Hermeneutics, Exegesis and Exposition

How's THAT for a title to a blog post?

A minute ago, I turned on the TV to see what football games were on, and for some reason (I didn't do it, I swear!), the TV was tuned to our 24-hour religious broadcasting station. I got there just in time to hear the following sentence:

"In hermeneutics, exegesis must precede exposition."

One doesn't often hear any of these words on television, much less all three in one six word sentence, so I was intrigued. Hermeneutics is the science and art of determining the meaning of biblical text. The point the speaker was making was that before you can "expound" (even to yourself) on those meanings, you have to engage in a process of exegesis in which you seek to discover, first and foremost, what the language used meant to the original audience. The point, I take it, is that the meaning of a message gets blurred by translation (from Greek, say, into English, or worse yet from Arameic into Greek into English) and further, even with a "perfect" translation, the words themselves may not have the same meaning for us that it they had for the initial audience for those words. As a consequence, before one can really even begin to talk meaningful about the "message" embedded in a biblical text, one must first endeavor to discover what the language meant to those to whom it was initially directed. Context, in other words is, if not everything, at least essential to understanding. It is only when you have un\covered as much as you can of he context that you can even begin to discern, much less "expostulate on," the implications of the message for ourselves and our times.

As concepts, these are hardly novel to any lawyer. One of the very first lessons taught in law school is that, when reading and trying to understand a judicial decision, the first and frequently most important question you have to ask yourself is "What was really going on here; what were the facts that led to the decision and what interests were really at stake; what did the decision mean to the people involved?" In short, the decision itself is simply the tip of a vast iceberg; the endpoint of an involved and sometimes long process involving much more than the particular litigants that end up before the court. To understand what the decision really means and how it relates to issues of concern to you and your clients, you have to try, insofar as possible, to understand what preceded the decision and what it meant to the people actually involved.

Thus, it should not have surprised me to hear a theologian argue that the same process needs to be used in trying to understand the Bible. Yet, it did. Few people I respect take the Bible literally. Most see much of what the Bible says as metaphor. However, even these people tend to think that the metaphors have a single meaning that has not changed over time. And, I have largely thought that one had to accept at least that premise to treat the Bible as "gospel." Yet, even a moment's reflection makes me realize that even this is not true. Having recognized the metaphorical nature of the message one still has to ask "What did that metaphor mean to the original audience?" The message is buried in THAT meaning, and if we automatically assume that the meaning of the metaphor has not changed we are very likely to miss the true message altogether.

There is not enough in this to allay my doubts that the Bible is divinely inspired. However, it does tend to help me understand how those who do believe it to be divinely inspired can "live with" some of what's in it.

Also, there is a relativism buried in this approach to the Bible that makes me smile.