Hermeneutics

Universal access to the whole NT was not realistically possible for a very long time after the books which comprise the NT were gathered together in one volume. How many early believers could study these works, let alone own them?

Among those who like to criticize Dispensational Premillennialism one encounters a popular mantra: The OT needs to be interpreted by the NT. Since the NT introduces Jesus Christ, and the Apostolic writings unpack the doctrine of Christ, one must go back to the OT with the NT teaching in hand to unlock God’s meaning.

This forward movement in scriptural narrative is twinned with an inherent purpose or teleology. Neither the eschatology nor the teleology in Scripture must ever be separated from our reading of the Bible as biblical theology.

Here are six principles for understanding the Bible (and its “big story”) the right way. These six reasons are why many Christians believe there will be a 1,000-year millennium, and that the nation of Israel has a key role to play in God’s plan to bring in Paradise 2.0

Read Part 1.

There’s an argument among conservative Christians over whether we should translate the Bible “literally”—by which the proponent usually means “word for word, so much as is possible in translating from one language to another”—or “loosely”—by which the proponent means “concept for concept.” The technical term for the latter is “dynamic equivalence.”

I’ve noticed that our culture seems to think that conservative Christians believe that the Bible should be interpreted literally. I say “our culture seems to think” this because the expression occurs frequently in popular media, whether journalistic or social. I’ve even seen some conservative Christians describe themselves that way.

That’s unfortunate.

Nobody today or in the past has ever interpreted the Bible literally. We’re not Amelia Bedelia.

There are at least five reasons that progressive dispensational (PD) represents a departure from a normative hermeneutic (literal grammatical historical) and reading of the Bible. The first two pertain to methodology in arriving at conclusions, and the latter three have to do with theological conclusions which are not exegetically derived.

The Complementary Hermeneutic Is a Departure from Fixed Meaning

Blaising and Bock recognize that methodology is definitive in the formation of PD, and acknowledge that PD is the result of a methodological departure from the hermeneutic of classical and revised dispensational thought, as they observe that,