Biblical Hermeneutics

[Ed. note: this is our seventh installment in the Bell Ringer of excerpts from the important Nordskog Publishing title Rebuilding Civilization in the Bible: Proclaiming the Truth on 24 Controversial Issues. 

Though necessarily theological and somewhat technical, we urge our readers to take the time to read through. Few issues in our time are more important than this one.]

TOPIC 2

DOCUMENT 2 

Biblical Hermeneutics

Introductory Comments

As soon as we had created the “ICBI Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy” in 1978, Dr. Norman Geisler and I both realized at our Summit Meeting (and we convinced the other board members) that some liberals within evangelicalism, who did not seem to have the same honesty and integrity in theological matters as we had, would begin claiming falsely that they believed in the Bible’s inerrancy (because now it was the “politically correct’ thing to claim) and begin to say that they just wanted the right to be able to “interpret” the inerrant Bible the way they felt it should be interpreted. This would be their means of getting around the clear teaching of Scripture on certain points they did not like and then continue on their pathway towards more and more relativity regarding the Bible. 

So Norm and I suggested to our Executive Committee and other scholars at the Summit Meeting that within a year or two we needed to call another conference and create another document stating the affirmations and denials for true Biblical hermeneutics. We did just that and the team met again near Chicago in the spring of 1982 and hammered out “The Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics.” This document on Hermeneutics is important for today because these basic principles appear to be almost unknown by many serious Bible teachers who seem to allow their imagination to impose itself upon the Biblical text to make the Bible say what it does not really say. Within evangelicalism there seems to be a great “over-tolerance” for allowing any Bible teacher to have the Bible teach almost anything he wants it to teach. 

Though these four hermeneutic principles immediately following are not officially included in the ICBI statement on hermeneutics, they are compatible with the thought and flow of the ICBI hermeneutic statement. These are general principles to which most conservative Christian exegetes and pastors would agree and by which they already operate. We include them here for the personal help they may be to any Christian reading this who has not had a class on exegesis or hermeneutics (the science of interpreting any piece of literature, sacred or secular). I learned these principles from Dr. E. J. Carnell at Fuller Seminary in the 1950s. 

  1. The New Testament interprets the Old Testament (without contradicting the Old Testament). 
  2. The Epistles interpret the Gospels (as a more complete revelation of Jesus’ life and teaching). 
  3. The systematic passages interpret the incidental passages. (Any single verse anywhere needs to be interpreted within the context of whatever systematic, more full explanation is given regarding the point being made in a single, stand-alone verse). 
  4. The literal passages interpret the symbolic passages. (We look to the literal passages to tell us what the symbolic passages mean rather than vice versa. However, a symbolic passage may enrich and further develop a literal passage, but may not contradict it or overpower it.) 

DOCUMENT 2 The Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics Copyright 1978, ICBI. All rights reserved. Published with permission from the Dallas Theological Seminary Archives, repository of ICBI Archives. 

ARTICLES OF AFFIRMATION AND DENIAL

ARTICLE I

We affirm that the normative authority of Holy Scripture is the authority of God Himself, and is attested by Jesus Christ, the Lord of the Church. 

We deny the legitimacy of separating the authority of Christ from the authority of Scripture, or of opposing the one to the other. 

ARTICLE II

We affirm that as Christ is God and Man in one Person, so Scripture is indivisible, God’s Word in human language. 

We deny that the humble, human form of Scripture entails errancy any more than the humanity of Christ, even in His humiliation, entails sin. 

ARTICLE III

We affirm that the Person and work of Jesus Christ are the central focus of the entire Bible. 

We deny that any method of interpretation which rejects or obscures the Christ-centeredness of Scripture is correct. 

ARTICLE IV

We affirm that the Holy Spirit who inspired Scripture acts through it today to work faith in its message. 

We deny that the Holy Spirit ever teaches to anyone anything which is contrary to the teaching of Scripture. 

ARTICLE V

We affirm that the Holy Spirit enables believers to appropriate and apply Scripture to their lives. 

We deny that the natural man is able to discern spiritually the Biblical message apart from the Holy Spirit. 

ARTICLE VI

We affirm that the Bible expresses God’s truth in propositional statements, and we declare that Biblical truth is both objective and absolute. 

We further affirm that a statement is true if it represents matters as they actually are, but is an error if it misrepresents the facts. 

We deny that, while Scripture is able to make us wise unto salvation, Biblical truth should be defined in terms of this function. 

We further deny that error should be defined as that which willfully deceives. 

ARTICLE VII

We affirm that the meaning expressed in each Biblical text is single, definite, and fixed. We deny that the recognition of this single meaning eliminates the variety of its application. 

ARTICLE VIII

We affirm that the Bible contains teachings and mandates which apply to all cultural and situational contexts and other mandates which the Bible itself shows apply only to particular situations. 

We deny that the distinction between the universal and particular mandates of Scripture can be determined by cultural and situational factors. 

We further deny that universal mandates may ever be treated as culturally or situationally relative. 

ARTICLE IX

We affirm that the term hermeneutics, which historically signified the rules of exegesis, may properly be extended to cover all that is involved in the process of perceiving what the Biblical revelation means and how it bears on our lives. 

We deny that the message of Scripture derives from, or is dictated by, the interpreter’s understanding. Thus we deny that the “horizons” of the Biblical writer and the interpreter may rightly “fuse” in such a way that what the text communicates to the interpreter is not ultimately controlled by the expressed meaning of the Scripture. 

ARTICLE X

We affirm that Scripture communicates God’s truth to us verbally through a wide variety of literary forms. 

We deny that any of the limits of human language render Scripture inadequate to convey God’s message. 

ARTICLE XI

We affirm that translations of the text of Scripture can communicate knowledge of God across all temporal and cultural boundaries. 

We deny that the meaning of Biblical texts is so tied to the culture out of which they came that understanding of the same meaning in other cultures is impossible. 

ARTICLE XII

We affirm that in the task of translating the Bible and teaching it in the context of each culture, only those functional equivalents which are faithful to the content of Biblical teaching should be employed. 

We deny the legitimacy of methods which either are insensitive to the demands of cross-cultural communication or distort Biblical meaning in the process. 

ARTICLE XIII

We affirm that awareness of the literary categories, formal and stylistic, of the various parts of Scripture is essential for proper exegesis, and hence we value genre criticism as one of the many disciplines of Biblical study. We deny that generic categories which negate historicity may rightly by imposed on Biblical narratives which present themselves as factual. 

ARTICLE XIV

We affirm that the Biblical record of events, discourses, and sayings, though presented in a variety of appropriate literary forms, corresponds to historical fact. 

We deny that any event, discourse, or saying reported in Scripture was invented by the Biblical writers or by the traditions they incorporated. 

ARTICLE XV

We affirm the necessity of interpreting the Bible according to its literal, or normal, sense. The literal sense is the grammatical-historical sense, that is, the meaning which the writer expressed. Interpretation according to the literal sense will take account of all figures of speech and literary forms found in the text. 

We deny the legitimacy of any approach to Scripture that attributes to it meaning which the literal sense does not support. 

ARTICLE XVI

We affirm that legitimate critical techniques should be used in determining the canonical text and its meaning. 

We deny the legitimacy of allowing any method of Biblical criticism to question the truth or integrity of the writer’s expressed meaning, or of any other Scriptural teaching. 

ARTICLE XVII

We affirm the unity, harmony, and consistency of Scripture and declare that it is its own best interpreter. 

We deny that Scripture may be interpreted in such a way as to suggest that one passage corrects or militates against another. 

We deny that later writers of Scripture misinterpreted earlier passages of Scripture when quoting from or referring to them. 

ARTICLE XVIII

We affirm that the Bible’s own interpretation of itself is always correct, never deviating from, but rather elucidating, the single meaning of the inspired text. The single meaning of a prophet’s words includes, but is not restricted to, the understanding of those words by the prophet and necessarily involves the intention of God evidenced in the fulfillment of those words. 

We deny that the writers of Scripture always understood the full implications of their own words. 

ARTICLE XIX

We affirm that any pre-understandings which the interpreter brings to Scripture should be in harmony with Scriptural teaching and subject to correction by it. 

We deny that Scripture should be required to fit alien pre-understandings, inconsistent with itself, such as naturalism, evolutionism, scientism, secular humanism, and relativism. 

ARTICLE XX

We affirm that since God is the author of all truth, all truths, Biblical and extra-Biblical, are consistent and cohere, and that the Bible speaks truth when it touches on matters pertaining to nature, history, or anything else. 

We further affirm that in some cases extra-Biblical data have value for clarifying what Scripture teaches and for prompting correction of faulty interpretations. 

We deny that extra-Biblical views ever disprove the teaching of Scripture or hold priority over it. 

ARTICLE XXI

We affirm the harmony of special with general revelation and therefore of Biblical teaching with the facts of nature. 

We deny that any genuine scientific facts are inconsistent with the true meaning of any passage of Scripture. 

ARTICLE XXII

We affirm that Genesis 1-11 is factual, as is the rest of the book. 

We deny that the teachings of Genesis 1-11 are mythical and that scientific hypotheses about earth history or the origin of humanity may be invoked to overthrow what Scripture teaches about creation. 

ARTICLE XXIII

We affirm the clarity of Scripture and specifically of its message about salvation from sin. 

We deny that all passages of Scripture are equally clear or have equal bearing on the message of redemption. 

ARTICLE XXIV

We affirm that a person is not dependent for understanding of Scripture on the expertise of Biblical scholars. 

We deny that a person should ignore the fruits of the technical study of Scripture by Biblical scholars. 

ARTICLE XXV

We affirm that the only type of preaching which sufficiently conveys the divine revelation and its proper application to life is that which faithfully expounds the text of Scripture as the Word of God. 

We deny that the preacher has any message from God apart from the text of Scripture. 

This article is an excerpt from Dr. Jay Grimstead and the late Dr. Eugene Clingmans’s Nordskog Publishing book Rebuilding Civilization on the Bible: Proclaiming the Truth on 24 Controversial Issues.

© 2022 

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
No comments yet.

Leave a Reply