Hermeneutics: My First Step into the Catholic Church – Part I, On Preunderstanding

“Those who leave out the context really leave out the conception.  They have a mysterious power of making the world weary of a few fixed and disconnected words, and yet leaving the world entirely ignorant of the real meaning of those words.”
– G.K. Chesterton

“The preunderstanding of the interpreter, even when it includes a faith posture and a rigorous historical approach, generally incorporates a wide variety of other assumptions as well.  These other assumptions will influence the outcome of the hermeneutical effort. Across the history of the church these assumptions have generally revolved around the nature of the Bible and more particularly the intersecting concepts of revelation, the Word of God, inspiration, authority, tradition, and function.”
– Duncan S. Ferguson
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Contrary to popular belief, the interpretation of texts is not an exclusive exercise for only scholars and academics.  All of us practice the art of interpretation all the time, whether we are conscious of it or not. Merely reading, seeing, and listening are all, in and of themselves, not enough.  The communication of meaning is conveyed with a context. Without a context there would be no meaning. It is not that our words have arbitrarily assigned significations in a direct one-to-one symbol-to-thing correspondence.  Instead, a single word or a single phrase can have a plenitude of meanings – and the surrounding circumstances provide the basis for understanding which meanings are intended.

Interpretation is necessary because sometimes a clear statement, such as “I never said she stole my money,” can have different meanings depending upon a single emphasis of a single word in the statement.  Interpretation is necessary because it is possible to say simple sentences such as “I saw a man on a hill with a telescope,” and there will still be a substantial number of possibilities as to one’s meaning because of syntactic ambiguity.  Interpretation is necessary because of the great number of phrases that we use every day with multiple meanings – such as pass out, work out, throw out, take off, take out, take up, blow up, go off, break off, and the list could continue for ages.

Interpretation is necessary, even more when working with a second language, because of figures of speech such as “he can’t help himself,” “I don’t buy it,” “hit the hay,” “lost his marbles,” or “beat around the bush.”  Strictly literal interpretation does not help us with idioms such as “turning the tables,” “cutting corners,” “get out of hand,” “bite the bullet,” or “on the ball.” Interpretation is necessary because communication cuts across different languages and different historical ages.  Meanings of words change over time. Meanings encompass different degrees and different aspects when transposed between languages.

All these variations in emphasis or syntax, phrases, figures of speech, idioms, and words with complex historical development, are what form the specific contexts in order for meaning to be possible.  The very act of thinking includes and depends upon interpretation of all these aspects of language in our everyday life. We recognize the words that we have learned automatically, and without thinking about them.  We assume what we have learned in our use of language. At an even deeper level, our brains are neurologically wired in order to recognize contexts which make possible our perception of not only words, but of things.

It is with an entire collection of memories, images, experiences, and lessons learned that our brains can recognize and distinguish what we see in any scene, such as that of friends sitting around a campfire.  It is by growing, observing, and learning that we internalize and remember what we have learned. One’s memory allows one to understand meaning, because the brain applies memories to present perception. Without the memory, and without your working assumptions based upon your memory, you would not be able to understand what you hear and see.  Owen Barfield, in his challenging book Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, discusses the nature and origin of language, and explains this fact when he writes:

Let the reader imagine for a moment that he is standing in the midst of a normal and familiar environment – houses, trees, grass, sky, etc. – when, suddenly, he is deprived by some supernatural stroke of every vestige of memory – and not only memory, but also of all those assimilated, forgotten experiences, which comprise his power of recognition.  He is asked to assume that, in spite of this, he still retains the full measure of his cognitive faculty as an adult.  It will appear, I think, that for the first few moments his consciousness – if it can bear that name – will be deprived not merely of all thought, but even of all perception, as we ordinarily understand the word – unless we choose to suppose a certain unimaginable minimum, a kind of panorama of various light, which he will confront with a vacant and uncomprehending stare.

Without memory, however it is stored in your mind and in your consciousness, the data collected by your senses cannot be distinguished or organized in any particular way.  This distinguishing and organizing process of the information received through the senses is a process that is learned in infancy, and then is informed by experience and organized memory.  The very ability to have ideas, concepts, and meanings is made possible by memory. Take away memory, and even the ability to hold onto simple concepts would be destroyed. Barfield continues describing the individual deprived of the ability to remember and therefore of the ability to recognize:

It is not merely that he will be unable to realize that that square, red and white object is a ‘house’, and to form concepts of an inside with walls and ceilings – he will not even be able to see it as a square, red and white object.  For the most elementary distinctions of form and colour are only apprehended by us with the help of the concepts which we come to unite with the pure sense-datum.  And these concepts we acquire and fix, as we grow up, with the help of words – such words as square, red, etc.  On the basis of past perceptions, using language as a kind of storehouse, we gradually build up our ideas, and it is only these which enable us to become ‘conscious’, as human beings, of the world around us.

In other words, the memory is what makes ideas possible, which in turn makes thinking possible, which then makes consciousness possible, in which we are able to understand meaning.  It is with our very ability to hold ideas and concepts that we interpret what we hear and see. This is necessary to think, to act, and indeed to live. All this is fairly straightforward and elementary, but I have begun this essay by describing it because it is actually a fact about who we are – and it is a fact that is disputed.

It turns out that there are Rationalist philosophers, first prominently arising in the 1600s, who argued that there is a kind of objective perceiving and thinking that is possible without taking anything for granted.  The idea that it is possible not to take anything for granted is based upon their claim to think without basing their reasoning upon what would be characterized by the modern Objectivist philosopher, Ayn Rand, as “unprovable assumptions.”  Unprovable assumptions to the rationalist involves anything based upon experience or sense perception, which are changeable and unreliable.

René Descartes is famous for basing his entire philosophy on a disembodied rationalist neutrality.  In his Discourse on the Method (1637), Descartes explained that, “as for the opinions which up to that time I had embraced, I thought that I could not do better than resolve at once to sweep them wholly away …”  This “single design to strip one’s self of all past beliefs,” Descartes argued was necessary in order to be able to objectively determine the truth of things:

Accordingly, seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us; and because some men err in reasoning, and fall into paralogisms, even on the simplest matters of geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error as any other, rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for demonstrations; and finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts (presentations) which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the objects (presentations) that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams.

Because Descartes believed that almost anything was subject to doubt and deception, Descartes’ purpose was to entirely eliminate the ideas, concepts, and memories that form and shape how we perceive and how we think.  The man without memory that Barfield describes is the man Descartes wants to become. In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Descartes really attempts to reduce himself into a pure disembodied mind:

I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colours, figures, sound, and all other external things are nought but … illusions and dreams …; I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses, yet falsely believing myself to possess all these things … I suppose, then, that all the things that I see are false; I persuade myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my fallacious memory represents to me.  I consider that I possess no senses; I imagine that body, figure, extension, movement and place are but the fictions of my mind.

Taking note of Descartes new “method” for thinking could lead us down the path into the historical debates between different schools of epistemology.  Empiricism (holding that knowledge only derives, a posteriori, from the sense perception of experience) was advocated for by philosophers such as John Locke (1632-1704), George Berkeley (1685-1753), and David Hume (1711-1776).  Rationalism (holding that knowledge only derives from a priori reasoning), by contrast, was advocated for by philosophers such as René Descartes (1596-1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), and Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716).   Modern versions of empiricists are John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and Rudolf Carnap. Modern versions of rationalists are Ayn Rand, Noam Chomsky, and Jordan Peterson.  There is also, of course, the school of Realism, sitting between these two extremes. But rather than exploring this debate in detail in this essay, it is important for our purposes only to note that what one believes about how knowledge is possible will determine how one interprets meaning.

Indeed, there are those who argue that, because there is no absolute or universal truth, interpretation is not very important to analyze because it is simply what everyone does in order to reach or create their own personal truth.  Everyone’s interpretation will be different from everyone else’s because truth is not something that we need to bother with trying to discover. Rather, it is what we make for ourselves. It is argued that truth is merely the personal meaning created by the autonomous individual, acting upon his own personal preferences, desires, and choices.  Meaning, therefore, would be, under this line of thinking, entirely fluid, changeable, and malleable. One need not interpret a text in order to determine its meaning. One would, instead, simply decide how to interpret a text in order to suit one’s own personal consumer preferences to determine what that text means to one’s own self.

Therefore, what one believes about the origin of knowledge and what one believes about the nature of truth are both determinative of how one engages in the act of interpretation.  Despite what the rationalists and the relativists say, this means that we do not start out thinking and interpreting with our own individual and personal blank slates.

The Problem of Preunderstanding

This raises the issue of what it is that we take for granted.  What school of epistemology that we presuppose (rationalism, realism, or empiricism) will determine how we understand and how we interpret.  In his book, Biblical Hermeneutics: An Introduction, Duncan S. Ferguson calls this “preunderstanding”:

Preunderstanding may be defined as a body of assumptions and attitudes which a person brings to the perception and interpretation of reality or any aspect of it.  Whenever anyone attempts to “hear” what the text has to say, that person inevitably hears and identifies the sounds from within a prior structure of experiences or preunderstanding.  To doubt one’s own capacity to be free from preunderstanding which necessarily colors the perceptions and interpretations of reality is the beginning of epistemological wisdom.

If we cannot grasp the fact that we have a preunderstanding, then it would be pointless to even pretend to engage in any kind of rational discourse, any kind of reasoning, or any kind of scholarly endeavor.  Ferguson continues:

That our minds are filled with all sorts of ideas, experiences, customs, and aspirations, many of them unconscious, is certain to be the source of much of our trouble.  On the positive side, it must also be recognized that preunderstanding is a necessary precondition for understanding reality. Without some frame of reference, in fact, there would be no reality to perceive.

Which brings us back to Barfield, who argued that our memories and the ways in which our minds have reasoned out the concepts that we have formed from past sense perceptions is what makes our ability to perceive reality possible.  That this is true does not commit us to either rationalism (preunderstanding constitutes only a priori reasoning) or empiricism (preunderstanding constitutes only sense experience).  That this is true does commit us to paying attention to the fact that different writers, speakers, thinkers, and communicators may very well have different preundersandings, containing different assumptions, concepts, memories, and attitudes that shape both the ability to communicate meaning and the ability to understanding meaning.

There is, again, an even deeper level to all this.  This isn’t a matter of simply finding the right school of epistemology and then deciding whether reason or experience is the primary source of knowledge.  Instead, this is about how we talk to each other, how we read, and how we think. In turn, not only does this determine whether we can really communicate with each other and thus the nature of our relationships with others, but it also therefore determines our very quality of daily life as lived in reality.  Our reality is different from that which the advocates for neutrality tell us. It is argued that, in order to communicate and relate to others, we can assume an objective, abstract, and neutral point of view. The ability to assume this abstract point of view is a power that is assigned to us or to others when making decisions (in our government, in our courts, in our city councils, in our schools and colleges, and in our homes and families) that determine our human flourishing and happiness.  If this ability to be neutral does not exist, then every decision made by a purportedly neutral decision maker is being made under a pretence.

It is not just that each individual person can’t help but have a preunderstanding, it will also be that we have shared preunderstandings that belong to groups of people.  Collectively shared preunderstandings will be in conflict with other collectively shared preunderstandings by other groups. A preunderstanding can be passed down from one group to another, from teacher to student, from parent to child, from television to consumer, from one generation to another.  This leads to scholars and historians, particularly of a deterministic inclination, to enter into explanations of how different frameworks of preunderstanding were built by historical circumstances and experiences.

If experience, circumstance, and history determines our preunderstanding, then how we understand ourselves, our problems, and the meaning of our lives will best be understood by learning the history that has shaped us.  To learn this history, you have to listen to those who are telling the story of history. There are of course different historical stories and narratives, because there are different historians with different preunderstandings.  Therefore, as philosopher Thomas Pfau points out, “such narratives don’t just write themselves but rest on myriad interpretive choices. The very labor of specifying and rendering intelligible historical contexts—both for those inhabiting them and for historians belatedly returning to them—actually presupposes conceptual frameworks (not necessarily explicit) on which all hermeneutic practice depends.”

I have become convinced that, as complicated as all this may sound, it is fundamentally important to how we live to be deliberately conscious of how our preunderstanding shapes us.  Our frameworks of preunderstanding determine our ability to interpret and to understand meaning. How we understand meaning is everything – these frameworks shape our biggest life decisions, our relationships with those closest and dearest to us, and our moral and spiritual choices.  Pfau argues that this comes before we understand both our history and our reality:

It is true, of course, that in their very application to that reality, these frameworks themselves are in turn subtly and, on occasion, massively altered. Nonetheless, I maintain that such frameworks logically precede the historical situation to which they are applied. On rare occasions, conceptual and narrative frameworks may be rendered unusually explicit by the work of philosophical or theological reflection. More frequently, though, they constitute a received and oblique “tradition” whose tacit efficacy has been variously characterized as “implicit reason” (John Henry Newman), “background awareness” (Michael Polanyi), “pre-judgment” (Hans-Georg Gadamer), or simply as a tangle of narratives absent which living and breathing human beings would remain bereft of all perspective on their existence (Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor).

Therefore, our traditions of preunderstanding and prejudgment, our frameworks of thinking and background awareness, our underlying assumptions cannot be tossed aside to assume some kind of totally pure and neutral state of mind.  We engage in interpretation with a great deal of background context taken for granted. If you have any interest in church and religion, in theology and philosophy, in orthodoxy and heresy, all this will depend upon your ability to see how your preunderstanding determines your interpretation of a text.

Hermeneutics

The only conclusion that I can reach after thinking all this through is that hermeneutics is very important and necessary.  What, then, is hermeneutics?

Historian and sociologist Philip Gardner says that hermeneutics is “that long-standing branch of scholarship which, taking its name from Hermes, the messenger of the gods, is dedicated to ‘the art or science of interpretation’, to the uncovering and elaboration of meanings which are hidden or obscure.”  Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer writes that those who are interested in the art or science of interpretation will care deeply about learning and understanding history, as “[t]he history-embracing and history-preserving element runs deep in hermeneutics, in sharp contrast to sociological interest in reflection as basically a means of emancipation from authority and tradition.”  Theologian J. Edwin Hartill, in his book Principles of Biblical Hermeneutics, writes simply that “Biblically, Hermeneutics is a science of interpreting the Bible.”  All this assumes that there is, in fact, a proper way for interpreting the meaning of texts in the Bible.  There are rules for how to property interpret Scripture. If you do not know these rules, or if you do not learn this practices, then you will interpret Scripture erroneously.  Bad interpretation leads to poor teaching, impoverished understanding, theological illiteracy, damaging life choices, and both material and immaterial harm.

Looking back at what has happened retrospectively, I can now see that it was my studying of hermeneutics and the right interpretation of Scripture that has led me to the Catholic Church.

What Led Me to the Study of Biblical Hermeneutics

My father taught me the inductive Bible study method from a young age, and one of the greatest gifts my father ever gave to me was an abiding love for the reading and studying of Scripture.  Bible study is no light or simple thing to my father. It involves hours of reading, of prayer, and of compiling careful notes on legal sized paper with columns for observations, deductive observations, interpretative questions, interpretative answers, conclusions, and applications.  My father takes an abiding and contagious joy in this kind of deep study, and I am more grateful than I can say that he shared it with me.

Meanwhile, my maternal grandfather’s home was a veritable theological library of shelves and shelves of Bibles, Bible commentaries, works of theology, collections of sermons, indexes, lexicons, and handbooks.  My grandfather loved to talk about the study of Scripture. It was probably his favorite topic of conversation. I could ask him about anything I happened to read or hear from the pulpit, and I would see grandfather’s eyes light up, and he would carefully open his Bible and search the Scriptures and commentaries with me to see whether the things I asked him about were so.

I was finally also privileged to have a father-in-law who was always happy to engage in hours of theological debate and conversation.  He was firmly committed to using Scripture as the standard to make good and practical judgments by, and he loved to hammer out those judgments tempered by as many questions as could be asked.  He told me that he preferred conversation about these things with those who would not be easily offended by his being blunt, and with those who would not take it personally when he pointed out misguided or erroneous attempts at interpretation.  This kind of conversation, both relaxed and in depth, is rare.

Between the threefold examples of father, grandfather and father-in-law, I found that the rewards of this kind of reading, prayer, method, and study are always richer than one remembers when one is not doing it.  Each time I made a daily routine and habit of it, I got more out of it than I did the time before. There are dry spells and there are inspired spells, but if you stay committed to it, the dividends are beyond measure.  My own personal success at keeping this kind of study has been less successful than it ought to have been and than it ought to be now. I’ve had different levels of success and failure with keeping up such study during different seasons of life.  But never have I found myself better off for not doing it. And, unlike many others, I have had the advantage of family members giving me examples to follow.

Then, within the Protestant and evangelical circles in which I grew up and continued through college, law school, and career building, I also made it a habit to attend weekly gatherings for Bible study or what is now often called “community groups.”  I have seen, experienced, and participated in both good and bad in this regard. Some studies or groups are directionless and poorly led, and I have taken up leadership in them only because there was no one else to do it. Others, I was happy to find, lead to the cultivation of, not only deep and insightful conversation, but lasting and meaningful friendships.

Some groups have circles for “sharing” and the taking of turns to give everyone the opportunity for personal self-expression, or even for improvised renditions of “what this passage means to me.”  Other groups have contained informed, challenging, and provocative teaching and inspiring edification. The quality of such groups seem haphazard and random, not that this difference of quality is unique to Protestant churches.  If you attend a particularly poorly led group, you will be exposed to all manner of Bible interpretation, based upon everything that interpretation could possibly be based upon.

Hermeneutical Problems:
Post-Evangelical < Evangelical < Fundamentalist < Protestant < Catholic

Eight years ago, I found myself attending a “post-evangelical” church.  The pastor of the church had not attended seminary and viewed himself to be like the apostles in being theologically untrained.  He and his church were, in fact, largely influenced by the teachings of Mark Driscoll, who was leading Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington.  They would often copy Driscoll’s latest sermon series. As part of Driscoll’s ministry, he was involved in a church planting network called the “Acts 29 Network,” and a sort of teaching/training/publishing network called “The Resurgence.”  I was eventually asked to begin participating in church leadership meetings and was exposed to their teaching and training for pastors and preachers. It was while in the midst of those meetings that I first noticed that there was a framework underlying the entire church and its planting network.  This lead me to then look at the reading and studying resources of “The Resurgence.”

“The Resurgence” Store, devoted to providing theological training and resources to the pastors associated with the network, recommended a grand total of just under fifty books and eighteen authors.  Ten of these “books” were “study guides” or “companion leaders’ guides” for the purposes of leading “group discussion” about the accompanying companion book. This was a common marketing trend for any popular Christian bestseller, essentially providing a journal light on content and simplistic in questions.  Out of the remaining books, thirteen were written by Mark Driscoll (born 1970). Twelve more recommended books were written by young popular pastor/authors, such as Matt Chandler (born 1974), Darrin Patrick (born 1970), Justin S. Holcomb (born 1973), Mike Wilkerson (born 1977), and David Platt (born 1979). Except for one last category of five books, the oldest authors in the group were Bill Clem (born 1955), Sam Storms (born 1951), Wayne Grudem (born 1948), and D.A. Carson (born 1946), of which one book was recommended for each.  Suffice to say, all of the above were written by white, middle-class, men who were almost all in their 40s or younger. None of the above books being used for theological training were written during the first half of the Twentieth Century and nothing at all was being used that was written before the Twentieth Century … except for a single category.

The Resurgence website’s recommended books did have one older category, and it was called “Dead Guys.”  The Resurgence’s recommended theology books in the “Dead Guys” category contained the following: The Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin, The Bondage of the Will by Martin Luther, Selected Sermons by Charles Spurgeon, Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, and … wait for it … The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.  This was how The Resurgence summarized and categorized the resources they would recommend in order to provide teaching and training to pastors and leaders in the church. (Note: I love both Spurgeon and Lewis.  Yet, my abiding affection for the Narnia stories would not induce me to include them as textbooks for seminary education.)

If you wanted to go to a place where your self identity could be affirmed while also being around people who said they still believed in the Bible, this “post-evangelical” church was the place to go.  If your idea of salvation meant being able to feel like you were accepted and that your self-worth would not be harmed, then this was the place for you. If you wanted to learn anything about traditional Christian doctrine or practice or discipline or study or history or training or application or art or music or architecture or social service or the kingdom of heaven, you would not hear of or learn anything about it in that church.

The result in the pulpit was depressing, and it constituted a series of sermons that, except for a lot of the name “Jesus” thrown in, were indistinguishable from motivational speaker / self help talks that you could find outside the church.  A great deal was said about one’s self identity, acceptance, and self worth. A little was said about protecting and holding onto gender roles. A little was said about a Reformed view of the sovereignty of God. A little was said about how important it was to preserve masculinity.  A little was lauded about the latest works of Rob Bell, David Dark, and Jefferson Bethke. When he found out that I was a reader, one of the leading elders in the church did share his reading list with me. It was as follows:

– The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery by Ian Morgan Cron;

– A Multi-Site Church Roadtrip: Exploring the New Normal by Geoff Surratt;

– Communicating for a Change: Seven Keys to Irresistible Communication by Andy Stanley;

– Chase the Lion: If Your Dream Doesn’t Scare You, It’s Too Small by Mark Batterson;

– Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality by Scott Belsky;

– Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek;

– TED Talks Storytelling: 23 Storytelling Techniques from the Best TED Talks by Akash Karia;

– Stop Acting Rich and Start Living Like a Real Millionaire by Thomas J. Stanley,

– Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Not only is this reading list real, but I’ve subsequently learned that this elder is now starting a sister church plant of his own in a neighboring town.

It is difficult to express how utterly profound is the impoverishment of teaching that results from this kind of “theological” diet.  Pop psychology, self-help, and motivational speakers are one thing. The soul-sucking consequences of replacing a long and rich intellectual tradition of the life of the mind (and the theological, historical, and aesthetic resources that come with it) with trendy, faddish, business-model, corporate-speak is simply incalculable.  This is spiritual death. This is evangelicalism turned into a Kafkaesque Orwellian lobotomization of the mind meets nightmarish Dale Carnegie/Oprah Winfrey pep talks. This is, if you have ever read Neil Postman, the gates of hell prevailing against the … well, against the what?

Of course, the problem here is that I mentioned some phrases called “intellectual tradition” and “life of the mind.”  Of course, if you have no idea what “intellectual tradition” or “life of the mind” means, then you end up trying to “do church” and you say things about how we need to “love on” people for purposes of a Reformational “Missional” Resurgence.  You may know how to mix Steve Jobs WikiQuotes with inspirational Mark Driscoll Tweets with the help of the latest “Companion Leaders Guide” about how to use sex to sell your latest sermon series, but reading one single book on theology, church history, or hermeneutics will be too much for you.  You will probably be able to find some metaphors that you can argue really mean “oral sex” in the Song of Songs, but you will have no appreciation for the fact that the Song of Songs is a poem nor would you even guess why anyone would read poetry or what that might mean for how you interpret a text’s meaning.  You may even decide that you can sum up “the Gospel” like this:

God changed our hearts and we began to describe the gospel as acceptance, security, purpose, value, and significance in God through Jesus alone. When we understood the gospel as an infinite new identity, everything began to change at Redeemer. Think of it this way: If you have acceptance by God through Jesus alone, why do you need to seek acceptance elsewhere? Worldly people look for acceptance in possessions and people, religious people look for acceptance in behavior (and are therefore some of the most judgmental people on the face of the planet), but the gospel says we have acceptance by God through Jesus.  (See http://redeemermodesto.com/story)

Translation: if you believe that Self worth and Self acceptance constitute salvation, you’ve come to the right place.  Here at our church, we’ll use Jesus to build your Self-esteem and Self-significance. YOU will be able to feel accepted because Jesus accepts YOU simply as YOU are without anything crazy that might threaten YOUR Self identity or demanding “behavior modification” that might make you uncomfortable.  Judgmental people in other churches might make such threatening demands, but at our church Jesus will help convince YOU that YOU are special and help YOU see how valuable and accepted YOU really are. This, really, when you think about it, is the Gospel.

Shorter Translation: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism by way of Dr. Phil.

If you are paying close enough attention to the latest consumer demand in church marketing, you may even rename your church a “Mosaic,” rename your pastor “Mystic / Futurist / Designer / Filmmaker,” and replace any church symbols such as crosses with “less threatening” social media icons.  Then you may replace your choir with a pop band, replace your choir director with a “worship facilitator,” and replace your altar and sacristy with a multimedia display and surround sound subwoofers. Your tech crew and equipment will then be more expensive and will need more money and more man hours than your substantive content.  Your “Mosaic” website will then have lots of fast and spinning videos with a Youtube Channel and a Podcast. Your “church service” will involve less “church” and instead be able to give off more of a nightclub vibe that gives some Jesus-flavored TED Talks. Ideally, your website will have little to no actual text or substantive content at all, because that commits you to what is written.  But it’s ok to say things about “being empowered” and to generally list topics such as greatness, leadership, choice, risk, and, of course, living life to the full. (See https://mosaic.org/)

Just to qualify all that I’ve written here, everything that I have said rejecting and denouncing a specific kind of church leadership also rejects and denounces myself.  I was a part and partaker of the cavalier attitude towards theology and church history. I was inattentive and unaware. I made fun of liturgy, of ritual, of tradition, of even what was “old” and “out of date.”  I even, in an episode that I will be ashamed of for the rest of my life, mocked and made fun of the very idea of the sacraments to a friend who was just starting to seriously ask questions about them for the first time.  I allowed the charisma of energetic, fast-talking leaders to convince me that there was an “in crowd” of Christian believers who were particularly smart and knowledgeable about culture and being up-to-date. And I was tempted by the pride and the arrogance of belonging to that crowd.

I was mindless, unconscious of the roots of things, and I did not pay attention to the framework that underlay this way of thinking about church and about the teaching of Scripture.  So, looking at all the culturally savvy books and trends in media and ways that were promoted about how to revitalize a church, I was one of the worst offenders for a number of years.  Pages and pages of fashionable titles written by best-seller preachers were all devoid of any substance compared to the riches of even a little work such as St. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation of the Word written in the Fourth Century.  And I was one of the pretended teachers of Scripture who could not be bothered to take even the little time that would take to pick up and read such a book.  We interpreted Scripture by applying it in ways that would sound best to the market that we were dealing with. As far as church teaching and Scripture interpretation went, we made supply meet demand.

Beginning the Study of Biblical Hermeneutics

Only by the grace of God, it was with time that, while in the midst of all this trendy, media-savvy, mass-consumer-marketing enthusiasm, I could feel the yawning empty void.  That will be more of a story for another day. Mindlessness is a drug, and with my background in Bible study, I gradually woke up to it. Then I could resist it in the only way that I knew how.  I began a serious study of hermeneutics in preparation to teach a class on the subject. I began to look at the rules for how to properly interpret and apply Scripture. This study was food for a starving soul.  Hungry for deep Scriptural teaching, I began devouring books on hermeneutics, and I read the following:

– Biblical Hermeneutics: A Treatise on the Interpretation of the Old and New Testaments (1883) by Milton S. Terry;

– Protestant Biblical Interpretation: A Textbook of Hermeneutics (1950) by Bernard Ramm;

– Principles of Biblical Hermeneutics (1960) by J. Edwin Hartill;

– Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (1993) by Jaroslav Pelikan;

– Exegetical Fallacies (1996) by D.A. Carson;

– Evangelical Hermeneutics: The New Versus the Old (2002) by Robert L. Thomas;

– Whose Bible Is It?: A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages (2005) by Jaroslav Pelikan;

– Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics: Foundations and Principles of Evangelical Biblical Interpretation (2007) by Graeme Goldsworthy;

– Hermeneutics: Principles and Processes of Biblical Interpretation (2007) by Henry A. Virkler and Karelynne Gerber Ayayo;

– The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture (2011) by Christian Smith

There are a host of different consequences to reading and studying ten books about the right interpretation of Scripture while attending a church whose leadership does not know what hermeneutics is.  The first and most immediate consequence is the temptation to pride. The temptation to become arrogant and condescending is a subtle temptation. One can give into it unconsciously if one is not paying attention to one’s words and one’s attitude.  One feels the temptation at its very greatest while sitting and listening to a thoughtless, poorly reasoned, or pop psychologized sermon. But to act and to feel in this way is both unfair and unreasonable. Treating other persons with scorn simply because they have not read a book that you have read is not only uncharitable, it is nonsense.  And the way to resist this temptation is to really read the books and to really try to understand them.  Do that, and you will end your reading of ten books on hermeneutics convinced that you know even less about proper interpretation of Scripture than you thought you did before you started reading.

Beginning to study hermeneutics made me realize how very little I really knew and how poorly I had been taught.  There is a great deal of scholarship and theological work that has already been done by men and women who are far wiser and sharper than I.  It is only by studying this collection of work that I learned how much a good interpreter of the Bible needs to keep track of. In order to properly interpret a text of Scripture and in order to discern and rightly explain the meaning of the text, you are required to perform a number of different objectives.

1) First, just as in any other written text, you have to find the meaning in the context.

You cannot cherry pick out of the text to decide the meaning.  You must keep the context of the whole of Scripture in mind. This doesn’t just mean the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter, or even the book.  It means the whole. One single New Testament passage can easily quote from and refer to eight different Old Testament passages from six Old Testament books.  If you do not know those Old Testament passages, you do not have the right frame of reference to understand the New Testament passage. This is the first requirement of interpreting a text by the meaning intended by the author rather than by the subjectively and arbitrarily imposed meaning of the reader.

2) Second, you must pay attention to grammar and language.

More stupid and mistaken interpretations of Scripture have been made simply by not paying attention to language and the rules of basic grammar.  The rules of grammar determine whether a statement is “prescriptive” or “descriptive.” The rules of grammar determine whether the Apostle Paul is saying “It is a good for a man not to touch a woman” in I Corinthians 7:1 or whether he is quoting a Gnostic argument that he then argues against.  If, for example, you want to make the argument that Ephesians 2:8-9 supports your assertion that faith is a gift of God selectively given to only a few, then you need the phrase “and that not of yourselves” to apply to “faith” rather than to “salvation” as a whole. Grammar, not the argument that you want to make, determines the meaning.

3) Third, when interpreting a translation of Scripture, you must interpret the text in light of the fact that it is a translation.

The original Hebrew and the original Greek determine the meaning.  If you ignore the original language when you interpret Scripture, then you subject yourself to the errors and misunderstandings that can result from translation.  Grammatical precision is one thing in English and another thing in Greek. Thus, the fact that Greek words come in masculine, neuter, and feminine forms matter for interpreting verses such as Ephesians 2:8-9.  The form of the Greek word for “faith” (pisteos) and the form of the Greek word for “gift” (doron), along with the gender of the pronoun in the phrase “and that” (kai touto), determines the antecedent.  This involves more than the grammar of the ancient original language.  It also involves paying attention to linguistics, common usage, figures of speech, culture, and history.

4) Fourth, Scripture must be interpreted in the context of the history and culture of the time in which it was originally written.

If, in Ephesians 6:5, St. Paul admonishes a servant, with legal rights, remedies, and protections under Roman law, to submit to the master under whom he is employed, this has one meaning.  If by “servant”, St. Paul really meant a nineteenth century “slave,” as in a human being who is owned by another human being as property because of the color of his skin, then Ephesians 6:5 has an entirely different meaning.  History and culture of the time in which the text was written determines which meaning was meant. The elementary level conclusion here is that if you want to properly interpret Scripture, you have to do the work of studying history.  Culture also is largely determinative of meaning. Studying ancient culture determines whether a passage like I Timothy 2:1-7 is (a) directing every woman in all churches to remain silent or (b) directed at silencing some local women who were promoting the teachings of the pagan Artemis cult from a temple in the same city as Timothy’s church.

5) Fifth, Scripture must be interpreted in light of its literary form.

Meaning of a text depends upon the literary form of the text.  If you try to interpret a historical text as poetry, you will get it wrong.  If you try to interpret a parable as law, then you will get it wrong. If you try to interpret proverbs as a prophecies, you will end up with some crazy prophecies.  Whether the text that you interpret is history, law, proverb, prophecy, reasoned discourse, or poetry, you need to understand how the literary genre works in order to understand the meaning.  Literary genre determines how literal or how metaphorical a Scriptural text is meant to be taken by the author. Trying to interpret the meaning of a poem literally is just as useless as trying to interpret the meaning of a law metaphorically.

Understanding the Hard Work of Hermeneutics

All of the above are the rules that determine why the “what does this verse mean to me?” analysis inevitably goes south.  These rules are common sense, reasonable, logical, and a matter of tradition in the history of the Church, as Henry A. Virkler writes in Hermeneutics: Principles and Processes of Biblical Interpretation:

In his book on Christian doctrine, [St. Augustine] laid down a number of rules for the exposition of Scripture, some of which remain in use today.  His rules include the following, summarized from Ramm:

1.  The interpreter must possess a genuine Christian faith.
2.  The literal and historical meaning of Scripture should be held in high regard.
3.  Scripture has more than one meaning, and therefore the allegorical method is a proper one.
4.  Significance inheres in biblical numbers.
5.  The task of the expositor is to understand the meaning of the author, not to bring his own meaning to the text.
6.  The interpreter must consult the true orthodox creed.
7.  A verse should be studied in its context, not in isolation from the verses around it.
8.  If the meaning of a text is unclear, nothing in the passage can be made a matter of orthodox faith.
9.  The Holy Spirit is not a substitute for the necessary learning to understand Scripture.  The interpreter should know Hebrew, Greek, geography, and other subjects.
10.  The obscure passage must yield to the clear passage.
11.  The expositor should take into account that revelation is progressive.

Ever since studying proper hermeneutics, I have only been continually and constantly surprised at how very little of these principles are actually or ever taught in today’s churches.  There is a great deal of depth here, and Virkler touches on other points that I did not summarize above. That the Holy Spirit is not a substitute for the necessary learning required to understand Scripture is a truth too little accepted and too little understood in a majority of pews and pulpits.  This does not mean that God is not powerful enough to use unlearned and untutored teachers and preachers. It does mean instead that the Lord expects teachers and preachers who have the opportunity for Biblical learning to avail themselves of that opportunity, and not to treat theological education as mutually exclusive to being spiritually led.  Moreover, the doctrine of “progressive revelation,” or as John Henry Newman called it, “the development of Christian doctrine” over the history of the church, is yet another truth that will fundamentally determine the interpretation of various passages of Scripture. These are truths and principles that cannot be ignored. For any man or woman who pretends to be a leader in the church, or to be a teacher of Scripture, to ignore or to neglect these principles is to fundamentally fail in responsibility and to ultimately rest in intellectual dishonesty.

Eisegesis or Exegesis?

Inevitably while studying hermeneutics, the distinction between exegesis and eisegesis comes up.  The majority of the time you hear this distinction, it is because someone explains to you how you are conducting eisegesis and are therefore wrong, while they are conducting exegesis and therefore right.  Reformed theologian James White is particularly fond of leveling this distinction at his adversaries in order to demonstrate the superiority of his own interpretive method.  Yet, aside from its rhetorical uses, it is admittedly a distinction that is often made by Bible scholars of a particular sort. In his Protestant Biblical Interpretation, Bernard Ramm sums up his understanding of Biblical interpretation when he writes:  “The true philological spirit, or critical spirit, or scholarly spirit, in Biblical interpretation has as its goal to discover the original meaning and intention of the text.  Its goal is exegesis – to lead the meaning out of the text and shuns eisogesis – bringing a meaning to the text …”

In An Introductory Dictionary of Theology and Religious Studies, F.M. Gillmann writes:

Exegesis, from the Greek word exegeōmai, ‘to lead out of,’ denotes the reading out of the meaning of a text.  Applied to the Bible, it is the process of understanding and explaining the biblical text.  This may involve translation, paraphrase, and commentary on the meaning, with the goal being to set forth the original sense of the document.  It is the task of biblical theology to relate the results of exegesis to contemporary life.  The procedures of exegesis are determined by the science or art of hermeneutics.  Eisegesis, in contrast, is a misguided form of biblical interpretation that involves reading meaning into a text.  In this process an interpreter imposes on the text a meaning alien to it.

Let’s pause to ensure that we do understand what this means.  To determine what the text means by extracting the meaning out from the text is exegesis.  To determine what the text means by inserting meaning into the text is eisegesis.  According to these scholars, exegesis is always good and eisegesis is always bad.  Exegesis is neutral and objective.  Eisegesis is interested and subjective.  Some scholars will even argue that this is the same as the distinction between honesty and dishonesty.  For example, Wyman Lewis Richardson writes:

Whereas exegesis involves drawing a meaning out of a text by various tools and methods, eisegesis involves putting a meaning into a text by allowing our presuppositions and assumptions to shape our reading of the Bible.  Exegesis is an honest task.  Eisegesis is often deceptive and shaped by our own desires.  There is a key truth we need never to forget: Exegesis must take precedence over eisegesis.

It is with Richardson that we can begin to see the limitations of this view, a view which arises out of the Rationalist Enlightenment thinking exemplified in Descartes.  Interpretation of Scripture and studying the meaning in the text has never been exclusively a matter of dividing “meaning” between (a) the text’s meaning, and (b) the reader’s meaning, as if there was some sort of competition between different mutually exclusive meanings and we must only choose the right one in order to prevail in our search for the truth.  In the Ancient and Mediaeval worlds, meaning was much more rich and complex than that. In fact, if we look closer, we will see that Richardson’s argument that only exegesis is honest assumes a kind of metaphysics that was not assumed by earlier Christian theologians.  In this first volume of his Summa Contra Gentiles in 1259, St. Thomas Aquinas explained: “That he who understands should understand something arises from the fact that he is disposed in a certain way, since something is understood in act in so far as its likeness is in the one understanding.”

This means that there is something wrong with the difference between taking and putting meaning into and out of and a text as the above Protestant scholars characterize it.  If you look again at Richardson’s argument, eisegesis means allowing your presuppositions and assumptions to shape your reading.  This is, Richardson implies, dishonest. Therefore, you must divest yourself of your presuppositions and assumptions and essentially start reading a text as if from a pure neutrality.  The problem here is that, in order to conduct exegesis in this way, you have to adopt the metaphysical presumption of Richardson and Descartes that adopting such an objective stance towards the text is possible in the first place.

The human mind works in a particular way.  Part of the way in which the mind works, in order to avoid complete and total shutdown, is to act and think based upon a large collection of assumptions.  A small minority of these assumptions may be conclusions that were reasoned out in advance. The vast majority of these assumptions come from our culture, our society, our schools, our parents, our experiences, and how our minds have processed our memories and sense experiences.  In the realms of reason and rationality, it was not until the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, that the idea of an objective, clean slate was accepted as a popular notion of what was even possible. In his book, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre writes:

Consider, for example, one at first sight very plausible philosophical thesis about how we ought to proceed in these matters if we are to be rational.  Rationality requires, so it has been argued by a number of academic philosophers, that we first divest ourselves of allegiance to any one of the contending theories and also abstract ourselves from all those particularities of social relationship in terms of which we have been accustomed to understand our responsibilities and our interests.  Only by doing so, it has been suggested, shall we arrive at a genuinely neutral, impartial, and, in this way, universal point of view, freed from the partisanship and the partiality and onesidedness that otherwise affect us. And only by so doing shall we be able to evaluate the contending accounts of justice rationally.

This Enlightenment view of rationality that MacIntyre describes is, of course, applied to Biblical interpretation in the making of the exegesis vs. eisegesis distinction.  According to this school of thought, only by reading the text after having abstracted oneself from all the particularities of one’s particular circumstances and experience can one “extract” the meaning from the text.  “Meaning extraction” in this sense, must be done from an entirely neutral and impartial point of view with no prior commitments.  But the immediate question is what assumptions and presuppositions do you have to assume in order to take on such an entirely neutral and impartial point of view before reading the text.  MacIntyre continues:

One problem is that those who agree about this procedure then proceed to disagree about what precise conception of justice it is which is as a result to be accounted rationally acceptable.  But even before that problem arises, the question has to be asked whether, by adopting this procedure, key questions have not been begged.  For it can be argued and it has been argued that this account of rationality is itself contentious in two related ways: its requirements in fact covertly presupposes one particular partisan type of account of justice, that of liberal individualism, which it is later to be used to justify, so that its apparent neutrality is not more than an appearance, while its conception of ideal rationality as consisting in the principles which a socially disembodied being would arrive at illegitimately ignores the inescapably historically and socially context-bound character which any substantive set of principles of rationality, whether theoretical or practical, is bound to have.

Applying this line of reasoning to the interpretation of Scripture, insisting that exegesis is always superior to eisegesis is thus to beg the question.  It is to assume with Descartes that it is even possible to assume the mental position of a blank slate without first presupposing a tradition or a school of thought.  If it is the case that there are competing traditions of thought, one of which posits the possibility of assuming total abstraction and one of which denies that possibility, then it is not, in fact, neutral to assume one tradition rather than the other for purposes of interpreting a text.  One tradition states that you can abstract yourself to the point of pure objectivity in judging the meaning of a text. Another tradition holds that, by the very nature of language and meaning, neutrality is not possible, and that to pretend to be neutral is in fact to be intellectually dishonest or to be deluded into thinking that you can work without assumptions.

Given that there are competing traditions of interpretation of Scripture, how do we decide among different traditions of interpretation?  This question grows in importance the more that we think about it. This is, therefore, the next question that we must explore.

To be continued …

Note: This is part one to an essay that is the first of four essays exploring the reasons why I have entered the Catholic Church.  An introduction to this series of essays was published on April 29, 2019 and entitled as “Reflections upon Entering the Catholic Church.”

References:

– Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Contra Gentiles, Book One: God, 81, 7. 1259. Translated by Anton C. Pegis. 1955.
– Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. 1928.
– Chesterton, G.K. “The Tragedy of King Lear.” The Spice of Life. 1950. The Soul of Wit: G.K. Chesterton on William Shakespeare. 2012.
– Descartes, René. Discourse on the Method. 1637.
– Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. 1641.
– Ferguson, Duncan S. Biblical Hermeneutics: An Introduction. 1986.
– Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics. 1976.
– Gardner, Philip. Hermeneutics, History and Memory. 2010.
– Gillmann, F.M. An Introductory Dictionary of Theology and Religious Studies. 2007.
– Hartill, J. Edwin. Principles of Biblical Hermeneutics. 1947.
– MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? 1988.
– Pfau, Thomas. “Modernity as a Hermeneutic Problem.” The Immanent Frame. December 22, 2014.
– Ramm, Bernard. Protestant Biblical Interpretation: A Textbook of Hermeneutics. 1950.
– Richardson, Wyman Lewis. Walking Together, Leader’s Guide: A Congregational Reflection on Biblical Church Discipline. 2007.
– Virkler, Henry A. Hermeneutics: Principles and Processes of Biblical Interpretation. 1981.