In 1950, a work destined to become a classic was released, Protestant Biblical Interpretation by Bernard Ramm. It quickly became a textbook used by a huge number of Protestant seminaries. It was one of the last hermeneutics textbooks of wide acceptance that still took the viewpoint that by the use of a type of “scientific” linguistic exercise, one could determine that meaning of a Scripture with a certain high degree of probability. Of course, there are difficult to interpret Scriptures, Dr. Ramm would never have denied that, but, even then, one can rule out quite a few wrong interpretations.
“What is the control we use to weed out false theological speculation? Certainly the control is logic and evidence… interpreters who have not had the sharpening experience of logic…may have improper notions of implication and evidence. Too frequently such a person uses a basis of appeal that is a notorious violation of the laws of logic and evidence.” (Protestant Biblical Interpretation, Boston:W. A. Wilde, 1956)
Please notice that one of the main thoughts is that simple logic and evidence can ferret out the meaning of a Scripture. At times, in the book–yes, I first read it around 1974–it appears as though the role of the Holy Spirit was only to inspire the authors and to clear our minds so that we can use our full logic. His book was one of the last books of wide acceptance published under a modernist mindset. Within a few years, a decade, the first of the books began to come out in the USA that spoke of black theology, women’s theology, and liberation theology.
When those books came out, they were relentlessly put down by conservative Christians on the grounds that they had thrown logic away. There was no conception that the viewpoint of the typical theologian of that era might not be as neutral, logical, and unaffected as they had thought. For instance, women theologians began to point out that some of the assumptions by modern western Christians of women like Mary Magdalene and Bathsheba were not actually backed up by either Scripture or by the early history of interpretation. The Bible never says that Mary Magdalene was either an adulteress or a prostitute. Go ahead, search, lots of luck! And I, myself, published a couple of posts that point out that Bathsheba was considered innocent by both Scripture and Talmud. But, to put it bluntly, both interpretations arose in the West going into medieval male-dominated times.
Moreover, in philosophy, modernism had reached it zenith and was now dying. Post-modernism made clear just how often our apriori worldview influences our view, our interpretation of what we experience and read. Of course some post-modernists very clearly went off into la-la land. I am thinking here of instances such as people who even began to argue that the image of Christ on the cross, and even that type of preaching, should be removed from our churches, because it gives a message that it is OK to be a father who convinces his son to let himself be tortured to death, and that obedience to daddy is more important than self-preservation. The main contribution of post-modernist was the acknowledgment of our inability to be perfectly neutral.
Post-modernism has clearly made the case that this sort-of Greek Stoic ideal of the unemotional neutral observer theologian does not exist. No amount of training can teach us to see Scripture without some degree of bias. Unfortunately, too many of the post-modernists made it seem as though there was no common understanding to speak of. At the same time, in science, in 1962 Thomas Samuel Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, from which we get the term paradigm shift. He argued that we do not so much proceed in science in incremental increases of knowledge but only when a shift happens in our perceptions that allow us to perceive a new reality. Again, there have been the extremists who dwell on conspiracy theories, being the lone researcher who sees the truth, etc., but it is well accepted in science that observer bias must be accounted for. It is so pervasive, that no amount of training can prevent an observer from having bias in a scientific experiment.
So, what solutions have the law, science, and, yes, the Church come up with in order to minimize bias and misinterpretation? Yes, what do all three fields share in common as a way to overcome the inherent bias of humans?
===MORE TO COME===
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