My recent post on Romans has a bit in common with Andrew Perriman’s method outlined here.
Perriman makes this claim about his method for interpreting the New Testament from a narrative-historical frame:
10. If we are to be consistent hermeneutically, I suggest that what principally connects the New Testament with the church today is the continuing historical narrative of God’s people. I think it is misleading to accommodate the historical distance by differentiating between what the text meant and what the text means. It means what it meant. Within the narrative frame there are certainly direct lessons to be learnt, and I do not discount analogical reading, but the New Testament is formative for the church today primarily because it explains what happened at a critical moment in the history of the people of God.
I think over all he is correct here, but perhaps what he does not address is that the texts really do “meant what they meant” but their significance for the community that canonized them can change from time period to time period. Paul’s theory of justification did not change during the reformation, it’s significance (rightly or wrongly) became different for the church. Similarly, the Old Testament, despite its historical and literary meaning for its author and original audience, still has a tropological or spiritual function and significance to God’s people today. Bruce Charlton (who is not a Bible scholar, but a Medical Doctor and read in evolutionary theory) points this out very elegantly here.
I think my approach to the New Testament very much mirrors Perriman’s, but I also think that the Scripture carries a significance to believers that is based upon but goes beyond their initial meaning. The very act of canonizing the bible indicates that the books therein are now a collection for the church rather than writings to individual churches.
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