Hermeneutical controls

Stuart: What is your criterion for an appropriate means of exegeting scriptural truth? Is it necessarily the one that is most "scientific"?

SH:

1.I wouldn’t use the word “scientific,” which carries unhelpful connotations. Each field of knowledge has its own methodology which is adapted to the subject-matter.

To outline an answer to your question:

i) One reason we should use the GHM is practical: the GHM is inescapable. Everyone uses it. There is no adequate alternative.

The Catholic or Orthodox will employ the GHM when they exegete the church fathers or conciliar statements or papal encyclicals, &c.

In addition, when the Catholic or Orthodox debate a Protestant, they expect the Protestant to understand their words according to the common literary conventions and cultural assumptions of their time and place.

So they are presuming the GHM even as they dispute it.

When a commenter leaves a critical comment on my blog, he expects me to interpret his words within the shared framework of two 21C English-speakers.

2.Apropos (1), unless an author is writing with the intent to deceive, he wants to be understood by his audience. And in order to be understood, he must take their conceptual horizon into account.

He means what he meant his words to mean, and what he meant his words to mean is suited to what his audience could or could not take him to mean. It takes for granted a common body of beliefs from the past and the present.

Communication would fail unless the author and his target audience are using the same cultural code language.

When we study the Bible, we must make allowance for that fact, and assume the viewpoint of the original author and his implied audience.

3.Among other things, the Bible canonizes a literary tradition. Later Bible writers interact with earlier Bible writers.

As such, there is a great deal of intertextual exegesis in Scripture, both within the OT, as well as between the OT and the NT.

So we can learn from Bible writers how they themselves understood the Bible.

Stuart: Why should I not believe that God intended that "truth" preside in His Church's (whatever that is) pronouncements, rather than the historical-grammatical method of interpretation-regardless of its putative rational superiority?

SH: You should believe it if you have good reason to believe it. But absent a divine promise to that effect, your expectation would be unfounded.

Stuart: I am neither Romanist nor Orthodox but merely wish to know the correct method of establishing scriptural truth.

It seems to me that both the Romanist, Orthodox and Reformed positions take as their starting points propositional statements that one would be hard pressed to justify w/o question begging (for example, papal infallibility in the case of Catholics and sola scripture in the case of Protestants).

SH: I’ve defended sola Scriptura on several occasions at Triablogue.

Stuart: Why should I not consider it inconsistent for a Calvinist to claim Truth can be explicated via manmade means ("proper exegesis") rather than as a God given "brute fact" that needs no rational justification?

SH:

1.That depends, in part, on what kind of truth we’re talking about. By and large, the articles of the faith are not items of innate knowledge. So it’s not a brute fact, like my natural knowledge of informal logic.

Rather, it takes the form of acquired knowledge, and that knowledge is acquired by means of verbal revelation.

Words have socially assigned meanings. Moreover, an author assumes more than he says. He takes for granted a certain amount of background knowledge on the part of the reader. The reader is expected to mentally fill in the gaps.

2.For Calvinism, the dichotomy between revelation and secondary means is a false dichotomy.

Calvinism has a strong doctrine of divine providence. God is the author of second-causes.

God can work through means as well as apart from means.

Stuart: Likewise, can the Orthodox or Catholic believer claim infallibility for the Church w/o assuming it?

SH: Catholicism and Orthodoxy do more than merely assume the truth of their respective positions. They argue for their positions.

To take a Catholic example, just read A History of Apologetics by Cardinal Dulles.

While this is by no means limited to Catholic apologetics, it obviously covers that field.

Dulles is, himself, a Catholic apologist.

Or, to take another example, the current Pope (Benedict XVI) is acutely aware of the fact that given the virtual eclipse of Catholicism in Europe, he and others must make a case for Catholicism.

Over on the Orthodox side of the street, Orthodoxy has spend a lot of time in the past defending its position against schismatics, heretics, papists, and Mohammedans.

More recently, it has also defended itself against Evangelicalism. Cf.

P. O’Callaghan, An Eastern Orthodox Response to Evangelical Claims

J. Stamoolis, ed. Three Views of Eastern Orthodoxy & Evangelicalism.

When, therefore, Catholicism or Orthodoxy gives us reasons to be either Catholic or Orthodox, its reasons are subject to rational scrutiny.

Stuart: Truly accounting for belief seems to me to be as much a problem for those outside Calvinism as those inside.

SH: Yes, each side has its own burden of proof to discharge.