Reading The Bible, Interpreting The Bible
February 20, 2018 by Scot McKnight
A friend of mine
recommended that I read David Steinmetz’s well-known essay, “The Superiority of
Pre-Critical Exegesis,” in his book Taking the Long
View: Christian Theology in Historical Perspective.
Here’s at least one of the
problems: Bible reading intimidates many ordinary Bible readers, and one reason
why is specialists — names not given — are so good at what they do, so
insightful in what they teach, and so industrious in their efforts (footnotes
galore, historical sources cited galore, knowledge galore) that the ordinary
Bible reader has done two things: (1) read the work of specialists and (2)
stopped reading the Bible for the sheer delight it brings.
The specialists are saturated
with history so so much so that many of my friends see themselves
as historians, not Bible readers. They see through the text to what happened
(or didn’t happen) and spend their time reconstructing the history behind the
text. Hans Frei tore into this approach years ago in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.
That is, many scholars today care
about one thing: the intention of the author in the author’s
(reconstructed) historical context. Ah, but I care about this and we should
care about this. The point is not to abandon historical undertakings but to
realize it’s not the whole picture.
David Steinmetz blows this theory
apart and advocates that medieval Bible reading was superior.
Here is what most are taught in
Bible colleges and seminaries today: the author’s intention is the meaning of
the text, and the author’s meaning is God’s meaning, and therefore, to talk of
Paul or Peter or Isaiah is to talk of God. This is the historic approach:
In 1859 Benjamin Jowett, then Regius Professor of Greek at the
University of Oxford, published a justly famous essay on the interpretation of
scripture. Jowett argued that “Scripture has one meaning—the meaning which it
had in the mind of the Prophet or Evangelist who first uttered or wrote, to the
hearers or readers who first received it.” Scripture should be interpreted like
any other book, and the later accretions and venerated traditions surrounding
its interpretation should, for the most part, either be brushed aside
or
severely discounted. “The true use of interpretation is to get rid of interpretation,
and leave us alone in company with the author.” (3)
It’s still with us, in spades . .
.
Read
more at
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2018/02/20/reading-bible-interpreting-bible/#jsA2sbDSzERbqAXt.99
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