by Richard Barcellos | Mar 4, 2011 | Hermeneutics, Historical Theology
Brief survey of the history of hermeneutics – 1. Intro.
Introduction: The Apostolic Fathers are those church leaders who wrote between A.D. 90 and 150.[1] Subsequent to that several other church leaders are identified as the Church Fathers. Two things happened in the era of the Apostolic Fathers: 1) the fathers continued the hermeneutical methodology of the New Testament and 2) they introduced a moral usage of Scripture or functional hermeneutic.[2] Dockery explains the moral use of Scripture as “…the readers appl[ying] the text to their own context and situation without attention to its original context and situation.”[3]
The moral use of Scripture approach was soon partially eclipsed, however, probably due to heretical views of the Old Testament. Gnostics denied continuity between the testaments, arguing that the God of the Old Testament was not the same as the God of the New Testament. Marcion (circa A.D. 85-160) argued on these lines. He was an early leader in the church at Rome. Excommunicated for heresy about A.D. 144, four years after he went to Rome, he rejected the entire Old Testament as Christian Scripture.[4] He believed that law and grace were incompatible and that the God of the Old Testament was not the same as the God of the New Testament.[5] The Old Testament was “not for Christians, but for Jews only.”[6] He insisted on interpreting the Old Testament literally, which, in fact, lead him to reject it altogether.[7] Marcion created his own canon, which included Luke (except chapters 1 and 2, which he viewed as too Jewish) and Paul’s letters (except the Pastoral Epistles). Though Marcion accepted 10 of Paul’s letters, he edited them to “remove remnants of Judaism.”[8] Marcion’s 11 book canon is the earliest known. Just as much of the material in the epistles of the New Testament was occasional, brought on by circumstances experienced by the recipients of the New Testament books, so Marcion’s canon helped create an occasion for orthodox believers to declare themselves on the issue of the canon.[9] Both Gnosticism and Marcion forced the Apostolic Fathers to justify the Old Testament as Christian Scripture. The functional hermeneutic was eclipsed by a typological hermeneutic more in line with Christ and the New Testament authors.[10] Dockery says, “Soon a typological interpretation of the Old Testament became a standard way of expounding the Scriptures.”[11] In the discussion of Patristic hermeneutics below, we will see several examples of this method of interpretation which, by the way, is basically consistent with the New Testament’s use of the Old.
[1] Dockery, Biblical Interpretation, 48.
[2] Dockery, Biblical Interpretation, 45.
[3] Dockery, Biblical Interpretation, 45.
[4] Thiselton notes that upon excommunication “Marcion established his own “church.”” Thiselton, Hermeneutics, 94. The quotation marks are Thiselton’s.
[5] Patzia & Petrotta, PDBS, 76. Cf. Thiselton, Hermeneutics, 94.
[6] Thiselton, Hermeneutics, 94.
[7] Thiselton, Hermeneutics, 94.
[8] Thiselton, Hermeneutics, 94.
[9] Though this is not the whole story behind the formation of the New Testament canon.
[10] More on this later.
[11] Dockery, Biblical Interpretation, 48.
Dr. Richard Barcellos is associate professor of New Testament Studies. He received a B.S. from California State University, Fresno, an M.Div. from The Master’s Seminary, and a Th.M. and Ph.D. from Whitefield Theological Seminary. Dr. Barcellos is pastor of Grace Reformed Baptist Church, Palmdale, CA. He is author of Trinity & Creation, The Covenant of Works, and Getting the Garden Right. He has contributed articles to various journals and is a member of ETS.
Courses taught for CBTS: New Testament Introduction, Biblical Hermeneutics, Biblical Theology I, Biblical Theology II.
by Richard Barcellos | Mar 3, 2011 | Audio/Video, Ecclesiology, Preaching
Rare TV interview of the late great preacher here.
Dr. Richard Barcellos is associate professor of New Testament Studies. He received a B.S. from California State University, Fresno, an M.Div. from The Master’s Seminary, and a Th.M. and Ph.D. from Whitefield Theological Seminary. Dr. Barcellos is pastor of Grace Reformed Baptist Church, Palmdale, CA. He is author of Trinity & Creation, The Covenant of Works, and Getting the Garden Right. He has contributed articles to various journals and is a member of ETS.
Courses taught for CBTS: New Testament Introduction, Biblical Hermeneutics, Biblical Theology I, Biblical Theology II.
by Richard Barcellos | Mar 2, 2011 | Biblical Theology, Eschatology, Hermeneutics, New Testament, Old Testament
I suspect, though I could be wrong, that sacred space and sacred time theology (even under the days of the new covenant) is the historic Christian position, irrespective of theological tradition. It was neither invented by the Reformed, nor the Pentecostal, nor will it be done away with by 20th and 21st century Evangelicals. My hunch is that it has probably been around since the beginning of time. God’s mandate to Adam as His vice-regent was to extend the culture of the garden to the ends of the earth. And if the garden was the first temple (a special dwelling place of God among men on the earth), with the first priest (Adam), and it had a Sabbath (which was a pledge of eschatological rest), then both sacred space and sacred time were present concepts and, at least, potentially co-extensive. However, the fall took place. Adam failed to extend the garden-temple across the earth. But no need to fear! The mandate of Gen. 1:28 is now in the hands of the Mediator between God and man – Christ Jesus, the skull-crushing Seed of the woman. He is setting up mini-temples (sacred space/local churches) throughout the entire earth (Matt. 28:19-20), with priest-kings offering up spiritual sacrifices, particularly when they gather on the day on which the new creation dawned, the Lord Jesus’ day, the first day of the week, Sunday, the new covenant’s Sabbath. Some day the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord in fulfillment of God’s creation mandate to Adam. Then all earthy space and time will be sacred. Then the Lamb will be all the glory! Until then, we get glimpses of that which will be ours in full when He comes. Even so, come Lord Jesus. Amen.
Dr. Richard Barcellos is associate professor of New Testament Studies. He received a B.S. from California State University, Fresno, an M.Div. from The Master’s Seminary, and a Th.M. and Ph.D. from Whitefield Theological Seminary. Dr. Barcellos is pastor of Grace Reformed Baptist Church, Palmdale, CA. He is author of Trinity & Creation, The Covenant of Works, and Getting the Garden Right. He has contributed articles to various journals and is a member of ETS.
Courses taught for CBTS: New Testament Introduction, Biblical Hermeneutics, Biblical Theology I, Biblical Theology II.
by Richard Barcellos | Mar 2, 2011 | Audio/Video, Books, Hermeneutics, Podcast, Practical Theology, Preaching
R. Scott Clark interviews Dennis Johnson concerning his book Him We Proclaim. I recommend the book highly, especially chapters 4. The Complication, Chastening, Rejection, and Recovery of Apostolic Preaching in the History of the Church, 5. Challenges to Apostolic Preaching, and 7. Theological Foundations of Apostolic Preaching. The interview can be listened to here.
Dr. Richard Barcellos is associate professor of New Testament Studies. He received a B.S. from California State University, Fresno, an M.Div. from The Master’s Seminary, and a Th.M. and Ph.D. from Whitefield Theological Seminary. Dr. Barcellos is pastor of Grace Reformed Baptist Church, Palmdale, CA. He is author of Trinity & Creation, The Covenant of Works, and Getting the Garden Right. He has contributed articles to various journals and is a member of ETS.
Courses taught for CBTS: New Testament Introduction, Biblical Hermeneutics, Biblical Theology I, Biblical Theology II.
by Richard Barcellos | Mar 1, 2011 | Hermeneutics, Historical Theology
Introduction: Christian hermeneutics includes a study of those interpreters and schools of interpretation in the Christian theological tradition who, in fact, may not be Christian in the soteriological sense. This field of study usually starts with the second century A.D. and carries on into the present era. In our study of Christian hermeneutics, we will select some highlights along the historical continuum to introduce students to the main practitioners and interpretive schools. We will concentrate on the Apostolic Fathers/Patristics, the schools of Alexandria and Antioch, the four-fold method (quadriga) of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Reformation, the Reformed orthodox of the post-Reformation era, the Enlightenment, nineteenth-century Germany, Princeton Seminary prior to and including Geerhardus Vos, and briefly look at the end of the twentieth century. This will give us a wide-ranging look at the key players and key movements.
It is of interest to note that, at least in the past, historical Christian interpretive methods have received a highly negative assessment from conservative Evangelicals. Patristic methods, for example, have been down-played as models for us to emulate. In the words of C. S. Lewis, a sort of “chronological snobbery” seems to be part of the reason for this. The Middle Ages are viewed as casting a dark shadow over the church in terms of hermeneutical method (and just about everything else). Though all agree that the Reformers got back to the Bible, their immediate successors, the post-Reformation Protestant Scholastics, so the theory goes, supposedly left the Bible and substituted it with a neo-Aristotilian, Confessional/Dogmatic Scholasticism that utilized careless proof-texting, an ad nauseam hyper-syllogistic form of argumentation, and left the Christocentric hermeneutical emphasis of Calvin. Some even view the post-Reformation Protestant Scholastics as precursors of the rationalistic Enlightenment.[1]
This highly negative assessment of the history of Christian interpretive method has been challenged and is slowly being qualified and modified in our day.[2] Granted, no one is so naive to assert that all interpretive methods throughout the history of the church are equally valid or that there are no bad examples. What is being recognized, however, is that we have much to learn from the history of Christian hermeneutics and we need to sit humbly at the feet of those who have gone before us and carefully listen.
As will be noted below, the Enlightenment caused a revolution in hermeneutical theory. It sought to make hermeneutics an objective science and effectively took God out of the hermeneutical equation. The meaning of biblical texts was limited to what the interpreter thought the human author (or editors) intended. In the name of objectifying hermeneutics, a subjective principle was smuggled into Evangelicalism as a cure-all for interpretive conclusions. Human authorial intent became the goal and end-all of biblical interpretation. However, in order to determine human authorial intent, interpreters became dependent upon background sources, which are neither infallible, nor objective. Pre-Enlightenment/pre-critical interpreters did not limit the meaning of texts to the human author. Human authorial intent as the end-all of interpretation is a post-Enlightenment phenomenon and, in essence, has caused several generations of Evangelical interpreters to shun pre-critical hermeneutical practitioners as worthy examples of biblical interpretation. As Moises Silva says, “…the popular assumption [is] that the Christian church, through most of its history, has misread the Bible.”[3] Our brief survey will attempt to show that a more positive assessment is warranted.
[1] Cf. Richard C. Barcellos, The Family Tree of Reformed Biblical Theology: Geerhardus Vos and John Owen – Their Methods of and Contributions to the Articulation of Redemptive History (Owensboro, KY: RBAP, 2010), 53-107.
[2] See the relevant discussions in Dockery, Biblical Interpretation Then and Now, Moises Silva, “Has the Church Misread the Bible?,” Dennis E. Johnson, Him We Proclaim and Richard C. Barcellos, The Family Tree of Reformed Biblical Theology, specifically, 66-78.
[3] Silva, “Has the Church Misread the Bible?,” 33. Cf. 34-37 for Silva’s discussion of F. W. Farrar’s negative assessment of most of the church’s interpretive history. Cf. David C. Steinmetz, Calvin in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 95-109, for Steinmetz’s discussion of “Calvin and Isaiah” in the context of the history pre-critical exegesis. Steinmetz takes Farrar to task (esp. pp. 95 and 107).
Dr. Richard Barcellos is associate professor of New Testament Studies. He received a B.S. from California State University, Fresno, an M.Div. from The Master’s Seminary, and a Th.M. and Ph.D. from Whitefield Theological Seminary. Dr. Barcellos is pastor of Grace Reformed Baptist Church, Palmdale, CA. He is author of Trinity & Creation, The Covenant of Works, and Getting the Garden Right. He has contributed articles to various journals and is a member of ETS.
Courses taught for CBTS: New Testament Introduction, Biblical Hermeneutics, Biblical Theology I, Biblical Theology II.
