Hermeneutics - Lesson 4

Hermeneutics 
Dr. Todd Miles 
nt310-04 
Special Revelation 
Lesson Transcript

Well, I asked you to think about what are some implications of the Bible being divine. Well, here are a few that come to mind. If the Bible is the Word of God, then it's authoritative. It's authoritative. I read the Bible expecting to hear from God who is the sovereign God. He is the Lord. That's a little different than when I'm reading, say, like Lord of the Rings, which I'm not expecting to hear from God when I read Lord of the Rings, as much as I love reading that book. Secondly, it raises the bar for interpretation. If it's from God, I want to get it right. If I'm reading Shakespeare or something like that, I typically don't read a lot of Shakespeare. But. But if I were to read Shakespeare, I if I misinterpreted part of it, I wouldn't be too bothered by it. I mean, I want to interpret things rightly, and I would understand there probably is a wrong interpretation. But I wouldn't lose sleep over the fact that I didn't that I misunderstood this part of one of his plays. But with the Bible, I want to get it right. I want I want to understand what God means by what he says. Also, another implication was, if every word of the Bible is inspired by God, then I can expect there to be some unity to the entirety of the Bible. The Scriptures were written. Let's let's date the books of Moses, the Pentateuch first, five books in the Bible, about 1400 B.C. Let's date John's apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, about 100 A.D. That means that the Bible was written over a 1500 year span by many different authors. Who knows exactly how many in a variety of places, different cultures, at least three languages Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. Those three languages is what the Scriptures were written in. Why would we expect there to be unity as we move from Genesis all the way across the canon to the Book of Revelation? If the Bible was not authored by the Holy Spirit. We wouldn't expect it. It would be crazy. Well, if. If we thought that there should be. We might wonder at the fact that all of these different authors were consistent at so many points. But we would expect there to be a lot of contradictions and and errors and that sort of thing. But because the Bible is inspired by God. There's one divine mind behind it all. And so we approached the Bible expecting there to be unity as we move from Genesis to the Book of Revelation. So when I read the Scriptures, I might be in Malachi, but I can understand that's going to have something to do with Matthew, and it's going to be consistent with Genesis and the Book of Revelation. No matter where I'm at in the Bible, it's telling one unified story because there's one divine mind behind it. And then one last implication I mentioned just a moment ago is that I can expect there to be no errors in the Bible, the doctrine of innerancy. It flows out of the doctrine of inspiration. I can't prove to you that there are no errors in the Bible. You can't you can't prove a negative. You can't do that unless you're like omniscient and omnipresent, which I suppose God is. Right. So but I can assume inerrancy. I can assume inerrancy because of the doctrine of inspiration. The Bible claims to be the very Word of God. Every word in the Scriptures comes with that divine stamp of of authority, of imprimatur. So my expectation is that there's not going to be errors in it because I don't know what to make of the doctrine of inspiration while simultaneously believing the Bible is full of errors. Those are a few implications of the divine aspect. But what about the human aspect? Well, if God wrote through humans. Then I would expect. Historical and cultural context to matter and to be very important as I'm reading the Scriptures and interpreting them. Imagine that the Bible was just it landed on planet Earth as if shot from Krypton like Kal-El was, you know, young Superman. Young Superboy. Right. And and we go to this rocket ship and there's smoke and rubble and we open it up. And here's this tome that claims to be the word of God. Why would we expect historical cultural context to matter at all if that were the case, if it were just dropped out of the sky, like this divine dump of data, divine data from the Lord. We wouldn't. But because it was written by particular people to other particular people in a particular place at a particular time, then historical cultural context matters as we interpret. The same could be said about the different literary genres. Why would we expect literary genre to matter if it was just dropped out of the sky? But it was written by real people who engaged in writing, using common literary styles, literary genres, kinds of writing that the the poets of the Old Testament wrote poetry that followed all of the rules of Hebrew poetry. And, you know, if you're someone like me who is not terribly artistic, especially when it comes to poetry, I read the biblical poetry and I say, Well, none of this rhymes at all, but it probably rhymes in Hebrew. And but then when you learn a little Hebrew, you realize it actually doesn't rhyme in Hebrew either, at least phonetically. And so and I think what good poetry should rhyme. Well, I mean, that's great if you're doing like, limericks and the kind of roses are red, violets are blue poems that I write. But Hebrew poetry doesn't rhyme phonetically, but it does rhyme conceptually. And so parallelism is very, very important. So if you want to understand the Hebrew poetry, you have to know the rules of Hebrew poetry. Again, if it were just dropped out of sky, that wouldn't matter. We wouldn't expect us to have to know human literary genres, especially literary genres, from a time period, you know, 2000 years ago. Another implication, it seems to me, is that if the Bible were just dropped out of the sky, we might wonder to ourselves. Does this really apply to us? Is this relatable in any way, or am I just going to flat submit to it? But the Bible wasn't dropped out of the sky. It was written by real people to other real people. Most of the New Testament is what we call  occasional. That means that something occasioned the writing of these letters or the writings of the Gospels. We know why Luke wrote his gospel. He was basically paid to by someone, someone named Theophilus, to give an orderly account of all that Jesus said and did. We know that Paul wrote to the church in Galatia not because he was bored and had time on his hands and wanted to, you know, occupy himself for a while, but because he had heard a bad report. And so he writes them and says, What on earth is going on over there? Right. It's very, very relatable. Paul wrote to the Galatians because he wanted to communicate to them with urgency that they were departing from the gospel. And all of the scriptures are like that. We should never have any doubt that this that this applies to me. We should never doubt that. Of course it applies to me and it can apply to me because it was written by humans, to other humans. Now, God, of course, is capable, is capable of like dropping something out of the sky that's very relatable to humans. But he didn't merely do that. Instead, he used other humans who were motivated by real concerns to write to us. And so we should expect the Scriptures to be eminently applicable, imminently relatable. You know, God, God could have dropped the scriptures out of the sky, got got God could have dictated them to us, but instead He gave us something, I think far better. He gave us his inspired word. Every word, his word, but every word written by us, by people like us to other people like us. He didn't have to do it that way, but he did. And I think that makes the Lord all the more wonderful and it makes his word all the more wonderful. Now, every single thing that we're going to do in hermeneutics is going to flow from either the divine aspect or the human aspect. We're going to look at human literary genre. We're going to look at historical cultural context. We're going to pay attention to the Bible as God's word to us. That is to be obeyed. Inspiration is going to be our guiding principle for everything we do in this hermeneutics class. Now the rest of the bridge can be filled out much more rapidly. God inspired a human author who then wrote down that message from the Lord. That's what transmission is. It's the writing down of the original text and then the making copies of them afterward. Now we have copies of what was written down, but we don't have any of the original manuscripts. Sometimes we'll will refer to the original manuscripts as the autograph. Please don't say original autographs. That's redundant. It's. You can either say the autographs or the original manuscripts. We don't have the autographs, so we don't have the original manuscripts. We have none of them. We might ask, why didn't God preserve them? Well, maybe the reason for that is because we are prone to worship things. We have a whole church history full of veneration, of relics and things like that. Maybe it was an act of mercy, or I remember even that that snake that Moses made to that the people could look to, to be healed when they were bitten by these poisonous snakes in the wilderness, that eventually that became an object of idolatry and had to be destroyed by one of the good kings of Israel. It's probably an act of mercy that we don't have the autographs anymore, but we do have plenty of copies of it. And so there were there were copies made. That's the act of transmission. But what was transmitted was written in Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic. And most of us don't speak or read Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic. So it has to be translated. And so translation is where we take the meaning of the text, and we re convey it in in another language into a language that other people are familiar with. And the Bible is really the first and most translated book in all of human history. It's also the most retranslated book as well. So, so now we've got it in our own language, but we have to read it. And in order for Revelation to get from the mind of God to the mind of Todd, I have to read it and I have to interpret it correctly. And interpretation is so important that it's recommended you take a class on hermeneutics and well, that was a joke. You're taking that right now. And then then the fifth step, of course, is application and all all else does as no good without application. I'm going to take great lengths to describe to you this this idea called Speech Act theory, where God does things in his word and we want to do the right things. We want to respond appropriately. God doesn't just speak to hear himself speak. He didn't speak so that Bible publishers could make a bunch of money. He spoke so that we might be changed. And Paul, for example, in Colossians 1:28, wrote this. He said, HIm, that is Jesus, we proclaim warning everyone in teaching with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Christ. That was the reason why Paul did everything that he did, including writing letters to the churches, the writing of Scripture itself, so that there would be application transformation. Paul wrote to his young protege, Timothy, and first Timothy one five. He says, The aim of our charge is love, that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. God wrote God inspired so that we might be changed. Application is vital to this task of revelation going from the mind of God to our mind. The Scriptures have to be applied correctly. And only then can we say that God has truly revealed himself.