34 Quotes About Hermeneutics

Seldom do we embrace a new idea, especially one of a religious nature.

(I should mention I attended a Christian elementary school where “my dad’s hermeneutic can beat up your dad’s hermeneutic” served as legit schoolyard banter.)

One could say that my view legitimately fuses the end-time messianic expectations of all three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity!

As a result of overly reactive posturing toward an unbelieving world we sometimes breed our own worst understandings of the Bible.

The ideal interpreter should be one who has entered into that strange first-century world, has felt its whole strangeness, has sojourned in it until he has lived himself into it, thinking and feeling as one of those to whom the Gospel first came, and who will then return into our world, and give to the truth he has discovered a body out of the stuff of our own thought. -- The Present Task in New Testament Studies

The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to Scripture.

The Gospel presents us with the righteousness of Jesus Christ, who, in his earthly life, perfectly interpreted the word of his Father. In so doing he justified the fallible attempts of his people to interpret the word. The justification of our hermeneutics by the perfect hermeneutics of Christ is the motivation for us to strive for hermeneutical sanctification.

Someday when we get around to writing a genealogy of our failures, inadequacies, and disappointments, an important place in such a study will be the books we never read, for whatever reason. Aside from the music we never listened to, the movies we never watched, or the old archives and maps we never explored, the books we never read will be one of the indicators of our anachronisms and our flawed humanity.

It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition.