The Indispensable Hermeneutical Ingredient

By Jason Strange 

2/28/2011

If all of sacred scripture is not about Jesus than I ask what is it about? If he is not the central message of the Bible than who or what is? Scripture makes it clear that he is the ‘Sine qua non’ (refers to an indispensable and essential action, condition, or ingredient) the indispensable Hermeneutical ingredient of the Bible, things don’t taste right if Christ is dislodged from his Book. It actually becomes a recipe for disaster.  It’s as if the sun were dislodged from its center all the planets would fall from there magnetic fields from which they are held, so too, hermeneutics fail and fall unless Christ is burning at the center of the interpretation (thematically and exegetically) shining his light and warmth upon the text in his full effulgence (brightness, brilliancy, candor, dazzle, brilliance, illumination). 

                Jesus showed that there was an organic connection between Himself and our understanding of the scriptures. Jesus himself declared in Luke 24, john 5:39, that there was a direct correlation to Himself as the central message of Scripture and our comprehension of the parts to the whole.  He is revelatory glue of the text, and when Christ goes scripture becomes ‘papier-mâché- a book layered with stories one on top of the other.

The progressive nature of revelation was a gradual unfolding of the activity of God; it is God’s self-revelation and self-disclosure. It was organic in nature because all historic revelation is divinely bound together into one unit; the tentacles of the divine root streaming through history until the sonic-bloom of the Interpreter shows up on the world scene. He is the One who spoke the world in existence and comes to speak definitively once more.

It was as if a nuclear chain reaction had happened; small explosions in the timeline of revelation, one sparking the next, growing in power and magnitude; and now the times had reached their fulfillment, word giving birth to Word. Each dispensation building upon another, revelation history growing and expanding until the fullness of time had come and the full arrival of God had flowered. It’s as if the OT was so pregnant with Messianic hope and expectation that Christ had to be born. Now all the OT expectation was coming together. And just as the Shekinah had left 400 years later it shows up on a hill in Bethlehem and rests on a child. This child being the light of the world who comes to illuminate the darkness, he comes as the grand interpreter of all that was written. Man’s understanding of the sacred text was severely wounded by Israeli occupation and the true Israel, the new creation of a new humanity arrives to interpret and to put his world back in order.

(By Israeli occupation I mean seeing Jesus (not Israel) at the center of the hermeneutic, at the exegetical level within the OT. "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you,^(BF) that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled." Luke 24.)