One of my favorite subjects is hermeutics. We are all "hermeuticians" (don't think that's a word, but oh well). We all bring certain interpretive presuppositions to the table. The questions then become what are my presuppositions and if they are no good, what do I change them to?

I'm not convinced that the grammatical-historical method is the best method of interpretation. I agree that a text should be understood in its historical context and that the grammar of the original languages should be known and understood to properly interpret the text. But this doesn't seem to be enough. How does grammar give rise to the literary structure and form, or even the line of argumentation of a given text? I would modify the grammatical-historical to the literary-historical where grammar would be a subsumed category under "literary." Literary would also include things like genre, line of argumentation, structure, and any other literary category.

Now, given the varying interpretations among the different denominations, it seems that the majority of these differences arise from one main hermeneutical concept: the covenant. I don't think this is the only difference, but I do think it is the primary one. How one (person/group) understands the significance and structure of the covenant will determine how one interprets a number of different issues, e.g., baptism, the Supper, salvation, etc. and the relation between these things. But the covenant isn't an abstract notion; it is an historical one and therefore falls under the category of history, at least. I think, though, that a better argument could be made that all history is covenantal, so to speak of history is to speak of the covenant. So, I think that our hermeneutical scheme can be modified to literary/covenant-historical.

Now one more factor needs to be addressed, and that is the place of typology in biblical hemeneutics. I will discuss this in my next post.