Corrupt Hermeneutics: Methods and Meaning
If you ask any conservative scholar to comment on any errors in the foregoing “Lost in Method,” there won’t be much. But the reason they won’t disagree with this re-emphasis on a biblical revelation to ground and control meaning, a revelation which they say are trying to explain and serve, is that everything I said about “revelation” and “supernatural” can be taken as represented by a proposition, not phenomena. Phenomena without which there is no possible meaning and no salvation.
A proposition is “Jesus is Lord,” or “the blood of Christ cleanses of all sin,” or “God is sovereign.” But did you ever stop and think whether these propositions display a supernatural appearance of God? Whether they can be said the same in an essential sense, in the sense of knowledge, the equal of God? They can’t and they aren’t. Although the human indwelling of God is supposed to be essential to teach them rightly, why is this indwelling only spoken of by them in the form of being and not particular kind of knowledge publicly accessible and demonstrable of Him which would be impossible to obtain without him giving it to us?
I constantly talk about this biblical vital center and the equivalent of God implanted in the mind which is supernatural and impossible to duplicate by man. Now I say that it acts as its own dynamic magistrate over meaning that produces the required moderation, moral thinking, and circumspection to render the original meaning of the text without a conservative scholarship that uses other means to teach it. I will get back to this and the issue of propositions later that is thought the equivalent to Truth and a counterbalance to the problems of an uncontrolled subjective interpretation, but first let me ask you to think about some set-up ideas.
With “methods and meaning” there is a means of reaching a product and an end-product. Subject is fundamental to any of the usual ruminations on hermeneutics, so I must put something down from the get-go.
You have people essentially arguing for the application of a system of procedure and those for the needs of the reader. Then you have those who take both into account, that both are important, and you must come up with a scheme that pulls from the text something accurate and equally allows it to apply to an individual. Neither lobe nor a happy middle, however, is what a good biblical hermeneutic is about.
The fact is that this objective supernatural phenomenon of which I speak dynamically creates its own method and meaning for the subject. If it’s kept in view, it continually pushes out the incorrigible implication of the text into man’s mind and spirit without the need for constant reflection on self or reasoned systems. In short, the method and meaning are itself some kind of appearance of God before the reader sees anything pertaining to its testimony and elucidation by another.
This diametric, “method and meaning,” is different here than saying “there is a proposition and a means of determining or constructing that proposition.” For a Christian, a “method” is not a human method, and “product” is not a human product except in the sense of it being human intelligible. They are prepared for integration into his noetic condition and ability, but not determined by it, having come from a place far away which has created the possibility of a noetic condition and ability in which an essential moral act can take place.
A proposition, like “Jesus is Lord” or “Paul understood sin as debit,” are concepts; creative products of the mind. It’s the end, or conclusion, of the result of a chain of evidence, other propositions, data, potentialities, theories. The concept is a construct used to represent those, not those predicates themselves.
Concepts are not bad. They are the most precious abstract, mundane thing humans have, and make him human. But they are only tagging in symbolic fashion a group of predicating information as a totality so that a thought can be built to form a greater one made from more knowledge and allow him a trans-human end.
A belief is an arrangement of concepts, but emerging from and controlled by various sources of real information. The proposition or concept “Jesus is Lord” is not a supernatural object of worship, it’s only a marker for a number of data points pertaining to displays of that object. These are supposed to support the belief that Jesus is a supernatural object of worship, which are themselves supernatural because Jesus is presumed so. These data points are not your dreams, your feelings, your tradition or anything mundane and unconfirmable by anyone else, because these are not public transcendent displays and open to inquiry and independent confirmation. They need to be “truth,” reality, facts, and have the potential of showing it openly. Therefore, “Jesus is Lord” is a concept which is of a supernatural implication, but is not supernatural evidence or reason, and then can’t be treated as the source of divine epistemic power to independently inspire or carry what Christians call faith.
“Truth,” which is often used for “meaning,” should not be. Although a concept, “Truth” has not a fundamental meaning, in the biblical sense, of a construct or a mere voluntary conclusion. It’s one of those essential concepts that can be removed without destroying a mind.
“Meaning” is what reality implies to consciousness, not what it is. “Truth” is fundamentally that which corresponds to reality, and reality is something objective that invades subjectivity but not created by it.
Meaning and Truth is ultimately a phenomenon, an appearance of an object or fact otherwise hidden if It does not make itself known, and induction and induction are human methods for consciously connecting the cause and the phenomenal effect, but only necessary as conscious controls when Truth is put as a proposition, not a phenomenon, where the phenomena controls the process of linking. Because we have lost contact with any sense of an abiding “Truth” which has its own power of persuasion to choose and guide a method of its resolution to the great questions of existence, we confuse “Truth” to mean only a personal construct and confuse a method to it as a universal truth in itself. “Truth” in the biblical sense aligns more with supernatural “method” than with “meaning.” We derive our meaning from Truth, the theophany of God which is objective, not Truth from our meaning, which is morally tied to it but morally voluntary for the individual.
Using “truth” for “method” as I suggest as working interchangeably in biblical hermeneutics, if applied to any other study, will swallow it whole and destroy it. Science,” for example, the method, is in casual conversation put for the truth it is capable of resolving, and in doing so you begin to believe its capabilities unlimited, reaching far beyond what it is capable into metaphysics. Therefore science has become a kind of cultish belief that resembles more the unfounded pagan faiths of antiquity than it does the original aims of the scientific method: it has no revelation of transcendence, but zealously makes pronouncements of them. “God does not exist,” “matter is all that ever was and ever will be.” Extreme objectivity destroying its professed and revered objectivity, where extreme subjectivity is its only refuge.
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