:: Ryan Thomas ::

This content come from Mere Christian Hermeneutics. Vanhoozer, K. Zondervan. 2024.

“If scripture is the lifeblood of the church, biblical interpretation is its circulation system: translating, preaching, commentary, lived tradition – all are forms of biblical interpretation.” (2)

In all reality, if Christians, as a people of faith, claim that our eternal hope rests in what God has revealed about himself in these particular sets of texts, then there can be no greater responsibility to rightly understand them. It is interesting then, how society’s understanding of the scriptures has ebbed and flowed throughout history. In fact, the history of the church and the history of biblical interpretation are interwoven. Consider the Church’s defense of 19th century American slavery as one example. Biblical interpretation has crafted and defined those multiple branches and thousands of denominations within the global faith today. It’s too important to ignore.

Before getting into some of the different forms of interpretation, let’s glance at a few things Dr. Vanhoozer (K.V.) says about what the Bible is…

1. Human words that communicate God’s words. This is one of the wildest aspects of Scripture if you stop and really meditate on it. In most other religions the god of choice dictates his own words in a divine stream of consciousness. Someone records and then promulgates them. But in Christianity, God filled human authors with his own Spirit, then worked through their backgrounds, experiences, worldviews, socio-political contexts, and belief systems to use words to communicate specific truths about God.
   
   We see this prolifically in the Hebrew writers. They were so inundated with the concept of Messiah and political-nation-state liberation that the concepts saturated their writings. We cannot possibly know what Isaiah and Jeremiah thought about their own prophecies, (whether or not they rightly understood the spiritual nature of the coming Messianic liberation) but they were writing in the middle of national oppression and uncertainty. Their words sounded a whole lot like a literal conquering liberator who was coming with an army of angels to wipe out Israel’s literal oppressors. And so, when Jesus showed up on the scene, the spiritual authorities took one look at him, and said he couldn’t be the Messiah.
   Ask yourself, “Why didn’t God simply dictate to Isaiah and Jeremiah that the coming Messiah would initiate a spiritual Kingdom that liberated people from the greatest oppressor – sin and death?” That is a long answer, but part of the reason is because he chose to use human words based in human contexts.
   
2. Divine address in a divine voice. Now, this may seem to contradict the first point. Whose voice is it? David’s or God’s? Peter’s or God’s? Well, the answer is, yes. the Bible is not just a collection of moments throughout history when special men got special revelation which detailed otherwise unknowable things about God for the sake of teaching the masses a single concept. The Bible is how God chose to specifically reveal things about himself through conversation and interaction with humanity in their world and affairs. This is something that is difficult for modern Christians to wrap their heads around because we’ve had a complete Bible that we can read for ourselves in our own native language for hundreds of years now. But that was not the reality for most Israelites and then for most Christians up until recent times.
   
   The Voice of the text and the story it told was of most importance to the earliest believers (in that group I mean Israelites too). It’s quite a different thing from having a complete record of all that God will ever say through special revelation.
   
   To clarify: God did orchestrate the record of Scripture, but he did it through human words and experience. He is that close to us. And, he knows that this is likely the only way we could ever grasp realities about him. So he spoke into the human story, demonstrating his heart through his purposes. Obviously this includes those moments in the Bible such as “Thus says the LORD” and those red words of Jesus’. But the point isn’t so much about what exact words God used when speaking us (consider that Jesus spoke Aramaic, not Greek). The point is that he communicated with us – and still does through the way his Spirit makes the words alive today.
   
3. A pattern of divine communication and communion over which the risen Lord presides and presents himself. Since this book contains God’s communication, then it contains something of God himself. He is not like long-dead authors who “continue to speak” through their words. He actually continues to speak through his words because they possess a degree of his eternal presence. This is not to make too much of the printed text book, but rather to say that God intends to meet his people in his words. One cannot meet Hemmingway any longer in his works. They can hear his voice (interpreted through the reader’s lenses), but they cannot fellowship with his actual presence because that is inaccessible to us now. God remains accessible through the risen Christ – who is himself the word of God. (Fun side note: the Bible never refers to itself as the word of God. It couldn’t possibly do that because the whole thing didn’t exist when it was being written. Jesus is solely identified as his word.)

In summary:

1. Before considering how the Bible has been interpreted, it’s important to understand what the Bible actually claims to be.
2. The Bible claims to be: 
   A) Human words
   B) God’s communication in God’s voice
   C) The living and present voice of God in Christ