Hermeneutics?

This excerpt (given in class as a handout) articulated well the many hermeneutical problems that have faced the church for centuries. However, like most of the cast studies presented in the book, this introduction did not give a resolution; it gave hard to follow rules.

The author’s proposed reformation of hermeneutics sounds great, but at the end of the day, it’s a lot of hard work and boils down often to conjecture, sometimes more, sometimes less. His idea was that we need a firm understanding of 1) the cultural context that the Bible was written in (this is compounded by the fact the Bible, being written over a period of thousands of years, is written in a multitude of cultural contexts; 2) the cultural context in which the gospel is to be presented; and 3) the Bible itself. At the outset, this idea seems to rip the intelligible Bible out of the hands of the people, placing it instead in the hands of scholars. However bad and historically repetitious this proposition sounds to me, I really can’t think of another way the Bible, the gospel, or God is to be understood.
The second paragraph on page 18 of the reading does provide a good answer to this fear however. It states that “we must depend of the works of the Holy Spirit and trust that the same Holy Spirit is at work in the lives of all believers.� I think that we must walk humbly in our hermeneutics because, like Peter, Christ has not been revealed to us by flesh and blood, by the Father in heaven. (see Matt. 16:17-20)