{"id":90660,"date":"2021-03-10T23:28:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-11T04:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/keriritenour.com\/grace\/biblical-interpretation\/"},"modified":"2023-10-06T22:18:28","modified_gmt":"2023-10-07T02:18:28","slug":"biblical-interpretation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/keriritenour.com\/grace\/biblical-interpretation\/","title":{"rendered":"Biblical Interpretation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hermeneutics <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The word Hermeneutics<\/em>\nmeans “the art or science of the interpretation of literature.” If\nthe word hermeneutics<\/em> bothers you, just substitute the phrase interpretive\nrules for Bible study<\/em>.  Most\neveryone understands that there are ways of figuring out what someone means by\ntheir words. For example, if you walk in on a telephone conversation and hear\none person say to another “I really hate it when you do that”, you\ndon’t really know what it is that the person hates, do you? However, chances\nare you will have ways of figuring this out, or interpreting what was said.\nYour first thought might be to wonder what the rest of the conversation was\nabout, or who is on the other end of the phone. This is called context<\/strong>. You know that if you can\nfigure out what the context was, you might be able to figure out what it is\nthat this person hates. It’s clear that without knowing the context of the\nconversation you wouldn’t have a clue about how to figure out what was being\ndiscussed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You probably don’t view this kind of\noccurrence as being a rule of interpretation, but in practice \u201ccontext\u201d is a\nrule that you and I use every day. Hermeneutics is just a fancy way of\ndescribing a set of rules that we use for interpreting the written word. The\nfact that we need rules is not debatable, since we’ve all seen what happens\nwhen someone’s comments are taken out of context. The question is over\nwhat rules to apply to the Bible, and how to apply them in specific cases.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Literal\nGrammatical-Historical Interpretive Model <\/em>is the method that we will employ.\nThis method holds to a belief in a ‘God breathed’ <\/em>or inspired <\/em>Bible.  We start there because the Biblical writers\nthemselves understood and declared that their writings were inspired. Jesus\nHimself also supported the assertion by quoting from books of the Bible – never\nquestioning the correctness of the words or their meaning. Secondly, this\nmethod supports the Christocentric<\/strong>\napproach, essentially that the OT as well as the NT is Christ centered, allowing\nfor figures of speech and symbolic interpretation when the context clearly\nsupports it. The literal method on the whole does not support the Allegorical <\/em>view practiced in the\n2nd and 3rd centuries. Each verse does NOT have a literal, historical meaning and<\/em> a secret meaning that only the super\nspiritual can understand. This leads to multiple interpretations where\ninterpreters can’t agree upon an accepted interpretation. God is not the author\nof confusion (I Cor. 14:33).  It also\nleads to a division among Christians by creating a cast system of spiritual haves\nand have-nots<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hermeneutics, or a set of interpretive rules,\nincludes 5 key stipulations:<\/p>\n\n\n\n