Hermeneutics: Reading the Bible Faithfully

What Is Hermeneutics? Why Interpretation Matters

Somewhere on a desert road, a court official from Ethiopia sat in his chariot reading the prophet Isaiah out loud, and he could not make sense of it. Philip, sent by the Spirit, ran up alongside and asked the question that hangs over this entire course: "Do you understand what you are reading?" The official answered honestly. "How can I," he said, "unless someone explains it to me?" (Acts 8:30-31). That is the whole problem of interpretation in a single exchange. The words were right there in front of him, in his own hands, and still the meaning was out of reach.

¹⁵Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.2 Timothy 2:15 · NIV

Paul tells Timothy to be a worker who correctly handles the word of truth. The phrase behind "correctly handles" pictures cutting a straight line, the care of a craftsman who does not want to ruin good material. It assumes something important: the word of truth can be handled well or handled badly, and the difference is not an accident. Hermeneutics is simply the name for the discipline of handling it well. It is the set of principles that carry you from the words on the page to the meaning God actually put there.

Everyone is already an interpreter

People sometimes talk as though there are two kinds of Christians, the ones who "just read the Bible" and the ones who "interpret it." There is no such division. The moment you read a verse and decide what it means, you have interpreted it. The only question is whether you did it well or badly. Someone who says "I do not interpret, I just take it at face value" has already made a string of interpretive decisions: which words are literal, which are figures of speech, how this line relates to the one before it. So the goal of this course is not to turn ordinary readers into scholars. It is to make you a careful interpreter instead of a careless one, aware of the moves you are already making so you can make them on purpose.

The goal is the author’s intended meaning

Here is the conviction that will run through every session. A passage has one intended meaning, fixed by God through the human author who wrote it, and our task is to discover that meaning, not to invent one. This is what separates interpretation from imagination. A text can carry many faithful applications to many different lives, but it does not carry many meanings, one for each reader who happens along. If a verse can mean anything, then it means nothing, because there is no way to be wrong, and a book that cannot correct you cannot teach you either.

This is why interpreters make a careful distinction between what a passage meant to its first hearers and what it means for us now. The two are not equal partners. The first controls the second. An application that does not grow out of the original meaning is not really application at all; it is a new idea wearing the costume of a Bible verse. So we always work in that order: what did this mean when it was written, and only then, what does that require of me today.

The chief danger is proof-texting

If interpretation can go wrong, it usually goes wrong in one particular way: we lift a line out of its flow and make it say what we already wanted to hear. That is called proof-texting, and it is the most common way sincere disciples end up teaching things the Bible never said. The verse becomes a mirror. We bring our idea to it, and it reflects our idea back to us with the authority of God stamped on top. Peter saw this happen even in his own lifetime, and he did not treat it as a small thing.

¹⁵Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. ¹⁶He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.2 Peter 3:15-16 · NIV

Peter says that in Paul’s letters there are things "hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction." Notice two things. First, some passages are genuinely hard, and admitting that is honesty, not weakness. Second, the danger of twisting them is real enough that Peter uses the word destruction. Handling the word carelessly is not a harmless hobby. This is why interpretation is careful work done in humility, and why it leans on the Spirit rather than on cleverness. Paul reminds us that the person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from God, because they are discerned spiritually (1 Corinthians 2:12-14). We read with our minds fully engaged and our hearts fully dependent, asking the Author to help us understand what He wrote.

How this differs from How to Study the Bible

If you have been through How to Study the Bible, you built a habit there: slow down, look closely, ask questions of the text, notice what is actually on the page before rushing to what it means. That habit of observation is the raw material for everything we do here. Hermeneutics supplies the rules that govern what you do with what you observe. Think of it this way. Observation without principles drifts, because you can notice a hundred details and still assemble them into a wrong picture. Principles without observation float, because a method has nothing to work on if you have not first looked hard at the text. This course assumes the looking and trains the handling.

A first taste of the gap

Take a verse you have probably seen on a coffee mug: "I can do all things through him who strengthens me" (Philippians 4:13). Read quickly, it sounds like a promise of unlimited personal achievement, the verse an athlete writes under his eyes before a game. Now notice the gap between that impression and what Paul is actually doing. He is writing from prison, and the "all things" he has in mind are learning to be content whether he has plenty or nothing. We will not resolve this fully yet; that is next session’s payoff. For now, just feel the distance between the first impression and the intended meaning. That distance is the reason this course exists. Learning to close it, honestly and carefully, is what it means to handle the word of truth correctly.

When have you seen a Bible verse used to mean something it plainly does not mean? What went wrong, and what would it have taken to catch it? Then be honest: where might you be doing the same thing?

Go Deeper

Study question: Pick one verse you have often heard quoted on its own. Read the whole paragraph around it. Does the surrounding context confirm the usual meaning, or complicate it?

• R.C. Sproul, Knowing Scripture. (Reformed.) The most accessible first book on the subject; short, warm, and practical.
• Robert Plummer, 40 Questions About Interpreting the Bible. (Baptist, SBTS.) A question-by-question reference you can keep on the shelf and return to.