Popular Exegesis – Cutting the Knot

David Ker at Lingamish has started a series in which he looks for ways to bypass the Grammatical-Historical approach to Bible study and look for ways that would allow more people to get involved in the study.

To quote:

… In fact, GHI [Grammatical-Historical Interpretation-HN] rather than illuminating the texts almost always results in muddying the waters and leaving us less certain about the “original intended meaning,” (OIM). What GHI fails to address is the need for intuitive and populist ways to arrive at Scriptural meaning leading to appropriate localized applications….

It’s a bit ironic for me that he begins his series just as I am starting to follow Scot McKnight’s series on John Walton’s book on Genesis (see my initial notes on my threads blog).  This discussion of Genesis 1 illustrates what I would see as a clear case in which approaching the text without some context in terms of ancient literature in which to understand it would result in an incorrect understanding.

Having expressed my skepticism, however, I intend to follow David’s posts rather closely as I would like to get hold of any light he can shed on ways that people can reasonably and accurately study the Bible for themselves without excessive dependence on others.  By dependence on others I don’t mean a proper dependence in terms of getting facts from those who have researched them, but rather the dependence that says, “A scholar says it means X so it <em>must</em> mean X.”

David is certainly pointing at a very real problem.  My tendency is to believe the problem won’t be solved unless the believers in the pew decide to spend more time on their Bibles.  But I’m willing to hear any shortcut that doesn’t result in each person coming out with an individual opinion without good checks on that opinion.