Why Hermeneutics is Important

Here's an issue where I part company with many of my emerging friends - hermeneutics. Without trying to paint with too broad of a brush, let's just say that supporting sound methods of Biblical interpretation isn't very high on the emerging church wish list.

But it's terribly important, and yesterday I ran into yet another reason why...

My wife is an avid blogger, and she reads a lot of blogs too. She frequents a number of blogs that are passionately pro-children and large family. As a father of six, I am - of course - all for this sort of thing. But these blogs and their adherents share one very common but blemished thread, which yesterday Carmen asked me about. Before I deal with it, let me point out a parallel.

Without wanting to get into the whole charismatic/non-charismatic debate (and with all due respect to Mary), very often supporters of modern-day "speaking in tongues" will turn to the book of Acts and cite reference after reference showing how commonplace "tongues" were and therefore insisting that this should be the same today. [Again, I'm not saying this is their only argument, nor do I want this to turn into an anti-charismatic rant.]

Fundamentally, this line of reasoning is flawed. Acts is, by definition, a narrative text. It tells a story. It was penned for a specific purpose - to tell the story of how the Gospel of Christ spread against unbelievable odds. As my pastor puts it, it's to tell the world that "Aslan is on the move".

Acts is not an instructional (didactic) text, in the classic sense. It's not a "do this" and "don't do that" kind of text. The Epistles are didactic, as is much of the Torah, and other texts. But texts like Acts are narratives, and as such we should be extremely cautious about making doctrinal decision based upon them. Sound theology cannot come directly from narratives. Narratives should certainly support the theology gleaned from didactic texts, and narratives can certainly exemplify the orthopraxis (right practice) beyond the orthodoxy (right doctrine). But if your personal theology of issue ___ is based primarily upon narrative texts, you have a problem.

This takes us back to the pro-children/large family blogs my wife reads. Most of them contend that a young and unmarried woman must be "under the covering of" her father until such time as she marries. In practical terms, this means that my Bekah should live at home with me, not going to school after High School, not working much (if any) outside of the home, until such time as she marries. She is then transferred from the "covering" of me to the "covering" of her husband (where she will still not pursue a job or education outside of the home, not coincidentally!).

The basis for this insistence? That's the way it was done in the Bible. See, they've taken narrative texts about the culture and families of an ancient time period and attempted to make them didactic.

So when asked why a woman shouldn't work outside of the home, a standard response is to list all the women of the Bible that "worked" and show that they did so largely (if not exclusively) from home. But even if this were true (and it's not, incidentally) it wouldn't prove a thing about my Bekah. It's an exercise in history and anthropology, no more. Are there principles about raising my daughters that I can glean from narrative texts? Absolutely! But we can't go beyond the bounds of Scripture and make it prescribe something it really one describes.

Incidentally, if we carry this viewpoint about young woman to its natural end, we all end up pretty much Amish.

Hatushili