How To Read The Bible - A New Hermeneutic
What Works For Me
When Reading the Bible
by R.E. Slater
August 16, 2020
The Many Worlds of Hermeneutics
I originally wrote this piece as a single composition as I did not wish to have any of it read alone in its parts as each part is necessary for the other part. However, it is a long piece and so, with reservations, I have divided it up for the convenience of the reader. But for those who wish to read it as a whole I have left the original intact and titled parts 1-6. Thank you. - res
PART 3 - A New Hermeneutic
You'll forgive me if I place an abrupt stop here in reciting the fundamental and evangelical history of biblical interpretation and how it developed off the rhetoric of the Textus Receptus or, Received Text, of the Scripture. There are too many books on this subject which have addressed this area from every imaginable angle - some of which I have reviewed here at Relevancy22 under the topics found under "evangelicalism".
My point is, when I was Spirit-led away from the lands of evangelicalism, from the lands of literal thinking and apologising of my Christian faith, I felt an unbounded freedom to explore and approach God and the bible in ways which gave wings to my Christian faith. I no longer needed the worlds of apology. I hungered for the worlds beyond... forbidden to be explored. Along the way I developed a new language and new theologies. All this can be found in the chronologies of my historical journey through Relevancy22.
My language has wandered in-and-out from old to new paradigms as I digested and learned new ways of thinking about God and the bible. Along the way I am learning how to connect the dots and interweave its many pages-and-ideas back inwards-and-through one another. Only recently this past week have I felt I completed this first, primary, task of preliminary studies. And only this present week do I feel I have permission to repeat my journey using the new words and ideas I have learned over so many long years of studying. In many ways, August 2020, has become my watershed moment. Its grand of the Lord to allow me to complete this arduous trek but more daunting now than ever to speak-and-say this new Christian faith rightly to the generations coming forward.
The Jesus Hermeneutic of Love
What I do wish to say is that the most helpful way I am learning to re-read the bible in its depths is the very one I wish to think and talk about of my God, Lord and Saviour. These methods, or overlays to the bible, are not attributable to any one type of bible interpretation or form of hermeneutic. No, on these subjects I have found there are many ways to read and interpret the bible beyond the literal, historic, grammatical, and contextual interpretations I have grown under.
The most helpful overlay which God by His Spirit has been building into the foundations of my heart, head, and voice, is of God's wondrous love. What?? God's Love?? Yes, soooo simple. This "revelation" became my "waking moment" in spirit-renewal and revitalization. By simply substituting God's Love as the central component in my faith and epistemology of knowing I could remove the incipient biblicism (bible idolatry) which had crept in under previous faith cultures.
When I read the bible, I read it through God's love, and not through what I think the bible is saying to me under some interpretive scheme or doctrine. God's love is my primary theme. It is my primary doctrine. It is my principle hermeneutic. I think of God and His Word through the knowledge that God is always, and ever will be, a God of love.
In the center of my Christian faith is no longer the bible but a God of Love. When the bible tells of God saying to His people Israel to go to war and kill their neighbors I now know these "heavenly" commandments did not come from God but from the interpretive reasoning in the skulls of Israel's priestly teachers and appointed kings.
Let us assume then that God's people - those well-meaning Christians embracing the Trumphian age of the Church (or anti-church, as I and other Christians are tending to think of today's conservative evangelicalism) - are hearing God in the way they had been taught to think and reason in accordance with conservative doctrines centering the bible on sin and judgment. How then is white Christian nationalism any different now than early religious nationalism then?
The ancient Israelites claimed they were believers and followers of God yet violence is found throughout their narratives and legends. So too the conservative evangelical churches of today. And yet, one thinks Christians of this sort are but hearing God as they were wont to hear God. Because of this church history is filled with the church killing believers and unbelievers; excluding themselves from society; insulating themselves from the sinful world; and, acting exactly as the world with the same secularity they declare themselves impervious too.
There is then no difference between the Christian faith of the new testament from the Jewish faith of the old testament. The sacrificial blood of Jesus teaching love of neighbor and shunning of legalistic religion is absent today's church. The real church of God loves, binds up wounds, works towards societal policies and politics of goodwill and well being. It shuns false teachers, it ceases to listen to slanderers perpetuating evil as good, and stops societal injustice by measuring wisdom over partisanship.
Jesus as Ethic, Message, and Center of the Christian Faith
When God said to love one another and not kill God meant it. To show this God showed how seriously He takes Love as a guiding principle in living life. God, who could be no other than He really is - as the God of Love - showed us how to read and understand Himself when He came to this earth as Jesus showing us that He is a God who Loves.
Now you might say this is too simple. How can the Love of God cannot be the center of the Christian faith and doctrines? But yet it is. And this is the task we must clothe ourselves of as we speak of the bible and its ancient words to others, including God's wayward church. That the center of our Gospel of Jesus is the Love of God.
When reading the bible we must learn to read it through God's Love. The bible itself is no longer the center of our private or churchly interpretations but God Himself is the center to all thoughts and testimonies. Jesus said "I AM the Word of Life." So let it be. The Word of God has come before us. We have beheld His light and it is the Light of the Life and Love of God" (paraphrased). God, the author of the bible, is our new center to any and all future interpretations of the bible. It couldn't be any more simple.
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John 8:12 (ESV) - Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
John 14.6 (NASB) - Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.
John 1:4 - In Him was life, and that life was the light of men.
John 1:14 - The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John 1:17 - For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
John 10:9 - I am the gate. If anyone enters through Me, he will be saved. He will come in and go out and find pasture.
John 11:25 - Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me will live, even though he dies.
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1 Corinthians 13:13 - And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
1 John 3:1 - See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
1 John 4:7 - Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.
1 John 4:8 - Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
1 John 4:16 - And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
1 John 4:18 - There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
1 John 4:19 - We love because he first loved us.
Galatians 2:20 - I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Jeremiah 29:11 - For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
Jeremiah 31:3 - The LORD appeared to us in the past, saying: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.
John 3:16 - For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
John 15:13 - Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
Psalm 86:15 - But you, Lord, are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.
Psalm 136:26 - Give thanks to the God of heaven. His love endures forever.
Romans 5:8 - But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Deuteronomy 7:9 - Know therefore that the LORD your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments.
Zephaniah 3:17 - The LORD your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.”
Ephesians 2:4-5 - But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.
1 Peter 5:6-7 - Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. 7 Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.
Romans 8:37-39 - No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
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