# LCMS Convention Workbook_St. Louis Missouri_1973_S453
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

438 CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION

cient church who denied

the true humanity of Jesus.
They held that He only ap-
peared to be human.)

a. One obviously human as-
pect of the Sacred Scrip-
tures is that the language
of the Bible is human lan-
guage, written to be read
and understood by human
beings. Accordingly,
the Bible's language con-
forms to the usual prin-
ciples of grammar and svn-
tax. The biblical liter-
ature contains many of
the literary forms and
devices used by other lit-
erature for the purpose
or effective communica-
tion.

b. The Bible, considered as
written communication, is
human also in that it has
a history.

(1) In a sense, the biblical
literature represents a
"development." The
Bible did not fall full-
blown from heaven, but
grew upon earth. The
biblical literature came
into existence over a
period of many centuries.
It was written by human
beings for human beings
who lived in vastly vary-
ing cultures and condi-
tions, but the message
remains the same.

To
VY

Inasmuch as the Bible
was written in history
by authors who were not
insulated from the cul-
ture in which they lived
and wrote, and inasmuch
as its literature was
not produced in a vacuum
but was originally com-
posed for and addressed
to distinctively discreet
situations and circum-
stances, this literature
has a historical dimen-
sion that gives it its
own peculiar and concrete
particularity. In this
sense, it is time-bound
and culture-conditioned
as is every product of
the human mind and spir-
it.

(Note: For example, the
situation in Corinth

which occasioned Paul's
correspondence with the
congregation there, had

product of purely human
thought and experience.

b. In a product of human
thought and experience,
no eternal and immutable
truth is to be found. In
literature containing
merely human reflection
on such lofty themes as
God and His relation to
man and history, there
are bound to be radically
variant viewpoints. This
is all the more true of
literature that comes from
different periods of his-
tory and that attempts to
discuss such themes in a
manner that is relevant
and relative to widely
differing cultures.

c. Those who accept the
radical view of the
Bible's origin forfeit
from the outset any
right to expect to find
even a core of truth in
it.

(1) In the Bible there is to
be found only one layer
upon another of histori-
cally conditioned human
opinion.

(2) Any attempt to penetrate
all the culturally rela-
tive accretions to find
some kernel that remains
true through all the time-
bound interpretations is
like peeling an onion.
When one layer after
another is removed,
there is finally nothing
left.

ad. It is claimed that when the
full implications of the
Bible's historical dimen-
sion are understood, it is
quite beside the point to
ask whether its viewpoints
are true or false, for they
were the only ones possible
in the historical context
from which they derive.

e. It ts equally out of keep-
ing with the Bible's his-
torical dimension to ex-
pect uniformity of view-
points, since each of the
units of tradition finally
incorporated into the Scrip-
tures reflects the perspec-
tive of those who trans-
mitted it orally or commit-
ted it to writing.

Bible, it insists that it
does so not because of any
presuppositions about what
must be in the Bible by
virtue of its historical
nature, but because such
things are simply found in
the text and cannot be e-
vaded by anyone engaged in
serious inductive study of
the Scriptures.

The fact that the Bible par-
ticipates in human frailty
is not to be regarded as a
"presupposition" with which
the Bible is approached, but
as a "conclusion" resulting
from the sheer weight of the
evidence discovered at the
"data gathering" stage of
critical study. Whether
called a "presupposition" or
a "conclusion", the end
result is the same.