‘So, what’s it like’, she asked, ‘this biblical interpretation business?’ I was teaching a course on biblical interpretation for our church-based theology school, and I had a pretty good idea what she meant. She wanted to know whether this would be a dry and studious exercise, or whether it would actually be fun – as I’d promised. The words ‘biblical interpretation’ don’t generally strike a chord of joyful enthusiasm in church members, so I assured her that I had every intention of making it fun – an adventure even. But on this occasion her question caused me to pause, and ponder it from a different angle, more allegorically. Biblical interpretation is like… what?
NOT A BRIDGE, BUT A JOURNEY
I remembered my seminary days, when the imagery used was of a great cultural divide separating the context of the biblical writers from our contemporary context today. We learned about bridging the ‘hermeneutical gap’ – and it wasn’t just a cultural gap. It was an enormous expanse encompassing time and history, geography, social structures, language, worldview, and simply a way of life so far removed from our twenty first-century Western world (with its technology, freedoms, democracy and individualism) as to seem almost unbridgeable. And hermeneutics? Now there’s a word to strike fear into the hearts of the bravest congregation. I avoid using it, but what it represents is deeply important.
