Every seminary has its own unique heartbeat, values and distinctives. At Baptist Bible Seminary, our six distinctives will serve you well as you prepare for a life of ministry for Jesus Christ. This month, we highlight our emphasis on a distinctive hermeneutic.
Foundational for every course we teach is a literal, grammatical and contextual hermeneutic that allows you to study every Sacred Text as the biblical author wanted to communicate it to his original audience.
This method is literal and grammatical because the writers of Scripture used human language to convey God’s revelation to their original readers. By paying close attention to the words the author used and the way he put them together, we can discover the literal or normal meaning of the text. This means taking words in their literal sense and also recognizes the author’s use of the figurative sense in various contexts.
This method is also contextual because when we interpret the Bible, context is king. At BBS, you learn how to use context properly to interpret God’s Word. Context determines whether to take a word literally or figuratively. The immediate grammatical context of a passage is most important for interpreting it correctly. The wider context of a book can also help us as we seek to find the biblical author’s meaning through his words.
A clear hermeneutical distinctive at BBS is how we distinguish legitimate from illegitimate use of context for interpretation once we look beyond an individual book of the Bible. Any Scripture written earlier than the book we are interpreting, which the author and recipients of that book would have had access to, is antecedent revelation that may help us as we interpret. However, because the readers of the book did not have access to any revelation written later, we must never allow later revelation to influence our interpretation of an earlier book. If we do, we violate the foundational principle of grammatical, contextual interpretation. In essence, we are saying that the original readers could not interpret the revelation they received because they did not have the later revelation to help them. The distinctive hermeneutic you will learn while studying at BBS will prepare you to interpret God’s Word accurately and teach it confidently to others. You will be “a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the Word of Truth” (2 Tim 2:15, NIV).
by Dr. Ken Gardoski, Baptist Bible Seminary director of doctoral studies
