As I grew up, I was in a church that stressed that they were a “New Testament church, meeting according to “biblical principles of gathering,” having no creed or procedural handbook other than the Bible.
For me it was clear that the Bible taught our form of church polity, although I recognized that many otherwise good Christians (whose churches I visited and sometimes even helped out in) apparently were ignorant of such “biblical principles.” But then I left home for Wheaton College and for the first time in my life had to live with good Christian fellows who went to different churches than I did (mainly Baptist and Free Church) and who were not persuaded by my arguments that our particular style of meeting was the one sanctioned by Scripture. This created a crisis in my life, for here were Christians reading the same Bible and claiming it as their authority and yet interpreting it differently. This was a crisis in hermeneutics, for we were differing not on the authority of the text or on what it said but on what we understood the text to mean for us today.
Black, David Alan, and David S. Dockery, eds. Interpreting the New Testament: Essays on Methods and Issues
Published by Broadman & Holman Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee
First Edition. B&H Academic, 2001
by David Alan Black and David S. Dockery
ISBN: 978-0-8054-1850-7
David Alan Black - Interpreting the New Testament - Preface
One of the world’s best-known and most influential bodies of literature, the New Testament is also one of the least understood. If this is partly due to sloth on the part of the modern reader (and who has never been guilty of laziness when it comes to the study of the Bible?), it is also due in no small part to the proliferation of modern approaches to New Testament interpretation in the late twentieth century. Bewildered by this plethora of methodologies, the modern reader may well hesitate to go beyond a cursory reading (and understanding) of the New Testament writings. Even if one has the desire to teach or preach from the New Testament with authority and credibility, who has the time or courage to study it in depth and to proclaim it without fear or favor?
The purpose of Interpreting the New Testament is to enhance New Testament interpretation, teaching, and preaching by providing a useful means of learning what the New Testament is all about and—whenever possible—the historical reasons why it speaks the way it does. It endeavors not only to acquaint readers with the scope and trends of modern New Testament scholarship but also to enable them to have a clearer and more enjoyable experience when reading and applying these twenty-seven inspired books.
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