“Boy, I just don’t understand how in the world…
That just doesn’t seem like a legitimate mode of interpretation (or method).
Boy, I took a hermeneutics class. I never learned to do that!” Well, that’s too bad.
Maybe the problem was your hermeneutics class instead of John.
You get the New Testament author citing the Old Testament
(let’s just say just generally here) any place in the New Testament.
And there are places you wonder,
“Boy, how in the world did he get that out of that verse?”
And so we’re tempted to think that the New Testament writer’s just making stuff up.
I have found by experience that that is quite a premature interpretation
or a premature conclusion to draw.
Because sometimes what they’re doing is so subtle,
it might depend on a word or a form of a word,
or this word used in conjunction with another word and not this other word over here.
Sometimes what they’re doing is so subtle that it would never occur to us
in terms of method to do what he just did, to do what we just saw him do.
The standard here is not us. We’re not going to sit in judgment on John and say,
“Well, he should’ve taken my hermeneutics class. In my hermeneutics class in seminary,
we were never taught to do that with the Old Testament! So I don't know about John.
He’s just freewheeling out there. He should’ve read this or that book
that we had assigned to us in seminary.
Then he’d know how to use the grammatical-historical method properly.”
That’s nonsense, okay? That’s just nonsense.
We’re not going to sit in judgment on John’s strategy
because John isn’t going to do anything that other writers of his day aren’t doing.
What makes John different is that he had all this time spent with Jesus.
He’s living in a post Jesus context.
So he’s going to see certain things a little more clearly.
But what we’re going to find is that the general messianic character
of what John is doing, others could’ve done the same thing, and did,
even though their methods would not occur to us.
It’s not how we’re taught to do hermeneutics (the grammatical-historical method).
And I’m not here to pooh-pooh the grammatical-historical method.
I use it on every episode of the podcast, okay?
But we have to realize that the rules that we create to help ourselves know
how to approach the Bible did not exist in the first century.
Our rules are not being followed by writers that lived 2000 years ago.
We are trying to understand how to do a particular task.
And unfortunately, the way we teach hermeneutics…
Remember, we just had John Hilber on.
Just the whole thing about relevance theory and semantics and metaphor-over-literal.
You’re not taught that in seminary, either. But that is the way language works, okay?
It just is. Out-of-the gate, by default, most of the time we’re in metaphor mode
as opposed to literal mode. But that is not how hermeneutics are taught.
And that should change. I would like to see that change.
And this is another area where I’d like to see hermeneutics (the way it’s taught) change.
Maybe we would benefit greatly if we as part of a hermeneutics class
studied ancient first-century approaches to the Bible.
If we looked at the Old Testament in the New…
I’ll tell you what happens, just to be bluntly honest here.
People go to seminary. They take the hermeneutics class and their Bible study methods class.
They learn the grammatical-historical method.
They probably learn how to use software and look up things
and count the number of this and the number of that—all these procedural steps.
And then a few of those people will later trickle into Master of Theology programs
or doctoral studies, and then, then the floodgates open.
Then you’re forced to take classes on the Old Testament use by New Testament writers
and you see that the New Testament writers didn’t take our hermeneutics class.
They’re doing something different. They’re not thinking the way about the text
that we were just taught three years ago in our first-semester
seminary class on how to do this.
And I’ve actually seen this. I’ve seen both things.
I’ve seen this just explode people’s minds, like, “This is just awesome.
I finally can understand what in the world is going on in the Bible (this particular passage).”
And I’ve also seen the opposite. “The New Testament writers are just cheating.
This is all contrived and made up. This is not ‘proper method.’
They’re not using ‘proper method’
and so I can’t look at the Bible positively the same way anymore.”
I would say you need to climb down the pole of your elitism at that point.
And I think this would be less of a problem if we just taught people initially
in hermeneutics classes what the New Testament writers actually do
with the Old Testament and how their methods are consistent
with the methodology of their day. What were their strategies?
How did they look at the content? Not “how do we look at the content?”
Those are two quite different things. There should be overlap between those things,
but that’s what typically happens. You get one method of teaching hermeneutics
taught to everybody, and then when you get to your doctoral students,
“Oh, now we’re going to show you what’s really going on.”
I disagree with the methodology.
I have had three hermeneutics classes. In my experience they were all…
One was in Bible college and the other two were at two different seminaries.
And I can tell you right now, what I just described is what happens.
I have seen it over and over and over again.
And what we’ve been trying to do, leading up to this class, is to illustrate
(demonstrate, get it in your heads) how Old Testament content is repurposed—
the subtleties of it, the strategies of it, what the writers are doing.
And that’s what we’re going to do in this whole series.
So for those of you who are either now or maybe at some point later on…
“Boy, I just don’t understand how in the world… That just doesn’t seem
like a legitimate mode of interpretation (or method).
Boy, I took a hermeneutics class. I never learned to do that!” Well, that’s too bad.
Maybe the problem was your hermeneutics class instead of John.
Maybe that’s the answer. And I’m going to suggest it is.