Principles of Hermeneutics

Principles of Hermeneutics

There is a very important distinction that we must note at the beginning here. The Bible is the word of God. God speaks in the Bible. The voice of Jesus, the Good Shepherd, can still be heard (John 10:3-5). He calls His sheep through the word of God. His sheep hear His voice, and they follow Him. If we listen to Scripture we can hear the ipsissima verba, the very words of Jesus. Hearers will not hear the voice of Jesus in sermons, however, unless we preach that word. If we just read the word of the text and then preach about something else, the voice of God will not be heard in our preaching. Most sermons, unfortunately, are only sharing some opinions " rather than proclaiming the Word." Sermons are powerful when we proclaim the word, not when we merely share some thoughts.

We may take James3:l-12 as a text by way of example. We have studied it, we have compared the original Greek with the vernacular; we understand each word. The big word in this chapter is "tongue", used once in verse 5, twice in verse 6, once in verse 8. The word-pictures in this chapter, and in James generally, are from farming or rural life-horses, bridles, bits, wild animals, birds, snakes, aquatic creatures. Even the special word used for "sin" in verse 2 ("for we all sin") really means "stumble, trip” it is usually describes a horse that slips in mud or sand.2 Other farming words are "trees," "forest fire," "spring of salt," and "fresh water." Marine vocabulary is sprinkled in as well-"ship," "rudder" (for guiding a ship), "pilot," and "making a straight course." The vocabulary is rustic and very descriptive. There are twelve hapax legomena (words used only once) in chapter 3, indicating the literary craftsmanship of James.

Conceptual Overview

Hermeneutic streams of thought view language as constitutive of social reality rather than as merely representational. The groundwork for this social constructionist view was laid with the critiques of logical atomism and logical positivism represented by Bertrand Russell and the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus). Logical atomism's tenets included the suggestion that elementary propositions are either true or false, they are mutually independent, the semantic names they are constituted of represent simple items in the world called “objects,” and that worldly states of affairs are composed of combinations of these objects. Ordinary language philosophy, which included the later work of Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations), severely challenged these tenets. He suggested that there is no fixed essence denoted by words, as logical atomism held, but that rather words acquire their meaning through use, within particular language games (as Wittgenstein suggested) and within particular speech acts (as elaborated by J. L. Austin and John R. Searle).

Early Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics has had a rich and varied conceptual history. One of the early treatises on hermeneutics, Friedrich Ast's Basic Elements of Grammar, Hermeneutics, and Criticism, sets out the goal of hermeneutics as the understanding of the spirit of ...