Hermeneutics – Page 3 – What Does This Mean?

The Word of God Changes Everything

Encore Post: A good book, a great movie, a stirring song or a work of great art — all of these have the power to take you away to another place, another time, worlds away from day-to-day life. You can escape into them and find an energy there to face life for a little while longer. Yet even the best of them, even the most inspiring, do not change your world at all. Everything is still where you left it and you have to go on.

The Bible is different. It is not just any other book. It is like no other book. The Bible is God’s Word, breathed out by his Holy Spirit in the same way that God created the world. (1 Timothy 3:15-17) By God’s Word, the Holy Spirit creates faith in our hearts. (Romans 10:14-17, John 20:30-31) This faith takes hold of the promises of Holy Scripture, trusts the Gospel it hears when the Bible is read and lives by it. (Romans 1:16-17)

This is the reason why Christians have read the Bible in every worship service since Christ founded it and why the Hebrew and Jewish believers before them have read and meditated upon it for 3500 years. Great literature and works of wisdom authored by human skill can be very helpful to us when we want to understand the world and God who made it. These writings can just as easily confuse us, faith to provide insight and often completely mislead us. They often miss the mark when they assume that by our wits we can understand God. But we cannot.

Because Holy Scripture is God’s own message, it can be trusted to be true, where every other message can fail us. It teaches us when we do not know what to do. It is eternal and never-changing and so is a solid base on which to build our lives. It helps us see through the complications and confusion of life in a sin-filled world. The Word of God changes things, reviving our souls, giving us joy in times of depression and comfort in times of grief. (Psalm 19)

The very center of the message that the Scripture proclaims is the Cross. God saw us lost in our sins and loved us. Not willing to see us die forever, He came to seek us, find us, lay down his life to save us. In Jesus he took all our sin and guilt upon us. As the Lamb of God bore it all away. On the cross, he paid the full debt due because of it. Rising from the grave, he broke the power of sin, death and devil forever. That is why we gladly hear the Word of God, give thanks to him for it and use its power to obey it and serve him gladly.

The Four Ways of Interpreting Scripture

Encore Post: Pastor Smith has spoken a little about the four fold sense of interpreting Scripture. The Alexandrian theologians (at least some of them) followed this four fold sense method. Antioch held just to the literal or historical sense.

Those four are: Literal, Allegorical, Tropological, and the Anagogical senses. Below, I will try to explain them. I hope it proves to be a helpful primer. I do not believe I have a full grasp on each of these senses, but again I hope this gives some idea as to how the senses of interpretation were used to “get deeper into the meaning.”

The literal or historical sense is applicable to both a historical event and literary text. The literal sense is emphasized insofar as it historically grounds subsequent spiritual interpretation. Every subsequent sense was supposed to be connected then to the literal sense.

The allegorical sense then is used after the literal sense. The allegorical sense has been argued to go all the way back to St. Paul, even Jesus uses allegory in some of this parables. The allegorical sense of Scripture has been understood as referring to the mysteries of Christ and the Church as prefigured in Scripture. So then in the allegorical sense the object of allegory is properly Christ and the Church. Another principal of the allegorical sense in light of the Old Testament is that the object of allegory in reference of the Old Testament is a reality in the future.

The tropological sense applies a Scriptural text to the moral life. This sense, historically, has been a contributing factor for Christian anthropology and spirituality. The tropological and allegorical senses are united because while the allegorical sense refers to Christ and Church, the tropological sense refers to the individual members of the Body of Christ.

Finally the analogical sense is the eschatological sense of Scripture that looks forward to the consummation of everything in Christ at his final coming. In light of this we can kinda begin to see how these senses work all together. For instance, the anagogical sense represents the fulfillment of allegorical sense.

This was all supposed to find Christ, but more often than not, theologians went much further afield. This is why Luther was very weary of it. The medieval Church came up with some fanciful interpretations that had absolutely nothing to do with Christ.

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
St. Peter’s Lutheran Church
La Grange, MO

Martin Luther, St. Paul and Righteousness

We think of Martin Luther as a great reformer, a writer and a pastor. And he was all of these things. But his call was as a professor. His first lectures were on the Psalms, Romans, Galatians and Hebrews. To do these well, he spent many hours reading commentaries and the writings of the Church Fathers and the scholars of the Middle Ages. Once in awhile, he found himself not quite understanding a passage or a word. He spent months trying to understand some words. When he finally came to understand repentance, he described his excitement as if it unlocked all of Scripture for him.

Over Five Hundred years ago, as he was preparing to lecture on Romans, the great scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam, published a Greek New Testament (1516) with Erasmus’ own Latin translation with it. It was then he came up against Romans 1:17: ” ‘For in it [the Gospel] the righteousness (δικαιοσύνη) of God is revealed from faith for faith” Everything he read said this righteousness was the quality of God that moves him to condemn sinners. He just couldn’t understand how that was good news.

His friends urged him to lecture on the Psalms again, so he began teaching the book in March and April of 1519 — five hundred years ago. While he was working on his lectures in his tower study, he couldn’t get Romans 1 off of his mind. Then his eyes fell on the context: “The just shall live by his faith.” All of a sudden, it occured to him that the righteousness of God is not the holy nature of God, but it is God’s gift of righteousness that Christians receive by faith as a free gift for the sake of Jesus’ death and resurrection. It was as if God had opened the gate of heaven for him. God’s righteousness is a gift God gives by his grace.

Luther has a way to go before he fully understood theology they way Lutherans do today. Yet God had revealed to him the central teaching of the faith. He would never forget his tower experience.