Interpreting the Text of Scripture

Textual Criticism

How do you interpret Scripture? Many people in the church today don't understand that there are a number of methods for doing so. Which critical method gives us the most promise for attaining a clear interpretation of Scripture?

Generally speaking, the questions asked in biblical theology have to do with the preservation and transmission of the biblical text, including in what manuscripts the text has been preserved, their date, setting, and relationship to each other, and what the most reliable form of the text is; the origin and composition of the text, including when and where it originated, how, why, by whom, for whom, and in what circumstances it was produced, what influences were at work in its production, and what sources were used in its composition; and the message of the text as expressed in its language, including the meaning of the words as well as the way in which they are arranged in meaningful forms of expression. This is what brought about different types or styles of criticisms.

Historical Criticism: When the text is obscure, scholars attempt to discover "what actually happened" to help clarify the narrative. This is done by noting discrepancies in parallel accounts, examining secular history material, noting whether some events actually happened, recognizing supernatural occurrences, "invented" stories by the church, and other methods. In doing this it also will draw on the data of archaeology and other secular historical sources. Within this criticism it will also use the following:

Source Criticism: Source criticism attempts to identify the sources used in writing the synoptic gospels and identify their relationship to the gospels. For example, where there are duplicate accounts of a story, an attempt is made to explain a literary connection or an underlying source. Advocates of source criticism suggest the writers used a common source to which they adhered but felt the freedom to add detail and "were not worried about precision in historical details." The problem with source criticism is twofold: it tends to ignore the divine element in inspiration and acknowledge error; it is built on conjecture without any demonstrable proof of underlying sources.

Form Criticism: This endeavors to get behind the written sources of the Bible to the period of oral tradition, and to isolate the oral forms that went into the written sources. To that extent, as this attempts to trace history of the tradition, it is also known as traditional criticism.

Redaction Criticism: This is a study of the activity of the biblical authors in shaping, modifying, or even creating material for the final product which they wrote.

A basic problem in historical criticism is that it approaches the Bible like any other book and acknowledges the possibility of error; in this sense it is incompatible with the doctrine of biblical inspiration. In addition, it doesn't take the whole text into consideration and context and will often focus on small details in the text (atomism).

Literary Criticism: If historical criticism is concerned with the historical circumstances in which a text was written, literary criticism is concerned with the text as a finished piece of writing. The questions here are not so much how the text came to be written or what we can know from outside the text to account for what is in it, but what we can learn from what is said in the text itself. In this sense, the text constitutes a 'world' in its own right and as such serves as an object of investigation in all its aspects.

The New Literary Criticism: This has a lot of similarities with "literary criticism" but as time went on scholars became less and less interested in what the Scriptures actually said and became more interested in what might lay behind the text, or what "really" happened. In this method there is more of a focus on the reader and what is taking place as opposed to the text and what actually happened in historical context.

The most promising method for a right rendering of the text is "historical" criticism without a doubt. Historical criticism seeks to interpret the Scriptures by studying the text in its original historical-grammatical context in order to discover what the author's original intent was so that timeless principles can then be discovered and applied to a contemporary setting. We must first ask the question "what did it mean then?" This interpretation must be historical, grammatical, contextual, and literary and then we must compare that with other Scripture. After which, we then compare our traditions, reason, experience, and even emotions. Then we can formulate the timeless principle that we can apply in the 21^st century. I have great concern and reservation about the other views as it conflicts greatly with the doctrine of inspiration. Not to mention in the "New Literary Criticism" it seems to me that you can make the Bible say anything you want it too. We must remember that all heresy came from people interpreting the Bible the way they wanted it to say. How often I have heard in someone read a verse and then ask "what does that verse mean to you?" It doesn't matter what it means to you! What did it mean then must be asked first! What mattered was what was happening at the specified time. All right, I'm done preaching.

Bibliography

Carson & Moo, (2005) An Introduction to the NT. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan

Achtemeier, P. J., Harper & Row, P., & Society of Biblical Literature. (1985). Harper's Bible dictionary. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Moody Handbook of Theology