by Jimmy Stephens

Yeah, I agree with @Spicy, this is intended as a hermeneutical problem of the criterion.

So @Sachairi, we would all agree you should definitely look to the historical and cultural milieu of a work to interpret it. But that is to endorse a hermeneutical principle.

HP: As a rule of thumb, read a work through the lens of the original audience.

And @sukka 1P57 is asking, why should we use HP? More specifically, he’s saying there’s a dilemma. Either we get HP from Scripture or it’s extrabiblical. Each of these horns would seem to have an issue.

If HP is extrabiblical, then the Bible isn’t our ultimate authority; sola scriptura is false. Because ultimately we get our principles for interpreting the Bible from elsewhere and subject the Bible to that knowledge.

If HP is from Scripture, the problem is a matter of order. In order to get HP from Scripture, you need to interpret Scripture, which requires HP. But in order to get HP, you have to first interpret it from Scripture. So we seem to forever stuck, right?

However, I think there is a more general problem at work here. It’s that our interpretations are determined by prior beliefs (hermeneutical ones). Since our interpretations are always determined by our hermeneutical beliefs, how can we ever update, revise, or even check our hermeneutical beliefs?

There’s hidden here two problems still. One is how interpretation is possible. Here, the answer is that you need hermeneutic knowledge that is an interpretation; an interpretation that is your basic hermeneutics.

Humans come to possess this through God’s system of revelation. A person who meets the Bible for the first time approaches it as a creature made in God’s image, subject to a chain of cultural inheritance that goes back to Adam or the New Adam.

But there is an intimately related problem. How is good interpretation possible? An unbeliever can possess the requisite knowledge to make interpretations and yet always misinterpreting God where it counts.

This works very similar to the way our desires change. Some of my desires never change, or at least, they only change in terms of their outlet and their interaction with other desires (e.g., the desire to be happy). Other desires come and go, like the desire to play with action figures or the desire to attend a certain school. All sorts of factors make impact to strengthen, weaken, recapitulate, etc., desires.

Similarly, our hermeneutic commitments are hierarchical and personal. They are always the catalyst now for a new form of hermeneutical position tomorrow. Some of them are analytical beliefs subject to new evidences. Some of them are part of one’s religious identity, and so require nigh-unfathomable kinds of experiences to shake.

At any rate, you need the original Speaker to open the eyes of your heart. At the ultimate level, if someone is not born again by the Spirit, they will only ever be able to interpret things well enough to be a fake church member.

Entire books have been written on the relevance of being an image to our ability to read/understand text, and I tend to spend too much time mimicking them poorly. So I’ll stick with the simpler answers.

One big relevance is that it tells you what texts can possibly mean. Texts can only be about God.

I do not mean texts can be about God only, so they mean nothing to do with anything else. I mean that there are only God-addressing texts.

Further recommendation:

 

http://spirited-tech.com/2021/06/02/the-problem-of-the-criterion-a-christians-thoughts/