S1 E1 - Disastrous Consequences of Bad Hermeneutics

Dr. Kayser starts out his hermeneutics series with examples of bad hermeneutical systems paralyzing the modern church. He then demonstrates that Scripture alone — for example, the examples of how Jesus and the apostles interpreted Scripture — gives an entire system of hermeneutics. This podcast gives a defense for learning our hermeneutics from Christ and the Word rather than man-made hermeneutic systems.

What is Living by Every Word?

Biblical Blueprints exists to fight the bad presuppositions that "set themselves up against the knowledge of God" (2 Cor. 10:5), the glasses that keep ordinary Christians and theologians alike from seeing how "the key of knowledge," the whole Bible — and every word of it — applies to the whole person and all of life. Biblical Blueprints wants to equip ordinary men and women to use the key of knowledge themselves — to equip a generation of radical Reformers who don't just consume theology-already-done-for-you, but rather continue to mine and apply Scripture's axioms for all of life.

Disastrous Consequences of Bad Hermeneutics

Hi, I am Phil Kayser. And I am excited about today's episode because it is one of the most foundational topics that we will be dealing with in the weeks to come - the topic of hermeneutics. And you might be thinking, herma what? Hermeneutics. It's a fancy word for the proper interpretation and application of Scripture. And before you turn off the podcast for something more interesting, let me explain why this is uber important and super practical.

Everyone who reads the Bible automatically engages in hermeneutics whether they realize it or not. It may be a bad hermeneutics, but you are using some hermeneutics every single time you read and apply the Bible. When someone says that Romans 13 mandates submission to every edict of the government - including China's former one child policy and you respond that it is actually calling for very limited government and requiring a civil government to implement God's laws and only God's laws, both you you are engaging in quite different hermeneutics with very different implications. Another example is that there are Christians today who missapply the covering that lepers put over their mouths in the Old Testament to justify the government mandating masks for healthy people today. They have missed the personal dimension of ethics - that commands not only address specific situations but also specific people. In this case that passage only deals with those who have been verified as having the infectious disease. Likewise, there are Christians who misapply Christ's call to love your neighbor as yourself as a mandate for getting a Moderna or Pfizer vaccine. Almost every day we are seeing very lousy hermeneutics being used in politics, in church life, in medicine, in family life, investing, and in other areas of life. So this issue of proper hermeneutics really is practical and important for everyone.

And I'm not just concerned about the hermeneutics of those who hate the Bible versus those who love the Bible. Certainly there are a lot of competing hermeneutics that have been invented by God-haters. For example, there is a Marxist hermeneutic that uses the Canaanite wars in the Old Testament to justify guerilla warfare today for the purpose of overthrowing a country and imposing communism. And they do it in the name of the Bible. They call their hermeneutics Liberation Theology. There is also what is called feminist hermeneutics that imposes a man-made set of rules upon the Bible that help people to ignore the clear teaching of the Bible about women - and to do so with a clear conscience. And feminist hermeneutics was so successful that the LGBTQ crowd adapted similar rules to justify their perverse lifestyle from the Bible. They sometimes call those rules Queer hermeneutics. Obviously those three examples are easily recognizable as demonic hermeneutics that are twisting the Scriptures. But all three of those hermeneutics have taken over mainline denominations and have even begun to infiltrate evangelical churches.

But I'm here to tell you that even many *conservative* Christians have failed to submit to a Biblical hermeneutic. By a Biblical hermeneutic I simply mean submitting to the methods that Jesus gave when He interpreted the Old Testament, or that the apostles gave when they interpreted the words of Jesus, or when they interpreted other New Testament writers, or the Old Testament. And I will point out that those are exactly the same hermeneutical methods used by Old Testament prophets when they interpreted other Old Testament prophets. The point is that the Bible itself gives us everything we need to know about hermeneutics. There are hundreds of such interpretations - enough for us to derive an entire system of hermeneutics from the bible alone. It's beautiful. That was the system that was used by the Protestant Reformers.

But many conservative Christians have forgotten the historic biblical hermeneutics, and have instead imposed some new man-made rules upon Christians for interpreting the Bible. We call this eisegesis instead of exegesis. Eis is the Greek word into and ex is the Greek word out of. So eisegesis is reading something into the Bible that isn't there. Exegesis is reading out of the Bible what is already there. Exegesis is being submissive to the Bible and letting the Bible tell us what to believe and how to behave. And I've already given you three examples of horrible hermeneutics that engages in horrible eisegesis - Liberation Hermeneutics, Feminist Hermeneutics, and Queer hermeneutics. But let me give you some examples of really bad man-made hermeneutical systems that have absolutely paralyzed the modern evangelical church from making any positive impact on politics or the rest of culture and have left the salt saltless (and as Christ worded it in the Sermon on the Mount) saltless salt is worthless for anything but to be cast out and trampled under foot of men. And that's what we are seeing today - a church cast out, with no influence, and under the feet and under the authority of God's enemies. If your hermeneutics leads you to be saltless in society, Jesus considers your influence worthless.

The first hermeneutic that I have seen used by evangelicals is what I call a Talmudic hermeneutic. I have one so-called conservative Christian commentary that reads every passage of the bible through the lens of the Talmud, which is the Jewish oral traditions. Quite a few Christian Messianic congregations do this. Why is this bad? These people think that is good because they are promoting a Judaic-Christian consensus. Well, its bad because there is no Judaic-Christian consensus. Judaism is hostile to the Old Testament, as Jesus pointed out over and over again. Jesus called the oral traditions pulled together in the Talmud the doctrines of man and He constantly opposed those teachings as being Scripture twisting. He said that those man-made traditions actually overthrow the word of God and nullify the commandments of God; they don't help to understand or apply the Bible. They do the opposite. The apostle Paul called them doctrines of demons. Why would we use doctrines of demons to try to understand the Bible? So when you see claims that Matthew is using Pesher or Midrashic hermeneutics, see red flags. That's a problem.

What practical difference has Talmudic hermeneutics made in America? In some circles it has made evangelicals blindly support anything that the state of Israel does. It has made them embrace unbiblical traditions within their churches - especially Messianic congregations. It has made some embrace socialism and to ignore Old Testament laws that the Pharisees ignored. It has been devastating. Thankfully, a lower percentage of evangelicals buy into this Talmudic hermeneutics very consistently. But a majority have been negatively impacted in at least some ways.

I have other commentaries that say that everything needs to be read through the lens of Ancient Near Eastern literature - shortened to the initials, ANE. Michael Heiser has been a popularizer of this theory. He is a bright guy and has had a huge influence in even Reformed circles. The idea is that to understand ancient literature you have to immerse yourself in the worldview of those ancients. Sounds fair enough, right? But what they mean by Ancient Near Eastern Literature is the *pagan* literature of that time period - the literature *outside* of the Bible. They say that you need to soak yourself in these ancient ways of thinking in order to properly understand the Bible. Why is this wrong? It's wrong because the Biblical prophets were constantly contradicting and seeking to overthrow that same body of Ancient Near Eastern literature. It was the pagan worldview of the nations that surrounded Israel. It was saturated with idolatrous, demonic, and pagan ideas. And the worldview of the Bible was radically different than the worldview of those pagans. And besides, Paul told the Church at Corinth (who were also being influenced by pagan ideas) "that you may learn in us not to think beyond what is written" in the Bible (1 Corinthians 4:6). He was indicating that we don't need to go beyond the Bible.

Now obvioiusly, there are variations on this ANE hermeneutics. Full Preterism uses one form of ancient literature known as apocalypticism to completely reinterpret not just the book of Revelation and other New Testament passages on eschatology, but also to completely reinterpret Genesis 1-2. This particular ANE approach to Genesis 1 says that Genesis 1 has nothing whatsoever to do with the creation of the universe. Instead, they claim that Moses was using apocalyptic language of the Ancient world to describe the setting up of the Old Covenant. I know it sounds bizzarre, but even evangelicals who are not Hyper-Preterist are lapping this up. So the consequences of this bad hermeneutics reach way beyond eschatology into cosmology, geology, politics, economics, and other areas.

Dispensationalism is another example of people who love the Lord, yet are using a faulty hermeneutic. I used to be a Dispesnationalist, and had to repent in my early 20s when I saw so many examples of the apostles contradicting this bad method of interpretation. Dispensationalists have come up with an elaborate system that presupposes (and it is these presuppositions that completely drive their hermeneutics - that presupposes) that God has two peoples (Israel and the church), two canons (Old Testament and New Testament - with one for Israel and the other for the church), two systems of ethics (one for the kingdom and one for the present), two futures (one on earth for Israel and one in heaven for the church), etc. And even though the apostles repeatedly contradicted each of those defining ideas, this continues to be used in the way people apply or refuse to apply the Bible to politics, business, sex, or other issues.

And some Reformed people have a similar system developed by Meredith Kline. He was a creative person who came up with an elaborate system of hermeneutics that so insulates one era of Scripture from another that they too believe it is inappropriate to claim a promise made in the Old Testament for us today (unless of course the New Testament claims it) and they believe that it is inappropriate to apply the Scriptures to most areas of life, since supposedly we live in a common grace era, not an intrusion ethics era. They hold to what is now known as a radical two kingdom view where the Scriptures don't apply to the common grace kingdom - to education, business, economics, science, politics, or other areas of life. Meredith Kline stated that his purpose for keeping the Bible restricted to church and personal walk with God was so that "the scientist is left free of biblical constraints." Wow! The bottom line or the practical result is that in these people's view, the Bible has nothing whatsoever to say about evolution, economics, politics, eductation, or other so-called secular areas. It has paralyzed the church and made it ineffective. We need to return to the hermeneutics of the Protestant Reformation.

And by now your head is maybe swimming and you are thinking, this is waaaaayyy beyond me. I'll leave it up to my pastor to figure these things out. No. You can't say that. You too are responsible for understanding the Bible and applying it. When you give your sons and daughters guidance on whether their clothing is modest or not, if you are applying the Bible at all, you are engaging in some kind of hermeneutic. And you better be applying the Bible. Deuteronomy 6 commands fathers,

> Deut. 6:6   “And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

That passage expects fathers to understand and apply the Bible to every area of life. This means that you don't have to have a PhD and some sophisticated system to be able to understand and apply the Bible. Any father can do it. Yay! That passage implies that hermeneutics is achievable.

And hopefully over the next couple of podcasts we can show you how super easy it is. We will just imitate Jesus and the apostles in how they interpret the Bible. And if you have any questions along the way or things that don't make sense, shoot our guys an email at [e-mail] and we may be able to address your question in a future podcast. But for now I'll sign out with the prayer that you will start living by every Word that proceeds out of the mouth God (Matthew 4:4).