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About Jesus - Steve (Stephen) Sweetman The
God Of Our Cause Webster's
online dictionary defines the word "hermeneutics" as the study
of the methodological principles of interpretation.
Okay, that might be a bit confusing.
I define hermeneutics as the attempt to understand what someone
says as he wants it to be understood, not as I want it to be understood.
You might actually say that hermeneutics is the art of common
communication. I use the
word "art" because our communication skills leave much to be
desired. Good communication
is a skill, an art that we constantly struggle to learn and implement
into our relationships. Biblical
hermeneutics, then, is the attempt to understand the Bible as it wants
to be understood, not as we want to understand it.
In
the mid 1990's my friend and I suggested to our pastor that we teach a
course on Biblical hermeneutics. He denied our request to help our
congregation to have good Biblical study skills.
I suppose that if those sitting in the pews had no such skills,
then they would have no legitimate right to question what was taught
from the pulpit. That was
life for Christians in the dark age of Catholicism during Medieval
times, but it should not be the way it is for us in these post
Reformation times. Without
some knowledge of hermeneutics it is easy for us to impose our
twenty-first century, western-world mindset onto the pages of the Bible.
That does great damage to both the Biblical text and our
understanding of the Biblical message.
When we formulate our personal theology and then search the pages
of the Bible for proof texts to support our position, hermeneutically
speaking, we are in the wrong. We cannot insert our theological concepts into the
pages of the Bible to make it say something it never said. Concerning
any Biblical text, we must ask to whom the passage was originally
addressed. We consider the
culture and language in which the passage was written.
We consult credible Biblical scholars who
have historical, cultural, linguistic, and archaeological knowledge. From
this process we are better equipped to understand any given Biblical
passage. Only after this
process can we ask how the passage applies to us. When
it is all said and done, we must clearly distinguish between our
interpretation of the text from the clear word of Scripture.
For
Christians, the Bible is the authoritative Word of God.
We are in error when we impose our personal theology onto the
pages of the Bible. The
Bible was written centuries ago in cultures and languages that most know
little about. It is bad
hermeneutics to interpret the Bible with our twenty-first century,
western-world thought processes and claim it to be God's Word.
The
Bible promotes God's cause, not our cause.
God is not the God of our cause.
He is the God of His own cause, and it is His cause that we must
discover throughout the pages of the Bible.
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