For some reason there are many Christians, through the centuries even, who want to make an attempt at reading Holy Scripture without reading it from its God-given context in Jesus Christ. That is to say, there are Christians who want to read the Bible from a christologically contextless frame wherein the Bible becomes a wax-nose given shape by their wits and capacity to marshal the latest reading strategies of the day. But the Bible isnât a book like that. It isnât open to naturalist or immanentist frames of reference. It has its whole and its parts altogether, in regard to its res (reality), to its meaning in Jesus Christ and the triune God. To just focus on reading the Bible as literature (as is popular among evangelicals and progressives, secularists and elitists alike) is to completely ignore its confessional frame as a Christian Scripture as Self-given by God for the world in Jesus Christ. In other words, the Bible surely has meaning, indeed it has an intensive meaning that has been given to it through the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. That is to say, all of Scripture, both Old and New Testaments alike have a telos, a meaning that are singularly funded by the life of Christ as its ultimate reality. Some biblical studies folks might want to assert that this is too reductionistic, too restrictive to attempt some type of âChristianâ reading of Scripture. But this fails to take seriously that the Bible, for the Christian, is the Word of God in written format. None of this is to say that its literary factors, and/or its historically grammatical features arenât significant towards explicating its outer meaning. It is simply to say that Scripture is indeed Holy because of its inner reality as that is found in Jesus Christ. Folks fail to recognize, often, that everything is suffused with some type of prior or inner context, whether we are conscious of what that is or not. And that prior or inner context informs the way we deploy the various literary and historical tools we have available to us in the hermeneutical process; it shapes the way we arrive at our biblical exegetical and theological conclusions. The art and science of biblical interpretation either lives under its kataphysical reality in Jesus Christ, or it strays wither and hither, here and there, over the arid landscapes and oases we perceive as the contextual factors, and thus meaning factors for Holy writ.
Charles Taylor refers to the aspects, and even the history of modern hermeneutical developments in the following way:
A hermeneutical account is one which strives to make (human) sense of agent and action, and hermeneutical argument tries to show that one account does so better than a rival one. It was recognized early on that this required a kind of circular argument. The aim, in the original context of Bible interpretation, was often to make a particular passage clear which was uncertain or enigmatic. But the reading offered of this passage or verse had to make sense of the whole to make sense of the part. But a question can always be raised; do we understand fully the meaning of the whole? Perhaps the meaning we see in this verse ought to call into question the idea we have of the whole, and lead to a reinterpretation. It is possible to argue in both directions, and hermeneutics involved a kind of circle, where one has to balance potential arguments in either direction against each other.
There is a circle here, but it is not a vicious one. It doesnât involve the notorious âcircular argumentâ, where one assumes the conclusion among the premises. On the contrary, the attempt is to bring the arguments in both directions into an equilibrium in which one makes maximum sense of the text.
Heidegger, and after him Gadamer and Ricoeur, pointed out that something like the hermeneutical circle obtains in our attempts to understand what Iâm calling here âhuman meaningsâ. The âtextsâ here can be events, passages in the life of individuals or societies, or human history; or we can start from individual experiences feelings, actions, decisions, and try to determine their meaning. Whatever meaning we attribute to the part has to make sense within the whole, whose meaning it also helps determine. The individual decision stands in this relation to the whole segment of my life in which it falls; the revolutionary turning point to the whole period in the history of society which it inflected; my momentary emotional response to the whole pattern of my feelings.
I believe that the notion of a hermeneutical circle can be generalized to understand how we operate with the skeins of interdependent meanings which are central to our human self-understanding, like that of pride versus shame, in contrast to guilt versus innocence, as well as their proper objects, which I mentioned in the first section; or the moral landscapes linking norms, virtues, and positive and negative motivations, which I have been describing in this one. Because here too, any change in one term disturbs the skein, and would have to be ratified by changes in others. Equilibrium can be restored either by making the ratification, or by refusing the original change.
There are examples in the above discussion of arguments in both directions. I argued, for instance, that our approbation of benevolence had to be seen as a putative insight into good, rather than as a brute reaction, because of how this experience opens into a whole chain of hermeneutical reasoning. The argument here runs from the potentiality of the part to generate a certain kind of whole. But there are also arguments in the opposite direction: Nietzsche is too firmly convinced that appeal for mercy cannot be emanate from the slaveâs will to power for him to accept its face validity. Equilibrium comes when one has a plausible account on both levels together; or to put it as a double negative, when there is no palpable distortion at either level. And hermeneutical argument usually consists in pointing out something which a rival view distorts or cannot account for.[1]
A lot to process, even in this small section from Taylor. For our purposes, I simply wanted to engage with the Taylor passage to help illustrate the complexities involved in both biblical and other types of hermeneutics, respectively. But what I also wanted to refer us to is the point about the part to the whole and whole to the part in the combine of meaning generation; within the context of text in particular.
Ultimately, for the Christian reader, we already dramatically understand that the whole meaning of the text of Holy Scripture is finally going to climax and realize itself in its inner reality in Jesus Christ. As such, this ought to invite us into the banqueting tables of Christâs radical potluck of interpretation of Holy writ. That is to say, when we are reading the Bible, whether in its Old or New Testament iterations, what always ought to be informing our understanding of the parts to the whole and the whole to the parts of meaning is that its connective tissue is none-else than Jesus Christ. We ought to learn how to allow this reality to be at the forefronts of our hearts and minds as we approach each and every passage we encounter within the binding of the Book we hold in our hands; more commonly known as the Bible or Holy Scripture. We ought to recognize, as is the case with any hermeneutical endeavor, that all things are a circle. But in the case of reading Holy Scripture the Christian is actively and participatorily brought into the circle of Godâs triune life; and that within this circle, as Scriptureâs terminating and circulating reality, the Christian has a dialogical means of contextual matter with the very personal-relational reality of Holy Scripture itself. What a joy to be a Christian within the fellowship of the triune life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Indeed, we are not orphaned readers, but readers of Scripture emblazoned with the fiery passion of Godâs life of eternal love, one for the other, in the other, and us in the other and singularity of Godâs eternal wooing of love and invitation into the life indestructible. So, take up and read Holy Scripture, but do so understanding that its meaning and reality is as near as your next prayer.
[1] Charles Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 218â19.
