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Date:         Sat, 23 Jan 1993 23:39:39 +0000
From:         "G.J. McCaughan" <gjm11@CUS.CAM.AC.UK>
Subject:      Re: Principles of Interpretation?
              <01GTTP3UMVXU96VZ9U@asu.edu>

[Oh dear. This seems to have got a bit long. Sorry, folks.]

Dave Davis writes:

> I'm looking for a short list (I'll go to the library later, thanks)
> of principles that folks have found useful for biblical interpretation.
>
> For instance, the Reformers
> contributed the principle 'let Scripture interpret Scripture'
> which is nice, I suppose, but pragmatically not very useful in
> talking with skeptics; nor is the sense of such a principle
> immediately obvious (as a principle, it itself requires interpretation!)
>
> I'm aware of (through the Brittanica article 'Biblical Literature')
> Hillel's 7 principles; these don't appear very useful to me either
> (ex: 'let the greater explain the less, and vice versa'- this
> covers a multitude of hermeneutical sins, I'm sure! :-) ).
>
> So, what sort of principles are people aware of? What helps one
> determine, for instance, that verse A. ('women should cover
> their heads in church') is peripheral but verse B. ('in Jesus
> Christ there is neither male nor female') is crucial? Should
> I read let A. interpret B or let B interpret A, or what?

I am no expert on this sort of thing, but here are a few thoughts
concerning how I interpret the Bible. Most are pretty unsurprising...

 * It is very important to have as clear an idea as you can of the
   background to any bit of the Bible you're studying.

   Thus: (for NT passages) are there any OT references the writer might
   have in mind? Was there anything specific in the situation of the people
   to whom the letter/prophecy/whatever was originally addressed that
   is relevant? What was the general attitude to such things among the
   common people, as it were? and so on.

   This is helpful because it can give you some idea of what the writer
   might have been thinking when they wrote the passage; and because it
   can avoid all sorts of potential misunderstandings.

   For instance: many of Paul's guidelines for proper behaviour in church
   meetings seem to be based on the principle that one shouldn't give a
   bad impression of what Christians are like. Under some circumstances,
   I believe, a woman with her head uncovered could be taken for a prostitute
   plying her trade...

 * It is also important to have a clear idea of why whatever-it-was was
   written, or said.

   This is sort of like the previous one. A good case in point for this
   is the first letter of John: it is generally agreed that the letter
   was written to a church in which there were a number of false teachers,
   who were claiming to be sinless, claiming special knowledge of God,
   claiming that various things usually regarded as sins didn't matter,
   and so on.

   Incidentally, an obvious question with these two points is: How can
   you tell? A good start is to read a lot more than the passage you are
   actually studying, to get some context. A commentary will probably be
   useful here, too.

 * If there is something that you suspect of being a slip of the tongue,
   transcription error, mistranslation or whatever, it's worth thinking
   about how such an error might have been made, just to get some idea
   of how feasible it is that it might indeed be an error.

   I do not mean to imply that one should be reading the Bible looking
   for errors all the time, of course. But here and there there do seem
   to be minor errors of the sort I mention above (examples: many of the
   numbers given in the OT for sizes of armies are implausibly large, and
   there is a known plausible explanation for how this could have happened
   as a result of copying errors; and there's a very odd bit in 1 Cor 12
   (I think) where Paul explains very cogently that "strange tongues" are
   edifying only for believers and offputting to unbelievers, whereas
   "prophecy" has the potential to convince unbelievers too; in the middle
   of which is the sentence "Tongues, then, are a sign for unbelievers,
   and prophecy for unbelievers". I've heard it suggested that Paul is here
   quoting (and mocking) a slogan of the Corinthians; what seems to me quite
   clear is that the passage as it stands (with no indication that that is
   a quotation, or anything) cannot be quite right.)

 * Don't expect to be able to understand everything.

   God is, errm, quite a lot cleverer than we are; the Bible was written
   a long time ago, and much has changed in the world since even the NT
   was written; we are fallible; not everything in the Bible is intended
   to be understood by everyone who reads it; -- so why should we expect
   to understand every single passage we come across? Many highly expert,
   very intelligent and very Godly people have disagreed on points of
   interpretation; it seems to me that it would be arrogant to expect to
   understand everything.

   I do not mean that we shouldn't make a great effort to understand all
   that we can. More to the point, we should not take the fact that we
   do not understand something as meaning that it simply doesn't make any
   sense. Sometimes we must simply admit defeat, pray that we haven't
   missed anything important, and go on to something we can understand.

 * Pray about it.

   The Bible was written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. We must
   be open to the Spirit in reading it. One important element of this, I
   think, is prayer: both prayer *that* we will learn what God wants us to,
   and prayer *about* specific things that give us trouble.

 * Think about it.

   The fact that we must let God's Spirit work in us does not mean that our
   obligation to think hard about what we are reading is any the less. God
   gave us minds capable of rational thought; it would be an insult to him
   not to use them in our efforts to learn about the important things of
   which the Bible speaks.

   It follows that it is best to study the Bible when we are awake and alert;
   and that we should be ready to expend considerable mental effort over any
   passage that we find difficult. Who, after all, said it would be easy?

   Of course the Bible is not only for the intelligent. But we must use all
   the faculties God has placed at our disposal.

 * Consult the experts.

   A good commentary is often useful. It is unlikely to answer unambiguously
   any really hard question; but it will save you from making stupid mistakes
   through ignorance, and it will give you some idea of where the real problems
   are, and what ways round them may exist.

   It is foolish to depend entirely on someone else's opinions, especially if
   you do not know that they are reliable. But it is also foolish to spurn the
   huge amounts of effort that have already gone into the study of the Bible.

   There are useful reference works other than commentaries. A "Bible
 dictionary"
   may prove very useful; likewise an atlas, or at least a few maps, showing the
   world at the relevant periods; and so on.

   One should also not ignore "tradition": that is, the ideas of Christians
   down the ages. According to the Roman Catholic church tradition is on a
   level with scripture in some ways; this seems ove the top to me, but it's
   possible to go too far the other way. If most Christians since the time
   of Christ have believed something, they may be wrong; but they're quite
   likely to be right.

 * If there is an "easy" interpretation and a "hard" one, give a lot of thought
   to the "hard" one.

   I mean "easy" and "hard" in the sense of less or more challenging to our
   lifestyles and other beliefs. We must be prepared to have our lives changed
   when we read the Bible. It is terribly easy to read something, think "Oh,
   it can't possibly mean *that* -- that would be far too difficult to live
   up to" and forget about it; the most challenging reading is by no means
   always right, but it's always worth thinking about.


--
Gareth McCaughan     Dept. of Pure Mathematics & Mathematical Statistics,
gjm11@cus.cam.ac.uk  Cambridge University, England.    [Research student]
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU