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April 5, 2008

The Hermeneutics Quiz

A few months ago, Scot McKnight published one of the stranger quizzes I have seen in some time. He called it "The Hermeneutics Quiz" and said, "This quiz is designed to surface the decisions we make, perhaps without thinking about them, and about how we both read our Bible and don't read our Bible."

Hmmm. As one who does read the Bible, I thought I'd give the quiz a try. And lo and behold, I couldn't answer most of the questions. Let's take a look at a couple questions to see why.

Question 1

The Bible is:
1. God's inspired words in confluence with the authors.
2. I fall somewhere between No. 1 and No. 3.
3. God's inspired words that arise out of a community and then are written down by an author.
4. I fall somewhere between No. 3 and No. 5.
5. Words of an author who speaks out of a community's tradition, but which sacramentally lead us to God.

Hmmm??? None of these seems correct. I might buy into the first two thirds of option five with a few modifications. But even "Words of an author who speaks out of a community's tradition" seems more restrictive, specifically confessional, than I would like. How about giving me an option 6, "A collection of divergent works, themselves often internally inconsistent, that speak out of several sometimes competing ancient community traditions. Such works appear unified only through the eyes of other, later, community traditions."

Question 4

The commands in the Old Testament to destroy a village, including women and children, are:
1. Justifiable judgment against sinful, pagan, immoral peoples.
2. I fall somewhere between No. 1 and No. 3.
3. God's ways in the days of the Judges (etc.): they are primitive words but people's understanding as divine words for that day.
4. I fall somewhere between No. 3 and No. 5.
5. A barbaric form of war in a primitive society and I wish they weren't in the Bible.

Again, I couldn't find an answer among the five options. I'm not sure how I'd even modify any of these to reflect what I think about these "commands." Certainly, "A barbaric form of war in a primitive society" might be okay except modern warfare is also barbaric. I worry about relegating the barbaric nature of war to some primitive past. I might have gone with option 3 if it were not for its first clause. In addition, I rather enjoy theses passages.

There were only four questions of the twenty for which I found a more or less acceptable answer among the options. Can you guess which ones? Answer below.

The article on "Hermeneutics" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy begins,

The term hermeneutics covers both the first order art and the second order theory of understanding and interpretation of linguistic and non-linguistic expressions. As a theory of interpretation, the hermeneutic tradition stretches all the way back to ancient Greek philosophy. In the course of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, hermeneutics emerges as a crucial branch of Biblical studies. Later on, it comes to include the study of ancient and classic cultures.

So without getting into too much complexity, hermeneutics has something to do with theories of interpretation and/or principles of interpretation and the application of the same to texts.

All the questions in the "Hermeneutics Quiz" seemed based on a couple of "theories of interpretation" for which I see no evidence. One is the notion that there is, or should be, a unifying interpretation of this diverse material. A second such assumed theory is that the God of the Bible corresponds to something that has a positive and consistent ontological status throughout long history and within the Bible itself. Please excuse the weasel words, but I'm trying to avoid a side discussion as to the exact nature or natures of that positive ontological status. If that God or those gods don't exist and never have existed, then only a few of the answer options make any sense at all. But perhaps my biggest problem with this quiz is the underlying assumption that hermeneutics as a discipline is some special property of a (the) believing community. Sure, the very fact that the Leadership Journal.net hosted the quiz entails certain theological commitments. But, if dialog is possible, and I'm not sure that it is, that part of the Bible reading community that does not share those commitments should not be excluded as a matter of course.

I want to thank Jim Getz of Ketuvim and Tyler Williams of Codex for bringing this quiz to my attention. Both Jim and Tyler have their own abnormally interesting take on the "Hermeneutics Quiz."

Here are the four questions that I thought had a more or less acceptable answer option: 3, 6, 14, and 15. And I wasn't real happy with a couple of these.

Posted by Duane Smith at April 5, 2008 3:26 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |

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Posted by: afarensis at April 10, 2008 10:45 AM

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