Reading the Bible is hard. It’s not only very long (over 700,000 words, depending on your translation), but its historical, cultural, and literary backgrounds often elude us. Even worse, simply looking up an unfamiliar city, town, or person in a commentary or Bible dictionary doesn’t usually help make sense of Scripture’s broad, nuanced narrative. We need a way to connect the dots, to fit the pieces together.
When I was a kid, I loved the Encyclopedia Brown books. Encyclopedia Brown was the prodigiously intelligent son of a police chief who had a knack for solving his father's especially vexing cases. In each story, 12-year-old Leroy (nicknamed "Encyclopedia") Brown would listen to the details of his dad's case at the dinner table, close his eyes and think for a minute, ask one question, then tell his dad the solution. The reader's job was to figure out how Encyclopedia arrived at the solution. You know the answer from the story, but the fun was that you had to trace his logic. The answers were listed in the back of the book (full disclosure: I often cheated).
In his book, The Hermeneutics of the Biblical Writers, Abner Chou provides a roadmap to traversing the complex terrain of biblical interpretation. “Hermeneutics” is a theory of interpretation, and Chou argues the best way to read the Bible is by patterning one’s reading off the biblical writers themselves. This requires careful attention to the precise way they frame their arguments and employ previous revelation, he says. Like Encyclopedia Brown, you've got to fit the pieces together.
“The prophetic hermeneutic continues into the apostolic hermeneutic, which is the Christian hermeneutic,” Chou writes, summarizing a interpretive grid through which biblical revelation is communicated. “We can learn how to study the sacred text from what the biblical writers instructed us to do as well as from seeing them use Scripture, provided we understand what they were doing” (Emphasis mine).
Tools for reading
There are two reasons why I found this book helpful. First, the scholarly reason: Chou responds directly to "problems" with Scripture that scholars have been trying to "solve" since the Enlightenment. For example, the New Testament frequently seems to quote the Old Testament in a way that doesn’t match the original intent — such as Matthew applying “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Hos. 11:1, Matt 2:15) to Jesus instead of Israel, as Hosea originally intended. In response, many scholars accuse the biblical writers of bad exegesis. The apostles, these scholars argue, clearly interpret the Bible much more liberally and creatively than conservative seminaries teach their students to.
Other scholars try to account for apparent inconsistencies between the original meaning of an Old Testament text and the way it is quoted in the New Testament with the concept of “sensus plenior” (the idea that God intended a deeper meaning behind Scripture the authors did not). Does the grammatical-historical interpretive approach hold up to actually reading the Bible? Chou argues it does...if we are paying attention. Neither scholarly option ("the biblical writers are malicious readers" or "the biblical writers are ignorant readers") wrestles adequately with the hermeneutical sophistication the biblical writers consistently display, according to Chou. “As opposed to writing ‘better than they knew,’ the prophets wrote better than we give them credit for,” he writes.
Chou’s approach relies upon tracing the “authorial logic” at every stage of progressive revelation. Literal-grammatical-historical hermeneutics is not a modern concept, constructed to explain post hoc how the Bible fits together. Rather, Chou argues, it is how the biblical writers themselves read their Bibles. Christians must line up the way they interpret the biblical revelation with how the writers themselves did, which Chou calls a “hermeneutic of obedience.”
“My mission is to vindicate the prophets and apostles and to use them to help shape our own understanding of God’s Word,” he writes. “They are not hermeneutical ignoramuses who have abused the Scripture. We do not know better than them. Rather, being moved by the Holy Spirit, they were brilliant — and we ought to humbly follow them. Their faithful hermeneutic provides us the certainty that the way we were traditionally taught to interpret the Bible is the method the Bible upholds.”
The second reason I found the book helpful connects to my own personal interaction with the author. I did not attend the college where Chou teaches (The Master's University), but about ten years ago I took a couple courses from him at the school's satellite campus in Israel. It is difficult to overstate Chou's commanding knowledge of the Scriptures even then, when he was still in his 20s. He is certainly brilliant (poke a former student and they'll tell you a story or two), but if you hear him teach it's clear his impressive biblical literacy comes from thousands of hours thinking logically about how the pieces fit together.
Hermeneutically speaking, that's where the bread is buttered — it is one thing to know a bunch of reference info about the Bible (e.g., knowing that 2 Samuel 7 is the forging of the Davidic Covenant). Hermeneutical wisdom comes from retracing how the biblical writers communicate meaning through narrative, history, and epistolary literature (e.g., showing how 2 Samuel 7 is expanded, explained, directly quoted, or simply alluded to in subsequent revelation).
These interpretive tools can transform your Bible reading. Some of them are old-fashioned according to some scholars, but Chou wants to sharpen them for you and prove they still work.
Connecting the dots
Here's the thing about Encyclopedia Brown: His nickname is a red herring. It was not his exhaustive knowledge that led him to the case solutions. Usually, his dad had all the relevant facts right in his notebook. The information was all there. What his son Leroy provided was the wisdom to interpret that information logically — to fit the pieces together.
It is no coincidence that Chou had us work through some Encyclopedia Brown stories during the first day of one of his classes. Because this is the skill most American Christians need: We know how to accumulate information, but most of us don't know how to make sense of it. We are usually pretty good at figuring out WHAT each text says explicitly (all it takes is reading, after all), but sometimes the key to biblical interpretation is in the implicit world — what is NOT directly stated.
Chou has a masterful grasp of this kind of reading, as this book demonstrates. As a student, I heard his take on passage after passage of Scripture and wished I could read the Bible like he did. I remember thinking if I could just know his methodology, I would be able to do it too.
After reading his book all about methodology, I have discovered this is both true and false. While grasping his hermeneutical framework is helpful, you can only gain so much from reading about reading the Bible. It’s a fine place to start, but at some point you've got to throw yourself into the text and solve some of the riddles yourself.