Thread by @thomaslhorrocks, Who's ready for a nerdy thread on biblical exegesis, hermeneutics, and preaching? [...]

Who's ready for a nerdy thread on biblical exegesis, hermeneutics, and preaching?

This is going to be a bit stream of consciousness and may take a while. I'm thinking as I write. If this isn't your thing, feel free to mute for an hour or so.

I'm currently working through the New Testament letter to the Ephesians in my church (with the welcome help of @newspangler).

This upcoming Sunday we'll be diving into Ephesians 2:11-22, a classic passage on the ethnic reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles in Christ.

As I'm preparing to preach, I'm reminded how grateful I am that I was required to read Richard Hays' The Moral Vision of the New Testament in seminary. I think it should be required reading Christians, tbh. https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Vision-New-Testament-Contemporary/dp/006063796X

The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation, A Contemporary Introduction...

The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation, A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Vision-New-Testament-Contemporary/dp/006063796X

In the book, Hays describes what he calls "the fourfold task of New Testament ethics." These four tasks are
1.) The descriptive task
2.) The synthetic task
3.) The hermenuetical task
4.) The pragmatic task

The descriptive task is basically "exegesis," that is, a careful reading of a particular text, paying close attention to literary and historical context, etc. This, Hays argues, must come first.

The synthetic task involves "synthesizing" a given text with the rest of the biblical witness, especially as it relates to a given topic in order to see if there is "a unity of ethical perspective within the diversity of the canon." (p. 5).

Next comes the hermeneutical task, "relating the text to our situation" or "bridging [the] chasm" of "the temporal and cultural distance between ourselves and the text." (p. 5).

Finally comes the pragmatic task, which is actually applying the ethical implications of the text in our lives and communities.

So, with that basic foundation laid, let me explain WHY I'm so grateful to have learned these distinctions and why I think they are particularly helpful for my upcoming sermon on Ephesians 2:11-22.

As I mentioned earlier, Ephesians 2:11-22 is a classic text about ethnic reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles in Christ.

Starting with the descriptive task involves understanding the underlying ethnic division that "Paul" says has been reconciled in Christ.

Paul says that there was "a dividing wall of hostility" between the Jews and the Gentiles, and that "in Christ" that wall had been broken down, and that "both groups" had been made "one body."

It's clear in this passage, and in the historical context, that the hostility between the two groups was mutual; it existed on "both sides," as we like to say.

(It was not, however, universal, and it's more complex than I can elaborate here. Paul simplifies it to make a point.)

Point is, Paul calls "both sides" to set aside their hostility and their attitudes of superiority and to be reconciled to one another in Christ. This is what we learn from the descriptive task.

(This was a pretty big deal, btw--Paul made some serious enemies with this message.)

For the sake of time and clarity, I'm going to skip over the synthetic task. But, if we wanted to, we could look at what Paul says about this ethnic divide in other letters, etc.

So now we're at the hermeneutical task. How do we apply this text to our situation?

Hmmmm...Ethnic division and hostility...that certainly seems to be in our modern context, amirite?! So let's just plug-and-baby,

"Both sides need to set aside the hostility."

Boom. Done.

This is where the hermeneutical task becomes so important. We need to "exegete" our own context as carefully as we exegete the original text. We need to ask in what ways the racial divide in America is both like and unlike the Jew/Gentile divide of the first century.

When we do that, we'll see that that there are some REALLY IMPORTANT differences. Perhaps most importantly, unlike the Jew/Gentile divide, the racial divide in America has been almost entirely one-sided. In our case, oppression has flowed and still flows in a single direction.

In our context, the division is less about competing attitudes of superiority as it was in Paul's day. In our context, the division is about white supremacy denying black equality.

This makes a HUGE difference when it comes to our application, or the pragmatic task.

While the truth of unity in Christ remains true, the fact that the details of our situation is different than the details of Paul's situation means that the details our particular application will be different as well.

The application for the white American church is for us to appropriately repent of the overt and covert white supremacy that has become interwoven in our historical and current attitudes and practices and to acknowledge the full equality of our Black siblings in Christ.

This acknowledgment must include more than mere mental assent to some abstract "spiritual equality," but must include real, tangible efforts to redress past wrongs and and current social inequalities in our communities, to actually love our BIPOC siblings as ourselves.

This, my friends, is why need to carefully distinguish between exegesis and hermeneutics in our preaching and teaching. Otherwise, we risk misapplying truths in our own context.

Did I just write my sermon on Twitter?

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