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An interesting assessment to say the least. So what kinds of compromises result from the "traditional historical-grammatical method"? How about the higher critical assessment of Scripture that set aside any miraculous involvement? How about the positivist notions of interpretation as if everything is simply available to the interpreter prima facie? How about the notions of redactional criticism that dissect just about everything in Scripture to assign it various levels of "history" and authorship?

I would assert that we should use the historical grammatical method, but recognize it is deficient in dealing with Scripture if it is the ONLY method used. It is largely humanistic (and as far as I'm concerned not any different from post-modern attempts when it fails to appreciate its boundaries) and pretends to know more than it should. If you really think so highly of modernism and its approaches to Scripture as if they are THE approach to Scripture, then I wonder at what point the Church discovered such? Has the Church (including the NT authors themselves) really been in the dark until the birth of modernism and its historical-grammatical methodology? I posit that it is certainly an invaluable interpretive method, but not the only one and that post-modern approaches (as well as the ancient practice of theological reading) offer valuable insights that are essential to a proper reading of Scripture in as much as they allow Scripture to say what Scripture is actually saying and do not simply hear their own voice or another voice in place of the voice of God by His Spirit.

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Cale,
You might also find the following two part article by Dr. Gordon Anderson to be helpful in presenting (IMO) a coherently helpful Pentecostal Hermeneutic: Part 1 and Part 2. There are others who launch in a different direction but knowing Gordon personally and seeing his hermeneutic at work I vouch for his methodology as more helpful than many others.

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That doesn't seem to be what Anti is arguing at all.

Before the thread gets away from me, I want to thank you, Rick, for the resources you've cited. I found Marc Cortez' blog and the essays by William LaSor and Doug Moo to be very helpful. I'll read the articles by Gordon Anderson next, and then look into the other resources you mentioned. I also want to offer my thanks to everyone who has so far participated in the discussion. I believe that sound hermeneutics are critically important to sound theology and will readily admit that my horizons have been expanded in that regard. That's not to say, in case anyone might misunderstand, that I'm about to abandon the grammatical-historical method. Rather, I'm thinking more critically and more formally about some interpretive approaches that I've long used intuitively without entertaining that they were beyond the methodology of the G-H approach.

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I think the deficiencies you have identified above are not a result of using the historical/grammatical methodology, but using it apart from orthodox theology and faith itself. High Criticism and Redactional Criticism have been the playground of postmodern critics, and those are the views that had elicited my concerns.



I think you are defining the historical-grammatical method far too narrowly. This is kind of like saying that the idea of the "Trinity" does not appear in scripture because the word itself never does. The predominant ideology behind the historical-grammatical methodology is a belief that the authority is inherent in the author of the words. In Scripture itself, this idea is seen when we see quotes that begin like "Isaiah says...", "Hosea says...", etc... The post modern idea that the authority rests with the reader is an idea that is foreign to the biblical text.

I think there is a whole lot of room for debate about what comprises a good historical-grammatical methodology, and how we can best understand the intent of the author. I also recognize that a good hermeneutic methodology can not exist in a vacuum, it need to be combined with good theology, and true faith in God. However,I don't think there are good arguments for looking for meanings in the text that we fully believe the author would never have intended.

sounds intersting ... thanks for the articles Rick

personally I love Gordon Fee's articles about this - and he is a pentecostal scholar

I think it basically comes down to why we read the Bible - do we "mine" it for instructions? .... or do we read it to know God?

will get back to you when I have done some reading

Dinah

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