John Walton on Different Hermeneutical Presuppositions
In an interview published on The Jesus Creed, though released by IVP, John Walton comments on different hermeneutical presuppositions. He is referring to the endless debates about how and when creation took place, but the ideas might be useful regarding other topics.
Walton: We too easily believe that the world of biblical interpretation is a black and white world—that whatever view we have adopted is right and everyone else is wrong. Such a view is too facile. In many cases we do our best to be faithful interpreters, but the Bible just doesn’t offer enough information to give irreproachable confidence. Even as evangelicals with a common core of theological affirmations, we work with varieties of hermeneutical presuppositions and we weigh the evidence differently. Consequently we develop different preferences based on which view has the preponderance of the evidence supporting it. Though ultimately one position undoubtedly is right and others wrong, we are not always positioned to see that well.
That being the case, it is uncharitable to simply label those who disagree with you as wrong, and even as less than Christian, when they have done their best to engage in faithful interpretation based on orthodox theological presuppositions and a defensible hermeneutic. Theoretically, people will know we are Christians by our love, and I am not sure that we always do a good job of that if we are constantly engaged in denouncing others who are simply trying to be faithful to the text.
There are several things that interest me here. Overall, I wish more people would take this sort of thing to heart. Of course, when we get to “orthdox theological presuppositions and a defensible hermeneutic” we reopen all the questions again. Often the debate is just what presuppositions are truly orthodox and what hermeneutical principles are, in fact, defensible.
This reminds me of another post I read recently, titled Types of Scholarship, and posted by Ken Schenck. There are a number of quite useful comments in the post, but he says that “a good deal of scholarship probably is bunk.” That’s very useful to know, right up until the moment that you have to determine just what is bunk and what isn’t. The problem is that not everyone agrees. I have published things that one person will say is quite horrible while another thinks it’s forward looking and well researched. I’ve encountered these contrasting attitudes much more frequently with other scholarly works I read.
My point here is that much of what is written in any field is going to be discarded eventually, and the process of scholarship–publishing, getting responses, thinking some more, perhaps getting discarded–is probably necessary. If any person or small group of people was permitted to exclude the bunk, then we’d be very likely to filter out the gems, stuff that looks like bunk at first but turns out to be exciting.
It reminds me of the comment one of my professors in graduate school made about Mitchell Dahood. I was making use of his commentary on the Psalms (Anchor Bible) and commented that I felt that in many cases I just couldn’t buy what Dahood had to say, yet in some cases he would come up with what seemed to me positively brilliant. I wondered if that was the result of my inexperience at the time. The professor said no. He said that Dahood was only right about 20% of the time (no idea where he got that figure!), but when he was right, he was so right that he made up for all the other times.
So if that professor was right, would I consider Dahood’s work on the Psalms extremely valuable (20%) or bunk (80%)? Personally, I’m willing to filter the material to get the creative input.
And since I usually try to mention a book or so that I publish, this post relates closely to the book I’m Right and You’re Wrong: Why we disagree about the Bible and what to do about it by Steve Kindle.
