A change in time and a change in culture, causes the question to be raised as to whether what was said then can be used without some form of transposition or, more in the form above, can come to us directly as a prophetic word of God. Does the Word of God require a prophetic interpreter?
Two issues spring to my mind which have demanded that the question of hermeneutics be dealt with: mythology and ethics.
The problem of mythology forms in more than one way. Firstly, are myths signs of a truth? Are they political code for instance, as in Caird. Or, secondly, with Bultmann, are they disproved - impossible to believe in - with the development of modern understandings of the natural world. With Caird, the language must be deciphered, and then it is presumably a further question of finding analogies with that addressed in the Bible. With Bultmann, the spiritual entities must be deleted and and the focus must remain firmly on the challenges being addressed to the human. It was Barth's simple assertion that Jesus Christ is risen which I found most helpful. If this is true, all our understandings must be reorganized in the light which this sheds. So it is entirely possible that mythological language operated politically, but that neither means that all people thought this or that angelic language, for instance, is entirely exhausted by political referents. Bultmann's problem should not be as easily dismissed as it often is, but it is still the case that statement of Christ's resurrection must change all our perceptions of reality if we are to be faithful to anything like its full significance.
There are many issues when we turn to ethics, of course, which have made Christians ask whether they can take the Bible at face value; war, gender and sexuality, slavery, to name but a few. In the case of homosexuality, for instance, many Christians have read the negative portions of Scripture, understood their plain sense, and yet not understood the reason or the purpose for them. Then, they have then been open to suggestions that the Biblical authors simply knew no better and that they were a product of their age. It has also be argued, perhaps a little more sympathetically, that the Biblical age was not aware of the committed and monogamous forms of homosexual relationship which we know today. Those responses to these entirely valid questions, which seem to me to have been most successful, have not explained have not isolated abstract principles from the Biblical text and found analogous circumstances to apply them to today. Instead, they have brought out from the rest of the Biblical material two things. Firstly, have come definitions of humanity which challenge are own. This is important because it was apparently new understandings of human identity which made the Biblical injunctions appear outmoded. Secondly, they have set the Biblical injunctions in a wider canonical context, including a canonical view of human identity, thus changing their appearance. No longer do they appear arbitrary, and possibly prejudiced. They are revealed as part of a far wider word of hope to humanity.
In both cases of mythology and ethics, Scriptural authority is held onto by returning to Scripture and discovering a reality there which relativises that which had formerly caused the Biblical texts to seem impossible. It all seems to be a question of who can pull the rug out from under whose feet.
The problem of hermeneutics is that it risks introducing a philosophical filter between us and the Word of God. Granted that the problem of differing circumstances always must still be addressed, what is required is a theological 'filter', or perhaps better, a prism, rather than a philosophical one. And, if theological, this too must be derived from Scripture.
Strange how we go round in circles:
The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself: and therefore, when there is a question about thew true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.
Westminster Confession of Faith 1.9
