Certain Knower or Responsible Interpreter?

Have you ever changed your belief about what an individual biblical text means?  Or has there ever been a passage that you absolutely positively knew what it meant—only to find out later that you were wrong?  Well, if you have, you are in good company.  We've all been there.  But, and here's the clincher, don't you think that there's a high probability that five or ten years from now, you'll be thinking the same thing about some of the passages that you now believe you "absolutely positively" know what they mean?  You've got it, "Absolutely!"

The other day, one of the professors in my Ph.D. program, Dr. Corne Bekker, was talking about the subject of hermeneutics.  During one of our breaks, I talked with him about the hermeneutical spiral.  If you're unfamiliar with the hermeneutical spiral, the easiest way to grasp it is to imagine a spiral with a dot in the middle.  The dot refers to what an individual writer (in this case, a biblical writer like Paul) wrote.  Now, since Paul wrote Philippians, he knew exactly what he meant.  However, you and I are not Paul.  We're reading Paul two thousand years later.  And when we approach a text we bring all of us to the text (our past experiences, our past education, our familiarity with Paul or the Bible, our past readings, all of the past sermons we've heard, etc.).  So, when we approach the text, we're usually not as close to the dot as we think we are. Usually, we're far out on the spiral.  We really don't know what Paul wrote, we just think we know. 

Then as time goes on and we read more of Paul and of the culture that Paul wrote into, the closer we progress on the spiral toward the dot.  Then we study Paul some more and the book of Philippians some more and we get closer and closer to what Paul actually meant.  Then we speak with some scholars and read commentaries and we get closer still.  And then we do more textual analysis and study and we bring a breadth of biblical study with us and we get closer still.  However, and this is important, we never get to the dot.  We can never say with absolute certainty, this is exactly what Paul meant when he wrote __________.  We can only say, to the best of our knowledge, I believe this to be most probably true.

Now, I'm sure some of you are having a hard time with this, but just think back to how many people you know who have misunderstood you or who thought they knew exactly what you meant—and they were wrong (and they're your friends living in your community and in this age).  When I was growing up, one of my brother's best friend's father was (and still is) a world famous poet.  He would often go to conferences where other academics would make presentations about what they believed he meant and he would often report back how far they were from what he had meant by his words (and these are scholars living in the same age).

So, back to my conversation with Dr. Bekker.  In that conversation the two of us were having, I shared with him that the hermeneutical spiral had led me to a phrase that I pass on to students and other pastors all of the time,

"God has not called us to be certain knowers, but responsible interpreters."

Dr. B. said, "You ought to share that with our class."  To which I thought, "And I ought to blog about that as well." Once you get this phrase down, it will free you immensely.  No longer will you need to feel the pressure to know with certainty. Nor will you state "truth" (note the small "t" truth) as though you know it with certainty. Instead, you will do your work to be a responsible interpreter, not a perfect one.  And you will start to hear yourself saying, "To the best of my current understanding, this is what Paul meant."  Humility is a good thing in interpretation—because chances are, five years from now, some of what you are absolutely sure about today, you won't be then—and no one likes to eat their words. Remember, you don't need to be a certain knower any longer, just a responsible interpreter (at least that's what I believe to the best of my current understanding of what God expects of us!)

Comments

[Mark]

Thanks Bruce, great posts!!

The way you say that gives us a great way of releasing our ego from the trap that we KNOW this or that.

I am guessing that we would agree there is a right and wrong way of interpretting Biblical texts. If so, how do you think this attitude positions ourselves when someone disagrees with our interpretation?