Craig A. Carter - Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis

T he conventional wisdom concerning biblical hermeneutics among the vast majority of evangelical biblical scholars today goes something like this:

We should interpret the Bible like any other book. The sole purpose of exegesis is to try to understand what the original author meant to communicate to the original audience in the original situation. The text has only one meaningnamely, what the original, human author meant to say. Allegorical interpretation is dangerous because it allows people to read any meaning whatsoever into the text. Maintaining a commitment to the authority of the Bible depends on not departing from the single meaning of the text discovered by historical study. The purpose of a college or seminary education is to train future preachers and teachers in the historical method. It is not the responsibility of the scholar to determine the meaning of the text for today. It is the job of the preacher, teacher, or individual reader to decide how the gap between the ancient meaning and the contemporary situation should be bridged. This is called application, and it is not the job of the biblical scholar qua biblical scholar to do it, although as a Christian, a biblical scholar must figure out how to apply the text to the present just like everyone else. A scholars expertise as a scholar, however, is an advantage only insofar as it enables a clear determination of the original, historical meaning of the text.

In this book, I argue that every single component of the conventional wisdom described in the above paragraph is wrong or, at the very least, highly misleading. I argue that we must interpret the Bible in a unique manner because it is uniquely inspired. The purpose of exegesis is to understand what God is saying to us today through the inspired text. The text may have one or several meanings because of the complexity of God the Holy Spirit inspiring the text through a human author. The authority of the Bible is Gods self-authenticating Word speaking through it, and in order to hear Gods Word, it is crucial that we interpret it as a unified book with Jesus Christ at its center. The interdisciplinary practice of biblical studies as found in academic settings today is an agent of secularization in the church and needs to be reformed so that it becomes a servant of Christian theology and spirituality rather than a confusing amalgam of history, philology, archaeology, literary theory, sociological theory, and philosophy operating with unacknowledged metaphysical assumptions and without any material center. The meaning of the text for today is what we seek to hear as we study the text carefully, intensively, and reverently. Biblical exegesis is a spiritual discipline by which we are gradually made into the kind of readers who can receive with gladness the Word of God. Ancient reading practices, which have never died out completely in the church, can help us hear Gods Word in less subjective and more ruled ways than modern hermeneutics makes available to us.