> I
> hear this "hermeneutical rules" allow this or don't allow that. I hear this
> from both liberal and conservative each arguing that hermeneutical laws
> require opposite things. I have begun to think that hermeneutical rules
> are merely subjective and are used correctly when your interpretation agrees
> with mine and used wrongly when your interpretation disagrees with mine.
>
> The reason for this subjectivity is that one must decide what kind of
> literature a piece is and the author didn't tell you. Secondly, even if
> something is poetry and normally doesn't relay history, some poems DO relay
> history like the poem written by Gordon Lightfoot on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
> So, I don't think an appeal to hermeneutical rules is very good because it
> is subjective.
I've stayed out of this debate so far because I have nothing to contribute
to it. But I can say that, although he overstates things a bit -- it would
be hard to argue on any hermeneutical rule or principle that the seventh
commandment, for example, means "thou shalt commit adultery" -- Glenn is
exactly correct here about the plasticity of Biblical interpretation.
There's a strong tendency for those committed to a belief or
interpretation to think and say that their particular interpretation --
and their corresponding interpretation or hermaneutical rule -- is
transparent while competing ones are not. This is false.
The deeper problem, for evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, is that
they tend to want to turn the Bible into what someone called a "paper
pope." They do this, I think, because they feel that salvation comes from
believing and observing the Bible. But that is not so. As Jesus is
recorded as having remarked on one occasion, "You search the scriptures,
because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that
bear witness to me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life."
(John 5: 39, 40)
I do not recall reading anywhere in the Bible that one has to believe in
any particular age for the earth or particular mechanism -- whether
naturalistic or miraculous -- by which the earth and the living things in
it came into existence in order to have salvation. People who try to read
this into the Scriptures are, I think, committing a grave error.
Lloyd Eby (Ph.D. in philosophy, and seminary graduate -- although that
proves nothing.)