NOTE: take note of the date of this post. Any posts on the Bible Studies themselves written before this date cannot assuredly follow the principles laid out in this page.
I have a certain hermeneutical approach (big words for a Biblical interpretive filter) similar to Peter Enn’s “Incarnational Approach” that says that Scripture is 100% God and 100% man, like Christ. My hermeneutical principle says that “Divine motivation supersedes human limitation; human limitation reveals Divine motivation.” Let me explain.
Incarnational Analogy
God had certain goals he wanted to accomplish in both Revelation of Himself and Redemption by Himself. The Bible is His expression of His goals accomplished in the Revelation of Himself, and Christ is the expression of His goals accomplished for Redemption by Himself. They both take the same form – Incarnation. Divinity had goals to accomplish and for one reason or another He decided to use humanity as the means by which he accomplished those goals. Divinity is infinite, humanity is finite. This means that something is necessarily lost in the incarnation of God’s Revelation and Redemption, but the one thing we can be sure is not lost is the goal for which God incarnated in the first place.
“Human Limitation Impedes Divine Motivation” view
Most “liberal” scholarship has focused on emphasizing the human limitations through which God expressed Himself. Showing that much of Genesis could very well be re-writes of very similar Babylonian myths; Jonah and Job seem to be purely fictitious accounts; it doesn’t look like the Hebrew language was even invented before the time many conservative scholars think most of the Old Testament was written; it looks like most of it was written while the Israelites were in Babylonian captivity trying to maintain an identity; so on and so forth. They stress the human limitations and think this effectively does away with Divine motivations.
“Divine Motivations Disregards Human Limitation” view
Most conservative “scholarship” tends to work off the same principle but doing the opposite. Amazingly, both liberals and conservative think the same way: if the Bible has this many “human marks” on it, it must not be the Word of God. Human limitation supersedes Divine motivations. They ignore or ineffectively explain away the human side of things and stress the Divine expressions and say the liberals must be wrong.
My Approach
Divine motivation supersedes human limitation
I take a middle approach. Divine motivation supersedes, but does not disregard, human limitation. There are very real, evident, historical human limitations present in the Bible – Old Testament and New. What this reveals about us is the principle by which we judge the reliability of the Bible. It’s laughable that both conservatives and liberals establish this modernist, enlightenment definition of truth where the Bible can only be the Word of God if it fits a certain factual mold. We act as if we will only believe it if it meets and exceeds the standard of the very type of knowledge the Bible spends all its time mocking. Is God any less God if Jonah is symbolic and written by Israelites in exile years after it supposedly happened? Is historicity of certain events the standard by which we judge the existence and authority of God and His Revelation? No.
Human limitation reveals Divine motivation
The struggle then is to search diligently and humbly for the Divine motivation behind every text. Be sure to know and communicate the human limitations, but use those as the means through which the Divine motivations of the text are expressed. Jonathan Edwards unpacks this idea well in “Treatise on the Religious Affections.” He says: “Thus to understand texts of Scripture, is not to have a spiritual understanding of them [over-allegorizing or finding new originally unintended applications]. Spiritually to understand the Scriptures, is rightly to understand what is in the Scripture, and what was in it before it was understood: it is to understand rightly, what used to be contained in the meaning of it, and not the making of a new meaning. . . Spiritually to understand the Scripture, is to have the eyes of the mind opened, to behold the wonderful spiritual excellency of the glorious things contained in the true meaning of it, and that always were contained in it, ever since it was written; to behold the amiable and bright manifestations of the divine perfections, and of the excellency and sufficiency of Christ, and the excellency and suitableness of the way of salvation by Christ, and the spiritual glory of the precepts and promises of the Scripture, etc., which things are, and always were in the Bible.” To put it simpler: any true understanding of Scripture is getting back to the true original Divine intention of its writing. At first this seems like the conservative approach mentioned above, but the reality is much more tenuous. The problem we encounter in this principle is that (just as in the Incarnation of Christ), the human limitations are purposefully in place to actually help accomplish the Divine intention and goal of the Scripture. They cannot be separate. When you downplay the human limitations, you downplay the very means by which God providentially ordained to reveal Himself thus downplaying Him.
Conclusion
I distinguish between the intentions of the writer (the human) and the intentions of the author (the Holy Spirit), but both are important, and both necessarily reveal the other. In each text of Scripture, there is an eternal “point” God wanted to get across that preexisted the writing of that text. God chose and ordained whatever given means and limitations to get this point across – a Babylonian creation myth, a piece of Second Temple Jewish cultural literature, a Gnostic gospel, or an Athenian statue to unknown God. He will travel as far as it takes to meet us where we are and communicate Himself in a way we can comprehend. The art of Biblical interpretation is the battle to see the pre-written, pre-creation, eternal Divine motivation for the Scripture through the chosen limitations of the human expression. This means being versed in both the intentions of the writer and the Author, and in that seeing Christ – the end and climax to which all Scripture points.
So when reading any of my Bible studies, I hope to provide a separate page on each book’s site with a sort of “Introduction” to that book discussing the various overarching “human limitations” in the book. I will then continue into meditations and comments on various parts of the book with that “Introduction” being in the background of all my writing. If it plays a big part in a given verse or passage, I’ll bring it up again, but most of my time will be spent in the “Divine motivation” realm, trying to unpack the beauties and realities of the Gospel that are present in every text of Scripture just as God designed and desired from eternity past to be revealed in His Holy Book, the Bible.
I hope this has been helpful even though it was more necessary for me just to work these ideas out in my mind. Probably the best thing you can do if you wish to see my interpretive method is to just see it in action by reading the blogs.
