Mercury Rising
The Art of Interpretation
Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! (Romans 11:33)
Hermeneutics is a big word you learn at Bible College. It is the study or practice of interpreting texts in the areas of literature, law and religion.
In literature, discovering the intent of an author can be an enlightening game. In law, one’s life (or life sentence) can hang in the balance of a judge’s interpretation. In religion, besides plumbing the depths of the mind of God, it is an enlightening game in the balance of which many lives hang. God has revealed His mind in His Word, and has also seen fit to give to His people the often difficult job of interpreting it.
The word “hermeneutics” derives from the story of the Greek god Hermes (called Mercury by the Romans). Wikipedia says:
The folk etymology places the origin (Greek: hermeneutike) with Hermes, the mythological Greek deity whose role is that of messenger of the Gods. Besides being mediator between the gods themselves and god and humanity, he leads souls to the underworld upon death, is the inventor of language and speech, interpreter, a liar, thief and trickster. These multiple roles makes Hermes an ideal representative of Hermeneutics, For, as Socrates notes, words have the power to reveal or conceal, thus promoting the message in an ambiguous way. The Greek view of language as consisting of signs that could lead to truth or falsehood is the very essence of Hermes, who is said to relish the uneasiness of the messaged.
So, the practice and application of hermeneutics has a negative side, a character trait found in the challenge Samson gave to his enemies. God’s Word gives us the milk of the obvious, but it also gives us enough mental steak to boggle the best of minds. One only has to read Ezekiel, Daniel or Revelation to observe that God often speaks in riddles. A verse James Jordan loves to quote is Proverbs 25:2:
“It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.”
In other words, God deliberately hides things from us. He is the Father in a game of hide-and-seek who delights in being found, as Philip Yancey once commented. Astronomer Johannes Kepler is credited with saying that as he studied the universe he was “thinking God’s thoughts after him.” Like the human experience, and astronomy, the Bible is an unfathomably complex work whose complete navigation is impossible. It is a food supply that will last until the end of history and beyond.
Someone challenged me last week on the application of the Tabernacle speeches (Exodus 25-31) to Genesis 1. “That’s just your hermeneutic.” The modern conservative seems to think that the Bible text itself is sort of “neutral,” that there are various hermeneutics we can apply to it and come up with different results. Interpreters with many varying agendas have attempted to hijack the Scriptures in the way Supreme Court judges continually violate the Constitution. Is this simply a question of agenda? Even the bland conservatism taught in the academies has its own agenda. The Bible is often contorted (or ignored) to maintain a scientistic worldview. There is no such thing as neutral when it comes to the Scriptures, but does the Bible itself have the answers built in?
If I were a biblical scholar, I would now spend pages discussing the issue like Warren Gage has done in his extremely helpful analysis, The Crisis in Protestant Biblical Theology [PDF]. But I’m not, and I’m not. Instead I’m going to bonk you on the head with what I have found has been the most helpful observation in Peter Leithart’s Deep Exegesis: his short object lesson using the movie Shrek. I’ve used it over and over and it really helps people understand where I’m coming from when it comes to hermeneutics. Despite appearances, I am not actually babbling incoherently. The Mercurial messages of God have not made this hatter mad.
Why is Shrek funny? If you had no prior knowledge of fairy tales or popular movies, you wouldn’t get the jokes. You would just sit there, in the cinema, or on your couch, with a blank look. You might even walk out. That is the situation modern evangelicals are in. As Bible knowledge decreases, academies are faced with students (and lecturers!) who might as well be from another culture. [1] The wisdom literature and the prophets were written for people who had memorised, perhaps even by chant, the earlier Scriptures since they were children. Then Paul turns up and takes young Timothy to see Shrek I, and the boy gets it. All the riches buried in the “loamy undergrowth” are drawn upon in a clever, tight, witty and often ironic presentation that not only relies upon a deep familiarity with the source material, but whose events follow a familiar structure to those in earlier texts.
This is the apostolic hermeneutic, pure and simple. Matthew can refer to Rachel’s weeping for her children as he relates Herod the Great’s massacre of the innocents. He can draw on an apparently unrelated text in Isaiah to refer to Mary miraculously conceiving. James can stand up and say “this is that” concerning the Tabernacle of David in Acts 2:16. None of these texts were prophecies of first century events. They are references to the way God does things, and the order in which He does things.
The Book of Revelation is the pinnacle, the finest example of tight, witty, ironic and provocative literary allusion in history. Without a deep grounding in the Torah and the prophets, we don’t get it. Because moderns approach the prophets and the Revelation as something unique, something new, few commentators even comprehend the actual purpose of these books. Most commentaries ruminate blindly upon the significance of Princess Fiona’s freeze-frame karate kick. They treat the Muffin Man rhyme as though it had just fallen from heaven. When they read Isaiah 11, with wide-eyed wonder, they strain over the meaning of the wolf in Shrek’s bed, or the quick quip of the smallest of the three bears. [2] And they give us a detailed history of the geographical location of Shrek’s swamp, and how the gradual accumulation of silt recorded in obscure histories or apocryphal scriptures is somehow the key to the canonical story.
If you as a child were raised reciting (or chanting) the Scriptures as Timothy was, the words and the structures would have shaped your thoughts, your dreams, your very imagination. You not only recognised the characters in Paul’s teaching, you recognised the shape of the stories. Like a little child, you would interrupt Dad’s retelling of the story because you already knew what was coming next. Instead, we get grave-faced theologians writing long dissertations to present in mind-numbing detail the seven historic views of the mysterious comment of the Magic Mirror concerning Snow White: “Although she lives with seven other men, she’s not easy,” and, like Snow White, remaining cautiously uncommitted to any of them.
The Bible’s built-in hermeneutic is simple. It is architectural. It is brick upon brick, storey upon storey, precept upon precept. So, when Ezekiel or Jesus or Paul or John writes something mystifying, like, “No wonder you’re late. Why, this watch is exactly two days slow,” much Mercury hath made him mad (Mark 3:21; Acts 26:24).
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Artwork: 2008 concept artwork for Alice In Wonderland by the brilliant Michael Kutsche.
[1] See Why Johnny Can’t Preach.
[2] See The Wolf and the Lamb.
