Our Interpretive Toolkit: Framing How We Read Scripture - Episode 136

Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel and lately on the podcast, I have been talking about Torah as wisdom literature. I have been getting into the work of John Walton and his son, J Harvey Walton, and we've been talking about the ancient genre of law collection and how that functioned differently than law code.

[00:00:38] We've also been talking about covenant a lot, and we've been talking about covenant stipulation and how that's not the same as law code or law collection. But it does have a crossover with law collection on some fronts, especially when you look at the 10 Commandments. The 10 Commandments or the seems to be both law collection and covenant stipulation.

[00:01:04] Now, today, we're gonna broaden the picture. We're gonna start looking at biblical interpretation methodologies. And the reason we're gonna do this is because a lot of people talk about methodology when they're talking about John Walton and his work, a lot of people will suggest there are methodological problems with his approach.

[00:01:27] We're also gonna be talking about this because we want to understand what biblical theology is and what it does. That's kind of a conversation that's been long and coming, especially for this podcast.

[00:01:40] And I'm gonna be honest with you, my view of biblical theology is not always the same as somebody else's view. And when we're talking about John Walton and methodology and all of these things like this, we really need to take care not to get pedantic and insist that someone's description of what's going on needs to sound like our description. Or even that it needs to address the same things that we're looking at or come up with an answer that is in alignment to what we think.

[00:02:14] It also doesn't mean that one idea or methodology must be better than another, or that some ideas are more primitive.

[00:02:24] One thing I do sense in the Walton's work is the idea that the past is primitive, and we just kind of have to accept that and look down upon it. Specifically, I'm thinking here in terms of their idea of referent and affirmation. I will have to lay that out in a different episode. But I want it to be clear that I don't think that previous times or changes in theology or ideas or worldview necessitate a change from primitive to civilized or modern.

[00:02:57] And I would probably suggest that the Waltons might not agree that even they are doing this kind of thing. So let's be fair as far as that goes. And honestly this is more of a claim about personality and opinion more than their actual work.

[00:03:15] What we want to analyze is their actual claims about Scripture and history. We're not here to analyze their opinions or their personal stances or their views on science or anything like that. None of that functionally matters because we're interested in the actual truth claims that they are making about Scripture.

[00:03:38] Okay, so last week I promised that we would talk about things like obedience and holiness and righteousness, and I said we'd get into the Old Testament New Testament distinction and some differences there. We probably won't get into that, but I do hope that we will get into those other themes that I mentioned. It's going to be an episode that is going to be diving pretty deep into some technical things.

[00:04:04] So if you aren't familiar with those already, you might be feeling a little bit lost in this episode. But I'm gonna do my best to lay it out pretty simply and straightforwardly. And as such, I want you to also know that by doing that, I'm going to be kind of glossing over a lot of nuance. It's just kind of what we have to do for this conversation.

[00:04:29] Another reason that this episode in particular is going to get pretty deep into the weeds is because I'm going to start talking about frame semantics again. If you don't know what frame semantics is, you can go to my episode number 1 21 called Devil in the Details. That's where I lay out what frame semantics is, what it does, how it's helpful, and I also have a really helpful, at least I hope it's helpful, study guide about frame semantics. You can find that when you go to my website and you see the tab at the top that says Resources.

[00:05:09] When you click on that, you will see a heading that says Frame Semantics Study Guide, and you can download that for free.

[00:05:16] I am also going to throw in a little bit of a plug here right now for my new biblical theology community that I mentioned last week, but I wasn't ready to give out the actual link for it. And I am ready for that this week. So you will find the link to my biblical theology community, you'll find it in the show notes. It is called "On This Rock," and the website is "On This Rock," but you have to hyphenate the words. Okay, so it's on hyphen this hyphen rock.com.

[00:05:51] I'm not gonna lay out the details of what's going on in that community, but if you wanna check it out, you can do that.

[00:05:58] It's really easy to sign up. Just go to the website, click join now, and you can get in there for free and see what it's all about. I am super excited about it. In that community, I will be talking more about frame semantics and things like that.

[00:06:15] So at any rate, back to our topic today, we're gonna talk about interpretation methodology.

[00:06:22] Part of the difficulty here is that when people say that they use a particular method, they'll kind of presume that you know what they mean by it. But every method has its shades and its different uses. We also need to acknowledge that these different methods are not incompatible. You can use them together. You can mix and match, you can do all kinds of things like that.

[00:06:47] A lot of people don't realize that they're using a method of interpretation and they wouldn't know how to describe it, even if they figured they did. So I'm hoping that this conversation will help you articulate that and see that for yourself. These different methods shape how we understand the Bible, how we understand theology, and how we live out our Christian life.

[00:07:11] Understanding these different methods is going to help us answer weird questions like. Why does this preacher say that the law is binding while this one over there says it's obsolete. That's not just a theological difference. It's probably an interpretation difference. Now, when people talk about interpretation, there's two words that get thrown around a lot.

[00:07:36] You hear exegesis and you hear eisegesis. Exegesis means to draw out the meaning from the text. This is the idea that you're letting the text speak on its own terms. Now, of course, everybody says that they do exegesis. Eisegesis, on the other hand, means that we're reading into the text. It's usually referring to what happens when someone brings their own opinions, their own assumptions, their own agenda. And they impose that upon Scripture.

[00:08:11] Now, nobody wants to say that I am doing eisegesis. That's usually the thing that you claim your opponent is doing. Now exegesis and eisegesis have something to do with interpretation, but it's not a direct crossover. Interpretation is that broader process or method that includes both exegesis and application. And our interpretive methods are shaped by the tools and the presumptions that we are bringing to the text.

[00:08:43] So even if we're committed to exegesis, we're still making choices. We're making choices as to which passages we connect together. We're making choices of how to handle genre, narrative, symbolism. We're making decisions on what we think counts as the main idea and what doesn't. And most importantly, this is the method that we're using to get to that point of determining all of those things.

[00:09:14] So everyone is doing interpretation. Even if you don't realize it, even if you think you're just reading the plain text, you're still making interpretive moves. You're reading it through the lens of your tradition or your sermons that you've heard, or your Bible study, footnotes and you're responding to your own expectations of what the Bible is supposed to say and how it's saying it.

[00:09:40] Now we'd all love to see that there was only one right way to do it. And of course that right way is my way, right? But that's not necessarily the case. There's not just one correct method that gets everything right, because methods are like lenses and each one can bring something into focus while obscuring something else.

[00:10:04] Again, we need to realize that methods don't always compete. They can often compliment. So the really good thing about this is that it's not a winner takes all fight between methods. But we ought to know what method we're using when, and the assumptions that that brings with it. Because it's going to color the meaning that we're drawing out.

[00:10:29] So the fancy word here is hermeneutics. What's the difference between interpretation and hermeneutics? Well, interpretation is what you're doing when you engage with the text. When you ask, what does this verse mean? That's doing interpretation. You're making sense of the text. Hermeneutics is how you think interpretation should be working.

[00:10:55] So hermeneutics is our methodology. It's our toolkit. Hermeneutics is what we're getting to when we ask what rules or principles guide the way that we read Scripture. So hermeneutics is the theory or the method or the set of tools that we use to practice interpretation.

[00:11:17] If we wanna get a little bit more technical, you can say hermeneutics is the philosophy and interpretation is the actual act of applying the philosophy.

[00:11:27] All right, so I'm gonna give a basic survey of the basic main methods. And first I'll give you an initial spoiler. Last week I talked about biblical theology and my version of it. My version is a little bit broad. I really kind of want to see it as: understanding the Bible in its original context. That means a lot of different things.

[00:11:55] So my version of biblical theology is not just one of these methods. It crosses over methodologies. It combines them to find hopefully what is useful. And it allows different methods to speak and input and have some say in my interpretation. So it's like I have a whole bunch of different toolkits that I carry around with me.

[00:12:18] My opinion is that that fixes some of the issues that individual toolkits can have.

[00:12:25] The dirty little secret of interpretation and why we don't all just get along with some idea that seems really clear to you, but that might not have any relevance to somebody else is because we are deep within these methods.

[00:12:41] I've described this as trying to convince an atheist of Christianity by quoting Scripture. Scripture is true. It's accurate, but it's not relevant to them. It is not relevant to their frame of reference. So when people are coming at things and using a different method, then there's gonna be a lot of disconnect.

[00:13:05] I also wanna say before I start getting into these methods that we are generally too quick to critique. That's not to say that there aren't problems to critique, but when it comes to critiquing, you have a few choices here.

[00:13:20] First of all, you can critique what you think is wrong about their idea or their evidence, and that might or might not be relevant to how they're actually thinking about it. This kind of a critique isn't in the realm of frame semantics and conceptual thinking. This kind of a critique lives more in the realm of propositional logic or word choice level.

[00:13:45] It's like trying to get that atheist to understand something within a Christian frame. You're flattening everybody's frame of reference down into one thing and presuming that we can all just get along and play together. Now, of course, many atheists still hold to a very Christian worldview in a lot of ways, even if they don't realize it because they've been raised in the Western world, they live in it.

[00:14:11] Their morals are framed by Christianity. So the overlap that we have can be leveraged to get a point across, but it's not guaranteed. And your approach might miss the mark entirely. Any overlap in frames can be utilized to provide a place of conjunction where agreement or a critique might be found.

[00:14:33] But if your critique doesn't critique something that actually matches up, then it's just not gonna make sense to the other people. I think this is why many conversations with people who disagree with us are so frustrating. We might try to match definitions of terms, which is the first thing we should do, though.

[00:14:54] Good luck even trying to get people to do that. But if that's all we do is match definitions of terms, we're still going to find mismatches because we're working on the word level, not the conceptual level.

[00:15:10] Another way that you can critique is through critiquing their methodology. Now, this is in the realm of frame semantics, because it interacts with their conceptual frame. This is a harder way to critique somebody because it's foundational to them, and there's no guarantee that they will agree that their frame is weak or that another frame might be better.

[00:15:36] Because remember, these don't have to be better or worse. There's no hierarchy here.

[00:15:43] Critiquing methodology can look like critiquing the source or the provenance or the history of their method, or the people who hold it though that's got some logical problems to it. So you can critique, say, Protestant theology by saying that it is a late comer in history.

[00:16:03] Now frames are related to how we think, so they encompass things like identity, worldview, really just the world and story we each live inside of. It doesn't even have to be the case that we identify with our ideas because again, it's not propositional, it's core conceptualization of how we view the world.

[00:16:27] In other words, our frame is the worldview and cognitive structural thought that we actually live in. These frames are set up with a variety of foundations, including our personalities, our cognitive ability or critical thinking skills, the amount of humility we're able to have, how much we identify with the ideas, and a whole bunch of other things.

[00:16:56] So I hope you see why it's so difficult to get people to agree. There is simply no way to get everyone on the same page with all of those things at hand. Personally, I feel these differences are why there's different interpretation methods at all, and even why there's different denominations.

[00:17:17] Now a third way you can do critique is to critique elements within the conceptual frame itself. You can shine a light on the actual things that the frame is bringing out because it's not like people have actually analyzed their own frames all that well.

[00:17:34] You can compare that frame with another frame to shine those lights on the elements there. In order to do this, you can especially look at functions and purposes of the frame. What does it actually do and who does it involve? Where are the elements located in relation to each other and or the outside world? What tensions exist in those interrelationships? Are the frame elements aligned cohesively? Is there anything that introduces contradiction? And lastly, what is the theological orientation of the frame?

[00:18:17] By looking at all of those things that can help you to actually analyze and compare the two ideas that you might have and the differences.

[00:18:26] Alright, so let's jump into these different methodologies. The first one I'm going to mention is the one that probably needs the least amount of description. This is the literalist reading.

[00:18:40] The literalist reading might be combined with some other methods, but it's a very common, modern evangelical, Protestant, or fundamentalist position to have. The goal is to read the text at face value. It assumes a straightforward historical account in the text unless the text is clearly metaphorical. The caution for this type of reading is that it can miss genre. It can miss poetic or theological nuance.

[00:19:12] Well, it can miss a lot of things. It tends to be overly rigid with no ability to rethink, no ability to adjust or shift or pivot. The appeal is that it's simple and it's clear, but again, it's blind to genre, to cultural differences, to a lot of types of nuance that we wanna have. The literalist reading often clashes with literary and sociocultural methods that we'll talk about later. The literalist reading is what you'll get when you go to, say, Answers in Genesis.

[00:19:50] Okay, so then we have the historical grammatical method. This method is asking, what did the author mean in its context? Okay, so that sounds great.

[00:20:03] Now you may have heard the "literal historical grammatical method." That is a method that combines the previous one with this one. If you hear somebody say the literal historical grammatical method, they're probably highly emphasizing the literalness of it. But you can do the historical grammatical method without including the literal part of it.

[00:20:27] The historical grammatical method is what you're gonna find in most conservative seminaries, and it's trying to prioritize authorial intent rather than theology. Okay? So that's a good goal, right?

[00:20:41] The historical grammatical method is a really good foundation to have. Its goal is to discover the author's intended meaning by examining the historical and linguistic context. Those are good goals, and those are goals that fit in with my version of biblical theology. We want that context. This is how we want to be reading the text, really, at least to start with or in part.

[00:21:11] The key tools to the historical grammatical method are the original languages and the original languages' grammar. We have word studies. We also are looking at the cultural background and the historical setting. The assumption in this method is that the Bible means what it meant to its original audience.

[00:21:32] Okay? So those are all really good things, right?

[00:21:35] Again, there is a whole lot of crossover potential with other methodologies here. There is a little bit of tension with canonical readings or christocentric readings, you know, like allegorical type readings that go beyond the original meaning. This is where we have a lot of problems when people go into the church fathers and they see all of that allegorizing happening and they go, what in the world? What do we do with that? That's not the right way to treat the text. Well, seems like they might have disagreed with you.

[00:22:11] All right, as we continue through these methodologies, I'm going to take the historical grammatical method and use that as a comparison with these other methods, and I think that's going to help us to kind of see them a little bit easier and in a better light. Because it probably is true that you are used to the historical grammatical method in some form. And as we said, it has a good goal. It has good tools . It has a good foundational assumption to it.

[00:22:41] So let's go on into the canonical reading. The question we might ask here is, how does this particular text fit into the whole Bible story? And we're looking at it as a complete thing, right?

[00:22:55] So I do this kind of thing all the time. Canonical reading absolutely features into the way that I do biblical theology. It's an absolutely essential part. You cannot just take the text on its own and presume that it means something by itself because it is part of our canon. It is part of our theology. It is part of a complete picture.

[00:23:21] This is why it's really helpful to look at themes, right? You can trace the themes through Scripture. That's kind of a canonical reading, right? A canonical reading is usually a little bit different than a systematic reading though, because rather than going into the text and asking, what does the Bible say about this topic? The canonical reading is really trying to look at the narrative scope. It's not necessarily answering single questions, although it can help us do that.

[00:23:53] So we go from historical grammatical, which kind of, it does have that tendency to separate out the text a little bit possibly. But a canonical reading absolutely participates in the biblical unity, Christ-centered meaning, and it can do things like pay attention to the ordering of the books and how you read those, like that actually might matter to the meaning of what we're getting.

[00:24:19] The goal for canonical reading is to read each part of the Bible in light of that whole cannon, again, especially with a Christological lens. The assumption here is that the divine author shaped the whole canon with internal coherence and theological purpose. Okay?

[00:24:39] So canonical reading is absolutely key to biblical theology. It's definitely part of early church readings, and it's starting to make a really good impact in modern times, I think. We have the idea of redemptive history in this kind of reading. A canonical reading is a really good compliment to literary or narrative readings, which we'll talk about here in a bit.

[00:25:06] Now, there can be some tensions with other methods, especially methods that really highly emphasize original meaning over final canonical form. This is where Walton is going to get into some hot water with people. He's really not doing a canonical reading.

[00:25:24] Now, that does not mean that he rejects that the canon exists or has a point. It does not mean that he's rejecting the theology that comes from a canonical reading because he doesn't. Walton is still bringing forward the whole story in different ways other than with a canonical reading. So I think that's really important for people to notice, and I don't see them doing that very often. It's usually, oh no, Walton's not reading canonically. What are we going to do?

[00:25:59] Now let's take a second and compare the historical grammatical method with a canonical approach. What's the difference between them? Well, again, the historical grammatical method is going to ask what did the original human author intend to communicate to their original audience using normal language In this historical setting right here?

[00:26:22] The goal is to recover the original human author intended meaning using historical, linguistic, and grammatical tools. It's anchored in the original context. It treats each biblical book on its own terms, and it tends to emphasize a single meaning of what the original author meant. This is why we have a lot of people who have trouble with the idea of typology, prophecy, or Jewish type midrash, which is kind of what we see in the New Testament. How can the New Testament authors treat these Old Testament texts this way? Because that's not the historical grammatical method!

[00:27:05] Why do evangelicals like to use this method? Well, part of that is because they want to support an idea of inerrancy and doctrine. They pair it with different types of systematic theology, but it can also be paired with biblical theology as I do.

[00:27:23] Now, the canonical approach, in contrast to that, is asking what does the passage mean within the final Spirit- shaped form of the whole Bible. The goal is to understand the theological meaning of the passage as it contributes to and is shaped by the canon as a unified whole. That means that when we're reading forward to backward, that the order does matter. Because in a canonical approach, you're not gonna presume necessarily that everything in an earlier text is going to mirror a later text precisely, right? There can be some development and progress as revelation happens, because people are actually receiving more revelation over time, so it's gonna make sense that their ideas are gonna change.

[00:28:14] A canonical approach is going to emphasize things like Scripture interpreting Scripture. The final form of the biblical text is the authoritative form. And so that can include some redaction and editorial shaping of the text. Again, focused on redemptive history. And where the historical grammatical method really had the idea of a single meaning, a canonical narrative embraces multiple levels of meaning. That can include typology, theological fulfillment, and even up to things like Jewish midrash. The canonical approach seeks theological and spiritual unity across the testaments.

[00:29:00] So again, to kind of compare the historical grammatical and the canonical, for historical grammatical, we have original author and context, ancient context. One intended meaning the Bible is a collection of ancient writings. And historical grammatical method is really good for precision, clarity and really paying attention to that language.

[00:29:26] Now the canonical emphasis is on that final form. It's looking at redemptive history. It can understand multiple layers and typologies. Rather than a collection of ancient writings, it sees it as a unified whole. And where historical grammatical method is really good at precision, the canonical narrative is really good at theology. There's obviously some distinctive problems with the historical grammatical method when you want to do strict theology.

[00:29:58] The canonical approach, on the other hand, does have its own weaknesses. It can overlook original context. It's also kind of bound in text form. And really both of these methods, the historical grammatical method and the canonical method are very bound to the text. That can pose a problem when we want to look at earlier times that may not have had the whole canonical shape. The fact that we're thinking about things in the form of a text is probably important because that's what we have, the actual text, right.

[00:30:38] But a slight problem with that is that we can overlook the experience of God's people in the past because they didn't always have a text. A lot of times they were interacting with God in ways that were a little bit more direct than reading the words on a page, meaning they had prophets and priests, and those were the ones who were interacting with God, providing that covenantal relationship.

[00:31:03] And to be honest, that's why I really appreciate John Walton's work because he's bringing out that point. I think his emphasis on Torah as not law collection or law code necessarily, but rather in covenant. He is allowing our idea of law and Torah to not rest on the text, but to rest on the relationship of people with God.

[00:31:33] I think that's a difference, and I think it's a really important thing that the church should have. I think it matters for theology, in fact. So rather than saying that John Walton doesn't pay any attention to theology, it's a little bit silly when you actually look at his ideas and what he calls Emmanuel theology, the idea of God coming with us is really essential because that's covenantal.

[00:32:01] Alright, so again, back to the historical method and the canonical method, they absolutely work together. Historical grammatical method can help flights of theological fancy from happening by grounding the interpretation in the actual text. Canonical reading can help our interpretation from being too flat or disconnected from redemptive history.

[00:32:25] So we can ask the historical grammatical questions. What did Isaiah mean? And we can follow that question up with, how does the New Testament show Isaiah pointing to Christ?

[00:32:38] Historical grammatical is kind of bottom up from the text to the meaning. Canonical narrative is top down from Christ and canon back into the text, and that actually kind of matches up with some of Walton's methodology because he's trying to suggest that the text is not the thing that encompasses everything.

[00:33:01] The marriage of historical grammatical and canonical can help us do multiple things at once. It can help us read the Bible in its time, and it can also help us read it for all of time, right? This whole idea that the Bible was not written to us, but it was written for us, and there's a distinctive difference there. And that's a John Walton quote, and I think it shows how his ideas can fit really well within both of these frameworks .

[00:33:31] Our next historical method is the literary narrative criticism. This is asking, what is the story being told? It builds on the canonical approach, but it adds in things like structure, genre, story mechanics, and literary design.

[00:33:50] It helps to explain how the texts actually function and not just what they mean. The goal here is to analyze the text as literature, which has plots, characters, structure, motifs. It may be less concerned with historicity.

[00:34:10] Now the narrative criticism absolutely can overlap with canonical readings, especially in things like typology. It pushes back against readings that flatten Scripture into systematic theology.

[00:34:24] So already we've seen that historical grammatical method, canonical approach, and literary criticism all fit really well with my idea of biblical theology.

[00:34:38] Now, let's compare the historical grammatical method with literary approaches. Again, the historical grammatical method is focused on grammar syntax, word meaning, historical cultural background. It kind of is reading the Bible as straightforward communication, again with a single intended meaning.

[00:35:00] The literary or narrative, or we might call it the rhetorical approach, is asking about the Bible as literature. The goal is to understand how the text is communicating, not just what it's saying. So here we have analysis of plot, characters, patterns, pacing, structure. You can see how that fits in with the canonical narrative. It pays attention to things like foreshadowing, irony, motifs, symbolism.

[00:35:33] It's a very common method for people who call themselves biblical theologians. Here, the narrative form of the text absolutely matters. The text has layers of meaning. And but it includes how the author is communicating and not just what he's communicating.

[00:35:54] The historical grammatical method has historical context, language, one authorial intent. The goal is to discover what it meant to that person. The literary method is shining the light on story and literature rather than historical context.

[00:36:12] The strength of literary narrative is that it brings a richness and nuance to the text. Now, the historical grammatical method can tend to ignore deeper story design, but the weakness of the literary method is that it can downplay concrete, doctrinal meaning of the text. So you can see why a lot of people are going to be a little bit uncomfortable with it as a main type of method.

[00:36:41] Again, it's not that we can't do these things together. The historical grammatical method can anchor things in context. The literary reading can show the design of the text and how that deepens its meaning.

[00:36:55] So we have kind of two things going on with these different methods. Historical grammatical can tell you the message of the text. The literary method can add meaning to that message.

[00:37:08] All right, so we've talked about several things that fit super well into my idea of biblical theology.

[00:37:15] Now let's talk about that scary thing called historical critical method. This is the methodology that is asking, how did the text develop. The goal here is to understand how the text developed over time. So we have source criticism. We have redaction. We have form criticism. There are several things here, and they're looking at the text as it developed. It can emphasize things like multiple layers of authorship or editorial stages.

[00:37:51] The reason that a lot of Christians are uncomfortable with this method is because it's really not getting into the meaning of the text. It's focused on source documents and redaction. And there's a whole lot of tension with any view that assumes a unified inspired canon.

[00:38:09] So what's the difference between historical grammatical method and historical critical method? Again, I think I've gone through the historical grammatical method enough that you kind of understand what it does. The historical critical method's goal is to analyze the development of the text as a human product, right? So it is placing the text in that historical setting. It is probably doing linguistic analysis, but it's investigating the sources that are behind the text.

[00:38:39] This method can be entirely neutral or even skeptical towards inspiration and theological unity. So that's our problem with it here, but it's really not trying to do theology. So it has a limited function for the Christian. Historical critical method can explain the literary construction, just like the literary method can. But really it's not trying to do that overarching actual theological meaning.

[00:39:09] But the thing is, that doesn't mean we can't use its tools. We just don't want to only do this method.

[00:39:17] All right, so now we're gonna get into the actual gold of the episode here. We're gonna talk about the socio-cultural ancient near Eastern contextual reading. This is asking, what did this mean in its ancient world. This is basically the Walton's home turf.

[00:39:36] The socio-cultural method aims to avoid anachronism. It's putting the Bible in a cultural frame. The goal is to understand how cultural norms and power structures and social context shape the text and our interpretation of the text. Its tools include insights from the ancient near Eastern culture, archeology, anthropology. It really adds a lot to the historical grammatical method, if you ask me.

[00:40:09] Now confessional readers of the Bible can feel that it downplays inspiration and continuity and theology. These are the criticisms that Walton gets all the time. So let's compare the historical grammatical method with the sociocultural method.

[00:40:28] Again, we have an author's intended meaning and internal features to the text with the historical grammatical method. The historical grammatical method absolutely prioritizes the biblical text itself as authoritative. And then the sociocultural method is asking, what did this text mean within the broader worldview and cultural system of the ancient Near East? It's trying to understand cultural assumptions, symbols, and the categories of the past that they would've been thinking about in their worldview. How would that audience have processed all of this?

[00:41:08] Features of this kind of methodology is that it's reading the Bible in conversation with contemporary to the time ancient Near Eastern texts and practices. Obviously, that is a lot of what we do here. It focuses on worldview patterns. You're looking at order versus chaos. We're trying to understand covenant in its ancient context versus a modern contract. We are trying to reconstruct what the Israelites would have assumed and thought, not just what was written down on the page.

[00:41:45] Again, this is key to Walton's approach. It's also key to Dr. Heiser's approach. Now, Dr. Heiser doesn't get quite the same pushback as the Waltons, and there's some reasons for that because of a few particulars about the Waltons approach.

[00:42:03] Now the risk of sociocultural methodologies is that it can subordinate the text to the restrictions of the time, right. The actual cultural flow of the time. Now, personally, I don't really see how that should be a problem because the text was written in a context and it's pretty hard to avoid eisegesis if you're not drawing out the text from that context.

[00:42:32] Of course, a lot of people just say that Dr. Heiser or Dr. Walton are prioritizing the book of First Enoch , or they're prioritizing ancient Near Eastern material and acting like that is inspired. But you see those critiques are missing the understanding of what's going on in these methodologies. Again, they don't understand the frame.

[00:42:56] An example of a difference between historical grammatical and sociocultural methods. In Genesis one, the historical grammatical focuses on the word day. What does the word day actually mean? It's looking at the grammar, it's looking at the structure of the words.

[00:43:16] But a sociocultural method focuses on things in the culture. The sociocultural method is really good for frame semantics because it can take the first chapter of the Bible and say. It's talking about a seven day structure. What does that mean in the culture? What conceptual world is being pulled up? This is why we get temple imagery, functional ontology, order versus chaos, and we can really see the difference in those motifs from the Bible to the ancient Near Eastern texts. If you're using another methodology, you can't really do that.

[00:43:57] Now, of course, the sociocultural readings can downplay authorial intention in favor of the reception of the audience.

[00:44:07] And of course, a lot of evangelicals are going to be really uncomfortable by non-traditional interpretations such as Genesis one not being about material creation. So confessional readers can worry that cultural parallels are going to relativize the Bible's message or maybe erode theological clarity.

[00:44:28] I think that historical grammatical method and a sociocultural method can work so well together. We need the historical grammatical method in order to understand the text and its grammar. We need the sociocultural understanding in order to fit those words into their conceptual frames.

[00:44:48] Okay, so those are all of the methods I'm gonna talk about today. It's a lot, I know. But it's okay. You can take notes, right?

[00:44:58] Okay, so before we go on to any more detail, I need to get into frame semantics in relation to all of these methods. How do the methods intersect with the potential use of frame semantics? The question I'm really interested in is if there's a better method than others, or if there's methods that just don't work with frame semantics.

[00:45:21] Really briefly, for those who don't know, frame semantics is a linguistic theory. It says that words mean what they mean only within the mental and cultural frames that they evoke.

[00:45:35] So for example, the word sacrifice doesn't really mean anything on its own without a context. But it evokes a whole frame of reference. When we think about sacrifice in the Bible, we're thinking ritual space, priest, blood, divine presence, covenant. You can't understand the word sacrifice unless you understand the network of meaning there. And it has huge implications for biblical interpretation and biblical theology in particular.

[00:46:06] Because ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek words evoked ancient frames, not modern ones. So the word sacrifice isn't pulling up this idea of the heroic soldier on the battlefield. In frame semantics, the meaning isn't found in the dictionary definition, it's found in conceptual worlds.

[00:46:30] Okay, so how do these interpretive methods handle frame semantics? Well, the literalist pretty much doesn't handle it at all because the literalist will collapse all of the frames into one, so it's pretty much useless.

[00:46:46] The historical grammatical method, on the other hand, can be compatible, but there are some limits. The historical grammatical method has so many strengths about grammar syntax and lexicons, that it's really relying on word level analysis. This is lexical semantics and not frame semantics.

[00:47:09] The danger with the historical grammatical method is that it isolates words from their frames. So if we look up law in a Hebrew lexicon, we might miss the broader covenant frame and that might lead us to over literalize or over moralize. So even though historical grammatical method can help with our frame semantics, frame semantics really demands more than historical grammatical method can provide.

[00:47:40] Now the historical critical method and frame semantics. They don't really work very well together because the historical critical method is not really that focused on meaning. The historical critical method tends to say that frames are historical accidents rather than actually holding meaning for all time or for any real purpose.

[00:48:03] Now, the canonical approach can work really well with frame semantics, but there are some caveats. The canonical method tends to move from original meaning to theological fulfillment, which I absolutely think we need to do. That's important and it's necessary, but it risks flattening or reinterpreting ancient frames typologically, and it does that without understanding those frames first. That's the problem I see a lot.

[00:48:36] This is the kind of pushback that Dr. Heiser would get when he said that the Satan in Job is not the serpent from the garden. There are biblical theology reasons that he says that. But people who want to use a canonical approach are really uncomfortable with that claim.

[00:48:55] Another type of flattening that we might see is that something like divine dwelling and sacred geography and an ordered cosmos kind of gets collapsed down into the work of Jesus. We don't really tend to look at it theologically before the typology of Jesus kicks in. I think that's a problem because people originally wouldn't have been thinking about Jesus.

[00:49:21] So then we come to literary or narrative method and sociocultural method. Both of these absolutely excel with frame semantics.

[00:49:33] The sociocultural method already emphasizes cultural worldviews, rituals, institutions, social assumptions of all types. This is basically the stuff of semantic frames. It recovers what sacrifice or covenant or clean and unclean actually evoked for the original audience.

[00:49:56] Now, not everybody doing sociocultural methodology is doing frame semantics, but I think they should be. I think it provides a disciplined linguistic theory for why the ancient Near Eastern parallels help, and it can also show where those parallels go too far. Frame semantics is what allows us to compare the two things and show how they're different, even though they're the same.

[00:50:24] The literary method is very, very compatible with frame semantics because literary readings pay attention to patterns, motifs, narrative resonance, and these are frame activated concepts. A literary reading is less concerned with word definition and more concerned with the meaning of the use of the word, which is exactly the point of frame semantics.

[00:50:52] The practice of frame semantics is something that reminds us that the meaning lives in the context and not just in the words that are used. So any of these methodologies that honors the cultural, conceptual, and narrative environment will go along really well with it.

[00:51:11] But on the other hand, methods that isolate words or treat meaning as only propositional or developmental, those won't fit so well with this methodology.

[00:51:24] Alright, so let's go ahead and wrap up this episode with a few examples from the Waltons themselves.

[00:51:30] We're gonna look at words like obedience, holiness, and righteousness, because the Waltons have suggested that those have been misframed by modern readers, especially under post reformation salvation centric categories.

[00:51:49] We're going to use frame semantics to help recover those ancient frames. And this is a hard practice because a lot of these ideas are so deeply embedded in our psychology and our understanding of theology and the church and God, that it's really hard for us to let go of our understanding and take on the ancient understanding.

[00:52:12] We want righteousness to be all about salvation.

[00:52:17] The Waltons suggest that there is a modern frame that is being imported. Even if they don't use the ideas of frame semantics explicitly, this is still basically what they're saying. They're saying that we are seeing the idea of righteousness as a legal status before God. It's associated with justification, salvation, moral perfection, and there's usually a binary idea here. If you're righteous, then you're saved. If you're unrighteous, then you're condemned.

[00:52:50] In regards to righteousness, Walton suggests that in the ancient Near Eastern frame, the idea isn't about salvation, but relational fidelity within covenant. So righteousness is about performing one's role appropriately, especially in ordered relationships like God and human, human to human or king to subject. Righteousness in the ancient Near Eastern frame is not about salvation, but about honoring the covenantal structure. So the word righteousness only makes sense inside the relational frame of covenantal role and order.

[00:53:32] So if we are interpreting righteousness in a salvation or legal frame, we're going to misinterpret it even if we have good grammar.

[00:53:42] And look, if you struggle with this, I really highly suggest you go into the Old Testament, find out where these words are showing up, and find out where it's talking about righteousness. Does righteousness seem to naturally and entirely encompass the idea of salvation? If righteousness on the other hand, is actually embedded in the cultic system of the temple and the tabernacle and altars and sacrifices and things like that. And we've now understood that sacrifice is not about a sin management thing, but rather it's about relational reciprocity with God, then Walton's ideas here start making a whole lot of sense.

[00:54:27] Again, I understand it's really hard for us to let go of our ideas. When we do the work to reframe our modern understanding, here's the question I'll ask you. Does that reframing in any way harm the idea of salvation? My proposition to you is that it doesn't because there's plenty of other words that talk about God saving us.

[00:54:53] Saying that righteousness is not about salvation, does not in any way dismantle salvation. It actually broadens the idea of what Jesus is doing.

[00:55:05] If Jesus is the one who justifies and saves and cleanses and makes us righteous, then what we're seeing there is a more complete picture of what Jesus did. It's not taking anything away.

[00:55:22] Okay, so I'm gonna leave you with that one for now to consider. Let's move on to the idea of holiness. Our modern frame of holiness is one of moral perfection, personal purity, and sinlessness, right? If you're holy, then you have all of these qualities.

[00:55:41] Again, if we look into the Old Testament and we see the word holy used we really have to put down our presuppositions and look at it honestly. Is moral perfection, personal purity, and sinlessness all of the concepts that are being brought up?

[00:55:59] Walton suggests no. He has a really good section on this in the Lost World of the Torah. Holiness is really a quality of God. Holiness is set apartness for sacred use or divine presence. So really it's defined by ritual status and cosmic order, and not just moral character. That does not mean that moral character cannot be part of it. It's just not what it is.

[00:56:31] The word holiness doesn't primarily evoke morality in the ancient mind. It evokes a sacred domain with boundaries and proper functionality. So if we're importing the moral perfection frame into this word, we're missing the sacrificial cultic, cosmic order covenantal frame that we have with the idea of holiness.

[00:56:56] Holiness is essential to the idea of God dwelling with us. So again, we're not taking anything away by removing the idea that it's primarily about moral perfection. I mean, I don't really think there should be a problem with us understanding that the whole point here is that God wants to be with us and that he works for that. Right. So, there's nothing really wrong or anti-Christian here, okay?

[00:57:26] So we're gonna move on to the idea of obedience. Again, John Walton has a whole section in the Lost World of the Torah about this, and J Harvey Walton talks about it in his dissertation as well. Our modern frame for obedience, is one of rule following. You do what you're told to either earn favor or avoid punishment, or get a blessing or avoid a curse, right? That's the idea of obedience.

[00:57:57] The Walton's frame, on the other hand, is that obedience is living in harmony with the ordered cosmos that God has established. So please note that we still have things that we're doing as far as obeying, but it's not transactional. It's, instead, vocational. Humans here are participants in the divine order. They're not legal subjects in a penal system.

[00:58:24] To be honest, I think this is probably one of those big sticking points that a lot of evangelicals are going to have with John Walton. If obedience is not just about following rules, it is about participating in divine order. So again, there's things that we do to obey, but those things that we do to obey are done in order to promote order and the flourishing of life and all of these things like this. They are done in the construct of covenant with God.

[00:58:58] So a covenant stipulation might have something that looks an awful lot like a law or a rule, but really it is a way to participate in the divine order and bring that to earth. Now you might wonder again, what's the difference here?

[00:59:14] Well, if obedience isn't about satisfying rule, but preserving or promoting God's order, then that means that not obeying isn't really going to necessarily end up with you being punished, but it will have a consequence attached to it, right. If you're not promoting God's order, well then you're not gonna live in God's order. I mean, that's pretty simple and straightforward, right?

[00:59:42] I mean, we might think of this in the context of parents and children. If you are a parent, you have rules of the house, at least I hope you do. Those rules of the house are meant to be obeyed, and you know, you might punish your child for not obeying a rule, but you're not punishing your child because they broke the rule. You are punishing them because what they did ended up doing something that did not promote life. It didn't promote the household order. They're not learning something that is going to give them a good life. That's why the punishment is there. Hopefully it's not just because you broke the rule and I'm going to punish you.

[01:00:28] I mean, I know there's parents out there like that, but I hope you can see that that's probably not what we should be doing. There is a purpose for the rules. There's a purpose for the guidelines, plus the fact that the rules of your house are not exactly exhaustive, are they? You didn't go and give your child a list of literally everything that they could and could not do.

[01:00:52] These rules are to represent the right way and the wrong way. Right? I know we've all come across children who really take a black and white view. And you either tell me, I can do this or tell me I can't, and I will push those boundaries.

[01:01:08] But I think that also is instructive and illustrative of what we have going on in salvation history in the Bible, and God working with his people. This is why God is patient. People are going to push those boundaries. It's what we do. God is patient with us when we push a boundary, we get a bad consequence. God will then try to bring us back, will try to correct us. And if we just insist on going down that path of depravity, then we will end up in a position where we completely reject God. And at that point, there's nothing God can do with us.

[01:01:47] He just has to give us up to our desires. And this is what we see in Scripture, like this idea of pursuit of our desire. Is our desire in line with what God wants and what is going to promote his order? Or is it in line with something else that's going to cause chaos disorder and rebellion? And I think this is a more helpful way to understand what's going on with the idea of sin and rebellion because it is like a father and a child.

[01:02:18] There's a structure of wisdom there. You ought to be obeying all of that because that's what's good for you. That's what's going to teach you the right way. It's not like you can't change that rule or else, right? Because that rule has to be there for all time and eternity. A better way of looking at it is that that rule is in that construct and that context in order to teach somebody, in order to teach the people something essential. In order to teach the people how to be in covenant relationship with God.

[01:02:52] So God isn't mad when you break a rule and you sin and you do something wrong, and God is just like, well, I gotta punish you now. Sorry, don't wanna do this, but it's for your own good. No, there's natural consequences and bad things that happen when we don't promote God's order. That's just embedded into reality.

[01:03:14] The punishment comes along after God's patience has run out and you have clearly shown yourself to be a rebellious fool who will not follow God. At that point, God just has to give you up to your desire. And possibly when he does that, then you will be able to learn and come back to him. That's what we see in like the exile. The people learned to come back to God. Now they didn't fully learn all of that until Jesus and that is like the linchpin of everything, right.

[01:03:48] So let's go ahead and wrap this up by looking at the idea of salvation in general. An evangelical post reformation frame, which is really deep in Western theology in particular, the idea of salvation really lives in a legal judicial domain. That's what it is. That's why we're talking about law code and Torah as law code, because we're thinking of it like that. We're thinking of the problem being guilt, sin and wrath in that legal judicial system.

[01:04:21] The solution for that is forgiveness, and usually in the context of imputed righteousness. Jesus is our substitute for that. The result of what Jesus did is our justification, our going to heaven, all of that kinda stuff, right. The mode here is transactional, repentance, and faith and salvation. A lot of times there's like a whole order of salvation where it happens like this, like this, and then like that. The goal here is to get to heaven or at least to have a good eternal destiny. The salvation frame is really a justification frame and it's grounded in a forensic legal model.

[01:05:06] I am suggesting there's some real issues that need to be dealt with here because it's just not fitting in with what we see, it doesn't fit in with the idea of forgiveness. Like literal forgiveness. You no longer are going to be punished for the thing that you do. That's forgiveness. Doesn't really fit in.

[01:05:26] And then, you know, we have to ask, where does righteousness fit in? Where does holiness fit in? Where does obedience fit into that?

[01:05:35] So let's look at an alternative frame. An alternative frame is in the conceptual domain of something like covenant, kingship, deliverance, or restoration. Or really all of those things. The problem here is not sin and sin management, but things like enemies, right? Like Satan and the dark powers, chaos, oppression, exile, and disorder.

[01:06:08] So look, just because we're kind of dismantling one of these frames that we hold dearly does not mean we no longer have a problem. These are big problems, right? it's not small things that we have to deal with here. The solution in this frame is rescue, protection, healing, return, and renewal.

[01:06:32] The agent here in this frame of salvation is going to depend on the text, right? In the Old Testament. The agent is Yahweh. The New Testament, we have Jesus. Both Yahweh and Jesus are described and seen as the deliverer and the king.

[01:06:52] Okay, so we have the domain, the problem, the solution, and the agent who's going to provide the solution. The result of all of that is peace, shalom, return from exile, covenant restoration, healing, living in the land with the rightful king. The mode here is relational. The people cry out for salvation. God delivers that salvation and there is a renewed loyalty there, a renewed relationship.

[01:07:26] This frame is about God's presence. It's situated in historical accounts. It is a communal activity and a communal reality, and it has a whole lot of theological depth to it. In this frame, salvation means being rescued from something that threatens God's people or God's order. Whether that is Egypt, Babylon, sickness, death, or chaos itself.

[01:07:58] This is why I love frame semantics people. We need to dismantle bad ideas, ideas that are later and that are not situated and that don't stem from the biblical text. But we don't wanna be left adrift. And we don't have to be.

[01:08:16] What we need to do is to get into the text, get into the meaning and the biblical world, and understand it there. Once we do that, it provides a new frame of reference. And I would suggest that it provides a more encompassing and broader idea. We're not removing any reality here.

[01:08:37] There is still salvation, there is still deliverance, there is still a problem that's resolved. In fact, there's quite a few problems that are resolved. And another benefit of this is that we can see this reality from the beginning. We can see God rescuing people again and again and again. It's not that we just have to wait for Jesus and then everything is okay.

[01:09:04] Jesus is the ultimate of this, right? He is the ultimate revelation. He's the ultimate picture of what this looks like, what this does. So this also does not downplay Jesus, but it allows the Old Testament people to also be participants of God's salvation. It allows them to be in relationship to him just like we are in relationship to him.

[01:09:31] Now, is our relationship better? Well, we have the most complete revelation. How awesome is that? So yeah, that's better. I mean, unquestionably. So that doesn't take away from the reality of the people of the past who are also saved by Yahweh.

[01:09:50] Actually, let's go ahead and look at some scriptural examples. Exodus 1413, quote, " Stand firm and you will see the salvation the Lord will bring to you today." End quote. This is about rescue from Pharaoh. Not go to heaven when you die, but it's just as real of a salvation. This is the typological pattern of salvation that we have in Scripture. This is also what Jesus is doing right in a typological way.

[01:10:23] Isaiah 52 7 says, quote, " How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion your God reigns." End quote. This is restoration of God's reign after exile. It's just as much salvation as we have in Exodus and as we have with Jesus. This is how we are to understand restoration and salvation.

[01:10:57] Luke 1 71 says, quote, " That we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us." End quote. This is Zacharia speaking, and he understands Jesus as the one who brings deliverance, not just spiritual forgiveness, but deliverance from enemy.

[01:11:20] All right. Actually, before I end, I know this is going a little bit longer, but let me do one final thing here. Let's compare righteousness and salvation. Salvation is not just about going somewhere else after you die, or forgiveness from sin because God can just forgive you for sin.

[01:11:39] Salvation is about being reclaimed by God's presence and his reign, here and now and forever, right? So righteousness, we have covenantal loyalty and faithful role performance within a relational order, right? You have king, you have patriarch, you have all of the people. If you're righteous, you are fitting your role well in that covenantal framework. the domain of righteousness is relational, covenantal, and vocational.

[01:12:11] The function of righteousness describes a status or behavior that aligns with God's purposes. So it's not like there's no morality here at all, but again, it is in the context of covenantal stipulation and covenantal relationship.

[01:12:27] The subject of righteous is either human or God. Noah was a righteous man. God is righteous. Righteousness has been misframed as moral perfection or forensic or legal innocence. We tend to think of righteousness as equaling sinlessness.

[01:12:46] Righteousness has an ongoing role-based behavior. You're actually supposed to live righteously. There's the undertone of faithfulness and trust and stability. Psalm one says, the righteous man is like a tree planted by the water. Why is it described like that? It's this picture of wise, covenantal, aligned life. In Romans, we have Abraham's faith was counted as righteousness. This is loyal trust, not a legal status.

[01:13:19] Let's go over to the salvation frame. Salvation is deliverance from danger, chaos, exile, death, or enemies. It's restoration to God's ordered presence. The domain of salvation is cosmic. It's political. It's relational. It's restorative and healing. The function of salvation describes God's action to rescue or restore or reestablish order.

[01:13:49] The subject of the verb salvation is almost always God as the savior. Humans don't save themselves. But we have misframed this as getting saved. We are now getting saved, going to heaven after we die. Personally escaping from hell. Salvation is often portrayed as urgent and immediate, but also eschatological. Deliverance now and ultimate restoration later. And that's as opposed to righteousness of being an ongoing role that you're actively doing in playing out. The tone of dependence, desperation, and celebration that comes along with salvation.

[01:14:32] So it comes down to righteousness is about your posture and performance within a covenantal framework. Salvation, on the other hand, is about God's intervention to restore, rescue and reorder the world. Those two things absolutely relate, but they're not synonymous and they operate in different frames.

[01:14:55] Our collapsing these ideas produces a justification frame where righteousness is a legal status that is granted. And salvation is a change in eternal standing. But again, we're overlaying that judicial model onto it when really we should be looking at covenantal, relational, and cosmic categories.

[01:15:17] When we bring together salvation and righteousness, we have a God who saves his people and they respond by living righteously. Righteousness can also describe God's saving action, right? He does what is right by rescuing us.

[01:15:36] There's a parallel in Isaiah 46 13. I bring near my righteousness. It is not far off, and my salvation will not delay. So this is cool. We have righteousness and salvation in parallel, but they're not the same. Righteousness describes God's covenantal, faithfulness. Salvation is the rescue action that flows from it. Again, righteous action can happen with humans or with God. Salvation is always an action of God. Righteousness fits in ethical and relational categories. Salvation is deeply in that rescue category. Righteousness is all about covenant wisdom, possibly a law court, and salvation is about exodus, exile, kingdom, and resurrection.

[01:16:28] Alright. I know that was a lot. This is a really big topic and a really big thing to talk about. I hope this has been helpful. I hope that you can see that if you're only using one kind of methodological toolkit, you're gonna get some things right, but you might get some frames wrong. You might get some things wrong in context.

[01:16:50] I hope you can see that if you're using frame semantics and sociocultural tools, then this is how we are able to recover covenantal and functional frames to make the Bible's meaning coherent to us on its own terms. By doing that, we end up being in a position where we can then apply that to ourselves and our situations.

[01:17:13] And if you're doing canonical theology, you can trace all of those frames forward. We can ask, how does Jesus fulfill righteousness within the same covenantal frame. We can ask, how is holiness reframed in the new covenant where temple and body and spirit are combined? How does obedience relate to identity in Christ rather than moral self performance?

[01:17:40] We often assume that we know what biblical words mean because we've heard them in sermons and systematic theologies. We've heard them over and over and over. But again, those meanings live inside mental frames. And if we're using the wrong frame, we're going to misread the Bible. I would submit to you that Walton's work shows how terms like righteousness and holiness belong to a covenantal ordered world frame, not a salvation contract.

[01:18:13] Again, that doesn't mean that they're not connected, but it's not a one-to-one thing, and I hope that you can see that frame semantics gives us a linguistically faithful way to reenter those biblical worlds in concept and worldview. And when we do that, we really deeply get into it and understand what they're doing, how they're doing it, and why we can then pull that meaning out for ourselves to apply that to what's going on for us.

[01:18:43] This isn't proof texting. This is seeing the narrative of the world, like literally the cosmos and finding ourselves in that narrative. All right, I'm gonna stop there. Thank you guys for listening to this episode. Thanks for hanging in there with this really technical and long conversation.

[01:19:05] If you guys have any questions, you can reach out to me through my website, genesis marks the spot.com, or you can come and join me in my new biblical theology community. The link is in the show notes, but if you don't see it there because you're just listening, you can find it@onthisrock.com, but you have to hyphenate between the words, okay?

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[01:20:36] At any rate, I will let you guys go for this episode and I wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.