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

Corrupt Hermeneutics: Red Flags

Here are some of my giveaways that what we are reading is not compatible with the original Christian view of revelation.

The medieval interpretive Quadriga, we have “Moral” and “Anagogical,”  “Literal,” “Allegorical.”  There is not a  whole lot to see here, but these methods, giving a compact summary of what is possible, suggest one for sure, which is not one of them.

Most of the time when the Quadriga is brought up its to comment on the allegorical method, by far the most divisive today. Of course, the issue of seeing anything that does not appear there naturally is always going to raise the hackles of those that strive for moderation, prudence, and reason in their interpretive efforts. But I think the more important takeaway is the impression that this makes those for whom the Christian revelation is of a character that does not first seem to inspire landfalls of meaning for which our first instinct between us and it must be something like  “remain calm, carry on.”

I also don’t think that a sudden Foxnews newsreel of a billion heavenly beings descending from the clouds all over the world to necessarily call for moderation as our first reflex, with all we know and have been looking for in biblical texts, or to start devising a system by which our understanding of this event will be properly classified. This is not to say that 2000 years after an earth-shattering miraculous event should not give reflection to interpretive classifications and systems, but it does mean that if what we received was really believed to be unequivocally a demonstration of the fact of God and his nature interpretations first reflex is an undiluted awe and a retelling of what occurred to induce it.

It seems to me that any progress in our reflection to this event that is not a simple effort to connect the dots between what was written and what has occurred is not really an expression of the awe of witnessing a supernatural event, but doubt, such that it must be controlled by reason and artificial, conceptual filtering structures if it is to be raised to a  level of cognition which is capable of understanding it. This is then quite different than a supernatural event changing and controlling meaning, as the relation of God to his people. It’s about people changing and controlling the event and then God.

I’m not nitpicking, I’m only describing the difference between what Christ and the apostles laid down and what we have done in response, which is not a simple reaction but various and sundry expressions of engagement with our own power to produce awe, if you will, instead of using God awe. The fact is not to be minimized that Jesus the Messiah and those immediately after him who were witnesses of him never devised such categories and never thought it even necessary, for example, for future generations to understand that when they said “scripture” they were talking about the Old Testament, and particularly of its revelation of Jesus and the consequences of his fulfilling of prophecy. Why do we di differently?

This seems like a minor complaint until we continue to see a pattern.

Corrupt Hermeneutics: Noun Flattening and Beyond

Conceptual flattening or noun norming words are mostly an unconscious attempt to conflate ideas with multiple biblical dependencies into one that inexorably carries none.  But these are words that can’t function in a biblical context unless modified by another which represents not a religious concept or name but a refers to its specific biblical, miraculous predicate. If we don’t deliberately supply what the apostles and Christ took for granted, done providentially to set a context for a test of our faith by motivation, in a world where “science” means “truth” or “truth” means “me” we will lose even the most crucial concept to human cognition: God.

The interrogative strategy of Jesus, who himself was to faith the equal of the prophetic revelation concerning him, asked messianic questions, or related a parable or incident, holding back that proper answer and awaiting it from the hearer who could see it. This strategy was to keep faithless out of the Kingdom, those who are unmoved by this supernatural scriptural phenomenon proving God while drawing those who were already prepared. Christ’s divine opinion is that if you don’t know his answer, or don’t believe it, speaking religiously and holding it back, either consciously or unconsciously, is the same and its and His denial.

Our strategy of faith destruction is making sure we disobey Him.  Our hermeneutics are like people on the street crying “meaning, meaning, meaning.” It is not until you approach them and ask them for this meaning that you find a blank stare and empty hands. Turning from you, they continue to shout “meaning, meaning, meaning”, meaning that they have none except “meaning.” We have meaning, or meaning is very, very close at hand for our examination and choice, but we prefer “meaning” to Christ and his special, non-conceptual one.

In this internal or external norming sin. Because words are not speciated by their informational authorities upfront, the reader is not compelled to take them as such unless the writer makes a separate effort to do so. But the informational authority for faith in the New Testament is “prophetic faith” not “faith.”  “Christ” is taken as the last name of Jesus, when it means “Messiah,” an informational authority pointing to the same prophetic revelation. “Righteousness” is flattened as a righteousness of physical doing, performing something physically, the deontological equivalent being the belief in a religious proposition when in the New Testament righteousness is more like the same: a righteousness around the handling of prophetic knowledge, around doing things and believing things with and for the sake of the fulfilments of God by his Messiah Jesus. “Word of God” is not a general Word or any biblical word you wish that turns you on or helps you make it through the night, but that same specific Word. Again, it’s more like “The Prophetic Word of God pertaining to Jesus Christ.”

The flattening by Jesus was one thing. Its to give the truth a deliberate shield from these others. This other one is done by the carnal mind because there is a default tendency to use what we already have instead of going out and acquiring something else. What we have is culture, numerous seemingly easy paths to any goal, many voices of instruction, conversational shorthand, personal bias in speaking only about what is appealing and self-affirming instead existentially challenging, good feelings and intellectual stimulation. A flattened concept with no phenomenal authority closes down what is intended to be an open, focused transcendent pathway and simultaneously opens another one inside the psyche that brings up instead an unlimited horizon of self-actualizing possibilities without such authority.

Discussions of Methods in theology are further presented as general principles that need not be taken for granted to refer to the transcendent world as science does with the idea of “gravitation” to the temporal world because transcendence is not of our natural experience and knowledge and is against our natures. In theology, there must be built-in, referential indicators of an ultimate and demonstrated supernatural Truth or it will be thought of like something originating and ending in the temporal world alone. It is not the occult, the New Age, heterodox beliefs, alcohol and drugs, sex or a general conception of “sin” that is killing us, its certain kind of sin, and one that is normally undetectable and seemingly innocuous, which is the sin of maintaining of prosaic language in talk about the greatest and most transformational event in human history.

For example, “Historical Grammatical.” Historical-Critical.” ‘Reader Response.” These biblical interpretative approaches are differentiated by trivial and identical presuppositions on how to frame if to frame at all, supernatural phenomena. I ask the reader to think back to any work on hermeneutics he has ever read. None refer to that phenomena, only to a broad, scientific principle of reading something correctly, and if a particular “meaning “is suggested it is a meaning that is as flattened as its symbol. For example, “Cross” means “sacrifice” or “love” or “death” or “altar” or “evangelistic work where one accepts the possibility of one’s death.”

Within these methods are “hermeneutical circle” and “hermeneutical spiral.” The person and text are at the center, constantly referring to individual parts bringing in all relevant parts to capture Truth as a whole, or meaning moves from text to context. The Rabbinic form is “text to text.” For Gadamer its dialogical, questions and answers in his “Fusion of Horizons.” Derrida and many others: “Deconstruction.”

In the same pattern, there is another anti-Christian urge in hermeneutics: not only to leave an ultimate, categorical meaning open to carnal choice but then to forcefully set it within the bounds of the world in a precise but corrupt place.

The Enlightenment established the pattern for all later attempts: the goal of hermeneutics was the author’s intent. It is not difficult to see that the “intent of the author” is not beholden to a certain author or a certain intent. You supply it, and since it applies to anyone it was accordingly never about the intent of the author of the revelation who is God, and certainly not the historical and revealed Messiah. It means whoever is writing the book. The author is James, Isaiah, and Luke. This forces discussion of revelation impediments as sources of meaning rather than revelation itself, becoming only people speaking as the author, and then if people under a cause of inspiration that can degrade into autosuggestion or hallucination, confused again by time, culture and language.

Now, the author is not important, only the self-actualization of the text as it serves the emotions of the reader.

“In short, a true hermeneutics was rendered impossible by an approach that failed to let the text speak for itself. The hermeneutical switch from the text to the individual resulted from a switch of focus from the accessibility of the text  (in terms of a method for interpreting a text) to inquiry into the structure of understanding itself. The focus of interest has thus shifted from the text to the self, and the significance of this shift is still being explored. The result is that the reader is. now seen as the creator of meaning rather than the text, and the act of “coming to understanding” has become an individual self-discovery, more than a process of decoding textual meaning. The author is now seen as entirely removed from the text or the discovery of meaning.” (Hermeneutical Spiral, p. 467).

Osbourne is dead on, but what our “conservative” divines are not understanding is that a solution to radical subjectivism should not have been “let the text speak for itself.” Please don’t misunderstand, I am not saying that the rule of letting the text speak for itself is not true. That is, in fact, my number-one rule. I am saying that we are allowing a prosaic rule stripped of the fundamental biblical context to pretend its competency to authoritatively drive a discussion about the meaning of metaphysical events. Those events are the nexus of meaning, not ideas of any kind, especially supernaturally gutted ones.

This not to say that the text should not be left to speak for itself, and it does not mean that the true meaning should not be understood and applied personally. We must affirm both. It means that “let the text speak for itself” contains many self-defeating choices as to what the text is and how it speaks. Because none of them are necessarily implied in the innocuous idea “let the text speak for itself,” it’s a certainty that the ultimate nature and biblical source of “text” and the ultimate nature of “speak” as it was originally understood could be destroyed by this rule. It has to be “let the prophetic revelation of Messiah speak for itself” because that contains and forces the incorrigible supernatural phenomena of history in the cause of God’s promise and the effect of Christ’s fulfillment of that promise as the one aim of a hermeneutics of God, not man.

You see that we are trying to imitate science here. You can’t do that with Christian metaphysics because our metaphysical investigations and discoveries are dependent upon the reality of an alien artifact, entirely foreign to this world, in which all meaning pertaining to ultimate things is contained.  If you don’t believe it you can’t be called a Christian in any sense, and to be Christian means that the prophetic of the Messiah is where the faith is described, delivered and clarified.

Christian Hermeneutics is far from a matter of illumination from reason, a process or feeling, which are human-insular. Since it does not naturally belong here it is possible to closet it, deny it’s real, ignore it, store it somewhere hidden, put it behind a glass display case or lose it entirely. You can’t lose matter, mind, sensibility, reason, Devils Tower or Sirius B. If you don’t constantly use messianic prophecy as your lens to meaning and refer to it in your key ideas, Christian meaning will be the equivalents of matter, mind, sensibility, reason and the Devils Tower. This is the first rule of Christian Hermeneutics, not “let the text speak for itself” or “what does this verse mean to me?” or “reader response,” or “the intent of the author.”

Hermeneutics, to one degree or another, is, and rightly so, attempting to attack the perceived problem of subject and object in the search for meaning in a text. Subject gets in the way or there is too much of an objective bias that misses the reader. The problem, we will see, is solved in the agreement between an objective supernatural phenomenon of scripture that penetrates a supernatural locus within man designed by God to do nothing more than accept and process it according to its rules, which are not necessarily fully understood.

The identification of this object has been lost, and therefore such methods and schools are formed and employed.  There is no need for any of them, and, quite hidden to us, they destroy Christian meaning instead of bringing it out. The apostolic period never found the need to establish a definition of school of hermeneutics and we should stop and reflect on why this was as a response to an original understanding of the Word of God, instead of looking at that period as an ignorant and primitive state that was improved only by modern, effectively anti-supernatural hermeneutics.

Please look at these articles:

What is the Word of God?: A Prophetic Think Tank

Christ and the Noun Norming of Transcendence: Passing by Nehushtan

Matthew 5 and the Adultery of the Heart: Passing by Nehushtan

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