A Call for an Adventist Hermeneutic

[Gregory Matthews]

See:

http://spectrummagazine.org/article/2016/11/01/viewpoint-make-2017-adventist-year-conscience-and-religious-freedom

In brief the above author says:

Here, in brief, are the four concrete steps toward the creation of a reformed paradigm concerning Adventist leadership and ordination:

• Seek a more united and a more biblically adequate Adventist hermeneutic that can help us understand more of the religious freedom and cultural dimensions associated with the theology of Adventist leadership and ordination.

• This would provide a really helpful foundation for a comprehensive theology of Adventist leadership, ministry, and mission as well as the theology and practice of “ordination.”

• Foundational ecclesiological principles guiding our practice of Adventist leadership, ministry. and mission including “ordination” could be established from such a theology. (I have critiqued the currently accepted foundational principles underlying the theology and practice of ordination elsewhere).

• With the above three steps in place, Adventists may move confidently into a renewed phase of policy development concerning ordination and credentialing.
•  

[Gerr]

Adventist  hermeneutics?  Might as well have Adventist Bible too!

[Gregory Matthews]

Hermeneutic:  This word has a range of meanings and people form differing religious traditions understand it differently.  Wikipedia has a good article on this.  See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_hermeneutics

In brief, Wikipedia says below.    But it goes well beyond that and is informative to me.

Gerry, with my understanding of hermeneutics, I will have to say that it is essential that Adventists have a good understanding of hermeneutics.   And I disagree with your comparison to having an Adventist Bible.

Biblical hermeneutics is the study of the principles of interpretation concerning the books of the Bible.

[debbym]

Hermeneutics are very powerful in determining how you derive is truth from scripture.

i have observes people deriving truth from scripture in a very superstitious way, or a very dramatic free association of one scripture to another, selectively ignoring other text.  i have seen approaches as if the whole bible were such a mysterious strange concoction of expression anything anyone wants to think or believe the bible says they will find it.

I have also seen this with people who approach the bible to utterly ridicule the possibility the scripture even has truth.

There are many ways to find oneself in a ditch and off the road, and getting nowhere in understanding God's thoughts towards us communicated in Scripture.

[Gail]

Totally agree, Deb! There can be so many variables that apart from the Holy Spirit it is amazing to get any agreement!

[hch]

Isn't that what the Jews did? Didn't the Jews have a Jewish system of Hermeneutics. The Scriptures could only mean what the Scribes said it meant and no more. Of course, when Jesus came and He did not fit into their Hermeneutical interpretation of Scripture, they missed His First Advent. Is that what is being proposed?

[Kevin H]

I have so many that I want to quote. No Gerry, an Adventist hermeneutic is not the same as having an Adventist Bible. I wanted to try to describe the difference and Debbym took my thoughts and put it far better than I could. And hch, that is not quite what the Jews did. They actually had a wonderful system of Hermeneutics.  Their problem was 2 fold: First they had lost much of the historical and cultural events that could help them so a better exegesis to give them a more proper analogy. Second, they did not do enough study of the Bible.  In the Jewish school system in Jesus' day the children would first learn to read and write and basic skills and learn the Bible and when they were done with this system they were probably at the equivalent to a 6th grade education in our standards. But then they could either go on in other fields, or else go more into religion and study with great Rabbis. The problem was that once reaching that stage of education they sadly got away from the Bible and began focusing on the thoughts and applications and arguments and disagreements of the great rabbis. These developed into traditions and speculations upon traditions.

Mrs. White talked about the conflict with Mary, Jesus and the educational system of the time. While most "uneducated" Hebrews had at least the equivalent of 2 to 4 years of college by our standards (basic skills and the Bible and moving on into trades) some out of the way towns, such as Nazareth only had the first 6 years of education. They never expected the headlines to read "Local Boy makes Good." The "wickedness" of Nazareth was not like Sodom or Times Square. It was that they thought they were limited with their 6 years of schooling Sometimes when we deal with inferiority we turn it into contempt to look down on those who we see as better than us. So Jesus probably had the 6 years of synagogue schooling, but after that the big city rabbis wanted him to come where they could get him into their advanced education and there the conflict would be.  

So getting to their hermeneutic, I believe that I follow their basic hermeneutic system only that I focus more on the Bible and live in a day where archaeology and linguistic studies gives us a stronger base in exegesis.

They understood that the texts had a local application. But that it is the eternal word of God and thus cycles around again where the principles of earlier texts can be drawn into an analogy for what we are facing today. Both the Rabbis and Paul would talk about making an analogy.

Hermeneutics are things such as Do you see the Bible as historical or do you not see it as historical. If you see it as historical then you can ask whether or not they have a fundamentalist mindset towards the passage or not. And  you can ask if the person sees the text that we have today as coming directly in it's final form exactly as we have it today, or if different sources were edited together.

As for me, I believe that the Bible is historical. I tend not to be a fundamentalists. I tend to see the Bible produced similar to Mrs. White's books with her having a vision and then studied it out and presented the information to us in the best she could.

I believe that we should start with an exegesis of the passage. What did it mean to the local people. How could the work have been finished then and how could God have set up the kingdom at this time? What went wrong? What were the issues the people then faced. Are they similar to what we are facing.

I'd be worried about an Adventist  hermeneutic like how the Adventist Theological Society says not to use any higher criticism. Granted higher criticism has been used in bad ways and deserve Mrs. White's criticisms about how it is misused. But in his book on Old Testament Theology which is a text book in many seminaries (not just ours) Elder Hassel said that while there is evidence of editing, we need to pretend that it is not there. We have to treat the text as if the form it is today was it's original form.

Sadly this does not fit. There are passages in scripture where we have to treat very carefully to try to make it fit this hermeneutic. For example, the book of Amos has two very different writing styles. The one writing style has curses on Israel's neighbors and the 7th nation is Israel (the northern kingdom). And the book is focused on the sins of the Northern Kingdom and how they were going to face exile. The second writing style is based on the first but places Juda in the 7th spot moving Israel to # 8 (which affects the writing style) and it applies the message of the one writing style to Judah. Indicating that there was a prophet named Amos who came to the Northern Kingdom and spoke against them and their need to repent or face exile. Someone about 100 years later in Judah took Amos' message and said "This is not merely our cousins to the north. We are now equally as wicked and if we don't repent we likewise will go into exile. " 

I know that I will be stepping on some toes here, but we have the story of Isaiah of Jerusalem dealing with issues in his day, which included the wonderful reformation of Hezekiah. Then there is Hezekiah's illness, and the visitors from Babylon. If Hezekiah shared with them is true riches, his God, they could bring that back and Hezekiah's reformation could have covered the whole world leading in a few Generations to good king Joshua.  But sadly he only showed them his stuff. They went home with memories of his stuff and eventually they came back for that stuff.  But then in following chapters we find two different messages. Deuteronomy 4 predicted that the exile could be the last days. So we find a section of Isaiah sounding like William Miller on the imminent coming of the promised one. Then we find chapters no longer focusing on the imminent coming of the Messiah but about being back in the land and setting up the post exile society and focused on the temple. Whether we want to believe that it was all predicted by Isaiah in Jerusalem, or if there was the Isaiah of Jerusalem and his school of students carried on into the exile where another prophet arose first wanting to preach the message on how the Messiah can come to lead them back home from exile, but since the work was not finished had to deal with the great disappointment of going back and starting another period of time in the land before the Messiah comes. (Just as Daniel and Ezekiel do). Being aware of these sections help us in reading the texts.

[Gregory Matthews]

Kevin Straub writing in the post that I have hidden above, made a reference to an interesting comment and reference to an article by Dr. Canale.  I believe that article is important and that it should have its own thread.  So I have moved Kevin's comment to a new thread that I have titled The Adventist Mind.

  I encourage you to go there, read the  cited article and comment on it.

Gregory Matthews

 

[Gerr]

On 11/24/2016 at 8:23 AM, Gregory Matthews said:

Hermeneutic:  This word has a range of meanings and people form differing religious traditions understand it differently.  Wikipedia has a good article on this.  See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_hermeneutics

In brief, Wikipedia says below.    But it goes well beyond that and is informative to me.

Gerry, with my understanding of hermeneutics, I will have to say that it is essential that Adventists have a good understanding of hermeneutics.   And I disagree with your comparison to having an Adventist Bib

Of course, Adventists should a good understanding of hermeneutics!  But have our own Adventist hermeneutics?  We might as well have an Adventist scientific method too?  For a hermeneutics, i.e.  Biblical hermeneutics is the study of the principles of interpretation concerning the books of the Bible,  to be valid, it must be applicable to Baptists, Catholics, and everyone else who who wants to study and understand the Bible!

[8thdaypriest]

36 minutes ago, Gerry Cabalo said:

Of course, Adventists should a good understanding of hermeneutics!  But have our own Adventist hermeneutics?  We might as well have an Adventist scientific method too?  For a hermeneutics, i.e.  Biblical hermeneutics is the study of the principles of interpretation concerning the books of the Bible,  to be valid, it must be applicable to Baptists, Catholics, and everyone else who who wants to study and understand the Bible!

Amen!  Good principles of study into the Scriptures, should apply to everyone, on every continent. 

I think folks here at Club Adventist, often do a good job of pointing out individual situations where poor principles have been used.

[Kevin H]

On ‎11‎/‎26‎/‎2016 at 2:56 PM, Gerry Cabalo said:

Of course, Adventists should a good understanding of hermeneutics!  But have our own Adventist hermeneutics?  We might as well have an Adventist scientific method too?  For a hermeneutics, i.e.  Biblical hermeneutics is the study of the principles of interpretation concerning the books of the Bible,  to be valid, it must be applicable to Baptists, Catholics, and everyone else who who wants to study and understand the Bible!

On the one hand I agree with you. What ever hermeneutics we use should be valid for all. It needs to be a valid approach. On the other hand we know that some churches do not accept any hermeneutic that sees the Bible as historical. Other churches, like maybe a number of Baptists, hold to a very strictly fundamentalist presuppositions. Some churches think the issue is God showing his power and flexing his muscle and loves to interpret miracles in the most dramatic way possible and loves it when natural laws appear to be broken. (For example in Joshua 10 it can be translated either that the sun did not shine; or that the sun did not move. Guess which possible translation they prefer?) For Adventists our hermeneutic needs to allow for the possible translations and interpretations and allow room for members with the different views. Also we are focused on a God who works in cooperation with his laws. (This is why we have the health message and hospitals instead of faith healers.)

Some have a hermeneutic where they have to see creation of the universe 6,000 years ago. We need to be fair to creation but fair to the issues of an old universe where the issues of Lucifer and the great controversy leading to the creation of this earth. And what does the Bible imply about creation as opposed to what tradition says about it. And we need to be fair to ancient genealogies, not read in them more than what they are actually saying and don't expect them to be a modern Greek genealogy.

We need one that does not use higher criticism  to divide up the Bible into a bunch of myths; but we also need to be fair to the evidence of editing and research and prophet's having schools where his students have worked with his writings like the white estate works with Mrs. White's writings. (I already mentioned about how the book of Amos shows a clear two person piece, a message from Amos directly dealing with the apostasy of the northern kingdom, and a much different writing style that applies Amos' message to the southern kingdom dealing with issues from 100 years later. And how we find in Isaiah a message from Isaiah of Jerusalem, and an application of his message to the imminence of the Messiah coming to lead the exiles home from Babylon and for the world to end [as we also find in Deuteronomy 4] and then the excitement changing to a great disappointment in realizing that the Messiah was not going to lead a second great exodus back but that there was to be a return to the land and set up things to prepare for eventually the Messiah to come. [As we find in Daniel and Ezekiel]. To have all of this and those sudden changes and great disappointment makes sense for a different prophet from the Isaiah school living at the end of Babylon with the hopes and great disappointment, rather than having Isaiah of Jerusalem predicting the imminence of the Messiah coming to lead them home from the exile then say "Just kidding.")

These are issues about the Bible that everyone should answer, and some of these (such as the relationship between God and his Law, and an old universe where the great controversy developed) are especially important to a Seventh-day Adventist as it would not be to SOME Catholics or Baptists (although hopefully there would be Catholics and Baptists who would find this hermeneutic as something that they can use.)