A Sojourner's Quest

PA RT I I I : L I V I NG I N T H E WAY / 2 1 1

Do We Presently Study the Bible in the Same Way and with the Same Methods as the Lord and the Apostles?

After more than twenty years of teaching the grammatical-historical hermeneutic, I can see only one problem with it: it doesn’t appear to be the way the biblical writers always did it! When we examine how the biblical writers used previously written Scripture, we see that they seemed to “discover” meaning there that, judged by its original context, can hardly be imagined to have been in the mind of the original author. This problem is especially evident in the way the New Testament authors used Old Testament passages to prove that Jesus Christ fulfilled prophecy (or to make some theological point.)

~ James DeYoung and Sarah Hurty. Beyond the Obvious . Gresham, OR: Vision House Publishing, 1995. p. 24.

Can or Should We Reproduce the Exegesis of the New Testament?

To the question whether we can reproduce the exegesis of the New Testament, S. L. Johnson answers: “Unhesitatingly the reply is yes, although we are not allowed to claim for our results the infallibility of the Lord and his Apostles. They are reliable teachers of biblical doctrine and they are reliable teachers of hermeneutics and exegesis. We not only can reproduce their exegetical methodology, we must if we are to be taught their understanding of the Scriptures.”

~ Ibid . p. 265.

What of Typology as a Valid, Important Method of Bible Interpretation?

[Typology] is a genuine approach widely practiced in the New Testament. For example, the furniture of the tabernacle and other matters associated with it and the temple (the altar and sacrifices, the veil, the golden cover of the ark of the covenant) are all types of Christ and of the heavenly realm (see Heb. 9). When we come to typology, we must avoid being too broad or too narrow in our interpretation. We can be too broad if we find typology everywhere. We can be too narrow if we reject typology as an exegetical method on the basis of the claim that it is not consistent with a literal meaning which embraces on meaning, found by means of grammatical-historical study. . . .