And This Was How Hermeneutics Came to My Life

During my recent (and futile) quest to find a copy of the TNIV locally, I came across some very exciting news whilst I browsed Zondervan's homepage: Walter Kaiser and Moisés Silva's An Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics: The Search for Meaning (1994) will be released in a second edition this coming November!

I encountered this marvelous book at the very beginning of the first semester of my freshman year in college, as my mentor Andy Smith was using it for his Hermeneutics class that Fall. (As a freshman, I had a slew of far less interesting courses to take; Andy, however, gracious allowed me to sit in Hermeneutics, which was like heaven to me.) I immediately fell in love with the book, and it is no exaggeration to say that it irreversibly set the course of my academic interests. Not only that, but Kaiser and Silva became teachers and dialog partners along the way, and I set about then to find and read every book, article, review, and scrap note that they ever published―an endeavor in which I'm still actively engaged.

Silva, in particular, had a powerful draw on me: the breadth of his erudition, his sophisticated grasp of linguistics, and his superb abilities as a scholarly writer left me gaping in awe. In fact, had he not retired in 2000, I would be filing right now to wherever he was teaching! Still, my debt to him is enormous. Later in my freshman year I encountered his Biblical Words and Their Meaning: An Introduction to Lexical Semantics (1995), the published form of his ThM thesis, which I swallowed whole with the cover. And the during the summer of 1997, I found a discounted copy of Foundations of Contemporary Interpretation, a six-volume series under his general editorship which had only recently been published in a single volume. Needless to say, Silva's own contributions to the series, Has the Church Misread the Bible? (1987) and God, Language, and Scripture (1990), were the highlight of my summer reading. Recently it dawned on me that I was thus reading Silva exactly 30 summers after he prepared for his upcoming exegesis course at Westminster by reading Lightfoot's commentary on Galatians. To this day, Silva reserves the term "perfect" for Lightfoot; and to this day, I reserve the term "infallible" for Silva. (Take that, Fee and Caragounis!)

Later still I read Silva's wonderful commentary on Philippians (1992), which along with his Explorations in Exegetical Method: Galatians as a Test Case (1996) and Kaiser's Toward an Exegetical Theology (1981) became the model for my own exegetical method (from which model I undoubtedly fall short at every turn!). (Note that, since then, both works by Silva have been released in second editions by Baker: see Philippians [2005] and the perhaps more aptly titled Interpreting Galatians: Explorations in Exegetical Method [2001].) But above all, it was Silva's chapter 14 in his and Kaiser's book, "The Case for Calvinistic Hermeneutics," that laid before me the prospect of a truly and consciously theological hermeneutics. In turn this program, which I adopted wholeheartedly, lead me to search for a normative exegesis, which brought me first to the Magisterial Reformation, and then to what the Reformers considered to be their own normative exegesis: that of the Church Fathers.

I am greatly indebted to Kaiser as well, but I never realized to what extent until, given the chance to teach a freshman class all they would hear about Old Testament prophetic literature, I opened my mouth, and Kaiser spoke. I can't think about Old Testament theology without thinking of "Promise" as its center, nor indeed about the relationship between Law and Gospel without thinking of the "weightier matters of the Law" as the heart of the issue. And Kaiser's view on the "analogy of faith" (article below; also chapter 11 in his and Silva's book) influenced me in much the same way that Silva's "Case for Calvinistic Hermeneutics" did.

So it is that now, 11 years after meeting Kaiser and Silva for the first time through An Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics, I'm eagerly looking forward to meeting them anew through this second edition of Our Book.



So you want to read something by Silva? No problem! Here you go:

• Contemporary Theories of Biblical Interpretation (New Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 1, 107-24)
• "Can Two Walk Together Unless They Be Agreed?": Evangelical Theology and Biblical Scholarship (Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 41/1 [March 1998] 3-16)
• Abraham, Faith and Works: Paul's Use of Scripture in Galatians 3:6-14 (Westminster Theological Journal 63 [2001] 251-67)
• Approaching the Fourth Gospel (Criswell Theological Review 3.1 [1988] 17-29)
  
• Systematic Theology and the Apostle to the Gentiles (Trinity Journal 15:1 [Spring 1994] 3-26)
• Review of BibleWorks, Version 6.0 (Westminster Theological Journal 66 [2004] 449-54)

Oh, and Kaiser too? Okay!

• Hermeneutics and the Theological Task (Trinity Journal 12:1 [Spring 1991] 3-14)
• The Promise of the Arrival of Elijah in Malachi and the Gospels (Grace Theological Journal 3.2 [1982] 221-33)