Popular dispensationalists tend to use hermeneutical shortcuts like “plain sense” or “face-value” meaning. I say “popular” in distinction academic dispensationalists who do the grammatico-historical spadework.
To see the limitations of this approach, let’s take a couple of examples. Consider the phrase: “Shooting the bull.”
What’s the face-value meaning of that phrase? When we hear that phrase, should we form a mental image of Buffalo Bill with a rifle?
No. The phrase is idiomatic for small talk.
Or consider the statement: “He took a bath.”
What’s the face-value meaning of that statement? Well, it could mean he washed himself in a bathtub. Or it could mean he lost a lot of money in a bad investment.
Which meaning is the face-value meaning? Which meaning is correct?
There’s no way of telling, from the statement itself, which meaning is correct. That’s context dependent.
Analyzing the meaning of the words and their syntactical relationships won’t tell you what the statement means. You need to be able to put that statement in a real-world context to know what it means.
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