle for the reformers, the one they returned to over and over and over again, was the analogy of scripture. This they saw as the first principle, the greatest principle of interpretation. The analogy of scripture means this. One must respect the whole of scripture when handling any part of it. The exegesis of one passage must be checked by the teaching of the rest of scripture, especially analogous passages. This principle is sometimes referred to under the statement scripture interprets scripture, or sometimes you'll hear people say the Bible is its own best interpreter. What they mean is not the Bible self-interpreting, in a sense you just open it and it makes sense, but that one part interprets the other parts and you must compare parts with parts and we must respect the whole. This means that those parts of scripture which are apparently ambiguous or obscure are to be interpreted in light of the clear, interpreted in light of those texts where the meaning is known. Analogous passages must be allowed to amplify one another, despite its great linguistic, historical, cultural, and genre diversity. The Bible has a unity and it's this unity, it's this analogy of scripture that really stands behind a lot of what we call doctrine. Providence, baptism, many other issues in scripture are the product of or the result of comparing scripture to scripture. Different texts may speak to the same issue and thus shed light upon one another. A single text may be one sided and you need to put it in the context of other texts. Let me give you one example here. This might help. The issue of faith and works, and of course the example is you must compare Paul and James. Because, quite frankly, the two of them thought of faith and works in different ways. For Paul works are things done to win acceptance and thus he thought of works quite negatively. For James works are evidence of real faith, so James thinks of works very positively. For Paul, faith is living relationship with God. But as James uses the word faith in his epistle, it's really nothing more than intellectual acceptance to a proposition. Now you've got to be careful what you absolutize there. You've got to compare the two of them together, see them in context, see what they're arguing with and against. Now this idea of the analogy of faith has been abused. It does get abused when we use it to ignore the historical progression of the text. When we use it to ignore the diversity of the text, but it's based on the valid assumption of the unity of scripture. Let me go back to it real quick though. And here's where you do where the comparing does help. Paul is certainly to be appreciated. And I don't think I can repeat the question. Paul is certainly to be appreciated in his emphasis upon salvation by grace through faith alone. There's no place for me to boast about my works. That works are the product of that faith. But James is an important qualifier here in that he reminds us that the faith alone that saves is never alone. It comes with it as what comes with it is that urge to behave as the people of God. Actually, those two terms are often interchangeably. And I try to use the term analogy of scripture because some people use the terminology of faith a little bit differently. But if I remember from my reading, R.C. Sprule uses the terminology of faith in the same way that I use the terminology of scripture. So I'm not meaning to use those any differently. Let's do it for our discussion. We'll just make those two terms synonymous. Okay. As a matter of fact, R.C. Sprule says this. He says this principle, and I don't think you have this. Oh, it is. You do have it. This principle rests on the prior confidence in the Bible as the inspired word of God. It is therefore consistent and coherent since it's assumed that God would never contradict himself. It is thought slanderous to the Holy Spirit to choose an alternative, excuse me, an alternate interpretation that would necessarily bring the Bible in conflict with itself and quote. Sprule goes on from there to note that quite apart from the issue of inspiration, the principle of the analogy of scripture is a sound approach in interpreting anyone's work, a literature generally. The simple cannons of human decency dictate that you give a writer the benefit of the doubts regarding consistency until they prove themselves inconsistent. In other words, if I have the option of interpreting a person's comments in one of two ways, one rendering what they've said consistent and the other one rendering those inconsistent. I should give the person the benefit of the doubt. This comes up a lot with Neophyte students. They'll read a book, maybe I've asked them to write a book review and they'll say the writer is inconsistent here. And I'll say wait a minute, the inconsistency may be on your part. You should not assume inconsistencies too quickly. Go back and read them again. It may be merely apparent. Let me go back to where I began here. My experience as a graduate student, not having heard of the analogy of scripture. I'll try to use the one term here. The reason I had never heard of the principle of the analogy of scripture in my education is that most of my professors were committed to the disunity of the Bible. Again, I'm going to quote Sprule here. He's absolutely right when he says quote, it's commonplace to find modern interpreters who not only interpret scripture against scripture but go out of their way to do so. Fourth, the Bible is written revelation. Oh, wait a minute. I want to break right here this evening because I want to keep four and five together and four is going to take me some time to develop. So let's break here and come back together at 715.