"Fish Mosaic" by Charlsie Kelly |
The truth is
that anyone who has spent time in the scripture has practiced hermeneutics, though
they might not have known that is what they were doing. Anyone who opens a
Bible and studies scripture for understanding and guidance interprets, in some
way, what they find there. The primary reason for reading scripture is applying
scripture to our lives in an effort to live as God would have us live. The best
source we have for learning about God is the Bible. But the Bible was written
book by book over thousands of years, thousands of years ago.
There is the
rub, there is our dilemma. How do we take a collection of books written by an
ancient people, who lived in a world we can never fully understand, and apply
it to our lives? Better still, how do we take this collection of books and
communicate the deep and profound meanings in the stories we find there to
people different from ourselves? I suggest we take a critical approach,
understanding our limitations and being honest about the assumptions and biases
we bring to our reading of the text. This approach is called Critical
Hermeneutics.
Critical
Hermeneutics requires we have a socio-historical understanding of the culture
in which the text was written. Just as we have biases and assumptions today,
the people that wrote the Biblical stories and the people they were originally
written for had biases and assumptions as well. They were also influenced by
the political, social, economic, and geographic environments in which they
lived, just as we are.By understanding the context in which the text was
written we can come closer to understanding what God was saying in that time.
We then listen for what we hear God saying to us through the text today and test
the truth of what we hear by comparing it to what we believe God was saying in
the past.
But why, why go
to all this trouble? Because, if we do not, if we simply draw a straight line
from the ancient text to today’s culture, we run the risk of serious Biblical misinterpretation.
If our intent in studying scripture is to know God and to grow closer to God
then we must be as accurate as we possibly can when we interpret scripture. We
must also be open to the possibility, or probability, that our understanding of
scripture will change as our life circumstances change and as our understanding
of the socio-historical setting in which the text was written changes.
Allowing scripture
to be dynamic, to be alive and changing, goes against our very nature as modern
people living in twenty-first century western culture. Our culture demands
exact answers, absolute truths. We expect black or white, yes or no, right or
wrong answers, not multi-layered, multi-colored, multi-cultural understandings;
especially when we are talking about God.
Bazinga! There
is a great Biblical lesson, right there in the tension we experience between
what we want from the scriptures and what we get from the scriptures.
Interpreting scripture is not easy. Following Jesus is not easy. Serving
others, loving our neighbors, and being the church in mission is not easy. We
like to think that a homogeneous culture is a perfect culture, a culture where
everyone thinks the same way, looks the same way, and knows God in the same
way. But that is not what scripture tells us and that is not what God has given
us. And thank God for that!
We are called to
take this multi-layered, multi-colored, multi-cultural world we live in and
create community. Given all of our differences, creating such a community can
only be done by God and through God. It is often said that people do not care
what you know until they know that you care. I think we could alter that a bit
and say that people will not care about God unless we can show them God cares
about them.
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