Hermeneutics and interpretation

I find such hope in how Jesus conveys to us the Kingdom of God. I feel I want the kingdom of God much more than Christianity. But this chapter (Matthew 22) plain scares me. It is a parable of a wedding, invitation, murder, re-invitation, and throwing out. If I imagine my own wedding, I was indeed sad when someone said they could not come.

Did the content of our Lord’s teachings predate and encourage the writing of the epistles - or not? Priority seems to make a lot of difference to theology. Does anyone recall the brouhaha (in theology)

mars-hill has very helpfully compiled some notes on various approaches to biblical criticism. Here’s a summary of the reasons that he has given for doing this:

Firstly, most Christian theologians would give the Bible the highest priority in answering questions of God’s character/being. It’s helpful to consider how we think of and read the Bible; becoming aware of the assumptions we bring to the text.

Secondly, as a mix of academic and popular contributors, this is an attempt to de-mystify some popular jargon used in theological writing.

Thirdly, in regards to dialogue with ‘the world’, the Bible can only begin to have relevancy when those communities stop perceiving it as fairy tales that adults read as fact.

Lastly, insights we gain from this can be added into the Commentary (here). This was the reason that motivated me to move my notes into this article format!

You could show your appreciation by visiting his blog.

The term Biblical Criticism refers to a set of scholarly tools that are used to think about the Bible. They can be thought of as lenses to view scripture through – depending on which lens you look through you will see something slightly different. Different approaches ask different questions of the text and, logically, come to different conclusions. Some of these lenses will give a big picture, others break the text down into tiny parts.

Criticism doesn’t make many direct comments about the Bible’s truth-claims, although each approach will have its inherent bias. To discuss the (in-)accuracy or inerrancy of the Bible see The Bible and the question of truth (here).

It is by emphasising the very humanity of God, as Being and Act of God, on our behalf, which can only re-direct, radically, questions of our being and action (ie. practical matters), away from ourselves onto the very ground of Christ himself. Questions of human response to God then become revised along the lines of Christ’s human response to God, on our behalf. This is in an effort to re-appreciate the context in which knowledge of Christ occurs, which could be described as ‘breaking-into’ the circle of God’s knowledge of himself.

Most Christians are blissfully unaware of debates surrounding the Bible’s historical background, let alone the fine details of authorship and dating. Canonical Criticism allows us to see the Bible as most of us do: separated from its roots and plonked into our 21st century lives.

This approach asks us to build on the findings of the Form Critics; moving from the life situation (‘sitz im leben’ described above) to a guess on how the texts were used in their original contexts and to follow their changing use throughout history. In other words, to ask what these stories, speeches, poems and prophesies looked like before they ended up in their current form and the reasons for those changes.

Many Biblical texts existed in an oral state long before they were written down. We can presume that as each generation received the tradition from their parents they adapted it in the light of their current situation. This is the same process by which we interpret scripture in our meetings and Bible colleges. By the time it came to be written down the information had changed from its original form. However, even after being ‘trapped’ on paper things continued to change (see Textual criticism).

Form Criticism is genre identification at an advanced level. Its goals are to recognise patterns of literary form, classify them, and try to identify how these forms were used in their faith community. This method has produced great results with the Psalms in particular.

Identification of literary form is achieved by noticing what each section of the text does. Does it address people or God? Is is praise, complaint or request? Are there typical word-groups or structure patterns that re-occur? This type of analysis can be done using a chart with the text in one column and the student’s notes in another. Comparing Biblical texts with contempory non-biblical ones can also be of interest. Once this has been done with several passages they can be compared and classified.

When I think of literature, I think of my days studying English at college. I think of context, genre, point of view, narrative, characterisation, theme, tone and how information is ordered. Applying these ideas to scripture can be an exciting way to understand what the author really wants to communicate to his audience and attempt to discover what the story actually says.

This type of discussion doesn’t need to touch on the truth-claims of the Bible. I’m not stipulating that they are fictional or historical. The point is that they are written communication. Somebody formed them for a purpose and they used sophisticated literary tools to convey the information.