Examples

“The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you” (Numbers 6)

Does God have a face then?

“Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” (1 Peter 5) 

The devil is not a lion that eats people, but clearly Peter believes that he exists and that he is active in this world.

“The Ancient of Days took His seat. His vesture was like white snow and the hair of His head like pure wool. His throne was ablaze with flames, Its wheels were a burning fire.” (Daniel 7)

Visions in the Bible have literal meaning, but aren’t always literal in every aspect. In this case with the appearance of God himself, the message to the reader is not about his literal appearance, but his character. (Holy) 

Definition and Basics

The word Hermeneutics refers to the science and methodology of interpretation. In our case – the Biblical text is what we are interpreting. Everyone understands the nuanced difficulty at times getting the meaning of written text. There is no body-language or vocal intonation to help out. In this case it’s even more difficult as we are dealing with very old historical documents, the originals written in languages that we probably don’t understand. (Greek and Hebrew) And yet, the words are inspired by God – God Breathed and meant to be understood, although not without some work and prayer. Our objective must be to understand God’s thoughts.

At the bottom of the page there are links to related books on this subject. For our purposes here we will concentrate on some history and some of the basics. The next page on the subject deals with the methodology we use here on Endtimes.org.

One of the most important rules of interpretation is Context. To clarify this is more than just understanding the most basic context of a passage of the Bible. It must go much deeper than that with ancient documents. This brings up one of the key rules of hermeneutics: 

Scripture interprets Scripture. If the Bible is truly the word of God then it must have a consistent thread running through it.

We must examine:

• Context of the Passage
• Context of the Book
• Context of the Bible
• Context of the People and Author
• Context of the Culture and Language of the time period.
• Context of the Historical Period
• Context of the Audience (if applicable – as with a letter)

The Difficulties of Interpreting Ancient Documents

We must admit that even if we think we have rock-solid guidelines for interpretation, we will fail at times to understand every word.

“Words and sentences occur in the context of a conversation, in the context of language, and in the context of a culture. Their meaning depends in a large part to these contexts in which they occur and without that context it is either difficult or impossible to know the meaning of the words or sentences. It is therefore no great thing nor something out of the ordinary that we should have words, concepts, and sentences that puzzle us in Holy Scripture.”
— Ramm, Bernard. Protestant Biblical Interpretation

Secondly, the prejudice of the Interpreter (including all of us)

“It is very difficult for any person to approach the Holy Scriptures free from prejudices and assumptions which distort the text. The danger of having a set theological system is that in the interpretation of Scripture the system tends to govern the interpretation rather than the interpretation correcting the system. The most persistent criticism of Bultmann and Tillich is that they have adopted certain theological and philosophical principles in such a set, rigid manner that it is very difficult for them to entertain an interpretation of a passage of Scripture that does not agree with their system.” — Ramm

The History of Hermeneutics

We believe that many of the early church fathers used a literal method of Bible interpretation. The New Testament was written in their time, so they understood the background of the New Testament books. However, as the church began to grow, heresies came into the church, and to protect the church some of the church fathers had to begin to put together more exacting guidelines for Bible interpretation, or Hermeneutics. The early church was battling some key issues.

• The Deity of Christ. (Gnosticism and Arianism)
• The validity of the Old Testament. (Marcionism)
• Greek philosophy

Some of the early church fathers that dealt with these issues are listed below. Many of their writings can be purchased inexpensively on Amazon.

• Ignatius
• Justin Martyr
• Irenaeus
• Tertullian
• Clement
• Origen
• Lucian
• Chrysostom

Impact on current views of Prophecy and Endtimes

Unfortunately, many of the early church fathers were influenced by Greek philosophy which caused them to take an allegorical approach to interpreting the Bible. Origen with his allegorical approach helped the early church win debates against heresy, but in the long run it stopped the church from correctly understanding prophecy. The Alexandrian school, and Philo, who tried to merge Hellenism with the Old Testament, adopted a very allegorical method of interpretation. This was later put in check by scholars from the Antiochene school, Lucian and later Chrysostom. In the end a more literal approach was used, except in the case of Eschatology. Unfortunately, leaders like Augustine continued to use a very allegorical method of interpretation when it came to prophecy. Augustine had a huge impact on the church in this regard, continuing through the dark ages, and up to the reformation. Remember that this did not impact the fundamentals of the faith. Those things were settled, having been worked out from more historical and doctrinal books that were interpreted literally. (The Gospels, Pauline Epistles, etc)

During the Protestant Reformation the literal method began to be used in some circles for prophecy, which opened the door for a system of theology that we call Dispensationalism, which holds to a literal return of Christ, and a literal 1000 year Millennial kingdom with Jesus sitting on the throne of David in Jerusalem, as predicted and promised to the Jews. Without a literal interpretation of prophecy much of the Endtimes related prophetic text we are looking at on Endtimes.org would not be clear, or worse, it would seem irrelevant. One needs to interpret Revelation 20:1-6 literally to fully understand the nature of the Millennial kingdom, and this is at the heart of current debates between Bible believing Christians. (More on this in Deeper Dive section)

If you are a Christian that believes in a literal 1000 year reign of Christ it might be interesting to know that this truth was basically hidden or disregarded for over a thousand years before the Reformation because of a decision made early on to NOT interpret Bible prophecy literally, even though Jesus always interpreted Old Testament future prophecy literally. (See Matthew 24, and especially the reference to the Abomination of Desolations sitting In the temple. That is a real future person and event – the Antichrist). Surely Jesus knew whether this event was literal or not. His belief was that it was a literal future event involving this figure described and pictured in the book of Daniel called the AntiChrist.

The church has gone through important stages in understanding the word of God for the last 2000 years. Issues were debated through the years, starting with the key issues of the faith. It’s no wonder that the first issue to address was the Deity of Christ. It was more important to have a clear understanding of who Jesus was before worrying too much about the timing of his return, or even the nature of his return.

Along side this debate was the debate over scripture, Old Testament vs. New Testament. These are foundational issues that had to be dealt with first. Some of these debates were revisited over the first 500-600 years, and beyond. It seems perfectly natural that issues over the Rapture or Endtimes in general weren’t top priorities.

Secondly, we have evidence from the writings of the early church that the understanding of dispensations was nothing new, and that some believed in a literal 1000 year reign of Christ on earth. There was recognition that God had worked in different ways during different periods, and details of the New Testament Church was an unrevealed part of God’s plan. The system of theology called Dispensationalism that we have now was developed between 1700’s and the present by different Bible scholars, including Darby, Chafer, Scofield, Ryrie, Pentecost, Walvoord, and others like our good friend Stan Toussaint. It was during this time after the Reformation that the doctrines of future things (Eschatology) were being worked out.

Some early church methods of Bible interpretation (Some taken from Jewish scholars)

• Literal: The plain and simple meaning of the text. Jesus supported the literal method, among others.
• Midrash: Rabbinical approach to interpretation sought to understand the literal, and then expand the teachings to contemporary issues. “light to heavy”
• Pesher: Exegetical method that suggests the prophetic writings contain hidden eschatological significance, or divine mystery. Jesus used this method on several occasions. (Lk 4:16)
• Allegorical: Assumes the text has a meaning other than what the literal wording says. Jesus never used this method. Practiced initially by Philo of Alexandria, who tried to mix Greek philosophy and Judaism. Followed by Clement and Origen on the Christian side.
• Typological: Seeks to discover a correspondence between people and events of the past and of the present or future. Matt. 12:40 – Jesus parallels the experience of Jonah with his own death. Moses was a type of Christ, who brought the people out of bondage, and was rejected by his own. Isaac when he was offered up by Abraham.
• Christological: Firstly, Jesus, and then the writers of the New testament had a decidedly Christocentric approach to Bible interpretation. Old testament passages were viewed in light of the new knowledge they now had about the person and work of Jesus Christ. (Messiah)

Modern methods

• Functional: Fitting scripture into current day context, disregarding the historical context.
• Literal Grammatical-Historical:

“Many Christians tolerate a form of mysticism in reading their Bibles that they would allow in no other realm. They violate every tenet of reason and common sense. Their Bible study is totally subjective. They wander around the Scriptures, waiting for a liver-quiver to tell them when they’ve struck pay dirt.” — Living By The Book – Hendricks

Our method

We use the Literal Grammatical-Historical method as our key to understanding Endtimes prophecy and all scripture. This method holds to a belief in a God-breathed Bible, inspired and inerrant in the original manuscripts. We start there because the Bible writers themselves understood and declared that their writings were inspired by God. Jesus Himself also supported the view by quoting from books of the Bible, considering the words binding. Secondly, this method supports the Christocentric approach, that the OT is Christ centered, and also allows for figures of speech, and symbolic interpretation when the context clearly warrants it. The literal method on the whole does not support the Allegorical view practiced in the 2nd and 3rd century to the present. Each verse does NOT have:

• A literal historical meaning
• A secret meaning that only the super enlightened can understand
• The reassigning of the OT covenants over to the Church

2 Peter 1:20

But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, ²¹for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

Follow this link to the Literal Grammatical-Historical

Further Reading and Resources

Protestant Biblical Interpretation (Bernard Ramm)

Basic Theology – Ryrie

Living By The Book (Hendricks)