Otis Q. Sellers rarely wrote about hermeneutics, but presupposed there are such things as the “facts of Scripture,” data or “givens” one must first observe and then interpret accurately.[1] By accurately, Sellers meant historically and grammatically, following the precept of Myles Coverdale (1488-1569):
It shall greatly help ye to understand the Scriptures if thou mark not only what is spoken or written, but of whom and to whom, with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstances, considering what goeth before and what followeth after.[2]
This is necessary if one would discern the divine intention behind the symbolic expressions of God’s meaning. This assumption followed from Sellers’s belief that Scripture’s human words are θεόπνευστος (theopneustos), that is, God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16):
My conviction in regard to the Old and the New Testament is that they
are the verbally inspired Word of God, that they are without error in their original writings, that they are of supreme and final authority in regard to all matters of faith. By “verbal inspiration” I mean that supernatural work of the Holy Spirit by which, without setting aside the personalities and literary abilities of the human instrument, He constituted the words of the Bible in its entirety as His written word to you and to me. I believe that every word of Scripture was produced under the guidance of God’s Spirit, that “holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). This conviction has stood the test of more than a half century of personal Bible research and study.[3]
And:
The Bible must be carefully considered from Genesis to Revelation, every passage that might have any bearing upon the subject must be noted, and if these are then studied to see what light they give upon the subject, we will have God’s word on this subject. All texts must be studied in the light of their context, and the words used must be considered in regard to their historical and grammatical meaning.[4]
When speakers of a natural language share information (about their finances, love lives, whatever) each knows that the other’s “authorial intention” underlies and prompts each’s exercise of linguistic capability (even if neither expresses the matter that way).
That is, what a statement means to the listener ought to be what it means to the speaker. What Jeremiah’s lamentations, for example, “mean to me,” does not shed light on, let alone override, how his first audience understood his words.
If I want others to know I’ll be with them, I trust them not to misconstrue my statement, “I’ll be with you,” regardless of their intentions toward me. (To deceive, rob, or otherwise victimize me, they must first interpret what I said accurately.)
Suppose, however, I see the Roman alphabetic string “I’ll be with you” in an English translation of אִתְּךָ אָ֔נִי (itteka ani) in Isaiah 43:2. I may very well have both God’s intention and the prophet’s. Since, however, Isaiah was neither an Anglophone contemporary of mine, but a denizen of 8th century BC Jerusalem, I may have to verify my understanding. I will either trust the translation or consult a Hebrew concordance.
To take another example, one may not interpret Jesus’ reference to His new covenant with the House of Israel (Luke 22:20) so that it contradicts His disciples’ understanding. For the men who broke bread with joined Him at that Passover table, the frame of reference for His words was formed by (among other scriptures) Jeremiah 31:31-34.[5] They would not be amused to hear that something called “the Church” replaced or “superseded” Israel in God’s plans.
In human communication, something can be “off” either with the transmission or the reception. The staticky sounds your car radio’s emitting, for example, might not be the radio station’s fault, but your radio’s. In the case of God’s communication, however, there can be no problem with the transmitter, only with the receiver.[6]
The Bible consists of manuscripts composed in Hebrew and Greek symbols arranged so as to convey meaning from God’s mind to ours, a meaning mediated by the Bible’s human authors who lived long ago and far away. The arrangements are the first observable facts. The extra-symbolic realities (people, places, things, and events) to which they refer are themselves sources of data (“facts”) subject to inductive and deductive inference (as well as verification).
When studies of American Fundamentalism address the issue of Biblical hermeneutics, they tend to historicize it rather than see the objective points the fundamentalists were making, points that transcend historical circumstance.
They allege, for example, that the fundamentalists inherited a 19th-century ideal of scientific pursuit rooted in the Scottish Commonsense Realism of (among others) Thomas Reid (1710-1796) as well as the scientific method of Francis Bacon (1562-1626).[7]
They say that while those models were serviceable in an age of scientific advance and industrial achievement that was the 19th century, they must give way to modern subjective sensibility with its emphasis on ambiguity and the “turn to the subject.” It’s as though connecting a method of interpreting Scripture to Reid or Francis is to discredit it.[8]
Commonsense realism is an implication of the Biblical worldview, which also implies that the Bible is the Word of God written, plenary inspired by God, and therefore inerrant in all that it affirms or implies.[9] Adherents of the historico-grammatical method like Sellers do not undervalue aspects of human experience that moderns emphasize.
They would remind us, however, that whatever insights about such matters that God deigns to occasion in our minds via the Bible were originally carried to the historically conditioned human mind expressed in Hebrew and Greek symbols. If the latter are to occasion those insights in our minds, we must acknowledge the primacy of the facts they represent. We must assemble, order, and draw inferences from them.
With apologies to Patrick Henry: if this be “Baconianism,” make the most of it.
Notes
[1] The following definition of “fact” is useful for present purposes:
A fact is a datum about one or more aspects of a circumstance, which, if accepted as true and proven true, allows a logical conclusion to be reached on a true/false evaluation. Standard reference works are often used to check facts. . . . Apart from the fundamental inquiry into the nature of scientific fact, there remain the practical and social considerations of how fact is investigated, established, and substantiated through the proper application of the scientific method. . . . In addition . . . there are the social and institutional measures, such as peer review and accreditation, that are intended to promote factual accuracy among other interests in scientific study. “Fact,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact Emphasis added.
To recognize the conditional (“if”) leaves intact the epistemological problem (how we determine what is true).
[2] From the Prologue to his 1535 translation of the Bible, the first completed published one in English. The full text of the Dedication and Prologue is here.
[3] Otis Q. Sellers, “The Importance of Acts 28:28,” Seed & Bread, No. 11, 1971. See Anthony G. Flood, “Otis Q. Sellers’s Method of Interpretation: Notes,” June 3, 2020.
[4] Otis Q. Sellers, “Future Punishment,” Seed & Bread, No. 182, March 10, 1986.
[5] “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah— not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.” Emphasis added.
[6] I owe my awareness of this metaphor to Greg L. Bahnsen.
[7] Adam Van Wart, “The Relationship of Common Sense Realism to Dispensationalism’s Hermeneutics and A Priori Faith Commitments,” Evangelical Theological Society Southwest Regional Meeting 2005, April 19, 2005. For the historical background, see George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, Second edition, Oxford University Pres, 2006, Chapter VI, “Dispensationalism and the Baconian Ideal,” 55-62.
[8] Neither Van Wart nor Marsden is guilty of making this facile judgment.
[9] The Biblical worldview, which alone makes sense of logical implication
and sense-making, implies the inerrancy of Scripture, which is Jesus’ view. He promised to send the Holy Spirit to bring to the remembrance of His apostles, including Peter, all that He had taught them (John 14:26). Peter implied that Paul’s letters were Scripture (2 Peter 3:16) which, according to one of those letters, is God-breathed. I make the argument for grounding commonsense realism in the Biblical worldview in Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him.