Bible Reading Principles - in big words

When we come to the Bible we pray for a virtuous hermeneutical spiral (not a vicious circle) in which our theological frameworks are brought to texts of Scripture and repeatedly refined by them. We cannot avoid bringing our presuppositions, but God knew that when he wrote this book for us and his Spirit is our teacher.

A hermeneutic of suspicion is required when we come to the Bible, but we are to be self-suspicious, not sceptical or closed to God or his Word but seeking to be transformed.

Something of what N. T. Wright calls broadly an epistemology of critical realism and narrowly a ‘hermeneutic of love’ is required.

Each satge of the process [of reading] becomes a conversation, in which misunderstanding is likely, perhaps even inevitable, but in which, through patient listening, real understanding (and real access to external reality) is actually possible and attainable.

(The New Testament and the People of God, London, SPCK, 1992, p64, indebted to Ben F. Meyer on ‘critical realism’.)

Our Canonical reading and use of the whole Bible must be multi-perspectival. As Ward says:

In sum, a principle of ‘canonically limited polyphony’ is proposed, which would establish three necessary conditions, collectively forming a sufficient condition, for the ‘naming’ of the God of revelation. [1] God must be named polyphonically. To name him in only one way would be to view and know his reality in only one dimension. [2] And God must be named by a limited polyphony. To name him in limitless ways is not to name him at all. [3] And to seek to delimit the polyphony by any other criterion than by the canon of Scripture is to risk naming a God after our own image…. Since no one can ever grasp the full polyphonic self-revelation of God at one time, no one can ever succeed in fully nailing God down. (Only idols are susceptible to nailing down; they even require it, sometimes (see Isa. 41:7).

(Word and Supplement: Speech Acts, Biblical Texts, and the Sufficiency of Scripture, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p296)

Trust that’s perspicuous!