The first goal of hermeneutics is to determine the author’s intended meaning of the text. The interpretation process must take into account the genre of the literature and the historical and literary context. The meaning of the text controls our application.
Summary Overview of the Hermeneutical Process#
The four steps we take to cross the bridge our contemporary culture to original context of the Biblical authors. These four principles enable us to discover the author’s intended meaning with reasonable certainty.
A. Text Has One Meaning#
Our first principle of exegesis is that, in general, a biblical text has one meaning and that meaning is the author’s intended meaning.
1. Word play#
One exception to the one-meaning rule would be what we could call word plays or puns where there is an intentional double meaning introduced into the text.
“The revelation of Jesus Christ”
Revelation 1:1
The first line of the Book of Revelation says “The revelation of Jesus Christ”. It could mean the revelation from Jesus Christ, that Jesus Christ is revealing the message of this book. But it also could mean the revelation about Jesus Christ, that Jesus Christ himself is reveled in the book and in fact both are true.
It is Jesus Christ who gives the revelation to John, He is the one who presents it, gives the message to the seven churches and then the rest of the revelation.
The book is also very much a revelation of who Jesus Christ is and we get the picture of the glorified Son of Man, we get Christ returning in glory at the end of the book
In this case, it was the author’s intent to present a double meaning, not just a single. So still we are talking about the author’s one intent and that intent just entials a double meaning.
“So, the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath”
Mark 2:23-28
In context that word Son of Man could mean two different things.
Son of Man is a Hebrew way of referring to a human being. Ben’adam in Hebrew means a human being, a person. In this sense, it would say the Sabbath was made for people, not people ofr the Sabbath. So, people have lordship over the Sabbath. In other words, they are more important; therefore, they have dominion over the Sabbath. If there is a physical need that needs to be met, it should be met.
For Mark’s reader, it must mean that Jesus who is the ultimate Son of Man, who is the Messiah. Son of Man is a messanic title taken from Daniel 7. The Son of Man Jesus is Lord even of the Sabbath.
Now, the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath, would suggest that Son of Man means people, so people are lord of the Sabbath. But the context of Mark’s Gospel where Jesus is the Son of Man makes it clear that the other meaning is there as well and maybe even is the dominant meaning.
2. Dual Fulfillment of Prophecies#
Another example of double meanings is what we call dual fulfillment of prophecies - when the author had one meaning in mind it would seem from the context, but the text is applied differently in a later context.
“The Lord Himself will give you a sign, the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel.”
Isaiah 7
If we look at the context of Isaiah, we see that this prophecy looks as though it is going to be fulfilled in the very near future. Isaiah predicts that before this child is old enough to choose wrong from right and before he is old enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the northern kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Syria will be demolished by the king of Assyria. We know that this happened in the 8th century B. C.
Matthew understands this verse to apply to Jesus, that He is Immanuel, He is ultimately God with us. The response to this would be that Isaiah was looking towards the near fulfillment, but ultimately God had in mind the ultimate fulfillment. Sometimes we might refer to this as typology where an Old Testament situation, person, or event foreshadows and points forward to its ultimate or final fulfillment in Jesus.
B. The Meaning of a Text is Genre Dependent#
The meaning of a text depends to a great extent upon its literary form, its genre. Each of these literary forms has certain rules, certain principles of interpretation. In order to comprehend God’s message to us through that particular literary form, we have to understand how that form works.
C. Context is the Key to Interpretation#
The third fundamental principle of exegesis is that context is the key to interpretation because the context of a passage determines its meaning. We have to distinguish between two different kinds of context: historical context and literary context.
Historical Context#
a. General Historical Context#
Historical context refers to the total life situation in which the book arose. There are three subcategories here to identify.
- Geographical Context
- Social and Political Context
- Religious Situation
A kind of broad example that hits various points of religious, social, cultural and historical context just to illustrate the need to understand the historical context. This is the parable of the tenant farmers in Mark 12.
“He then began to speak to them in parables. A man planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a pit for the winepress and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and wenta way on a journey.”
Mark 12:1
There were vineyards all over Galilee so anyone listening to this message would understand this.
A vineyard would have a wall around it for protection, would have a watchtower where a night watchman could keep guard to keep robbers and bandits away
It was very common to have a wealthy land owner who would rent such vineyards out to tenant farmers who would plant the vineyard, keep the crops, and give a share of those crops to the owner of the vineyard.
There is even more going on than that general historical context. Any Jew of Jesus’ day would immediately recognize in this parable an echo of an earlier passsage in Isaiah 5, what is called The Song of Vineyard.
“I will sing for the one I love a song about his vineyard. My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines. He built a watchtower in it and cut out a winepress as well. Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit.”
Isaiah 5:1-2
As soon as Jesus began to tell this parable, His Jewish hearers would immediately recognize this Song of the Vineyard. They would also recognize what happens in this Song of the Vineyard in the Old Testament context. This vineyard produces only bad fruits.
This song turns into a judgment oracle in Isaiah 5:3
“Now you dwellers in Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more could have been done for my vineyard than I have done for it. When I look for good grapes why did it yield only bad? Now I will tell you what I am going to do to my vineyard, I will take away its hedge and it will be destroyed. I will break down its wall and it will be trampled. I will make it a wasteland, neither pruned nor cultivated and briers and thorns will grow there. I will command the clouds not to rain on it.”
As Jesus begins to tell this parable, any Jewish person in the first century would immediately recognize that behind this parable is the judgment oracle against Israel for her sin.
Instead of referring to the vineyard in judging the vineyard, Jesus refers to the tenant farmers who are overseeing the vineyard and they represnet the Jewish religious leaders. Jesus takes this Song of the Vineyard from Isaiah and give a reinterpretation to it. Now, it is not just about Israel as the vineyard, it is about Israel’s leaders, the religous leaders, who are overseeing the vinyard and God the owner of the vineyard sends His servants who represent the prophets again and again. But Israel rejects them and the religous leaders reject them.
Finally, He sends His dear son, a reference to Jesus, and they kill the son. Jesus tells this parable and alludes back to Isaiah’s Song of the Vineyard and relates it to His soon death.
“Then the chief priests, the teachers of the law, and the elders look for a way to arrest him because they knew he had spoken the parable against them, but they were afraid of the crowd so they left him and went away.”
Mark 12:12
This parable is going to be one of the things that provokes Jesus’ death.
b. Specific Historical Context/Life Situation#
The specific historical context relates to the circumstances from which a book arose. Issues like the authorship, the date, the provenance (which means where the document was written from), the recipients (to whom the document is written), and the purpose and occassion for which it is written.
Literary Context#
Literary context refers to the progress of thought in the book or the process of the argument. The key question to ask with reference to literary context is “What is the point?”.
We determine this by methodically increasing our scope of inquiry (as if they are concentric circles), beginning with the smallest unit of meaning - the word, followed by the sentence, by the paragraph, by the large section, and finally with the whole book, letter, or document in view.
a. Word#
Sine all words have a range of possible meaning, not generally one single meaning, so meaning does not reside in words, meaning resides in words in context. The meaning of words is determined by their context.
b. Sentence#
You see the point is the sentence does not have meaning apart from it being an utterance within an historical context and part of a larger paragraph.
c. Paragraphs#
Paragraphs are arranged together into larger sections/chapters, and larger section form into a book, and together as a unit move the author’s argument forward in a specific way.
d. Book#
We move outward even further from the book, because the book itself has a larger context within the OT/NT, part of a larger corpus, like Paul’s letters, or the Gospels. That larger corpus, it is a part of that literary context.
e. Broader context#
And then from the New Testament documents we can go even further out in our concentric circle to the larger world of the Bible, all the books of the Bible form part of this broader literary context. By literary context we mean moving outward from the smallest unit of meaning and recognizing that we can really truly only understand God’s word when we read it within its broader context.
D. The Text Itself Must be Given Priority#
The fourth key principle of exegesis is that the text itself must be given priority, the text sets the agenda.
One of the criticisms of biblical interpretation in recent years is the claim that exegesis is a circular process. The interpreter comes to the text with certain concerns and simply reads those texts within those concerns and so it is circular. The interpreter is simply speaking to himself/herself.
The interpreter comes to the text, certainly brings perspective, biases, but then listens to the text and is transformed gradually from reading the text and briging it back.
1. A Spiral from Inductive to Deductive reasoning#
Inductive reasoning is reasoning from facts to propositions. Certain facts are in evidence and from those facts, we draw certain conclusions.
Deductive reasoning starts with a proposition or a hypothesis and then proving or demonstrating that hypothesis.
We read God’s Word and we seek to interpret the words and understand and comprehend those words. We take our understanding of those words and we form certain hypotheses or conclusions and then we test those conclusions against the larger world in which the Bible arose. We propose hypotheses and then we confirm those hypotheses. We read certain words in sentences and then we confirm the meaning of those words by examining ancient literature and understanding the meaning.
2. A Spiral from Text to Context#
Exegesis is also a second kind of a spiral, from the text of the Bible to our context.We come to the text with our concerns, with our issues, but then we allow the text to shape and mold us into the people of God. Ultimately, it is the text that sets the agenda.
The biblical text sets the agenda. The meaning of the text controls our contextualization, our application, rather than our context determining the meaning of the text.