Biblical Interpretation, Yesterday and Today

During the last few weeks, The Gospel Coalition released a series of video discussions with Tim Keller, John Piper, and Don Carson on the relationship between biblical authority, interpretation, and preaching. They observe that humility is a necessary virtue for good preachers, because they ultimately submit to God’s Word and learn from others who have studied the biblical text and context. This video series is a good place to start for learning about the issues confronting pastors in the study and when they try to explain the biblical world and text to their congregations.

If you want to learn more, The Gospel Coalition’s resource database offers a number of in-depth articles about the growing and changing field of biblical interpretation. Previous generations have much to teach us. For example, I am regularly amazed at the ongoing relevance of articles by J. I. Packer from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

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In 1975, one of the very first articles from Themelios (an international journal for students of theological and religious studies, published by TGC) includes Packer’s article “Hermeneutics and Biblical Authority.” Packer outlines seven key elements to an evangelical understanding of the Bible’s authority and how it relates to the particular struggles over issues of authority and inerrancy—issues we still confront today. Here’s a quick snapshot of the seven elements:

1. The inspiration of the Bible is an activity of God, who providentially rules over the utterances of men and is binding upon us.
2. There is a subjectively recognized and objectively inspired canon. In other words, not all inspired words are canonical, but all canonical words are inspired, and God causes his people to recognize them as such.
3. The Scriptures authenticate themselves to Christian believers through the convincing work of the Holy Spirit.
4. The Scriptures are sufficient for the Christian and the church in the realm of belief and behavior.
5. The Scriptures are clear and interpret themselves from within, standing above both the church and the Christian in corrective judgment and health-giving instruction.
6. The nature of Scripture is a mystery—that is, there is a human and divine involvement, where a particular book or letter is written by Paul, John, or Isaiah, yet all of Scripture are God’s words.
7. Finally, evangelicals hold that obedience by the Christian, individually, and the church, corporately, consists in the conscious submission, both intellectual and ethical, to the teaching of the Bible.

As always, Packer knows how to get to the heart of the issue. He writes about the complexity of understanding the intent of both the human author and God:

And, though God may have more to say to us from each text than its human writer had in mind, God’s meaning is never less than his. So the first responsibility of the exegete is to seek to get into the human writer’s mind . . . always remembering, as Calvin so wisely did, that the biblical writer cannot be assumed to have had before his mind the exegete’s own theological system!

Also from the archives, Don Carson’s article “Hermeneutics: A Brief Assessment of Some Recent Trends” shows us a glimpse of what scholars and pastors faced 30 years ago. Here’s a summary of a few trends from 1980:

1. Hermeneutics is a growing discipline, bursting its border in several directions. The area of study is fast paced and needs close attention of evangelical students.
2. It’s a slippery discipline because the terms keep changing, since the discipline has grown, but also because of an imposition of alien ideologies.
3. Hermeneutics is raising difficult questions in the areas of object/subject relations, historical vs. historical relativity, and Jewish hermeneutics of Old Testament.
4. Many hermeneutical methods are so wrapped up in ideological commitments that the possibility of discovering the objective meaning of the text is a priori ruled out of court.
5. There is a danger that some exegetes will go about their task of sharpening their tools yet never use them. The proper goal of the study of hermeneutics is to better understand and obey holy Scripture, and some never quite get to that proper goal.

It’s not too difficult to read Carson’s articles and observe similarities to today. Look no further than Kevin DeYoung’s recent critical review of Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible to see the relevance of Carson’s cautions and proposed direction.

Looking back himself, Carson encourages us to keep reading older, orthodox works on the doctrine of Scripture and interpretation. He writes:

These books have some important things to say, however dated they may be. They treat the Scriptures as the given, the thing to be studied, and then trace our the principles by which various forms, figures, and topics in the Scripture should be understood. . . . Moreover they include some reflection on the use of the Bible for establishing doctrine, and on the piety, devotion, or spirituality of the interpreter engaged in his hermeneutical task.

After you read Packer and Carson, be sure to check out the full archive of Themelios articles by scholars including Leon Morris, John Stott, Richard Bauckham, and many others.