Hermeneutics

When we read the Bible, we intuitively get its meaning. If we read a story about Abraham, we know that characters move through a story until its conclusion. If we read Proverbs, we know that we read wise sayings.

Yet our intuition mostly comes by way of basic education: we learned how to read and understand stories. So we apply what we’ve learned in school and in life to the Bible. And we attend a church where we hear the Bible preached. For that reason, we also have learned how to apply the Bible to our lives.

What we call intuition in large part derives from experience and education. And so it is worth considering how we get meaning from the Bible since we all bring something to the text. The question should be: are we bringing beneficial assumptions when we read it?

Here are four main ways that I see us reading Scripture to grasp its meaning. By looking at each, we can grow in our awareness of how we read the Bible and hopefully become more skilled at reading Scripture through this knowledge.

[Read more…] about How Do We “Get” Meaning from the Bible

The famous historian Adolf Harnack once asserted, “The attempts at deducing the genesis of the Church’s doctrinal system from the theology of Paul, or from compromises between Apostolic doctrinal ideas, will always miscarry; for they fail to note that to the most important premises of the Catholic doctrine of faith belongs an element which we cannot recognise as dominant in the New Testament, viz., the Hellenic spirit.”*

And it is not that he sees this difference between Jewish and Greek thought as a minor divergence. He claims, “Judaism and Hellenism in the age of Christ were opposed to each other.”** Harnack’s thesis, I would suggest, still predominates today, even if heavily nuanced and rebuffed largely by Hengel.

Yet the idea that Greek thought with its metaphysical interest or abstracted language does not match the biblical idiom of the Bible is beyond false. [Read more…] about Hellenism Wasn’t Such a Bad Thing