Two Strange Words for Reading Scripture
This year I retired as a teacher at a Christian high school nearby. I taught a course called Hermeneutics. It is an unusual word and it makes people pause and wonder. They want to ask me what it means but are hesitant to do so. The definition that I taught my students, I took from Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, who have an accessible book on the subject with the title, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. According to Fee, hermeneutics is “The art and science of interpretation.” We are talking about the interpretation of texts here. Biblical hermeneutics then, is the art and science of the interpretation of the texts of the Bible.
One of the problems for hermeneutics is another unusual word, distanciation. I told my students to identify the root of this word in order to remember what it means. Distanciation (used in the context of biblical hermeneutics) refers to the distance between the biblical texts and us. To be more explicit, there is the distance of time, culture, society, language, and so on. It is easy to ignore the historical reality of scripture and jump from where we are today back to scripture and read our own time, culture, society, language, etc., onto the texts. This is an anachronistic error—reading our time back onto scripture and deciding what it means based on that.
It is not that scripture is quiet for us in our modern world. Rather, what we want is to hear the words of scripture, with the church, in their own right. Our interest as Christians is to listen to the scripture speak to us in its own time and place, instead of trying to push our time and place onto scripture. The Word of God addresses us first, before we address it with our questions and troubles. We must listen to scripture with the church but that is worth more reflection in another blog.
Last week I had lunch with a colleague and friend named David Noe who is a professor and lover of the classics. David is dedicated to helping the church and Christians understand the Greco-Roman world that intersected with the early church. To do this he has started a podcast at adnavseam.podbean.com. I listened to it. David and his co-host Jeff Winkle make learning about the classical world in relationship to the Bible fun, witty, and intelligent. Give them a listen.