As a preacher and teacher of the Word, I make sure that when I study the Word of God, though I allow the Holy Spirit to interpret scripture, I also apply certain tools to help me to be a better and informed communicator. I have learnt to understand the importance of biblical exegesis and hermeneutics. Basically the distinction boils down to this (as it pertains to the Bible*): Hermeneutics is the field of study concerned with how we interpret the Bible. Exegesis is the actual interpretation of the Bible by drawing the meaning out of the Biblical text. The distinction is not quite as simple as theory vs. application, though, since hermeneutics is not just concerned with the philosophy of exegesis, and exegesis is not merely the application of hermeneutical theory -- even if we restrict our comparison to Biblical hermeneutics and Biblical exegesis. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate this: Hermeneutics also studies the role of eisegesis in interpretation, which is by definition not part of exegesis. Hermeneutics considers the role of church doctrine and theology in interpretation -- both of which are (often) irrelevant to exegesis. So we are sort of comparing apples to... ontology here. In a sense there is no overlap; The focus of exegesis is the text. The focus of hermeneutics is stuff like exegesis... why do we do it? how do we do it? how should we do it? As far as sequence, I suppose it could be argued that since exegesis is critical in nature, it implies some scientific method, which implies some prior hermeneutic. That is as far as I think we could go in relating the two sequentially, though.... (These thoughts boggle my mind when I listen to preachers...
Posted on: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 08:42:45 +0000
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