Christ vs. the Hermeneutical Death Spiral part 3: Red Flags

Corrupt Hermeneutics: Lost in Method

Planting explosives on the hulls of theologically liberal ships and bringing them to the bottom is easy. They are pretty, with plenty of pastel paint applied, of fashionable design, but they are not guarded, they leak like swiss cheese the more they are in the water and their keels were poorly laid down from the start. Its almost as if they were built and manned as momentary flights of fancy to only express a conceptual ship of ideal shape but, having invested so much in it there is nothing left to give the seaworthiness.

Now, conservative vessels are another matter. They are always built strong and seemingly unassailable. Not created for the show but the go. They lack personability and aesthetics, the inner appeal, but excel in prudence and sound design. They are also aesthetically deficient.  Prudence may seem better than pretty, but this is not saying that conservative ships are better overall than the liberal ones, nor the liberal better than the conservative unless there is a ship already at hand that was not built by human hands, has ethereal beauty, design, inexhaustible propulsion, and has no need for a guard because it can’t be destroyed.

Liberal theology is just too easy to knock down. It’s not a challenge. It’s also not necessary if the point is to convince, not emote.

Orthodoxy, conservatism, holds the Bible as authoritative and revered. It is a no-brainer that the leftist idea of the Bible as one spiritual document to be stacked upon a hundred others as equals, written only by the inspiration from the minds of ancient, clueless and superstitious agrarians, is liberal a theology that is a non-starter for a faith which is supposed to be exclusively generated and fired by its unique revelatory contents. Orthodoxy believes this, but for all its posturing it refuses to even entertain the thought that a ship, and ancient and transcendent artifact, is their sole transcendent vehicle to bring them to God.

Indeed, their pride is in their systems, their reasonability, their carefulness, the dependence upon “facts” generally, arguments that appeal to logic. History as it was and not how we wish it were, the fact of the natural blackness of the human heart, and many others that are hard for anyone still thinking to eschew. But it’s not these that we have a problem with, the problem is putting them first, and when they are put first it is guaranteed that “logic,” “history,” “reason,” “fact,” and even “God” in a theological discussion are not going to be servants of God.  They will be our gods.

I want to first come at this from the perspective of the god of organization, procedure, structure, logic. Because we have been so blinded, so trained to admit a solid demarcation between what is an idea and what is thought only a dispassionate and neutral process in our thinking, you may grow weary when I speak about the idea of “God” as a god, or “faith” as a god, as if to say there is no God and no real faith possible. No, not in the farthest reaches of the imagination. I am advocating Christian fundamentalism that is too fundamental for the fundamentalists and too radical for the radicals, as it always was.  This is not about whether Biblical concepts or a biblically endorsed method are true, it’s about whether these are going to be your direct point of contact with the Biblical revelation.

We will find that when they are not, that Revelation, that is, the theophany of a God of history as it presents itself to the mind and heart, is allowed to be what it is: its own self-contained, self-generating, self-attesting method and cause for deep and penetrating illumination and emotion which are implanted in the individual and work organically with him, to a degree even without conscious reflection.  We reflect on and understand why the Christ and the Apostles never laid out a formal systematic theology, never pointedly established a formal definition of “meaning,” never thought it necessary to define “revelation” and certainly never needed to take an extra effort to assure us what “meaning” means.

Grant Obsorne or anyone else is not singled out by any means. They are only examples of any such lost attempt you will see. He is mentioned only because he’s a classic symbol of organization and scholarship that invites the reader to a rational, balanced method for meaning, in a conservative fashion. He also symbolizes, so much against our natural inclinations, the out of control hermeneutic that I suggest.

In this kind of work, which applies even more so to those liberal, the reader must be a certain kind, and not the one who must absorb the great truths of the biblical text only by control of that which has no biblical equivalence. Almost all others won’t see the bait and switch because, well, how could one possibly reject a text-to-context hermeneutic? And if you accept it then you need to use it. If you use it, you will become its defender. If you become a defender maybe your still a Christian, but only insofar as the degree of what you defend is fundamentally like anything that was given by God to render meaning that is spoken of in Scripture which is said to contain meaning, not just guide a possible path to it.

Superficially, is there anything wrong here with the Hermeneutical Spiral? No, not in the least. It’s an excellent demonstration of moderation and sober reasoning. Is there anything wrong with losing sight of the issues in play and applying these rules, keeping in mind these dangers of fallacious and unwarranted applications? No, of course not. Do I recommend its reading and application? Of course, I do, I endorse it. But in its descriptions of egregious errors and proper application of a solution will we see the most egregious and fundamental type of error or solution? Will we see the point of revelation, the uncovering of a truth of Christianity that might have been lost which was the loss of the faith itself? Will we find the Holy antithesis to a fallen faith? Never in an eternity of years of simians in a room full of typewriters.

But, you say, this is not the purpose of the book! My response is that, in a nutshell, is the problem.

Here is the beginning of Osborne’s book:

• Context
  • The Historical Context
  • The Logical Context
  • Studying the Whole: Charting a Book
  • Studying the Parts: Diagramming the Paragraph/ 3. Arcing
  • Rhetorical or Compositional Pattern
• Grammar
  • The Preliminary Task: Establishing the Text
    • External Criteria
    • Internal Criteria
  • Grammatical Analysis of the Text
    • The Historical Development
    • The Verb System
    • The Noun System 3
    • Prepositions, Particles and Clauses
  • Exegetical Procedures
• Semantics
  • Semantic Fallacies
  • The Lexical Fallacy
  • The Root Fallacy
  • Misuse of Etymology
  • Misuse of Subsequent Meaning
  • The One-Meaning Fallacy

Now, this is valuable stuff. Background specific information and a thorough understanding of fallacious conclusions. All these issues of bad interpretation are not optional to our education about biblical meaning at its beginning.

But if there is one thing we should also be able to agree upon is that all these concepts, in every line of this outline, are something that need not have been precipitated or necessitated by exclusively an outside, supernatural agency. You can say they were motivated or inspired by one, but these direct objects of our apprehension of meaning are not that agency itself.

We can choose to believe that the author was motivated in producing this by a real supernatural, objective revelation of God, but we can’t see it for ourselves in these chapter headings because it is never used to modify and qualify them. You don’t read anything that shows or forces the supernatural, nor do you see in the subsequent treatment of these subjects only a historical, supernatural, biblical thing as a guide and magistrate over the results of the biblical meaning in which it leads. Unless of, of course, its another opaque and constructed hermeneutical agency, the concept “God.”

Please do not confuse this with me saying that there is no “God.” My argument is the opposite of this. It means that the concept “God” is not God, it’s only an idea that must be made by us in order to index, organize and mark the place where is to be found the phenomenon of God himself as he gave it to the world. We have been trained to think that our constructions are Truth, are divine, when they are only very crucial but transcendently unoriginal symbols of it.

The human motivation and its product are one and the same: invisible to casual observation, locked without an apparent need for unlocking to that which they are not. Yet a supernatural agency working objectively in history is precisely the bedrock of the definition of revelation in the Bible, and some form of the re-appearance of this historical display in the New Testament is not only the prescription and definition of meaning but the bedrock of faith. They are both supposed to be supernatural. The rule and the product are either of human contrivance or they are both of divine agency on their way to meaning and understanding.

This is not to say that human conceptualizations are bad, and certainly not human language. They are essential. We would be living on an animalistic level without them. But this fact is what hides instead of reveals.

This Christian assumption, if such direct transcendent control by supernatural knowledge is lacking,  can only bring us to a similar level equal with unrevealed, pagan religion: the religion of “feel it, know it,” or “measure it, know it.” These ways of knowing can’t produce products of open alien phenomena which are both accessible and clearly of another world which Christians say came 2000 years ago.

If there is a supernatural motivation of the author that sits behind a knowing by “procedure” or “intuition,” everyone is supposed to have access to its products, it has to be a part of “procedure” and “intuition” and its subject to objective scrutiny as to its reality.  If not, how much you want to bet the author does not believe that any such genuine, objective alien artifact exists outside of subjectivity or matter? That it is not believed that such a thing happened 2000 years ago and certainly has no machine-code level part in an investigation in how to read the bible right?

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