2 The Evangelical Dilemma: Hermeneutics and the Nature of Scripture
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THE EVANGELICAL DILEMMA: HERMENEUTICS AND THE NATURE OF SCRIPTURE[1]
Some years ago my then colleague David Scholer received a letter from a former student, who was in pastoral ministry in downtown Boston. In the course of her letter, she remarked, “I have come to realize that above everything else the ministry is hermeneutics.” That was a profound insight that I have had reason to reflect on again and again. What she meant, of course, was that Christian ministry means always to be thinking about and reflecting on Scripture in such a way that one brings it to bear on all aspects of human life.
Precisely because this is so, one does nothing more important in the formal training for Christian ministry than to wrestle with hermeneutics: the meaning and application of Scripture. But at the same time, precisely because it impacts all that one does and thinks with regard to Christian faith, it is important that one learn to do it well—and consistently.
In the previous essay[2] I hinted at the possibility that the debate over inerrancy would end up being not over the text of Scripture, but over its interpretation. Subsequent events, such as Summit II of the International Council on Inerrancy and the expulsion of Robert Gundry from the Evangelical Theological Society, seem to have borne that out. The issue is only partly Scripture itself; the real issue is hermeneutics—what some think is allowable within an evangelical context as to the meaning and application of the text. May women be ordained or not? Is there evidence of editorial activity among the Gospel writers or not? May practicing homosexuals be ordained to Christian ministry or not? These are the urgent questions, and they are not decided by inerrancy (although some have certainly tried to do so), but at the hermeneutical level.
Since I stand squarely within historic orthodoxy—and therefore also within historic evangelicalism—on the doctrine of Scripture, and yet since by ecclesiastical tradition and by temperament I find myself standing on the outside of the debate over inerrancy, it seemed to me to be a worthwhile exercise to try my own hand at finding an evangelical hermeneutics. I realize how arrogant that may sound. I do not, however, contend that what I present here is the way for evangelicals to go. I offer it rather as an alternative within evangelicalism, and I would like to submit it to the marketplace for discussion and review.
My ultimate concern is to test some ideas on the whole question as to how we handle the New Testament imperatives, so that we establish a hermeneutics that, on the one hand, calls for genuine obedience to Christ, yet, on the other hand, is more consonant with the gospel itself, rather than with some form of law. But in order to get to that concern, in this present essay I want to do two things: (1) define what I perceive as the central urgency in an evangelical hermeneutics—how to speak hermeneutically from one’s doctrine of Scripture itself; and (2) point out the hermeneutical problem areas for an evangelical doctrine of Scripture.
I. Words, Communication, and Meaning
In order to get at my concerns I want to start way back—with the need itself.
Human speech, by its very nature (i.e., the use of symbols [words] to convey meaning), requires hermeneutics. When we speak we tend to think it rather straightforward: my thoughts, expressed in words common to both of us, heard by your ears, and recorded and deciphered by your minds. Unfortunately, however, we have all experienced the phenomenon of being misunderstood, and thereby know what a precarious business human speech can be. Perhaps you have seen the wall plaque that reads: “I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” The problem, of course, is that between the mind of the speaker and that of the hearer are symbols—chiefly words, sometimes inflections or body language.
There is, therefore, probably a degree of misunderstanding between any two or more people engaged in an extended conversation or dialogue. That degree is increased as several factors are added. For example, short dialogue between two people who know each other well usually has the highest degree of understanding, especially since dialogue itself allows for clarification. But the possibility of misunderstanding is increased as one is distanced from his or her hearer or reader, such as with monologue replacing dialogue, or when the speaker is unknown to the hearer(s), or when writing replaces speaking. As one adds other distancing factors, especially time, culture, and a second language, the possibility of misunderstanding is heightened the more, unless the writer has tried to be particularly sensitive to such distancing factors; but even then the degree of understanding is predicated for the most part on the degree of common experience. Such complexities in communication should give guest preachers and lecturers, and especially the writers of books, plenty of reason to pause.
It is this last factor—our distance from the biblical writers in time and culture—that demands that we become good exegetes, if we are truly to understand the meaning of Scripture. We must wrestle with their use of words, syntax, and literary forms, which express their ideas, and we must hear those ideas within both the author’s and the readers’ cultural contexts and presuppositions, if ever we are adequately to understand what they intended by their words.
But that is only one part of the task, and frankly it is one that believer or unbeliever alike can engage in with a relative degree of objectivity, although we recognize of course that any interpreter always brings to a text a considerable amount of cultural baggage and personal bias. But a relative degree of objectivity should be possible whether one has either supernatural or non-supernatural presuppositions. One may or may not believe that Jesus rose from the dead, but no serious exegete can deny that Paul believed it, or that he believed there would also be a future resurrection of believers. Thus this task is the more strictly historical one. Whether one is a good exegete or not will depend on the right blend of knowledge of the primary sources, sensitivity to historical possibilities, and good common sense (my way of talking about evaluating historical probabilities).
The other side of the task, however, and for the interpretation of Scripture the urgent one, is that of relevance. How do these ancient texts have meaning for us today, or do they? At this point nearly everything depends on the presuppositions of the interpreter. Here is where evangelical and liberal divide, where Pentecostal and Dispensationalist, or Baptist and Presbyterian, part company. And here is where hermeneutics for a believer or nonbeliever, for a Christian or a Christian Scientist—even though they are reading the same texts—means radically different things. Many evangelicals, of course, tend to think the answer lies in finding the meaning of the text itself; and sometimes that is true. But far more often it is not so. Simply witness, for example, how almost anyone would agree on Paul’s intent in 1 Cor 14:40 that the Corinthians in their situation should not, in light of Paul’s words in chapter 14, forbid speaking in tongues; yet how many would differ from a Pentecostal like myself as to whether that admonition applies in a local church today.
What the text means—that is, how it is a word for us—that is the crucial hermeneutical question. Since our presuppositions determine so much at this point, let us therefore examine the basic presupposition that will distinguish an evangelical Protestant from other expressions of Christianity as well as from other religious expressions or attitudes, namely, the nature of Scripture.
II. Scripture and the Nature of Religious Authority
To this point I have purposely referred to the biblical documents as Scripture. That in itself is a commitment to religious authority that distinguishes Christian from non-Christian. But what it means to call these documents Scripture is not shared equally by all Christians. Here the evangelical Protestant and the traditional Roman Catholic have much in common over against liberal Protestantism or Catholic Modernism. The distinction between the evangelical Protestant and traditional Roman Catholic lies at a different point—the nature of authority itself.
What, then, does it mean for us to name as Scripture these documents that were written in recognizable human language, in largely recoverable historical contexts of a roughly 1500–year span some 1900–plus years ago?
That leads us to articulate a few presuppositions about the nature of religious authority in general, before particularizing on the evangelical’s understanding of religious authority.
I begin with some preliminary observations:
(1) The question of religious authority, most would agree, is an ultimate one; and ultimately we are dealing with God himself. The problems lie with the penultimates, i.e., how God communicates or reveals himself; or what authoritatively mediates God and God’s will to humankind.
(2) It should be noted further that one’s basic authority is ultimately a matter of faith, i.e., one makes a faith commitment of some kind that says: “This plus this,” or “This not that,” has authority in my life or church. This is so even if one does not articulate it.
(3) Related to this is the reality that one cannot finally prove his or her authority to be the correct one. What one can hope to show is the reasonableness of it. Thus, for example, just as a historian cannot prove the resurrection of Jesus, but can nonetheless show how the resurrection seems to make the best sense of all the available historical data, so I cannot prove the Bible to be God’s word. But one can show by a variety of evidence that it makes good sense to believe it to be so.
As to religious authority itself, then, it should be noted that it is of two kinds: Either (1) it is external to oneself (so-called objective authority), or (2) it is internal (so-called subjective). External authority is basically of three kinds: (a) a sacred book, (b) an authoritative person(s) [sometimes = the founder], or (c) a community of persons [sometimes = tradition]. Internal authority is of two kinds: reason and experience.
Each of these has its problem areas. For external authority it is always a question of authentication: why this one and not another. The problem with internal authority is that it lacks any means of verification, or absoluteness. People with similar religious experience or a common view of reason may find support in one another, but the ultimate authority lies with oneself—it is my experience, after all, or my reason—and the result is the autonomy of the individual. It is this idolatry, the autonomy of reason and the individual—which reflects a failure to take the Fall seriously enough—that divides the Christian from most Western non-Christians as well as the evangelical from the liberal.
The evangelical stance on the question of religious authority is that our basic authority is external. This is predicated on the prior theological grounds (which we find eminently reasonable) of the nature of God and the reality of the Fall. We believe that our vision of God was distorted by the Fall and therefore that God cannot be discovered, that is, he cannot be known from below, as it were. God must reveal himself if he is to be known at all; our knowledge must come from above. We further believe that God has so revealed himself: by deeds, in a Person, and through a book that both reports and interprets those deeds and that Person. Because ultimately we know the Person, or hear the gospel, through the book, we take the book to be our primary penultimate authority. That is, we believe that this is the way God chose to reveal and to communicate. The other forms of authority (tradition, reason, experience) in various ways authenticate, verify, or support, but all must themselves finally be authenticated by Scripture.
As an aside, my own understanding of Roman Catholicism is that they would also affirm that Scripture should authenticate other authority. The problem seems to be that whenever that attempt breaks down, they allow tradition, not Scripture, to have the final word.[3]
Because of the conviction as to the ultimate revelatory nature of Scripture, the church has traditionally tried to find ways to verbalize this conviction so as to safeguard it from being watered down, either from one of the other kinds of authority on the one hand, or from the drifts of culture or collective fallenness on the other. Out of such concern arose our various attempts to articulate the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture by the Holy Spirit. By this articulation we were addressing first the problem of authentication: Because Scripture is ultimately inspired by the Spirit of God, Scripture is understood to be self-authenticating. In the final analysis, we believe that the authority is intrinsic. God has spoken—and will continue to speak—here. Let the lion out of the cage; it will defend itself.
Second, by the doctrine of inspiration we were articulating our conviction that God himself is the ultimate source of the Christian faith, as it is revealed or defined in our sacred book.
III. The Nature of Evangelical Hermeneutics
That leads us then, finally, to look at the specific nature of evangelical hermeneutics, how it differs from others, and what are its own inherent tensions or difficulties.
It is the doctrine of inspiration, that God inspired not only the people who spoke but also the words they spoke, that distinguishes the evangelical view of Scripture, and also forces us to wrestle with the issues of hermeneutics. Inspiration maintains that God indeed “spoke all these words and said. . . .” But it does not maintain that he dictated all these words. To the contrary it recognizes, indeed argues, that these words are also the words of people in history. Thus our understanding of the nature of Scripture is that the Bible is God’s word spoken in human words in history.[4] As God’s word it has eternal relevance; he addresses us. It is ours to hear and obey. But as human words in history the eternal word has historical particularity. None of the words was spoken in a vacuum. Rather they were all addressed to, and conditioned by, the specific historical context in which they were spoken.
Evangelical hermeneutics, therefore, by its very understanding of the nature of Scripture, must always be interacting with the intersection of the human and divine in these words that are believed also to be the word. As such it must struggle against the tendency to come down on either side (the human or the divine) in such a way as effectively to negate the other.
Let me illustrate. First, an evangelical sympathizes with, but finally rejects, the fundamentalist’s anxiety over the need for absolute authority, which tends thereby to replace the authority of the word with the authority of the interpreter. To arrive at such an absolute the fundamentalist tends to see Scripture as a divine word only, and thus merely pays lip service to its human authors. As with Docetists or Apollinarians in Christology, the word may appear to be human, or even to have physical attributes of humanity, but in reality the divine has been so superimposed on the human as to eliminate it almost altogether as being truly human.
On the other hand, secondly, the evangelical also sympathizes with, but usually much less so and finally rather totally rejects, the liberal’s fear of imposing rules upon the church in the name of God that seem more arbitrary than loving, or dogmas that are difficult for moderns to swallow. But here, as with Arian Christology, the error lies in an affirmation of the human that diminishes or negates altogether the divine. Not all of our fear on this side may be fair or well-grounded, but it does seem to be a legitimate one. All too often the emphasis on the human side of Scripture results in the hearing of a word from man more than the word of God. In Scripture God does not so much speak to people, as people are speaking to and about him. The result is what James Smart called “the strange silence of the Bible in the church,”[5] a failure of “thus saith the Lord,” but plenty of “I think,” “I maintain,” or “it seems to me.”
The evangelical response to such hermeneutics is still valid. First, such an attitude toward Scripture tends to divest it of its divine authority. Rather than a powerful word from God that addresses us all and sits in ultimate judgment on our impoverished human lives, what is left of Scripture are the meager results of Western rationalism with its pallid moralism and a historical criticism that sits in heavy judgment on the text itself. If I select only parts of Scripture as God’s word, if I create a canon within the canon, if I listen only to what is compatible with contemporary fallenness—even if I do it in the name of love or broadmindedness—how does God himself, who judged human wisdom as folly through the scandal of the cross, how does God speak his judgments on our present fallenness, and do it with any authority? He speaks only what we think he should speak, only what is palatable to certain political or economic convictions, or finally only what we allow him to say. The final word and judgment are ours. That seems to us to be too great a price to pay to be contemporary or incarnational or “loving.” The scriptural view is that one must speak the truth in love.
Furthermore, the evangelical is always puzzled by the liberal, who redirects authority from the word itself to the interpreter of the word, as to why he or she still wants to use Scripture at all. Why bother with the text of the Bible, when the final judgment rests with us? The answer to that, of course, is the Bible’s historic place in the Christian faith and the fact that one has judged it to have a great deal of wisdom and truth after all! So one goes to it, and picks and chooses from it, but there is no thundering voice from Sinai, nor very little of the prophetic finger calling us into question—“Thou are the man”—or if there is, it tends to lack final authority from the outside. So we feel compelled to reject this hermeneutical stance that sees Scripture as a human word in such a way as to blunt or negate its also being God’s very word. Just as we also feel compelled to reject the stance that sees it as a divine word in such a way as to divest it of its truly human character.
But to steer between these two polarities is not without its own difficulties. To see Scripture as both human and divine creates its own set of tensions.
First, the intersection of the eternal word with historical particularity leaves us with far more ambiguities than some feel comfortable with. What do we do with the holy war and the slaughter of nations? How do we reconcile the lament to have Babylonian children’s heads bashed against rocks with God’s abundant mercy? What do we do with the holy kiss, charismatic gifts, head coverings, the mode of baptism, the sovereignty of God and human freedom, to name but a few items where evangelicals, who all hold the same view of Scripture, are deeply divided as to how it impacts our lives at specific points?
The longing for absoluteness on all matters, which compels the fundamentalist mindset, is ever with the evangelical as well—precisely because of the conviction that Scripture is God’s word above all. Since God himself is unseen and known only by revelation and faith, and must finally be trusted, the need for certainty is often vested in the penultimate that leads us to God. Such a need drove the Pharisee to put a hedge around the law and the legalist to put a hedge around certain behavior. It is too much to trust in God without absolute certainty, which of course, as Bultmann rightly criticized us, is its own form of idolatry.
Hence there is always pressure from this side of our fallenness to eliminate ambiguity. If God himself is infallible, then the text of his word must be infallible. If the text is infallible, then there must be an infallible understanding of it. But that is not an evangelical syllogism. The text itself in its intent is infallible, we would argue, because of its character as God’s word. And we insist on this, because even if we disagree on the meaning of the text, our hope lies in the text itself to have its inherent power as God’s word to correct us.
But the buck stops there, at the text and its intent, as to what is infallible. God did not choose to give us a series of timeless, non-culture-bound theological propositions to be believed and imperatives to be obeyed. Rather he chose to speak his eternal word this way, in historically particular circumstances, and in every kind of literary genre. God himself, by the very way he gave us this word, locked in the ambiguity. So let us not fight God and insist that he give us his word another way, or as we are more apt to do, rework his word along theological or cultural prejudgments that turn it into a minefield of principles, propositions, or imperatives, but denude it of its ad hoc character as truly human. The ambiguity is a part of what God did in giving us his word this way. Our task is to recognize and capitalize on what God has done.
Second, the fact of Scripture’s historical particularity not only locks in a degree of ambiguity, but also brings with it a degree of accommodation.[6] Here too is an area of evangelical anxiety. That there is some accommodation is a matter on which all agree—even the fundamentalist, albeit sometimes unwittingly. But how much, and of what kind(s), these are the burning questions. Could God, or did God, inspire midrash, for example, or pseudepigraphy? Or, would God not give us four Gospels if they were to disagree, as a student once insisted? Do the differences and so-called discrepancies reflect accommodation, or must they always have a resolution that satisfies Western logic?
Here is where some sore spots among evangelicals are openly festering; unfortunately they tend to fester between exegetes and dogmaticians. The issue is whether one is wont to begin with a theological a priori and conform historical questions to that a priori (= telling the exegetes what God could or could not have done even before one looks at the data), or whether one starts with historical investigation and expresses one’s theological constructs in light of that investigation (= telling the theologian what God in light of historical probabilities seems to have done). The believing exegete and theologian, it should be noted, are both working within a circle, hopefully the same circle. The tensions, therefore, lie not only in the starting point, but also in how much flexibility each thinks the circle can bear—either in or out.
One of the difficulties here is related to our reading these texts from our own cultural perspectives. The Western mind, for example, seems far more concerned with precision as the only way that “truth” can be expressed than did basically oral cultures. It is not that they played fast and loose with events per se, but that they appear to be far less concerned with verbatim reporting or the precise nature of all details.
Third, inherent to the conviction that Scripture is both human and divine is the recognition that it has diversity within an essential unity. The diversity results from its historical particularities; the unity from its ultimately divine origins. But how to articulate this unity and diversity is another area in which evangelicals are not all agreed. Unfortunately, it is also another area where exegetes and dogmaticians are all too often at odds.
The traditional hermeneutical principle here is the analogy of Scripture—Scripture interprets Scripture, because God is its ultimate author and therefore gives it unity. As an evangelical and an exegete, I would argue vigorously for the validity of this principle. But again, the problem arises at the point of working it out in practice. The exegete, for example, is understandably concerned when he or she sees the imposition of a possible, but most highly improbable, meaning on a text in order to make it conform to other texts for the sake of unity, which is all too often the result of a prior commitment to the shape of that unity as much as to the unity itself. Unity is often understood to mean uniformity. That Scripture might reveal a diverse witness on some matters is ruled out before one even looks at the texts.
While it is certainly true that one can make a beautiful quilt out of whole cloth, it is also true that one can do so out of patchwork. Any two pieces of patchwork lying side by side in isolation could appear so discordant as to make the dogmatician anxious. But when those two become part of a whole, with pattern and design, the glory of the quilt’s unity lies precisely in the patterns of diversity. What would seem to be incongruous is patchwork without overall pattern or design—a concern the dogmatician rightly addresses to the exegete.
IV. Closing Remarks
To conclude: To insist that the very nature of Scripture, as the evangelical understands it, has locked into it a degree of ambiguity, accommodation, and diversity causes some people to capitulate in despair—either toward the certainties of fundamentalism or the ambiguities of liberalism. I, for one, opt for what I call the radical middle. If God gave us his word this way, and I believe he did, then our task is to hold on to both realities—its eternality and historical particularity—with equal vigor. If we cannot always have absolute certainty as to meaning or application, we can certainly move toward a higher degree of common understanding.
As I see it, the way toward that higher level of commonality is still to be found at the crucial point of authorial intentionality, which by its very nature we would insist is also thereby the Holy Spirit’s intentionality. This does not mean that all words have the same intent. There is a different intent to poetry and a sentence of divine law. But all human speech has intent; and if we are to hear God’s word rightly for ourselves, we must begin with that original intent. If God did not speak timeless aphorisms, he did speak an eternal word. That word had specific intent in its historically particular moments. The task of exegete and theologian alike is to discover/hear that word in terms of God’s original intent. I would argue that it is that same word with its same intent that should now address us in our own historical setting. Instead of seeing this as a debility, we should see it as the greater glory of Scripture and praise God for it. That he would speak so directly to their contexts is what gives us hope that he will always through that same word speak again and again—to ours and all of humankind’s individual historical contexts.
1 [For the origins of this essay see Author’s Preface. Since this lecture in particular was originally prepared for a seminary audience, some of the trappings of that audience still remain.]
2 [Which was written in 1978 and published in 1980.]
3 [On this question, see chapter 5.]
4 This is adapted from G. E. Ladd. See The New Testament and Criticism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967) 12.
5 See his book by this title (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970).
6 [See chapter 1 above.]