The Role of Structure, Style, Context, and Culture in Understanding Scripture

Listen as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical interpretation in this address from The Gospel Coalition sermon library.

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This is the story of the temptation of Joseph by Potiphar’s wife. I hope you know the story quite well because I don’t have time to read it right through. You’ll be aware that in the central section you get this picture of how Joseph is tempted by this woman, and she persists and persists. He does his best to keep out of the way, and finally, one day when he’s in the house, she tries to tempt him. He flees but leaves his cloak in her hand. The result is that he gets thrown into prison.

All of that makes for some very, very important material in preaching, and it can be tied very strongly to some of the points Roy was talking about this morning. However, you must also look closely at what the chapter is doing in the book of Genesis. You must ask yourself, “What is the structure of the thing from a literary point of view?” Then you immediately notice something quite striking. The beginning of the chapter is rather like the end. Listen carefully.

“Now Joseph had been taken down to Egypt. Potiphar, an Egyptian who was one of Pharaoh’s officials, the captain of the guard, bought him from the Ishmaelites who had taken him there.” Now that’s just transition. Now you come to the crucial bit. “The Lord was with Joseph and he prospered, and he lived in the house of his Egyptian master. When his master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord gave him success in everything he did, Joseph found favor in his eyes and became his attendant.

Potiphar put him in charge of his household, and he entrusted to his care everything he owned. From the time he put him in charge of his household and of all that he owned, the Lord blessed the household of the Egyptian because of Joseph. The blessing of the Lord was on everything Potiphar had, both in the house and in the field. So he left in Joseph’s care everything he had; with Joseph in charge, he did not concern himself with anything except the food he ate.”

Now the end of the passage. Verse 20b: “But while Joseph was there in the prison, the Lord was with him; he showed him kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden. So the warden put Joseph in charge of all those held in the prison, and he was made responsible for all that was done there. The warden paid no attention to anything under Joseph’s care, because the Lord was with Joseph and gave him success in whatever he did.”

Do you see the same themes drawing back again and again and again? One of the lessons, in other words, to learn from this passage is success is not measured by your station in life but by fidelity to God, and God is quite able to meet out his blessing regardless of your station or circumstances and make you a mediator of his blessing, whether you’re a slave or in prison. It’s a minor lesson, but it’s worth learning, especially in our “triumphalistic” age.

But there’s a deeper lesson that is part of the structure of the book of Genesis. What’s the point? We know, because we have read the whole book of Genesis, that this is going to lead on to Joseph’s exaltation as the savior of Egypt, and as the savior of Egypt, he will ultimately provide food for his own family. Then we have read on beyond that. We have read on to how blessing comes to the whole family, and the patriarchs establish the line. The people are brought down to Egypt in preparation for the exodus, which becomes the whole focal point for the giving of the law, God’s meeting of his people at Sinai.

Out of this preserved race, using the typology of the exodus, ultimately comes the Messiah. Now if you’d gone up to Joseph when he was being tempted by Potiphar’s wife and put your arm around him and said, “Joseph, ol’ boy, I have got a word from the Lord for you. If you just hang tough on this one, this is what is going to come out of it, brother.” Wouldn’t that have made a fantastic impression upon him? It would have been a wonderful incentive to press on, but he had none of that, not a scrap.

He did have that vision when he was a boy, that his brothers and his parents would ultimately bow down to him. That was about it. Couldn’t have looked too promising when he was feeding slop to the other prisoners, but he was faithful in temptation. He was faithful in slavery. He was faithful in prison. The Lord enhanced his faithfulness in small things, and, in the peculiar providence of God, he became one of the links that lead to the Messiah.

One of my best friends in Australia is Peter O’Brien. He’s a New Testament scholar at Moore College. There was a lady on the street who suffered from several really painful, chronic illnesses, rheumatoid arthritis among them. She was in constant pain. She was a Christian; his parents were not. She was never a very articulate or well-read Christian. But although she suffered a great deal, she maintained a quiet, faithful witness for Jesus.

She sometimes wept and complained a bit, not much. She learned to express her gratitude and live with eternity’s values in view. Quietly, because of the integrity of her witness, she won several ladies on the street to the Lord, including Peter O’Brien’s mother. Because of his mother, Peter, who has become one of the finest New Testament scholars in the world, spent years as a missionary in India, has influenced students all over …

Some of you people have read, I’m sure, his commentary on Colossians, probably the best commentary on Colossians in the English language, and his commentary now on Philippians, certainly the best one in the English language on the Greek text of Philippians. Because, humanly speaking, there was an inarticulate lady who knew how to suffer for Jesus’ sake.

Now if you could have tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Listen, If you just prove faithful in this, one day you will see people converted in India because of it.” Thus, we learn lessons of faithfulness, the structure of the Canon as God builds toward the future, and learn God is a sovereign God who rewards us in ways and in generations beyond any possibility of our knowing. Just because we learn faithfulness toward God. All of that falls out the text from a literary perspective. I don’t think you would see those lessons unless you start to think in a larger literary, theological way.

Chiasms. Some people see chiasms in every second passage. I’m suspicious of many of them, but there are some wonderful ones. This is a listing of the woes in Matthew 23:13–32. There are seven woes. The first woe, verse 13, blames the opponents for failing to recognize Jesus as the Messiah. So does the seventh woe, verses 29–32. They are the heirs of those who fail to recognize the prophets. Second woe, the people are superficially zealous, but they are doing more harm than good with their religion.

The sixth woe, they are superficially zealous, doing more harm than good. Third woe, it’s on those who have a misguided use of Scripture, similarly the fifth woe. The fourth woe, right in the middle. So you have one, two, three, four, three prime, two prime, one prime. A chiasm: a, b, c, d, c, b, a. Right in the middle, then, is the fourth woe, a deep failure to discern the thrust of Scripture.

In other words, the woes have been put together in a structure that make a chiasm. That’s anything where you run a, b, b, a, or a, b, c, b, a, or anything that runs in that sort of order. What that tends to do is focus attention toward the middle. It drives you toward the middle, and the middle woe here is a deep failure to discern the thrust of Scripture. Those things are not accidental, and they help us, sometimes, to shape sermons and thoughts and biblical study so we see what is being particularly emphasized by the literary presentation in the text itself.

Parallelism. Wisdom literature is full of this; the Psalms are full of this. You are aware there are different kinds of poetry. In English there are so many kinds of poetry it’s hard to be an expert on all of them. When I was a boy, I used to memorize a lot of sonnets.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no; it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;

That’s “Sonnet 116” of Shakespeare. On the other hand, we had a poetry teacher when I was in high school who liked blank verse, as well, so I was introduced to Robert Frost. Now, blank verse and I never got along very well, except for a few poets, and Robert Frost was one of them. You almost have to be a Canadian to like this one, and see ice storms.

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay

Ice-storms do that.

That’s wonderful. You have got to be a master of form before you can break form effectively as that. The problem with a lot of modern verse, of course, is people have never learned form in the first place. They don’t know how to break it effectively. There are all kinds of different poets, of course, and poetical forms. E.E. Cummings:

anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so many floating bells down)

I can’t interpret E.E. Cummings, either. There are books that say they can. I take it on faith. Now Hebrew poetry is not based on rhyme, it is not based on rhythm, except secondarily. It is based on parallelism, as much Semitic-language poetry is. Many different cultures elevate a particular kind of poem. In Japanese they like the haiku, for example, a 17-syllabic thing, which now has come into English in some places.

But Hebrew is full of parallelism. NIV: “As a ring of gold in the snout of a pig, so is a beautiful woman without discretion.” Hebrew? It forgets the “as” and the “so is,” and so on. It just says, “A ring of gold in the snout of a pig. A beautiful woman without discretion.” Wonderful imagery. Wonderful imagery! It doesn’t have to say “as” this, “so is” that. That’s for the English translation. The Hebrew just puts the two together, and the parallelism does the rest.

There are different kinds of parallels. Some parallels are called synonymous parallelism, where one line says roughly the same thing as the next. Some are step parallelisms, where you get a pair of lines, and the next pair of lines takes you one step further on. Sometimes you have antithetic parallelism, where you have one step and then the other step. The Proverbs are full of that, and sometimes cast for us as “better this than that.”

You’ve got, “This is a good thing, and this is a bad thing.” It’s clear antithetic parallelism. Now it helps to spot what those things are, and in most of our modern English translations, things are set out for us in texts. Parallelism. Then there are larger structures that have to do with poetry. Turn to Psalm 1, rather quickly. It’s a well-known psalm.

“Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither—whatever he does prospers.

Not so the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous. For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.”

Notice the last verse: that’s antithetic parallelism. “The Lord watches over the way of the righteous; the way of the wicked will perish.” Look at the first verse. “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers.”

That’s synonymous parallelism, but there are two types of that. One finds each line simply repeating and re-enforcing the other line, and the other kind of synonymous parallelism actually takes the argument just a wee bit further, moves the argument just a little bit further along. That’s what this one does.

But then, if you look closely at the psalm as a whole, there are structures. Clearly, just reading the psalm at a quick level, you discover that it’s talking about the just person and the unjust person, the righteous person and the unrighteous person. Verses 1–3 describe the just, verses 4 and 5, the unjust, and verse 6 makes the final culminating contrast. Then you go back to verses 1, 2, and 3, the just person, and you discover that each verse makes its contribution.

Verse 1. It describes what the just person is not. It’s a negative description. “Blessed is the person who does not do this, this, and this.” What does he not do? “He doesn’t walk in the counsel of the ungodly.” That is, he doesn’t listen to a whole lot of ungodly advice. “He doesn’t stand in the way of sinners.” That’s just bad translation. It’s exactly what the Hebrew says, and it’s a bad translation.

The reason why it’s a bad translation is, in English, that means something quite different. We think of Robin Hood and Little John on the bridge, standing in each other’s way. But the closer parallel here, to a North-American perspective, is standing in someone’s moccasins, standing in someone’s shoes.

“Blessed is the person, then, who does not walk in the way of the ungodly …” That is, listen to a whole lot of bad advice. “… doesn’t stand in the way …” That is, stand in the place of, adopt the habits and lifestyle of, the shoes of, the wicked. And “… doesn’t sit in the seat of mockers.” That is, become so encrusted and barnacled over with evil and cynicism that now you sit back in your La-Z-Boy, put your feet up, and look down your long nose and sneer at all those funny, funny Christians out there.

Spurgeon says, in his Treasury of David, a person has received his master’s in worthlessness and his doctorate in damnation. “Blessed is the man who does not do that.” That’s the negative description.

Verse 2 is a whole antithetic description to verse 1. It’s the positive description. But instead of simply reversing these poles, it offers a completely different alternative. “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.” Yet, when you stop to think about it, it does reverse all the poles. Instead of listening to bad counsel, the person is thinking about God’s words all the time.

That’s good counsel, and if you think God’s ways all the time, it will shape how you live. “Day and night.” You delight in them, so it will shape how you live. Far from being a mocker, it will generate praise. Then you have a metaphorical description in verse 3. “He is like a tree planted by streams of living water.” In Israel, of course, so many streams are seasonal. They become dry wadis in the dry season.

But this one is carefully planted by streams, in the plural, of water, with the idea if one dries, you still have got more. In any case, this isn’t a deciduous tree. It’s an evergreen. His leaves never wither. It’s a fruit-bearing evergreen, and in the right season, it brings forth fruit. It’s a lovely picture. Whatever he does prospers. No matter what the storms, no matter how dry it gets, there’s always sign of life, there’s always leaf, and, in due season, there’s fruit. Antithetic.

Verse 4. “Not so the ungodly!” The Hebrew is a strong negative. It’s as if almost anything that you want to affirm of the godly, you disavow for the ungodly, but, in fact, it’s particularly tied to the metaphorical description. “There is a tree, planted, life-giving, green, bearing fruit.” Over against that, you have got chaff. Worthless, weightless, dead, useless, drifting, unplanted.

“They are like chaff the wind drives away; they will not stand in the congregation of the righteous.” A little bit of sensitivity, in other words, to the flow of the structure makes the thing come alive, makes it live, and makes it easier for people to remember, to understand, to take notes for that matter, and, ultimately, to imprint our own minds with the argument of the Word of God.

Now let me move from structure to the larger category of literature genre. The Bible is full of many literary genres. Fables, for example, like Jotham’s fable, Judges 9. Some people say, “Well, if Jotham’s fable is a fable …” And that’s what it is. “… then maybe Jonah is a fable.” The first answer to that is (it’s a superficial answer, but it’s worth giving) Jotham’s fable is called a fable. Jonah’s isn’t.

More important, a fable his certain characteristics, like Aesop’s Fables, like Jotham’s fable. All the elements in the fable are non-human, but they take on human characteristics. In Aesop’s Fables you have endless talking dogs and talking cats and talking lions, and so on. But in fables, as a literary genre, you don’t get this mix of people and beasts, which you certainly get in Jonah, and the fish doesn’t talk. It’s not part of the structure of anything.

No, Jonah isn’t a fable; it’s the wrong category from a genre point of view. You can’t interpret it as a mere fable. But the category “fable,” certainly exists in Scripture. Then there is Wisdom Literature. Wisdom Literature must not be interpreted as law. There are one or two popular speakers in North America who, mercifully, have not come to this side of the Atlantic, who have very large followings, largely on the basis of what they say about family and society and structure, and so on.

And when you listen very carefully and read their voluminous notes, and so on, that they sell to conference participants at enthusiastic prices, you discover a tremendous amount of their input is based on Wisdom Literature. And with all respect, I don’t think they understand it. They treat Wisdom Literature as law. Now if you’re going to treat Wisdom Literature as law, what are you going to do with this? Proverbs 26:4:

“Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you be like him yourself.” Next verse: “Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.” No lawyer would put two laws so utterly, mutually contradictory side by side. But the point is they’re not laws; they’re wisdom utterances. They are generalizations, epigrams. They are designed to make us think and reflect.

They do not, by themselves, automatically tells us exactly where all the application should be. Clearly, the very fact that they are put side by side is designed to make us think, “How do I apply the first one? What’s appropriate? How to apply the second one? What’s appropriate? And clearly, I could get it wrong. I could apply the first one is the second place, and the second one in the first place, and make an utter twit of myself. What do I do with this?”

It’s not law. It’s certainly not case law. But when you turn it over in your mind, in light of the sustained arguments of the book of Proverbs, for example, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” all the kinds of utterances that talk about the importance of speech and putting a guard on your lips and not saying too much and not promoting yourself, all those kinds of things.… You put them within that sort of context and value system, and both of these make sense.

“Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself.” There’s a danger of being dragged down in argument and debate so that you answer with the same sort of hotheaded stupidity that arouses the question in the first place. But there may be an appropriate place for answering a fool according to his folly in order to puncture a certain kind of hubris.

A friend of mine, who also teaches at Trinity, is very gifted at teaching undergraduates. Trinity. It’s a grad school; the average incoming age is 30 so they’re not sort of “teeny-boppers” sorting themselves out. But what he often does is do some lecturing in a local junior college nearby. It’s not a Christian institution, but he goes and teaches the odd course on religion. He was in there one night with a Catholic priest and a Jewish rabbi and himself, who happened to be a Baptist minister, all talking about what they thought of their faiths in a pluralistic society.

This chap, Perry Downs, is very good at articulating the gospel in a modern way but still not flinching one inch from the truth claims of the gospel. After he had finished his bit, there was one girl down there, 17 or 18, chewing gum, sort of sitting there, knowing it all. “Yeah, but if you’re right, what about all the Hindus?” Perry said, “Oh! Hadn’t thought of that.” Wonderful answer! It’s superb! And then he very carefully and gently laid out a whole foundation.

But it’s important to say to this ignorant generation, “We’re not the first generation of Christians who have wrestled ever with these kinds of things.” It’s important to take some of the hubris out of this sort of arrogant pluralism. “Answer a fool according to his folly …” That’s what the text says. “… or he will be wise in his own eyes.” But if you put that in the wrong place, you become like them. That’s a question of literature genre. How you handle a text and how you apply it.

Job. We immediately want to say, “Is it history? Is it just a parable?” There are other options. How about dramatic epic? Clearly, it’s stylized. You can’t really believe that people sat there and argued in brilliant semi-poetry. Clearly, it’s stylized. But there’s no reason to think that there’s no historical base, either.

Oh! This is the kind of argument that goes on in every generation. But this was a profound dialogue. It was a profound discussion that probed the farthest reaches of the mystery of evil, where God himself finally responded from the thundercloud. But it’s cast, from a literary point of view, as a dramatic epic.

Then there’s apocalyptic. What do we do with that? I’d love to spend time on that one, and take you through several passages in the book of Revelation. Part of our problem with that one, I think, is simply the fact that nobody writes apocalyptic anymore. One of my favorite stories is of a friend of a friend of mine who was passing out free New Testaments in modern English in a British university, which shall be blissfully unnamed, on the condition that people would read them.

He bumped into a chap to whom he had given one some months later, and he said, “Well, did you read that book I gave you?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I did.”

“What did you make of it?”

“Well, it was all right. It was interesting in parts, a bit boring at the front. You know. It goes over the same story three or four times. But I sure liked that science fiction at the end.”

You can see what’s going on in the person’s head. He’s trying to find a literary category, from the range of his experience, to make sense of this stuff with monsters and locusts, horns, heads, chaos, and slaughter. And the closest he can come to anything is science fiction. But it’s not science fiction; it’s apocalyptic.

If you want to read other apocalyptic, written from about 200 BC to AD 200, there are volumes of the stuff available in translation, even, in English. If you think this stuff is a bit hard to come to terms with, go ahead and read 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra, the Testament of Levi, parts of 1 Enoch. They are all available.

So John is writing in a literary convention God has used. He has used other forms of literary convention, so he is using a literary convention here in which John writes. I think, if I had a little more time, I could show you how there are large swaths of the apocalypse that you could make a lot of sense of by just understanding some of the literary rules bound up with that literary convention. The better commentaries will, I think, move you along that line. Now let me come, then, to a different issue, but it is related. We’ll finish with this one today.

It’s the so-called new hermeneutic, and it ties a lot of things together. You’ll recall that the first day, I said old hermeneutics, classical hermeneutics, saw the task as developing rules by which I, the interpreter, rightly understand it, the text. But the new hermeneutic does not see things that way. That whole approach to interpretation was based on the positivism of the nineteenth century.

There was a very famous German philosopher of history by the name of von Ranke who used an expression which has come down in all of the theology books that describe this and not a few of the history books. The historian’s task, he said, was to describe things er will blos zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen (as things really are, as things really were). That was the historian’s task.

No historian believes that today. None. Because all historians would say, “Look. Even your choices of what you include, all the things you can’t have access to, your own subjectivity.… What this boils down to is all history is interpreted history. You cannot, finally, describe things just as they were, neutrally. It’s impossible, and to claim it is a kind of arrogance that is epistemologically (that is, so far as the science of how people know is concerned) ignorant. This has affected many, many realms of thought.

In the area of hermeneutic, then, at the risk of caricature, it runs something like this. When I come to the Bible on any particular day, as I approach the Bible and try to understand it, I am a baggage of conditions. My genes, my heritage, my training, my education, or want of it, my presuppositions, my biases, whether I’m upset with my wife, or my children have just done something they shouldn’t, whether I’m cranky because I stayed up too late the night before marking papers.

Then all of these things come together so when I approach the text, and I read the text, I ask certain things. I don’t look for certain things. I can’t see certain things; I can see other things. So what I get from the text is a function, in part, of who I am. Not only who I am ontologically but who I am today. When you come to the text the same day, what you get from the text is necessarily a function of who you are. The truth of the matter is, in a year, we’ll both be changed.

So what we get from a text next year may overlap, in part, with what we get from it this year. We would like to think so. But, in part, the total thing we get out will be different. In fact, the very encounter with the text the first day has necessarily changed the total me. My encounter with the text has given me new information, or new insight, or a new perspective, or a new experience, so that as I walk away from the text, it is a slightly different eye than the one which approached the text.

Which means even if I come back to the text tomorrow, with the same paper still unmarked, still upset, and too tired, I will be subtly changed so that the total effect of reading the text tomorrow will be different from today, and on and on and on. Which means it becomes exceedingly difficult to start speaking of objective truth. Suddenly, meaning has less to do with a location in the text than with a location in me.

Now this approach to hermeneutics, let me say quite frankly, is not peculiar to biblical study today. This approach to understanding of how people think is throughout the university systems of the Western world. It has invaded virtually every discipline. It used to be all the non-hard sciences. Now it’s virtually every discipline except some branches of mathematics.

Whole university departments have split on these issues. Cambridge had a bloody fight (it was horrible) about 10 years ago. People were sacked, slandered, terrible graffiti written on walls over this issue. Cambridge University english department! Ten years ago. Law departments, philosophy departments, history departments, fighting over these things. Moreover, this sort of vision, when it’s pushed to the wall, is tied into another major phenomenon in our culture.

Nowadays, we speak of black hermeneutics, African hermeneutics, feminist hermeneutics, and so on and so on and so on. If we use those adjectives and someone comes back to me and says, “You’re not being fair. Your WASP hermeneutics (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant hermeneutics), your WASP-M hermeneutics (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Male) … We all have our own biases. You can’t escape them. You read your Bible one way; I read my Bible the other way.”

What do we say to all of this? I have to say, in the first place, that there is a great of truth to it, a great deal of truth to it. And there is a great deal of error to it, and if you get the truth and error in the wrong place, you end up, in my view, disastrously. The truth, it seems to me, is we are finite, and we are fallen. We cannot know everything, and we will all make mistakes in our interpretation. That surely is true.

It also means, for example, if you look at the dominant exegesis of a particular culture, it may be nicely supplemented by the dominant exegesis of another culture. For about 10 years, I worked with the World Evangelical Fellowship, and we brought together some people from around the world to talk about this and that subject, produce books. In fact, Sue Brown, although I have known Sue for about 20 years or so, that’s where we first started working together, on a couple of these things. We have had some interesting times.

Dare I tell this one, Sue? This one is funny, but it will step on some toes. On one particular discussion we had about how Christians should think through some of the passages that discuss the roles of women, Sue was there. I was in a chair and saying as little as possible, my safe place to be.

There were some strong feeling on different sides, and papers had been presented in advance, and so on. Then it suddenly dawned on me, after about two hours of discussion, that my good friend Sunand Sumithra, from India, hadn’t said anything. As chairman, I kind of had to sort of get everyone to say his or her bit.

So I said, “Sunand, you’ve been very quiet. Do you have anything to say?” Sunand said, “Frankly, I am shocked by what I am hearing. In the Hindi language, the very word ‘woman’ means ‘she whose womb is open.’ You’re not properly a woman until you have borne a child. When I read in the text that a woman is saved through childbirth, I just believe it. What’s the matter with you people?”

Of course, there was Sue, two slots down. Isn’t that interesting. I don’t think his exegesis was right. In fact, I’m sure it was dead wrong, but he was equally sure ours was wrong. What do you do about it? Do we just go home and say, “Well, the Bible means different things to different people.” That is the danger of the new hermeneutic. At the end of the day, there is no sure word and everyone does that which is right in his own eyes. That’s the danger.

The great strength of it is teaching a little humility, a little cultural humility. In another conference, we had a brother from Africa who worked through some of the Pauline epistles to show us metaphors for the church that have to do with solidarity and discount individualism and saw some things I, frankly, hadn’t seen because I see emerge out of the Western world with a lot of built-in biases in favor of a rugged individualism.

But African theologians can drift fairly easily toward ancestor worship and that sort of thing. Their sense of corporate solidarity is so complex they need to be corrected in another way, in my view. Oh, yes, the new hermeneutic can teach us a little bit of humility to listen to people from another perspective. There are some things to be learned from the feminist theologians or from the black theologians or from the Marxist theologians, and there are even some things to be learned from the WASP-M theologians.

The question to be asked, however, is.… Is there any sure word from God? Now here it seems to me important to avoid, on one hand, the error of von Ranke, the sheer arrogance of thinking we can know things just as they are, and, on the other hand, the error of endless subjectivity. There are a number of models that are used to try to explain how we do this.

1. The hermeneutical spiral

In the hermeneutical circle in we go from me to the text. The text affects me so I’m back to me and then I come back to the text again. Then I get some more from text. I go around and around and around. There’s no ending place. That’s a hermeneutical circle.

Instead of having a hermeneutical circle, you have, instead, a hermeneutical spiral. In other words, as I approach the text, I learn more and more about the text. As I study the text, I gradually ask fewer and fewer inane questions, more and more questions that have adopted a biblical word view. I can spiral in toward the real meaning of the text.

2. The fusion of horizons

If you picture a person’s whole understanding as one horizon and your whole understanding as another horizon, then part of what is important for having good communication is to fuse your horizon of understanding with the horizon of understanding of the donor, in this case a text, so that you can have good transfer of communication. And you can do that.

You can do that by processes called distanciation, where you distance yourself from your world and read yourself into the other world so that you adopt those sorts of biases and commitments and understandings so that you understand what’s going on. That’s part of what Roy has been doing when he explains some of the background of Malachi to us. He is helping us fuse our horizons of understanding.

And, in fact, part of a preacher’s job is to have a double fusion. One the one hand, you fuse your horizon of understanding with that of the text to understand what’s there. Then you have got to understand who your people are and make another fusion to communicate it again. In cross-cultural communication, that’s absolutely essential.

Increasingly, in the church of Jesus Christ, the church is so out of step with the culture, for both good and bad reasons, that it takes a great deal of thought and effort to learn how to make that fusion as well in order to communicate effectively in the next generation. But if you haven’t made the first fusion back here first, you don’t have anything to communicate.

Now, in the first step, it’s the receptor’s job (the one who is reading Scripture) to do a good job to get a good communication. In the next step, it’s first of all the preacher’s job, the donor’s job, to get a good match and communicate effectively.

3. The X-Y axis model

It’s a mathematical model. If you don’t know anything about mathematics, forget this model. On the X-Y axis, you can have a line that comes up to, in this case, the X-axis, asymptotically. That is, it comes up to it so close, but it never actually ever touches. Christians who think about these things do not say that you can ever have a perfect understanding of the Word of God, or an exhaustive understanding of the Word of God. What they do say is that you can have a true understanding of the Word of God.

It can be true, without being exhaustively true, without being infallible, without being uncorrectable. I claim the Bible is true. I do not claim all my interpretations of the Bible are true. I can approach the text asymptotically so that I can know absolute truth, but all that does is presuppose that meaning still does reside in the text. It does reside in the text, and not in me. That is essential.

Let me conclude with a story. Although I teach at Trinity Divinity School near Chicago, where the school is independent, but it is linked with 13 other schools through a loose consortium in the metro Chicago area. For some evening courses, students cross-register, and so forth. One night a number of years ago, I was teaching a course in hermeneutics, and there was a doctoral student from one of the more liberal institutions, Seabury-Western.

She was a very bright lady, and she didn’t like anything that I was saying. After I had finished trying to affirm, after many hours of lectures, the objectivity of truth and that it resides in the text and not in the knower, she gave the standard new hermeneutic line in great detail and was becoming angrier and angrier and angrier. I couldn’t get through to her at all. She just thought I was old-fashioned, right-wing, bigoted, narrow-minded, out-of-date, and some less-pleasant things.

Finally, in a moment of sheer perversity on my part, I confess it, I said to her, “Ah! I finally see what you mean. You are speaking with superb irony in order to affirm the objectivity of truth.” Well, she went up. “That is not what I’m saying. I’m affirming just the opposite. You’re twisting all my words.” She went on and explained all she thought I.… I said, “This is superb to use irony and invective so effectively in order to affirm the objectivity of truth. This is a wonderful way of proceeding!”

She went up again. We went around three times, and, finally, I said to her, “But that’s the way I’m reading you.” You see, I have discovered that the de-constructionists all want to be understood. If you don’t understand them in the book reviews, they’re the first to write in. I simply want to extend the same courtesy to Paul and to God. This is now bound up with our whole society. It’s very important. I had a question asked here from, I’m sure, a very convinced Christian.

Question: Am I free to interpret Peter’s fear of the wind and the waves as his fear of the power God, even though the writer would have regarded wind and the waves as the forces of evil? I must read subjectively, and so must everyone else. So rather than pretending there is an accurate reading, surely it is far more productive to study our different responses to the texts, and this must be our initial approach to the Bible: “What do I think it says in my context?”

Answer: We do have to ask how the text applies to us, always. But, just as you expect me to understand your question, and you will correct me, rightly, if I don’t, I am saying although understanding is never easy or automatic, and although, in a distant culture, we may have to fuse our horizons of understanding and go through processes to cycle in on it, and we will never understand fully and wholly, we can understand truly.

We are to go after the intentionality of the author as expressed in the text if we are to know the mind of God, before we are to apply it to our own generation. I will say a little more about this and begin with the aid of the Spirit in this connection next day before we go on to our final topic.