The History of the Bible, Part 3—Interpretation

By the step of transmission, God’s breath, from its intangible reality, was received and recorded as written text, readable and knowable by mankind. The next step, Bible translation, involved the process of freeing the written manuscripts from the confines of their ancient tongues and rendering them into modern languages.

The capstone of receiving and translating the Bible is understanding the intended meaning of its contents. The Bible may be translated into our language but for us to understand what we’re reading, we need the proper interpretation.

God’s Word is food to us (Matt. 4:4), yet for it to nourish us we need the Word to be opened to us, bringing us into proper understanding. Therefore, in Psalm 119:16 and 130, the Psalmist delighted not only in the Lord’s word (Psa. 119:16) but also in the “opening of [the] words,” which “gives light, / Imparting understanding to the simple” (verse 130). Proper spiritual interpretation opens the Word so that we can perceive its proper meaning.

Hermeneutics is the study of the methods or principles of interpretation. It has historically involved precise attention to the grammar and logic of the Bible, as well as to the Bible’s psychological and historical contexts. The goal of hermeneutics is to develop an interpretational key, a governing principle that stands apart from any individual passage, to present the central message of the Bible.

It is necessary to interpret the Bible guided by a hermeneutic key, particularly in rendering challenging passages, resolving apparent discrepancies, and assembling the central message of the Bible developed through various passages. Throughout history, interpreters of the Bible have developed different hermeneutic keys, touching on various aspects of God’s interactions with and activities related to man.

The highest and best hermeneutic should ultimately reveal not only what God does but also who God is according to His intrinsic being.

A major deficiency of written text is its inability to convey the tone or sense of dialogue as fully and clearly as an animate speaker could. For this reason, in the Old Testament time when the Scriptures were read aloud to God’s people, Nehemiah 8:8 tells us that the reading was accompanied by “interpreting and giving the sense, so that they understood the reading.”

Written translation by itself is in one sense an elementary form of interpretation; however, with translation alone, it’s as if we were left with only a transcript of a discussion, without a clear sense of the speaker’s tone, inflection, pacing, volume, even gestures and movements. Such paraverbal and nonverbal elements are regarded by studies of communications as accounting for 90 percent of what is understood and perceived. Thus, we can begin to understand the difficulty; we need not only an accurate translation, but also a proper interpretation to fully grasp the sense of a passage of Scripture.

The hermeneutic study of Scripture involves establishing a solid and “complex set of rules for finding and expressing the true sense of the inspired writers.” Such study can be neither light nor cursory, and while formalizing and standardizing a basis for interpretation cannot eliminate discrepancies among different interpretations, it can expose a host of illogical, irrelevant, or otherwise improper interpretations.

Having an external framework for evaluating passages in a work as complex and as rich as the Bible, which contains the writings of over 40 authors in an array of literary genres, allows us to see a central thought or theme in the Scriptures as a context for assembling the intended meaning of the Word.

The aim of hermeneutic study is to capture the sincere and full sense of each passage of the Bible. Word studies, lexicons, and commentaries are tools used to study several facets of the Scriptures:

First, the language of the text—requiring a knowledge of the original languages of the sacred texts and their grammar and logic;

Second, the context of the text—the relation of a particular passage to its surrounding verses and the overall context of its book;

Third, the psychology of the writer and the historical context;

And fourth, the items of truth discussed by the particular passage, for example, justification, sanctification, salvation, etc., according to their full definition and development throughout the Scriptures.

Then, based on these textual elements, hermeneutics will tend to expound a passage along particular lines of meaning: (1) literal, (2) moral, (3) allegorical, or (4) anagogical (that is, prophetic).

Parallelism, interpreting the Scriptures by means of the Scriptures based on the belief in the unity of Scripture, is another prevailing hermeneutic principle.

All of these approaches to interpretation suggest a viewpoint that underlies the text of the Scriptures, stands apart from individual passages,...