Exegetical Hermeneutics 101: Interpreting the Ambiguous in Light of the Clear

 I don't know if you have ever taken one of those quizzes that presents a sentence with a single word missing with just a blank where it should be and you have to figure out what that word is by the context alone but the means you are using there to do so are exegetical hermeneutics. By "exegetical hermeneutics" I mean the method of interpretation applied to a text that allows the language used by an author or authors itself to determine the referents, and therefore, limitations or lack thereof, of meaning. 

We employ it constantly when we converse with one another. If I am talking about my pet dog one day and then eating a hot dog on another, and some really savvy academic chap wishes to use it all as his context to interpret my meaning, he'll end up thinking that I either have a pet hot dog or that I must be from an Asian culture.

If you've ever conversed with a JW, you'll know that they tend to use passages about Jesus saying that the Father is greater than He is, and that He has God as His God, and that He's a man, etc. to control those passages that refer to Jesus being divine so that He ends up very less divine than the Father. They do the same with passages that refer to our being saved by works and use them to limit what those passages that refer to our justification by faith can mean rather than vice versa. These are examples of an eisegetical hermeneutic being employed, one where the referents of ambiguous texts are brought into a clear text in order to make the clear texts ambiguous so that they can be reinterpreted and given an interpretation that is legitimized, not absolutely, but enough to leave the hearer without a solid refutation of the falsehood.

In exegetical hermeneutics, however, a particular passage would be interpreted in its own context, with its own referents, and not violated by another context or another context's referents in order to muddy the authorial intent of that particular passage of study. 

What this means is the meanings of individual passages must be determined to be clear or ambiguous all by themselves without any interference from outside contexts. The hasty use of outside contexts are an employment of eisegetical hermeneutics as the methodology disrupts the ability to judge whether a passage is clear or ambiguous in its meaning when isolated within the framework its individual author intended. 

So, for instance, if Paul talks about the resurrected body in 1 Corinthians 15, it violates the authorial intent to bring in a foreign context full of references assigned to the word "body" and read them into Paul's provided context in 1 Corinthians 15. In fact, it even violates Paul's authorial intent to bring in other Pauline contexts, even within the same letter, because it makes ambiguous what Paul has made clear within the closed context of that particular pericope. 

So even though Paul uses the word "body" in 1 Corinthians 12 to refer to the church and not a literal physical body, one cannot bring in that referent to 1 Corinthians 15 prematurely before assessing whether the referents Paul provides in 1 Corinthians 15 are also of the church or are rather of the physical body, etc. Once one determines that the referents are the same, that the meaning is clear or ambiguous, from the context provided alone, it is then, and only then, that other contexts should be compared.

A good example of this is the divorce and remarriage texts in the Gospels. If read alone, as Paul seems to only have Mark, the Gospels of Mark and Luke are clear and unambiguous. It is the Gospel of Matthew that now brings in an ambiguity with an exception of the word porneia that everyone can posit his or her best guess as to what it refers. What exegetical hermeneutics do not allow you to do, however, is to bring the ambiguity into Mark and Luke. Instead, because referents cannot cross over contexts prematurely, what must be done is for the student of the text to come to a conclusion solely about what Mark is saying and then as to what Luke is saying and then as to what Matthew is saying, then determine which text or texts are ambiguous and which are clear, and from there interpret the ambiguous text in light of the clear.

In other words, this means that the clear texts provide the boundaries and limitations for what the ambiguous text might mean rather than vice versa. The reverse is eisegetical, but with the assumption that God does not contradict Himself in the Scripture, and that it must be brought together as one work in this manner and not in some eisegetical methodology that functions as a blender with the outcome being an interpretive mess, the clear passage or passages must provide the framework in which the ambiguous must be interpreted.

This means that if the ambiguous text is the Matthean text, and all must admit that it is since one can interpret it either in harmony or disharmony with the texts in Mark and Luke, then one must not treat it as the controlling text that provides the limitations of the way the others can be interpreted. Instead, the clear texts that do not have the ambiguities within them unless made ambiguous by foreign contexts (either Matthew or other foreign texts not referenced by Mark or Luke in their Gospels) must provide the controlling framework and limit how Matthew is interpreted.

This means that Matthew's exception clause cannot be interpreted in a way so as to violate the clear meaning of Mark or Luke. This leaves one with only the possibility of interpreting Matthew in harmony with the absolute statements in Mark and Luke as well as dismisses any claim that Mark and Luke are not absolute statements (which is a claim only made when one is interpreting the clear in light of the ambiguous and thus ends up changing the meaning of Mark and Luke that exegesis would provide without the addition of that ambiguity). 

If one fails to employ this exegetical hermeneutic, and many have, we will end up with a justification by works, a Jesus who is a creature, a spiritual resurrection without a physical body, and a whole host of other heresies and bad ethics. 

As I've argued many times before, language has a logic to it. It does not violate this logic and neither should we lest we find ourselves confessing to eat our pet Doberman rather than a Ballpark hotdog.

Of Siths and Jedis: The Devil's Path to Fatherhood

 I just watched Return of the Jedi with my kids the other day (believe it or not, they requested it), and something struck me that I guess I just never paid much attention to before. The Emperor (i.e., the devil figure in the movie) wants Luke to kill his father so that Luke can take his place. Now, that part I knew but didn't really ever connect it to the pattern we see in the devil's world of our own. This is the survival of the fittest, where the strong son now shows his right to rule by killing his father. It's a motif in most myths. The patriarchal deity is defeated in one way or another through strength and supplanted by his victorious son who now reigns as the supreme deity. The most familiar to us is Zeus who was an Olympian who defeated his father who was a Titan who defeated his father who was a primordial deity. Survival of the fittest is the pattern of the devil's fantasy because he so desires to murder his Father but cannot, so he places it into the heart of his religious myths in order to express his will. 

Unfortunately, this is the pattern of much of our world and not something merely contained in myth. Many a prince has supplanted their father. The one that comes to my immediate memory is that of Sennacherib's sons pushing a giant idol onto him and then slaying him because he did not name them as his successor. Some sons just do it because they cannot wait to rule by inheriting their fathers' fortunes. The Menendez brothers murdered their parents for a much smaller empire. 

Darwinism, and the atheisms to follow, have argued for a world where killing the strong is a necessity in order to take their place, so it makes sense in the devil's world that the only way to become a father, a true man, is to defeat the person who is father already. This is the devil's rite of passage. This sentiment can be heard in the echo of every rebellious teenage son who wants to rule himself and thinks that when he rules he will do a much better job than his father did.

Many people think that the devil had a big war in heaven with God, as though he tried to kill God, which is a true fiction of the medieval world. In reality, our world is that war. He cannot kill God but he can ingrain in all of God's fallen creatures the drive for the freedom that autonomy brings and allows to rule as one sees fit without the constraints of their father.

But this is not the nature of God's kingdom. The Son in God's kingdom seeks to glorify His Father, to exalt his rule, and in doing so, the Son is exalted to rule. The path to fatherhood, the path to power, is love and submission to the Father, the honor and expansion of the Father and His rule. Unlike the devil who desires that God's rule be blotted out as Zeus subjugated Chronos, the Son seeks to honor the Father; and thus, gains honor through it not by war but by love and a desire to continue what His Father began.

Indeed, God gives the very commandment that the Son obeys in love, to honor one's father. Hence, it is God's desire that fathers be honored and not slandered, established and not supplanted, expanded and not diminished. 

The path to fatherhood is the path to power but the power to do what? How one takes power is defined by what he thinks the power is for. If to honor one's father, the path will expose that. If to honor oneself, the path will bear that out as well.

The world has become filled with murderers because the devil is a murderer, and the first person to be murdered is the one on the throne to which we aspire. Indeed, our culture has all but wiped the father from the face of the earth; but the kingdom of God is not of this world and it is not of our fallenness. Whatever fathers God gives to us in life, and he will give us only a few, let us seek to honor and establish them rather than supplant them through selfish ambition because to honor them is to mimic the Son and to honor our true Father rather than the devil that we have allowed to take his place.

In the end, it is through honoring his father that Luke defeats the devilish emperor as it is through Christ's honoring His Father that allows Him to defeat the devil. If we are to pull the world toward God's kingdom, we must first and foremost understand this in our words and our deeds. Only then will we realize what path we are on and change course before being consumed by the darkside.