Purpose & Importance: “Why do hermeneutics?”
With a better grasp on the field of hermeneutics, why should we care? Why do hermeneutics? In short, because if we don’t do hermeneutics well, we will do hermeneutics poorly. Put another way, any interaction with the Bible requires that we do some interpretation. The question is whether our interpretations will be accurate or off-the-mark. What we learn from hermeneutics helps us avoid common interpretive mistakes and gives us principles for reading the Bible carefully. This will affect our lives if we are the sort of people who strive to live in obedience to God and in accordance with his word.
More specifically, the need for good hermeneutic principles arises because of our distance from the original writers of the Bible. We live in a far-removed age from them, and thus certain “common knowledge” elements no longer exist. Think of the difference between a person today using “That’s what she said” to insert humor into a conversation. The chances are slim that 1000 years from now this bit of common understanding will still exist. From the names of places we’ve never heard of to terms that we don’t understand, there are many bits of information in the Bible that are not immediately clear without the further understanding that hermeneutics helps us move toward.
Second, we have a large cultural gap between our modern world and the biblical world. Thus, many ceremonies and customs that were common to them are foreign to us. Also, our priorities, assumptions, and pre-understandings are not going to match up 100% of the time, and this can lead to misinterpretation.
Lastly, our languages are not the same, and thus we inherit all of the problems that arise from linguistic interpretation. Sometimes a word in Greek does not directly correspond to any English word, and we have to get as close as we can.
Because of all of these issues, and others not mentioned here, we need hermeneutics. So let’s get into it! Next, we’ll look at a few of the principles of hermeneutics.