In the last couple of posts I’ve interacted with Roy Beacham’s argument for a literal hermeneutic. I indicated that while I share Beacham’s concerns about approaches to Old Testament interpretation that re-interpret the text contrary to authorial intent, I think that the approach he advocates makes it difficult to understand numerous New Testament interpretations and fulfillments of Old Testament passages.
A few years back I raised a similar concern regarding Mark Snoeberger’s contribution to Covenantal and Dispensational Theologies: Four Views.
[Traditional dispensationalists] often begin by laying out their hermeneutic as if it is axiomatic and then insist that all passages conform to this hermeneutic without having first demonstrated the validity of their hermeneutic. Here Snoeberger explicitly affirms this approach. This approach violates the sufficiency of Scripture, since Scripture’s own self-interpretation should be the foundation for any biblical hermeneutic.
Interestingly, an article in the most recent volume of the Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal responds to the concern I raised. In “‘Received’ Laws of Language: The Existence, Ground, and Preliminary Identification of a Hermeneutically Disputed Notion” and an accompanying blog post, “The Sufficiency of Scripture and Transcendental Knowledge,” Snoeberger provides a substantial defense of his approach.
In the article, Snoeberger argues for the existence of natural laws. He further argues for a Van Tillian understanding of how these laws are “received.” Finally, he argues that natural laws are not restricted to matters of morality but that they encompass matters such as linguistics. I want to agree with Snoeberger on these matters.
In the blog post, rejects the sufficiency of Scripture critique by noting, “there must exist some tentative/provisional awareness, prior to reading the Bible, of certain basic hermeneutical a prioris. Otherwise, we would be caught in a paradox: we could not access the very Bible from which we learn how to read the Bible.”
I take the point. Further, I share his concern about the resurgence of pre-modern multi-sense interpretive approaches. Appeals to the Great Tradition to defend these interpretative models often undermine the sufficiency of Scripture.
Nonetheless, I have three reservations about Snoeberger’s argument. The first is practical, and the second two are theological.
First, while one can respond to the resurgence of pre-modern multi-sense interpretations by appealing to the received laws of language, I think it would be more fruitful to make the case that the apostles themselves did not adopt the allegorical approaches that became common in the patristic and medieval periods. This seems to me a more straightforward argument than appeals to the natural laws of linguistics. For an example of this kind of argument, see chapter 6 of my dissertation.
Second, while I affirm the reality of creational norms / natural laws, and while I think Christian’s should study creation (which includes the facility humans have in language) to discern these creational norms, all efforts to determine creational norms or natural laws need to be tested against Scripture. A key test would be to see how Scripture writers in both the Old and New Testament interpreted previous Scripture passages.
Third, while it is the case that “there must exist some tentative/provisional awareness, prior to reading the Bible, of certain basic hermeneutical a prioris,” a doctrine of biblical hermeneutics needs to be grounded in Scripture because of the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. In other words, a doctrine of biblical hermeneutics needs to ground hermeneutical a prioris in the biblical text.
I should clarify that Snoeberger does in his contribution to the Four Views book and in other places seek to give an account of the New Testament’s use of the Old. For instance, in another recent post to the DBTS blog, Snoeberger argues that the New Testament often uses Old Testament language by way of analogy, metaphor, and corpus linguistics. In other words, the New Testament may be using Old Testament language without claiming to be interpreting those Old Testament texts. In particular, he claims this approach is better than seeing Old Testament types fulfilled by New Testament antitypes.
I grant the NT may well make use of the OT in the way Snoeberger describes, and I fully grant that many hymns and later Christian writings certainly do so. But I’m not convinced that analogy, metaphor, and corpus linguistics will account for all of the OT’s use of the NT.