What Hath Hermeneutics to Do with Bible Study?

Hermeneutics is the art and science of interpretation. Most often, in my experience, the word is used to describe interpreting one specific book, as that book presents a wholly unique set of interpretive challenges. That book is, of course, the Bible. Good hermeneutics is good Bible study.

And what is good Bible study? It is, to paraphrase Kevin Vanhoozer, right readers reading rightly.

And that means hermeneutics is impossible to codify completely. There is a science to it, but Bible interpretation involves readers. It’s humans acting. It’s flesh-and-blood (flesh in both major biblical senses) subjects living in specific circumstances, asking specific questions, bringing specific sets of background beliefs, listening to God speak through other humans. And it is therefore, at minimum, as complex as humans are.

Proper biblical hermeneutics is an endless pursuit. Every Bible reader who pursues it will do so until he knows even as also he is known (1 Cor 13:12).

What is the difference between hermeneutics and exegesis?

Bible study means observing, analyzing, and labeling not only

1. various features of the scriptural texts we are reading, but also
2. successful and unsuccessful acts of communication more generally.

Category 1 is exegesis. Category 2 is what we call hermeneutics.

Exegesis and hermeneutics are observable in nature because human communication is part of nature, as it has been given to us by nature’s God. But these two observable things are like colors that blend on a spectrum. My way of distinguishing them is both a little trick of my own invention and something of an attempt to describe the way I see biblical studies practitioners using the two words.

Exegesis, in my understanding, can helpfully be boiled down to the set of grammatical, literary, and other labels we give to observable features of human communication. Perhaps also one might include the methods or steps of interpretation that are commonly taught to Bible students. That’s exegesis. It’s a word that tends to get used only to describe the most careful acts of interpretation, and that tends to pertain to religion and law.

Hermeneutics, in my understanding, is probably the broader category. It’s the theory that overarches our acts of exegesis, the theory that tries to explain successful human communication.

Why is hermeneutics important for interpreting the Bible?

And that means that a hermeneutic of some kind is essential for interpreting Scripture because, above all, we want God’s communication to us to be successful. If the Bible is God’s word (and it is), and if we are both fallen and finite (and we are), then one of the acts of redemption which God’s Spirit needs to perform in all Bible readers is that of guiding us into the truths he has revealed in his written Word.

This is not an easy task, because God in his wisdom made us not just finite but awfully and subtly so. And God in his plan allowed us to become not just fallen but—the same: awfully fallen, subtly fallen. It’s an amazing work of God when someone becomes a right reader; it’s hard for man, empowered by God’s Spirit, to put in the time to read rightly.

And the subject, the reader, is not the only difficulty in the hermeneutical task. The Bible is a big book and a complex one. It is the only book I’m aware of that is considered by anyone to be one book despite containing, in fact, sixty-six separate books—books written in two major languages (Hebrew and Greek, with some Aramaic sprinkled in) over the course of 1,500 years.

And those “books” come in all kinds of genres, some of which we don’t really use anymore. We tell historical narratives like both testaments do, but we don’t encounter much apocalyptic literature like Revelation in our day-to-day lives. We have letters (do people still write letters?), but the semi-open letter, the public letter of the type Paul wrote to various churches—do we encounter such things very often?

The genres come with characteristic literary conventions that we don’t use either. One of the most obvious is the parallelism that is endemic to Hebrew poetry: rhyming thoughts instead of rhyming sounds.

The Bible also tells a story in which God is openly and explicitly advancing a great plan of redemption, and therefore readers cannot simply rearrange the books or chapters of Scripture—like the Qur’an can be rearranged—and expect to catch the meaning of what they read. Bible readers have to know pretty much at all times where they are in the story the Bible is telling about our world, or they’re likely to misunderstand.

How does hermeneutics impact Bible study?

Permit me just a little more theorizing before I get practical. My mind never stops turning on this usually implicit element of exegesis: I think we all necessarily bring into our Bible reading our own general feel for what language is and what successful communication entails.

Not all communication is successful—like the time I told my church’s youth group my one hilarious true story about my clever/stupid comment to a border guard. They all just stared at me. Nary a titter was heard among them. Or the many times I have talked to tech support in a foreign land, and the polite person trying to help me got my tech problem completely backwards.¹

In real life, whenever you can, you adapt to communication failures. You repeat yourself, explain yourself. You provide more background information. And at a certain point, you gain some evidence that your act of communication is successful. Maybe it’s a glint in the other person’s eye or an answer they give to your question or the way in which they anticipate what you’re going to say next.

The authors of Scripture are dead. They can’t shake or nod their heads while you explain back to them what you think they just said. But the Bible is a big book, and if it coheres as a single divine message the way it claims (this I believe with all my heart, Lord help my unbelief!), then good and diligent and wide Bible reading will start to provide some of the same confirmation that good real-life communication does. Paul and James will start to nod at one another; Moses and Peter, too. The story of the New Testament will reveal itself to be the only possible completion to the story of the Old.

What is hermeneutics, and why does it matter? Kevin Vanhoozer explains on Logos Live.

How does hermeneutics shape the way we read the Bible?

I am no specialist, but I have learned from figures in hermeneutics and linguistics to assume a high degree of cooperative intent whenever someone talks to me or writes to me.² I am safe in assuming that the sender wants me to receive and understand the sender’s message. I can also assume that the writers of Scripture were not dummies, that they were internally consistent as authors (Paul in 1 Corinthians won’t contradict Paul in 1 Timothy), and that—because of inspiration—they were consistent with one another.

So the most important practical step I can take to employ good hermeneutics is to get a good and accurate big picture of the Bible. As I have said before, I say now again: The Bible is the story of what God is doing to glorify himself by redeeming his fallen creation. If I come into my Bible reading with that basic expectation, one I didn’t see with real clarity until I was in my early twenties, I will have a place to hang each hat I encounter in Scripture.

• The historical narratives line up reasonably neatly along the timeline of biblical chronology.³
• The wisdom sections of Scripture hang on the creation and fall that constitute the foundation of the Bible’s story: Proverbs can tell me, for example, that in God’s created world things usually work like so; Ecclesiastes can tell me that in this fallen world, things don’t always work out the way they were designed to.
• The Gospels—I was just saying this to my adult Sunday school class yesterday—can now have truly meaningful handoffs from the Old Testament story. I’m embarrassed at how little of this I saw as a young man when I read Mary’s Magnificat before Jesus (Luke 1:46–55) and Zechariah’s prophecy before John (Luke 1:68–79). These two figures believed that they were not seeing God starting a new story but continuing a very old one.

I could most certainly go on, touching every portion of Scripture. If there is just one hermeneutical principle I think most naturally (a) arises out of Scripture and (b) becomes a lens through which to view Scripture, it is that the Bible tells one story.

Is hermeneutics necessary for everyday Bible reading?

I am going to have some kind of big-picture expectation for the Bible. It’s a rulebook. It’s the product of the work of a bunch of drunk monks in the dark ages (someone said this to me once). It’s a physical talisman. It’s a communication of God to my spiritual leaders and not to me. It’s a set of moral stories. It’s a political symbol. Et cetera and more cetera. The Bible is, properly, none of those things (though it contains some of them).

Read the Bible like a rulebook and you’re going to be awfully confused by the judicial killings of the Amalekites by Israel.

Read the Bible like a set of moral stories in which the good guys are GOOD and the bad guys are BAD, and you’re going to be awfully confused by every character who gets any screen time in the biblical movie—excepting Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

Treat the Bible like a physical talisman or a physical symbol, and you won’t read it at all. To actually read it would be a category error.

Literally every day I read the Bible, I employ a hermeneutic, a basic set of expectations that the one story of Scripture will cohere. Without some recourse to that big picture, I am lost.

What are the main schools of biblical hermeneutics, and how might they lead to different practices of Bible study?

Good Christian people do tell the one story of Scripture a little differently from one another. I recently gave a lecture to a seminary class I teach in which I quoted ten different attempts at summarizing the whole Bible. All were different, though they divided into recognizable categories.

I think that probably the most impactful differences that you’ll see in evangelical Protestant hermeneutics⁴ are probably best summarized by the title of a book that is now a generation old: John S. Feinberg, ed., Continuity and Discontinuity: Perspectives on the Relationship Between the Old and New Testaments (Crossway, 1988).⁵ Christians who, to my fallen and finite eyes, sure seem to accord equal reverence to Scripture and to give equal effort in reading it do nonetheless differ on how much continuity they see between God’s methods of dealing with Israel and his methods of dealing with the church. Emphasize continuity between the testaments, and pretty soon, very practically, you’ll be baptizing babies—because the church can be expected to have a covenant sign like circumcision for Israel. Emphasize discontinuity between the testaments, and pretty soon, very practically, you’ll be baptizing only believers—because in the New Covenant of which (gentile) Christians are a part, all members know the Lord (Jer 31:31–34).⁶.

Personally, I have concluded that I am not smart enough to pick The One Hermeneutic to Rule Them All. Faithful Christians seem to be reasonably stable and faithful in their various dispensationalisms (classic and progressive), their various covenant theologies (Presbyterian and Reformed Baptist), and their various mediating positions (Stephen Wellum’s progressive covenantalism, for example). I get pretty nervous when dispensationalists of an older stripe want to relegate the Sermon on the Mount to a future era and cut a fine distinction between “the kingdom of God” and “the kingdom of heaven”; and I get pretty nervous when covenant theologians want to so wrap God’s old covenant promises into his new covenant ones that Israel seems to get lost in the shuffle. (I suppose I also get nervous about the Christians who want to throw all other whole-Bible hermeneutics into the stupidity bin and proclaim their big-picture to be The One Ring.) Most of the rest of the time, however, I forget which kind of interpreter I’m reading. A whole-Bible hermeneutic is important, even essential, but the vast majority of the Bible reads the same at the granular level from each perspective.

Brief excursus: Here are the books that seem to get cited most often from each of the various whole-Bible hermeneutical frameworks:

• Classic dispensationalist: Alva McLain, The Greatness of the Kingdom: An Inductive Study of the Kingdom of God (BMH, 1974).⁷
• Progressive dispensationalist: Darrel Bock and Craig Blaising, Progressive Dispensationalism (Baker, 2000).
• Progressive covenantalism: Stephen Wellum and Peter Gentry, Kingdom Through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants, 2nd ed. (Crossway, 2018).
• Reformed Baptist covenant theology: Pascal Denault, The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology, rev. ed. (Solid Ground Christian Books, 2013).
• Covenant theology: O. Palmer Robertson, The Christ of the Covenants (P&R, 1980).

How do hermeneutical frameworks shape theological conclusions?

At the level of day-to-day Bible reading, I don’t know that the various major hermeneutical framework options I just mentioned make as much difference as their progenitors insist—though I appear to have a minority view and may need to climb out of the stupidity bin. But at the level of theological conclusions, and the confessions and denominations that arise therefrom, these frameworks most certainly have practical ramifications. I do wonder sometimes which is the chicken and which is the egg, hermeneutical framework or theological conclusions? If that were clear, maybe evangelicals could declare a winner and move on.

I’d rather put it this way: Major frameworks embody major tendencies or values. And they’re major because they are indeed found in Scripture. At the highest level of abstraction that I can muster in this redheaded brain, I’d say that paedobaptist covenant theologies tend to value and emphasize the corporate nature of the people of God (hopefully without forgetting the individual); dispensationalist theologies tend to value and emphasize the individual necessity of conversion (hopefully without forgetting the church these individuals form, the one Christ is building). These values can go to seed: Presbyterianism can end up with “halfway covenants” and mixed multitudes; Baptists can end up being so independently minded that they are no earthly good.

Wherever you enter “the hermeneutical spiral”⁸—be it while looking at the forest of the whole Bible or the trees of one biblical passage—I’d just urge you to let both your big picture and your details be correctable by more Bible reading. I think that this kind of humble correctability by the Bible as your standard is the most important thing Protestantism offers to the world, and I suggest that the rise of mediating views between dispensationalism and covenant theology may indicate that there is still a center to be found.

What can I do to become a good Bible interpreter?

In addition to applying a the-Bible-tells-one-story expectation to all your Bible reading, the most practical step you could take to make sure you’re doing proper hermeneutics (exegesis and not eisegesis) is to enter into conversation with good interpreters who can both model the art and explain the science. Hopefully your own pastor is such a one.

It’s the chicken and the egg again, of course: How can you know what counts as a good interpreter until you are capable of forming good interpretive judgments yourself? That is actually a huge question with many possible answers. Pray, of course. Read your Bible, of course. And I’d add, look for fruit at the broadest possible level. Which of the major Christian traditions or denominations or tribes or groups has, in your experience, produced people who know and obey their Bibles and love God and neighbor?

A leading hermeneutical light, Kevin Vanhoozer, has said,

My ultimate concern … is with reforming churches … so that they become the kind of reading cultures that can form readers to inhabit the strange new world that has been brought into being by the gospel of Jesus Christ.⁹

When you enter the exegetical conversation, you are going to land in one or more “reading cultures.” Look around, and keep looking around to see if those cultures are producing good fruit.

Do theological commitments rule out honest exegesis?

One biblical studies academic, a former evangelical, said recently that the conservative biblical scholarship I both turn and contribute to, the kind of scholarship I’ve paid good money for in Logos over twenty-five years, is a massive act of self-deception. It is, he said, “a discursive creation of American evangelicalism.” He argued that if a biblical scholar signs a statement of faith, his scholarship is suspect. Conservative biblical scholars, he says, are “incentivized to lie to you” because the conclusions they draw—about the meaning of Isaiah 53 or the number of temple cleansings described in the Gospels or the author of Hebrews or any number of scholarly and exegetical questions—are at least partly predetermined by already codified evangelical beliefs. Unless someone can follow the evidence wherever it leads, says this PhD in biblical studies, he is no biblical scholar. His exegesis is actually eisegesis.

I’m tempted to reply acidly: So exegesis is what we—in this case, unbelieving scholars who are not bound by orthodox statements of faith¹⁰—say the Bible means, not what evangelicals say it means? But these matters are serious, and I won’t respond acidly. I will say this: I am a conservative evangelical Protestant who was ordained according to a doctrinal statement and teaches for multiple evangelical institutions, all of which have doctrinal statements. Not only do I resent being told that I am incentivized to lie; I regard it as part of my duty to God himself to treat my sixty-six books the way Jesus treated his (then) thirty-nine: “The Scriptures cannot be broken.” I stand with Augustine, who said many centuries ago in a letter to the famous Bible translator Jerome that the Bible cannot err—even though manuscripts, translations, and interpreters can.¹¹

I am unwilling to say that this skeptical ex-vangelical YouTuber scores no points, because interpreters can indeed err, and I am the chief of misreaders. I also grant that I am influenced by various “interpretive communities,” and that mine—the Great Tradition, or lower-case “o” orthodoxy, as embodied in Reformation Protestantism—lacks a perfect God’s-eye view of our own exegesis. We lack it now, anyway. I feel certain that Bible reading is part of the “everything” that Christ will reconcile to himself (Col 1:20).

Do you know what I would like to be my most eloquent argument against online skepticism that good scriptural exegesis can actually and rigorously hear God’s speech in Scripture? You. Christians. Pastors and other Bible nerds. Logos users. Go use this tool I kind of helped make, Logos, to get meaning from Scripture. Let your exegesis guide and correct your exegesis—and then guide and correct you. Let God’s Word, carefully heard, form you into God-loving salt and neighbor-loving light.

Sometimes skeptics get to me: Isn’t pervasive interpretive pluralism¹² an observable fact of our polarized church? Yes, it is. But then I go read Scripture again, and I feel and believe and know that I can’t blame God for this state of affairs. We humans found ways to misunderstand—actually to twist to the point of denying—“You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen 2:16–17). Our hermeneutics failed us when that was pretty much the whole of the ethical section of the “Bible.” Surely falling into sin all those centuries ago didn’t make us better Bible interpreters.

Our fallenness and finiteness mean we will never escape different conclusions about Scripture until that day when we know even as also we are known (1 Cor 13:12). The wheat of good hermeneutics and the tares of bad continually grow together. But take your one, five, or ten talents and invest them in Bible study, and see what fruit—some thirty, some sixty, some a hundredfold—might grow till the end of the age.

Conclusion

I have a lot of thoughts about Bible interpretation. Time would fail me to tell of the historical and cultural contexts of Scripture, common hermeneutical mistakes, and other juicy topics. There are just so many important questions regarding exegesis and hermeneutics. What role should theology play in exegesis? (Some!) Does the Holy Spirit guide exegesis? (Some!)

I think the most fundamental things I want to say about biblical hermeneutics are the following:

1. You are a subject. You will never stop being one. Being a right reader—that is, loving God and neighbor—is essential to reading rightly.
2. You will have some kind of big picture of the Bible, so it might as well be good.
3. The Bible is like every other book in that it must be read straightforwardly according to the normal, expected senses of words and phrases and idioms current at the time—being a good communicator and listener more generally should help you with Bible reading. The Bible is unlike every other book in that its most important Author knew the future and sent his Son to die for your sins.

Share your thoughts

How does hermeneutics shape Bible study? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Mark Ward’s suggested reading

Related content

• What Is Hermeneutics? | Kevin Vanhoozer
• All about Hermeneutics: A Guide to Interpreting God’s Word Faithfully
• Everything Boils Down to Hermeneutics
• Exegesis vs. Eisegesis: Are You Reading Scripture or Reading into It?
• Theological Method: How Should We Do Theology?

1. Or was it my fault? From their perspective, I was in a foreign land.
2. I think here of H. P. Grice’s Cooperative Principle and his maxims, including the simple ideas that people usually are saying what they believe to be true, that they usually give only as much information as is needed (no more, no less) to get across their intentions, and that when these maxims are broken there is a communicative purpose in the breaking. Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory has also been helpful, especially as transmitted to me by this book by a Bible translator that you should order so it gets off of Logos Pre-Pub: Ernst-August Gutt, Relevance Theory: Guide to Successful Communication in Translation (Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1992).
3. Though the narrative portions of, say, Job 1–2 are not necessarily easy to place on that timeline. We must use various clues, such as the absence of any mention of Jewish symbols and practices.
4. Most of the readers of this blog, as best I know, are evangelical Protestants; and those who aren’t tend to know that they’ve entered an evangelical Protestant space.
5. Two more recent books that discuss similar themes are Benjamin L. Merkle, Discontinuity to Continuity: A Survey of Dispensational and Covenantal Theologies (Lexham, 2020); and Brent E. Parker and Richard J. Lucas, eds., Covenantal and Dispensational Theologies: Four Views on the Continuity of Scripture (InterVarsity Academic, 2022).
6. I placed a Scripture reference next to one of these viewpoints in order to indicate which one I view to be correct!
7. Honorable mention: Cory M. Marsh and James I. Fazio, eds., Discovering Dispensationalism: Tracing Dispensational Thought from the First to the Twenty-First Century (Southern California Seminary, 2023).
8. Not my term: see Grant R. Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (InterVarsity Academic, 2006).
9. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically (Zondervan, 2024), 29.
10. I must pull in a favorite Stanley Fish quote, however, because leaving evangelicalism simply lands you in new orthodoxies: “What, after all, is the difference between a sectarian school which disallows challenges to the divinity of Christ and a so-called nonideological school which disallows discussion of the same question? In both contexts something goes without saying and something else cannot be said. (Christ is not God or he is). There is of course a difference, not however between a closed environment and an open one but between environments that are differently closed.” Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle (Harvard, 1999), 156.
11. “I learned to show this reverence and respect only to those books of the scriptures that are now called canonical so that I most firmly believe that none of their authors erred in writing anything. And if I come upon something in those writings that seems contrary to the truth, I have no doubt that either the manuscript is defective or the translator did not follow what was said or that I did not understand it.” Augustine of Hippo, Letters 1–99, trans. Roland Teske, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (New City, 2001), 316.
12. A phrase famously coined by Christian Smith.