Quotes About Hermeneutics

In hermeneutics, this phenomenon is called preunderstanding—the understanding one has about a subject before researching it, or the understanding one has about what a text is probably saying before one begins to study it.5

We do not interpret rightly any single passage of Scripture until we locate the text within this larger fabric of meaning in Scripture as a whole.

Quoting Scripture texts is different than shaping a worldview around them.

De rabbijnen wezen er graag op dat koning Salomo ter verklaring van elk vers van de Tora 3000 gelijkenissen gebruikte en dat hij van elke gelijkenis 1005 interpretaties kon geven. Dit betekende dat er 3 015 000 verklaringen waren voor elk stukje tekst. Een tekst die niet radicaal geherinterpreteerd kon worden om de actuele behoeften te bevredigen was dan ook dood.

The history of interpretation [of the Bible] is fascinating; but that is something else.

MAY 27 CRUCIAL TO THE hermeneutical approach is the Mahayana principle of the four reliances. These are: (i) reliance on the teaching, not on the teacher; (ii) reliance on the meaning, not on the words that express it; (iii) reliance on the definitive meaning, not on the provisional meaning; and (iv) reliance on the transcendent wisdom of deep experience, not on mere knowledge.

I would propose the following minimal guideline: extrabiblical sources stand in a hermeneutical relation to the New Testament; they are not independent, counterbalancing sources of authority. In other words, the Bible's perspective is privileged, not ours. However tricky it may be in practice to apply this guideline, it is in fact a meaningful rule of thumb that discriminates significantly between different approaches to New Testament ethics.

Beware of the interpreter who always quotes only the Haustafeln (e.g., Col. 3:22: "Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything") and never wrestles with Galatians 5:1 ("For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery")—or vice versa.

One consequence of this hermeneutical guideline is that interpretation of the New Testament cannot be performed by isolated individuals; the embodiment of the Word happens in the body of Christ, the church. Hermeneutics is necessarily a communal activity.29

It is not possible to use the just war tradition as a hermeneutical device for illuminating the New Testament, nor have the defenders of the tradition ordinarily even attempted to do so.

Those who can naively affirm the bumper-sticker slogan, "God said it, I believe it, that settles it," are oblivious to the question-begging inherent in the formulation: there is no escape from the imperative of interpreting the Word. Bumper-sticker hermeneutics will not do.

First, we should guard against falling into a habit of reading New Testament ethical texts in one mode only. If we read the New Testament and find only laws, we are obviously enmeshed in grave hermeneutical distortion. Likewise, if we read the New Testament and find only timeless moral principles, we are probably guilty, as Barth warned, of evading Scripture's specific claims upon our lives.

The New Testament has a normative role in Christian theology and ethics that is different from the Old Testament's role. We do not have a simple, undifferentiated canon running from Genesis to Revelation. The claim that Jesus' death and resurrection is the central decisive act of God for the salvation of humankind means that the cross becomes the hermeneutical center for the canon as a whole. Thus, within the canon the New Testament has a privileged hermeneutical function.

The value of our exegesis and hermeneutics will be tested by their capacity to produce persons and communities whose character is commensurate with Jesus Christ and thereby pleasing to God.22

The Bible had become a compendium of 'proof-texts', picked out at will and used to support almost anything a preacher wanted

We do not commit to believing what the biblical writers believe; we commit to believing what the affirmations of the biblical text are.

The text of the Bible means what God inspired it to mean, not "what it means to

So long as the New Testament served to decipher the Old, it was taken as an absolute norm.

Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it.

Milton S. Terry, for example, author of one of the most conservative textbooks on hermeneutics (1890), begins: "Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation."4 Yet even Terry concedes that hermeneutics "is both a science and an art. As a science it enunciates principles . . . and classifies the facts and results. As an art, it teaches what application these principles should have . . . showing their practical value in the elucidation of more difficult scriptures.

Betti wrote on philosophy, theology, and law, and many regard him as third in importance behind Gadamer and Ricoeur in twentieth-century hermeneutics. He argues that hermeneutics fosters "open-mindedness" and "receptiveness" to such an extent that the subject should be obligatory in all universities. It nurtures tolerance, mutual respect, and reciprocal listening one to another with patience and integrity.

The text is a limited field of possible constructions.

If it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal.

The well-known theologian Augustine adopted the point of view that Scripture, with the exception of prophecy, should be interpreted naturally and literally.