The Bridge from Then to Now

The oldest useful distinction in this discipline is between what a text meant and what it asks of you. E. D. Hirsch, in The Aims of Interpretation (1976), named the two sides meaning and significance: meaning is what the text expresses, fixed by the words in their setting, while significance is the relation of that meaning to everything else, including to you. His point was that significance changes with the reader and meaning does not, and that collapsing the two is how a reader ends up calling his own preferences exegesis.

Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart put the same division to work for ordinary readers in How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, where they reserve the word exegesis for the first task and hermeneutics for the second. Their first rule is the one worth writing inside the cover of your Bible: a text cannot mean what it never could have meant to its author or his original readers. It does not tell you what a passage does mean. It rules out a great deal, which is what a good rule does.

Their second rule is the bridge in its simplest form. Wherever we share comparable particulars with the first-century hearers, that is, where our specific situation genuinely matches theirs, God's word to us is the same as his word to them. So instruction to a congregation quarrelling over status needs no translation for a congregation quarrelling over status. The work only begins when the particulars are not comparable.

J. Scott Duvall and J. Daniel Hays turned that work into five numbered steps in Grasping God's Word, and the picture they use is worth carrying around: two towns and a river. Grasp the text in their town, which is exegesis. Measure the width of the river, that is, name every difference between them and us: covenant, culture, language, situation, place in redemptive history. Cross the principlizing bridge, by asking what theological principle the text expresses that is true on both banks. Consult the biblical map, checking the principle against the rest of scripture. Then grasp the text in our town.

Two warnings about that model before we use it. First, J. Daniel Hays and Richard B. Hays are two different scholars, and this course will cite both; do not merge them. Second, the bridge is where nearly every abuse in the discipline happens, because a principle stated at a high enough altitude will connect any two banks at all. Section 5 is about that, and you should not read the worked example without it.

Richard B. Hays, in The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996), asks a question that sharpens the whole operation. Before you ask what a text requires, ask in which mode it speaks. He names four. A rule is a direct command or prohibition. A principle is a general framework offered as a reason for action. A paradigm is a story or a portrait of conduct, held up as an example or a warning. And the symbolic world is the whole picture of God, humanity and history within which the moral instruction makes sense at all. Hays' formulation is that a text should be granted authority in the mode in which it speaks, and that all four modes are necessary.

Test it. 'Do not get drunk on wine' (Ephesians 5:18) is a rule and functions as one. Romans 13:10, that love does no wrong to a neighbour, is a principle, and treating it as a rule produces nonsense, since it prescribes no act. The story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 is a paradigm, and treating it as a rule has produced some very strange preaching. And 'you were bought at a price' (1 Corinthians 6:20) is symbolic world: it does not command anything, it tells you what kind of creature you are, and every command in the letter presupposes it. Hays insists that all four modes are necessary and warns against collapsing any of them into another, and he treats the symbolic world as the foundation the other three rest on, since a rule or a paradigm has no force outside the picture of reality that makes sense of it. Readers of Moral Vision differ over how much weight he finally gives the narrative or paradigmatic mode, and this lesson does not need that settled. The question the framework puts to you stands either way.

Daniel Doriani comes at the same problem from the pastor's side in Putting the Truth to Work (2001). He sorts biblical material along a spectrum of text types, from rules and ideals through doctrine and redemptive acts to exemplary acts, images, and songs and prayers, and he insists that different types are applied differently. Then he proposes that application itself has four aspects, and that most preaching does one and forgets three. Duty asks what I should do. Character asks who I should be. Goals ask what we should aim at. Discernment asks how to tell truth from error in a situation the text never names.

Doriani's other concern is the one his tradition presses hardest, and a student should hear it clearly. Redemptive-historical reading asks, of any Old Testament narrative, what God is doing in this passage before it asks what the human characters model. The failure it is aimed at is moralism: David and Goliath preached as a lesson in courage about your giants, which converts a text about God saving Israel through an unlikely king into a motivational talk. The redemptive-historical instinct is to read the passage for its place in the story of salvation first.

The honest complication is that the New Testament itself does use Old Testament figures exemplarily. Hebrews 11 is a list of examples. James 5:17 offers Elijah as a model of prayer. 1 Corinthians 10:6 says these things happened as examples for us. So the choice is not between redemptive-historical and exemplary reading; it is a matter of order and proportion, and writers in this debate differ over how much exemplary preaching is safe. Sidney Greidanus and Edmund Clowney press the redemptive-historical side hard; Doriani himself allows a wider place for the exemplary than some of his colleagues do. Know that the argument exists and that it is about emphasis, not about whether examples are legitimate.

Take 1 Corinthians 8:1-13 and do the whole crossing, out loud, marking each decision.

Their town. Corinth was a Roman colony refounded in 44 BC, a port with two harbours, ambitious, status-conscious and full of temples. The sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on the slope of Acrocorinth has been excavated and contained dozens of small dining rooms; the Asklepieion had dining facilities too. Most meat that reached a Corinthian table had passed through a sacrifice, because that was how animals were slaughtered, and a great deal of eating happened inside sacred precincts, because that was where the rooms were. Papyrus invitations survive from Egypt asking a guest to dine at the table of a god in his temple, which tells you that the practice was ordinary and social rather than sinister. Refusing such an invitation from a patron, a trade association or a civic body carried a real cost in a society built on obligation.

Who are the weak. Gerd Theissen, in The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity (1982), argued that the strong were the socially prominent minority, for whom temple dining was normal civic life, and the weak were the poor, for whom meat was something you ate at a festival and therefore something inseparable from a god. It is an elegant reading and widely followed. Justin Meggitt, in Paul, Poverty and Survival (1998), challenged the economic premise, arguing that cheap meat was more available to the poor than Theissen allowed. Bruce Winter, in After Paul Left Corinth (2001), emphasised the pressure of the imperial cult and civic festivals. Mark this as judgment call one: the social identity of the weak is probable, not certain, and your application should not depend on a detail you cannot establish.

What exactly is forbidden. Paul concedes the theology entirely, and twice (8:4, 8:8). Then in 8:10 the scene is someone with knowledge eating in an idol's temple, and in 10:20-21 he forbids partnership with demons and the cup of demons outright, while in 10:25 he tells them to eat market meat without raising questions of conscience. Gordon Fee resolved this by separating the settings: temple dining is forbidden, marketplace meat is free. Others read a real tension, and a few have proposed that chapters 8 and 10 come from different letters stitched together, a proposal most scholars now reject but which shows how the difficulty was felt. Mark this as judgment call two: the harmonising reading is well argued and widely held, and it is a reading, not a datum.

What the passage actually does. Whichever way those two calls go, the argument's spine is visible and undisputed. Knowledge is real and insufficient. Love, not information, decides the case. The other person is not an inconvenience but a brother for whom Christ died (8:11), so wounding his conscience is sin against Christ (8:12). And Paul's response is not to legislate for others but to bind himself: if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat (8:13). Then chapter 9 is an entire chapter of him doing exactly that with his own apostolic rights, which is Hays' paradigmatic mode in action. Paul argues by going first.

Now measure the river, and be specific rather than sentimental about it. What differs: we do not live in a society where the meat supply runs through temples; most readers face no patron whose invitation cannot be refused; the category of a public sacrificial meal has no exact modern equivalent in the West. What does not differ: congregations still contain people at different stages, with different histories, whose consciences bind them differently; the socially confident still find the scrupulous tiresome; and being right is still not the same as being loving.

The principle, stated at a defensible altitude: among people who belong to Christ, a liberty that is genuinely mine stops being an entitlement the moment exercising it would damage the faith of someone for whom Christ died, and the one who is confident, not the one who is fragile, carries the cost of that restraint. Notice what that formulation keeps. It keeps the asymmetry, which is the sharp edge of the chapter. It keeps the word damage, rather than softening it to offend. And it keeps the reason, which is Christ's death for the other person rather than social harmony.

Consult the map. Romans 14 says the same with a symmetry chapter 8 does not state: the strong must not despise and the weak must not judge (14:3), and Paul there calls a settled conviction on either side acceptable. Galatians 2:11-14 sets the limit: when Peter withdrew from Gentile tables under pressure, Paul opposed him publicly, because what looked like deference to scruples was in fact the gospel being compromised. So the principle is bounded. Restraint is owed over indifferent things; it is not owed where the truth of the gospel is what is being conceded.

Our town, and here the judgment calls multiply. In much of Asia, and in parts of Africa where food is offered to ancestors or at shrines, 1 Corinthians 8 needs no bridge at all: the particulars are comparable in the most literal sense, and a new believer's question about the family meal at a festival is the Corinthian question word for word. A Western reader who reaches immediately for alcohol as the analogue should notice that a passage which is plain instruction for one congregation is a bridging problem only for another, and should be slower to assume that his own situation is the normal one.

Where the particulars are not comparable, name the analogy and defend it. A defensible application runs something like this: a believer who has come out of a background where some practice was bound up with real spiritual allegiance, gambling, occult practice, a particular festival, may be unable to touch it without conscience damage, and the mature believer who can take it or leave it should leave it in that person's presence, and should not explain at length why he is theologically entitled to it. That application is arguable and it is arguable on the text. It is also clearly weaker than the exegesis behind it, because the analogy between temple meat and a modern practice is a judgment, and you should say so when you teach it rather than presenting step five with the same confidence as step one.

Now the warning, and it needs to land as hard as the warning about ignoring context, because it is the failure produced by people who have learned the method.

Principles can be stated at any altitude, and the higher you go the less they cost. Watch a real command climb. Do not eat meat in a temple if it will destroy a weaker believer's faith. Do not use a liberty in a way that damages another Christian. Do not use your freedom carelessly. Consider others. Be considerate. Be nice. Every step up is a defensible generalisation of the step below it, no step is a lie, and by the top the sentence asks nothing of anybody, because there is no person on earth who thinks of himself as not nice. The text has been obeyed into silence.

The same climb can be made from anywhere. Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain becomes support those who work for you, becomes be generous, becomes have a good attitude about money. Paul himself makes the first move on that verse in 1 Corinthians 9:9-10, and it is worth noticing exactly where he stops: he applies it to paying the people who preach, a specific claim about a specific arrangement that cost him something to argue for. He does not climb to generosity in general. Apostolic principlizing lands on the ground.

So test every principle you form with three questions. Could a person who disagreed with this passage's actual instruction still affirm my principle? If so, the principle is too high. Does the principle name anyone who has to change? If not, it is decoration. And does it keep the passage's sharp edge, the thing that would have been unwelcome to its first hearers? The sharp edge of 1 Corinthians 8 is that the person who is right has to give something up and gets no credit for being right. A principle that does not preserve that has abstracted away the only part the Corinthians would have felt.

The two failures are worth naming side by side, because a teacher tends to see only one of them. One reader lifts a verse out of its situation and makes it mean whatever he needed, and he has ignored the context. The other reader does the historical work impeccably, builds a bridge, arrives at a principle so general that it commits him to nothing, and calls the result responsible interpretation. He has ignored the text. Both readers have ended up with a Bible that agrees with them. Only one of them can show his work.