Equipping the Saints Week 53/ Hermeneutics Week 11: Using Lexical and reference tools

Sometimes in the course of Biblical study, it is necessary for contemporary people to consult various reference works. This is because the modern audience is far removed culturally and linguistically (language orientation) from the original audiences. Various types of reference works have been produced to help bridge this gap.

Because these works do not carry canonical authority that is found in the Scripture, the use of these poses a challenge to interpretation. I shall list various types of reference work, starting from the least authoritative to the most authoritative.

Secular Knowledge Base

The least authoritative references are works from secular academic disciplines. While these works carry great authority in the respective secular disciplines; they are not authoritative for Bible interpretation, neither do they carry as high an authority as the Bible as the arbiter of truth.

Sometimes knowledge from secular disciplines can be helpful in interpretation. When the debate started over the relationship between predestination and freewill amongst the early Calvinists and Arminians, the prevailing cosmology or meta-narrative understood eternity as an infinite distance on a timeline and inside a single timeline. In this view, the foreknowledge of God is often described as God “looking down the corridor of time.” If God lives within time and He can only look down the corridor of time to know a singular future, then foreknowledge certainly means fore-ordination – and no possibility of free will. Arminians found the moral implications of no free will unacceptable and rejected this conclusion. The Medieval cosmology left Calvinists and Arminians stuck in their divide.

Modern developments in cosmology in both philosophy and science, however, do not view time as not a single line, but as having an almost infinite number of branches. Each branch represents a possible choice. Eternity is understood as being both outside of time and enveloping time. This cosmology allows for free choices. The time-stream is like an open book or Web page hypertext to God. God can click anywhere He wants on the time-stream. In this cosmology, predestination is simply a matter of God drawing a time line through whatever combination of choices suits His purposes.

While such works can be helpful in Bible interpretation, the interpreter must be careful not to impose secular perspectives that are alien to both the Christian worldview and the text upon the text. This frequently happen in interpreting Genesis 1-2. Many interpreters feel pressure to make their interpretation fit the prevailing evolutionary narrative and read secular so-called science into the narrative.

Commentaries

Commentaries can be extremely useful in gaining the perspective of others. Seeing how others view the Scriptures can help us avoid skewing interpretation to fit selfish biases; this helps to avoid the fallacy of confirmation bias where the interpreter cherry picks facts that confirm his own biases.

Commentaries, however, carry low authority precisely they are largely perspective and opinion oriented. They tend to be heavy on opinion. While many commentaries use good hermeneutics and good exegesis, they are the [usually?] informed opinions of human beings.  The authority of these commentaries is far less than that of Scripture.

Historical narrative

History narrative can be a good source of information about historical persons, trends, and events contemporary to persons and events found in the Biblical narrative. Reading such history can fill in gaps in our knowledge of historical events portrayed in the Biblical narrative.

However, history book suffers in they usually presented as a narrative. As such both the facts chosen and how they are used to construct the story can be a reflection of the biases of the historian presenting the narrative. History books also suffer from the limitations of the methods of historical inquiry. History does not present itself as a well constructed narrative. Historians must piece together numerous artifacts and manuscripts. This includes making judgments about the authenticity of evidence discovered. Not every artifacts and manuscript is what it purports to be. While some highly intelligent minds have constructed for us some very good histories, professional historians are by no means infallible; their authority is inferior to that of Scripture.

Historical references

Historical references generally have somewhat more authority than historical narrative because the narrative, with its biases, has been filtered out. Historical references are focused more concisely on factual information and less on how it is woven into narrative. Such references are good sources for researching the cultural context of a given historical situation.

Historical references also suffer from the limitations on the historical method. As such, while historical references carry greater authority than historical narrative, their authority is less than that of Scripture.

Lexicons, concordances, and Bible dictionaries

These are the most authoritative extra-Biblical resources. These tools allow the interpreter to dig deeper into the Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic words that are in the original texts. The resources will list standard definitions of words, sometimes  including with them definitions examples of usage.

Week 53 Questions

1 Why is it sometimes necessary to use reference works?

2  What are some reference works?

3 Why are works in the secular knowledge base particularly risky?

4 What is the risk of using works from secular knowledge base, commentaries, and  historical narrative?

5 What is the most reliable  extra-Biblical reference source?