Hermeneutics and Bible Interpretation
June 9th, 2008
A little while ago my wife Larissa received an email from a someone about the dangers of Hermeneutics. It warned that Christians should not be involved in Hermeneutics as it was named after the Greek god Hermes. It said that if we do practice this we will be led astray.
When you look into the term Hermeneutics you realise it is not something we should be worried about. It is just the rules and principles of Bible Interpretation. Hermeneutics uses two main parts to find out what the Bible is actually saying to us - Exegesis and Interpretation.
Exegesis involves looking at the text and finding out a bit about the background of the time of writing and what the author was trying to say to the intended recipients. The whole aim is to come up with a summary of what it meant at the time of writing.
Once this is complete you can move on to the task of Interpreting the text and seeing if it has any meaning for us today. Most Bible text has some transferable meaning and use for our times. Some have not as they were specific for the time of writing. As we are looking at the interpretation side of things we need to remember what the ultimate goal of Biblical Interpretation is to get a plain text meaning.
You might ask why is this so important? Well I believe there are two reasons. The first is to accurately apply the Bible’s teaching to our lives and secondly to correctly teach it to others. The Apostle Paul warned Timothy to make sure he correctly handled the Word of Truth (2 Timothy 2:15). This should be the goal of all Christians and especially those in ministry because when it is not handled correctly people really are led astray.
So if you are worried about using the principles of Hermeneutics and being led astray you don’t need to. You might actually find that it helps you to understand the Bible better and then apply it to your daily life in a more accurate way.
If you would like to find out more about Hermeneutics you can visit Theopedia.com here