Hermeneutics
Rightly Handling the Word of Truth
A Position Paper • Bruce Mitchell • Agapao Allelon • allelon.us
“Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth.”
— 2 Timothy 2:15, NASB95
A Brief Statement
I believe that Scripture, as the inspired and inerrant Word of God, has a true and discoverable meaning — the meaning its divine and human authors intended — and that the reader’s task is to draw that meaning out, never to read his own meaning in. Hermeneutics is the art and science by which we do this: the disciplined interpretation of the Bible according to its grammatical, historical, literary, and theological context, so that we may accurately handle the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15), understand it as God intended, and obey it.
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A Detailed Exposition
There are many good ways to read the Bible — cover to cover, book by book, verse by verse, or following the long thread of redemptive history. But there are also fallacious ways that lead a reader not merely past the meaning but clean against it. The difference between the two is named by most students in their first year of serious study: exegesis and eisegesis. They sound like variations on a theme, and grammatically they are, but they point in opposite directions. To grasp the difference — and the larger discipline that governs it, hermeneutics — is to learn how to listen to God rather than to ourselves.
What Hermeneutics Is
Hermeneutics is the art and science of biblical interpretation — the study of the rules and principles by which we rightly understand the Bible.1 The word itself comes from the Greek hermēneuō (ἑρμηνεύω), “to interpret, explain, translate.” If hermeneutics is the science — the body of principles — then exegesis is the art, the practice of applying those principles to a particular text, and application is the further step of bringing the discovered meaning to bear on life.2 The terms are sometimes used loosely, even interchangeably, and that is not always wrong; but it helps to keep the order clear: hermeneutics gives us the rules, exegesis does the work, and application reaps the harvest.
Exegesis: Drawing the Meaning Out
Exegesis is the art of drawing out and explaining the meaning of a biblical passage — studying a text to understand what it actually says, what its author meant by it, and how it bears on our lives. The word comes from the Greek exēgeomai (ἐξηγέομαι), “to lead out, to draw out, to explain.”3 It is a gloriously fitting word, for it is the very verb John uses of the Son: “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God … He has explained Him” (John 1:18) — Christ is the great Exegete of the Father. Exegesis is, at root, an act of humility: it lets the text speak first. We see the pattern as early as Nehemiah, where Ezra and the Levites “read from the book … translated to give the sense so that they understood the reading” (Nehemiah 8:8)4 — the first portrait of biblical exposition, and its goal: understanding that leads to obedience. This is what Paul charges Timothy to do: to be a workman “accurately handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15), a phrase that pictures cutting a straight road or a straight furrow through the text.5
Eisegesis: Reading the Meaning In
Eisegesis is the opposite error — the imposing of one’s own meaning upon a text, distorting it in the process. The prefix tells the story: eis means “into.” Where exegesis leads the meaning out, eisegesis reads a meaning in.6 It must be admitted honestly that all of us do this to some degree; none of us comes to the text empty-handed, free of bias or assumption. The danger is not that we have presuppositions but that we let them rule — that we read a verse, leap to the conclusion we already wanted, and never stop to ask what the author was actually saying. Eisegesis is not merely poor interpretation; it is dishonest interpretation. It is unfair to the author, whose words are bent to a meaning he never intended, and unfair to our hearers, whom we feed our own opinions in the name of God. It is like reading the first line of a novel and declaring the whole book to be about that line.
The Reign of Context
If there is a single governing rule, it is this: a text without a context is a pretext. Meaning lives in context — literary, historical, cultural, grammatical, canonical, and theological.7 The literary context is the words, sentences, and paragraphs that surround a verse, and the book and chapter in which it sits; to study Mark 16:15, one must read Mark 16:9–20, and indeed the whole Gospel. The historical context is the world in which the words were first written and first heard. The canonical context is the rest of Scripture, which never finally contradicts itself. To lift a verse out of its setting is to silence the very voice we claim to honor.
The Grammatical-Historical Method
The method that honors context is what has long been called the grammatical-historical approach: we interpret the words according to their normal grammar and their original historical setting, seeking the plain, intended sense of the text — what the church has called the sensus literalis.8 The Reformers recovered this from a medieval habit of layering allegorical, moral, and heavenly meanings atop the text until the words could be made to mean almost anything.9 Several principles guard the method. Scripture is essentially clear in its central message — the doctrine of perspicuity — so that any honest reader may grasp its main sense.10 Scripture interprets Scripture: the clearer passages govern the obscure, and no text may be read against the harmony of the whole.11 A passage has one intended meaning, though it may have many faithful applications — a vital distinction the careless reader collapses, mistaking “what it means to me” for “what it means.”12 Each text must be read according to its literary genre — narrative as narrative, poetry as poetry, prophecy, parable, and epistle, each in its own key.13 And the whole of Scripture finds its center in Christ, who Himself “explained … the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures” (Luke 24:27).15
Yet method alone does not open the heart. The natural man does not welcome the things of the Spirit of God (1 Corinthians 2:14); we depend on the Spirit’s illumination to grasp the significance of what we rightly read. This illumination does not bypass the labor of study — the Ethiopian still needed Philip to guide him (Acts 8:30–31) — but it is the difference between reading words and meeting God in them.14
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Practical Implications
Ministry Emphasis: Teaching / Bible Study
How, then, do we actually do this? An exegetical study moves through a simple, repeatable rhythm — observe, interpret, correlate, apply. 16. First, observe: read the passage slowly, more than once — once to hear what it says, again to hear what the author is saying — noting its genre, its flow, its repeated words, its tone. Second, interpret: ask what came before and after, what the words meant in their original setting, and what the author intended; consult the grammar, weigh the key terms, and trace the cross-references. Third, correlate: ask how this passage fits the message of its book and the whole canon, letting Scripture interpret Scripture. Only then, fourth, apply: ask what this one meaning requires of me, here and now — mindful that a single meaning yields many faithful applications.
The surest way to avoid the eisegesis trap is to make exegesis the habit — to keep asking, before we ask what a text means to us, what it meant as written. Read twice. Listen before you speak. Suspect the interpretation that flatters you. And remember the stakes: every cult and every heresy is, at bottom, a failure of hermeneutics — a verse pried loose from its context and pressed into service of a meaning it never bore. To handle the word of truth accurately is therefore not a scholar’s luxury but a shepherd’s duty. The people of God are fed or starved on the quality of our interpretation.
This, finally, is an act of love and reverence. To labor over the text — to draw out its meaning rather than impose our own — is to treat God’s Word as what it is: not a mirror in which we admire our own ideas, but a window through which the living God speaks. The interpreter’s humility is simply the creature’s proper posture before the Creator who has condescended to be understood.
A text without a context is a pretext. Draw the meaning out; never read it in.
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Biblical, Exegetical, Theological, and Historical Notes
1 Hermeneutics derives from the Greek hermēneuō (ἑρμηνεύω), “to interpret, explain, translate” — traditionally linked to Hermes, the messenger of the Greek pantheon. As a discipline, it is the theory and rules of interpretation; see Roy B. Zuck, Basic Bible Interpretation, and Bernard Ramm, Protestant Biblical Interpretation.
2 It helps to keep three things distinct, even when usage runs them together. Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation. Exegesis is the art — the practice of applying those principles to a particular text to discover its meaning. Application (sometimes treated under homiletics or contextualization) is the further step of bringing that meaning to bear on life. The source tradition sometimes blurs these; the order clarifies the work.
3 Exēgeomai (ἐξηγέομαι) means “to lead out, draw out, narrate, explain.” Strikingly, it is the verb of John 1:18: the Son has “explained” (exēgēsato) the Father — Christ is the definitive Exegete of God. Good exegesis imitates Him: it makes the meaning known rather than inventing it.
4 Nehemiah 8:8: the Levites “read from the book … translated to give the sense (Hebrew mĕpōrāsh) so that they understood the reading.” This is the earliest clear picture of biblical exposition — reading, explaining, understanding — and it issues at once in worship and obedience (Nehemiah 8:9–12).
5 2 Timothy 2:15: the workman “accurately handling” the word translates orthotomeō (ὀρθοτομέω), literally “to cut straight.” The image is of cutting a straight road or driving a straight furrow — a clean, true line through the text, neither wandering nor forced.
6 Eisegesis joins the prefix eis (“into”) to the same root: reading a meaning into the text. Where exegesis leads the meaning out, eisegesis smuggles a meaning in. Since every reader brings presuppositions, the goal is not the impossible feat of having none, but the discipline of submitting them to the text rather than imposing them on it.
7 “A text without a context is a pretext” is the interpreter’s proverb. Context is layered: literary (the surrounding words, paragraph, book), historical and cultural (the original setting), grammatical (syntax and word usage), canonical (the rest of Scripture), and theological (the analogy of faith). To study Mark 16:15, one must read Mark 16:9–20, then the whole Gospel.
8 The grammatical-historical method seeks the plain, intended sense of the text — the sensus literalis — by attending to its grammar and its history. It is the mainstream of Protestant interpretation; see Milton S. Terry, Biblical Hermeneutics, and Walter C. Kaiser Jr. and Moisés Silva, Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics.
9 Medieval interpretation often employed the Quadriga, a fourfold sense — literal, allegorical, moral (tropological), and heavenly (anagogical). The Reformers did not deny that Scripture has depth, but insisted that the literal/grammatical sense governs and controls all the rest, lest the text be made to mean anything the interpreter wishes.
10 The perspicuity (clarity) of Scripture: its central, saving message is plain enough for any honest reader to grasp (Psalm 119:105, 130; Deuteronomy 30:11–14). This does not mean every passage is equally easy (cf. 2 Peter 3:16), but that Scripture is not a locked book reserved for experts.
11 “Scripture interprets Scripture” — the analogy of Scripture (analogia Scripturae) and the analogy of faith (analogia fidei). The Westminster Confession (1.9) states the rule: the true sense of any text is to be searched out by other places that speak more clearly. The clearer governs the obscure.
12 A passage has one intended meaning but many legitimate applications. This guards against the modern reader-response instinct that multiplies meanings at will; meaning is fixed by the author and discovered by the reader, while application is as varied as the lives that submit to it. On authorial intent as the anchor of valid interpretation, see E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation. The popular question “what does this verse mean to me?” must always follow, never replace, “what does this verse mean?”
13 Genre governs reading: narrative, law, poetry, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, parable, epistle, and apocalyptic. Each carries its meaning by its own conventions. To read poetry as if it were statute, or apocalyptic as if it were newspaper, is to misread. See Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth.
14 Illumination is the Spirit’s work of opening the regenerate mind to the significance of Scripture (1 Corinthians 2:14; 1 John 2:20, 27). It is distinct from inspiration (which produced the text) and does not excuse careless study — the Ethiopian still needed a guide (Acts 8:30–31). Method without the Spirit is sterile; the Spirit without method is presumption.
15 All of Scripture finds its center in Christ, who “explained … the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures” and “opened their minds to understand” (Luke 24:27, 44–45). Redemptive-historical reading traces this Christ-ward thread — disciplined by the grammatical-historical sense, lest it dissolve into the uncontrolled allegory the Reformers rejected.
16 The observe-interpret-correlate-apply rhythm is the classic inductive method taught, among others, by Howard G. Hendricks, Living by the Book. On the movement between the parts and the whole — the “hermeneutical spiral” by which understanding deepens — see Grant R. Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral; on the common errors to avoid (word-study fallacies, illegitimate totality transfer, and the like), see D. A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies. As one who reads in the dispensational tradition, I hold that a consistent grammatical-historical method should be applied throughout the whole canon, including prophecy — the interpretive commitment that Charles Ryrie identified as one of the marks of dispensational theology.
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Select Bibliography
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), 1.9.
International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics. 1982.
Augustine of Hippo. On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana).
Carson, D. A. Exegetical Fallacies. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker.
Fee, Gordon D., and Douglas Stuart. How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
Hendricks, Howard G., and William D. Hendricks. Living by the Book. Chicago: Moody.
Hirsch, E. D. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kaiser, Walter C., Jr., and Moisés Silva. Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics: The Search for Meaning. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
Klein, William W., Craig L. Blomberg, and Robert L. Hubbard Jr. Introduction to Biblical Interpretation. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.
Osborne, Grant R. The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation. 2nd ed. Downers Grove: IVP Academic.
Ramm, Bernard. Protestant Biblical Interpretation. Grand Rapids: Baker.
Terry, Milton S. Biblical Hermeneutics. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
Thomas, Robert L. Evangelical Hermeneutics: The New Versus the Old. Grand Rapids: Kregel.
Virkler, Henry A. Hermeneutics: Principles and Processes of Biblical Interpretation. Grand Rapids: Baker.
Zuck, Roy B. Basic Bible Interpretation. Colorado Springs: David C. Cook.
