Quotes About Hermeneutic

Although there has always been a hermeneutic problem in Christianity, the hermeneutic question today seems to us a new one.

There has always been a hermeneutic problem in Christianity because Christianity proceeds from a proclamation.

They have failed to understand the timelessness of Babylon, that Babylon is always with us. One careful reading of the major chapters about Babylon is all one needs to form a Babylonian hermeneutic that provides discernment of Babylon in America and in its churches. Yet repeated failed readings of Revelation have today led to a failure to discern Babylon.

All I can say is that, for those who may be bent on avoiding the authority of Scripture, no hermeneutic is going to stand in their way.

Under a hermeneutic that is more culturally sensitive than biblically sensitive, meaning and understanding of Scripture can be no more than illusive mirage, incapable of being grasped. For with each change in culture comes a new context, and with each change in context comes a new truth.

In fact, I believe that theological interpretation runs the risk of jeopardizing what it means to be a responsible biblical hermeneut, by attempting to overlook or negate, whether consciously or not, a biblical hermeneutic.

interpretation is a conversation between text and reader, requiring not detachment but involvement. This conversation is often called the "hermeneutic circle." Our life situation will necessarily determine the questions we bring to the text, and hence strongly influence what it says and means to us. At the same time, the text maintains its own integrity, and we owe it to ourselves and the text to try to enter into its world as much as possible.

In the name of rejecting ecclesiastical authority as "hierarchy" or "tradition" as theological manipulation and bondage, we have instead created a hermeneutic of suspicion and have invested every biblically informed conscience (instead of a pope) to speak ex cathedra. It is a Pyrrhic victory for Free church Protestantism when the net effect of its teaching results in the replacing of the tyranny of the magisterium with the tyranny of individualism.

Many in the church have turned their back on serious study, and have embraced an anti-intellectualism which refuses to learn anything from scholarship at all lest it corrupt their pure faith. It is time to end this standoff, and to reestablish a hermeneutic of trust (itself a sign of the gospel!) in place of the hermeneutic of suspicion which the church has so disastrously borrowed from the postmodern world.

The ultimate challenge of a Jesus-centered hermeneutic is that it makes love the lens through which we must henceforth read, interpret, and apply all Scripture. "The whole Bible does nothing but tell of God's love," says Augustine of Hippo.