How Biblical Hermeneutics Transforms Us as Readers

Learning to read is the first and most important step in a child’s education, the principal doorway to learning about everything else. Reading both informs and forms, which is why children of God down through the ages have sought to figure out what the Bible means, why it matters, and how they should respond to or participate in the Bible’s story.

Figuring this out is an art and a science, and it’s called hermeneutics.

Why Hermeneutics?

Hermeneutics is the study of the principles and practices necessary for textual understanding. It’s a discipline that asks, What exactly are we doing when we read, understand, or apply texts?

Hermeneutics is for those who, like me, care about biblical literacy and are concerned about the conflict of biblical interpretations. It’s for those who, like me, are puzzled about the nature and method of literal interpretation. It’s for those who, like me, want to live under Christ’s lordship in every area of their lives, including their study of the Bible.

Biblical hermeneutics isn’t rocket science; it’s theological science. And it transforms us as readers of God’s Word.

Our concern, then, should be for seminaries and churches to become the kind of cultures that can form readers to inhabit the strange new world brought into being by the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Forming Reading Cultures

To read the Bible as God’s Word involves the science of God (theology) and the culture to which this science gives rise. The social spaces where reading happens are known as “reading cultures.”

Not every reading culture acknowledges the Bible as God’s Word. Students at secular universities who enroll in “The Bible as Literature” classes belong to one kind of reading culture, participants in Bible Study Fellowship to quite another. What’s ultimately at stake is whether and to what extent we acknowledge the Bible as God’s inspired Word.

What’s ultimately at stake is whether and to what extent we acknowledge the Bible as God’s inspired Word.

The first step toward forming a reading culture that accords with Holy Scripture is to acknowledge the existence, and influence, of reading cultures. Some readers may resist the idea that they belong to any culture that might affect their reading. The cure for this naivete is a good dose of church history. Travel is equally educational. Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear quickly come to understand that culture pertains not only to those people over there but to all of us. Every person’s biblical interpretation is culturally conditioned, minimally, by the reading culture to which he or she belongs.

Let me now set forth my working assumption: the kind of exegesis we do depends on the nature of the reading culture into which we’ve been socialized. Reading cultures are communities that value and practice a certain way of reading. They generate interpretations and, more importantly, form readers to conform to their community’s standards and practices.

My question, then, is this: Is exegesis without reading cultures possible? Biblical interpreters do well to examine not only the presuppositions they bring to the text but also the ways their presuppositions and interpretive practices have been formed by the particular reading culture they inhabit.

It matters because the ways Christians read the Bible eventually shape Christian culture. A disordered reading culture will form a disordered Christian culture (and vice versa). It’s a kind of hermeneutic circle: reading cultures form readers, and readers form reading cultures.

Transforming Readers

The urgent question concerns theology’s role. Different reading cultures attune readers to attend to different things. How are seminaries and churches forming Bible readers to attend not only to grammar but to God? What, if anything, is distinctly theological about biblical interpretation?

The ways Christians read the Bible eventually shape Christian culture.

To read the Bible “like every other text” is to do it an injustice, because in important respects, it isn’t like any other text. God is involved in the production (writing) and reception (reading) of the Bible in a way qualitatively different from his involvement with other texts. While the reading of the Bible is in some respects similar to the reading of other books, overall it’s marked by an even greater dissimilarity: “What makes the Bible like other books is the fact that it has authors; what makes the Bible unlike other books is that its primary author is God.”

To read the Bible theologically is to be attentive not simply to its original historical context or even theological content but also to how the text effects a breaking in of God’s Word into the reader’s own context, making the reader one of those “on whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor. 10:11).

The question that remains is how readers should respond to, and be formed by, what John Webster called the “eschatological culture” brought into being by the living and active word of God that invades and interrupts our worldly places. To read the Bible theologically is to inhabit a context into which God breaks in.

We, as Christians, belong to a peculiar, eschatological reading culture. We must therefore come to understand authors, texts, readers, and the process of reading itself in relation to God and the gospel of God. This is our proper theological context. It’s therefore important not to confuse the eschatological culture that all Christians share with particular ethnic, national, disciplinary, or denominational cultures.

The goal is a mere Christian hermeneutic that accords with our eschatological Christian culture, a hermeneutic that will form readers to read canonically, in spirit and truth—and as a result, be transformed.