Dr. James Rosscup · The Master's Seminary · 77 minutes
Lecture by Dr. James Rosscup, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Before the principles come the bearings. Dr. Rosscup walks the whole spectrum of Christian study, from the canon to the pulpit, to show where hermeneutics sits and why everything downstream depends on it. He then turns to the interpreter himself: his relationship to the Holy Spirit, his awareness of his world, and the habits of observation that keep him from leaping to conclusions. Listen for the four reasons interpreters go wrong.
Hermeneutics is basic and foundational: the biblical preacher must first observe what Scripture says and then interpret it, and everything else builds on that. Rosscup maps the whole spectrum, from the canon through textual and historical criticism, to hermeneutics, exegesis, homiletics, Bible exposition, biblical and systematic theology, and the history of Christian doctrine.
Study of the canon asks by what criteria the 66 books are recognized as Scripture, with the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha excluded. Rosscup is careful about the direction of the verb: the church does not decide what belongs in the canon but comes along behind and recognizes what God already intended to be his word, helped by scholars who have given their lives to the question.
Textual criticism weighs the words of the text, and can be destructive, pronouncing words spurious, or constructive, defending with evidence that what we have is the word of God. Historical criticism studies authorship, date, and setting, and its constructive work is a gift: the vindication of Belshazzar as co-regent with Nabonidus after decades of critics calling him an error, and background studies like the article on drunkenness at Ephesus that illuminates Ephesians 5:18.
Hermeneutics supplies the principles, methods, and laws of interpretation: context near and far, word study, grammar. Exegesis, a word meaning to lead out of the text, is those principles put in process, and also names the product. Bible exposition is the simpler, popular outflow of that heavier work, explaining the text's flow and meaning to an audience with illustrations and bridges, never in isolation from its context.
Sermon preparation must be saturated with hard, skillful labor and with what Rosscup calls prayer-peration, crying to God through every step: gathering, organizing, selecting examples, crafting wording, and thinking through delivery. He tells how Spurgeon, hitting a wall mid-sermon, sent up a quick prayer and found the Spirit bring fullness and flow, and he presses prayer before, during, and after the message.
Much preaching today is shallow, brilliantly delivered but thin, often justified by a user-friendly philosophy that underestimates what people can receive. The remedy is depth preached simply, and preparation that begins weeks ahead, some expositors reading a book fifty times, building a reservoir so that funerals, weddings, and family matters cannot reduce Sunday to a scramble.
Biblical theology draws only from the Bible, studied by persons, the theology of Moses or of John, and by periods, tracing how much light God had given at each stage. Revelation is progressive: far more is known of life after death by the book of Revelation than in the Pentateuch. The rule that follows is to read a passage within its own period and purpose, not to read later revelation back into it, as Augustine did when he turned the sun of Psalm 19 into an allegory of Christ.
Systematic theology compiles what may be known of God from every source, chiefly Scripture, in the line of Calvin's Institutes, Chafer, Hodge, Berkhof, Strong, and Grudem; dogmatic theology restates it for the present generation. The history of Christian doctrine traces how the church debated its way to sound teaching, and Rosscup recalls being unable to put down James Orr's The Progress of Dogma as a seminarian.
General hermeneutics gives principles that work anywhere in Scripture: context, cross-reference, the priority of the original languages, grammar, progressive revelation. Special hermeneutics takes up literature with its own features, parables, typology, and prophecy, where the general principles still apply but specialized offshoots are needed.
The interpreter must be oriented to the systems of interpretation history offers, literal, allegorical, devotional, and decide where he stands. Rosscup points to Origen's fanciful tricks as allegory's warning, and asks whether a literal interpreter will be rigidly literal or keep the fluidity to handle figures of speech and symbols. He is honest about his own settled conviction: studied hard and honestly, the text keeps coming out where he stands, and he holds it with a clear conscience while admitting no interpreter is perfect.
The chief orientation is to the Holy Spirit, resident in every believer but meant to be president, in control. He is a person, not an it, and the spiritual man of 1 Corinthians 2 has the mind of Christ. His purpose, Jesus said in John 16:14, is to glorify Christ, so the interpreter walks in step with him: the comprehensive walk of Galatians 5:16 and the step-by-step, stay-in-line walk of 5:25. Rosscup confesses seasons in seminary when the workload crowded out that closeness, and rues them.
Observation is the art of awareness. Natural observation can be astonishing, like the memory performer who returns a congregation's names minutes later, or the novelist whose Westerns are dense with verified detail, or the television detective who notices the bus that was not running that night. Supernatural observation adds the Spirit's help to a sharp mind, but never replaces hard work: do not ask God to bless nothing. What to observe includes connecting words, verbs, patterns, repetitions, and contrasts, always with the proof in hand.
The question of interpretation is what the text means, and the danger is jumping there like an Olympic broad jumper. Four causes: precipitous judgment that makes a mountain of one observation; a close-minded attitude that settles a passage because a beloved teacher says so; lazy-mindedness that wings it and misrepresents God's word, workmanship to be judged; and staked interests that force a passage to fit a system, as the Watchtower does with firstborn in Colossians 1:15 while ignoring the word's use in Psalm 89. Rosscup models the alternative: he abandoned the gap theory of Genesis 1 and his early reading of the fruitless branch in John 15 when honest study demanded it.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Why does Rosscup call hermeneutics basic and foundational among the disciplines?
2. What is the church's role with respect to the canon, in the lecture's careful wording?
3. What did later scholarship show about Belshazzar, whom critics had called an error in Daniel?
4. What does the word behind exegesis mean?
5. What happened when Spurgeon hit a wall while preaching, in the story Rosscup tells?
6. What is the remedy the lecture offers for the Saturday night freeze?
7. Why is Augustine's reading of the sun in Psalm 19 offered as a warning?
8. What distinguishes biblical theology from systematic theology in this lecture?
9. What does special hermeneutics take up that general hermeneutics does not?
10. What does Rosscup say the Spirit should be in the believer's life, beyond resident?
11. What warning accompanies supernatural observation?
12. Which of these is one of the four reasons interpreters leap to wrong conclusions?
13. How does the lecture answer the Watchtower's use of firstborn in Colossians 1:15?
14. What example does Rosscup give of changing his own mind under honest study?
All fourteen correct. Lecture 2 is complete.
Rosscup went before God and said he wanted the truth even if it cost him his school's expected conclusions, and found honest study led him home anyway. Where do you feel the pull of staked interests when you read Scripture?
Resident versus president: what would it look like this month for the Spirit to move from one to the other in your study of the Bible?
Of the four reasons interpreters leap to conclusions, precipitous judgment, a close-minded attitude, lazy-mindedness, and staked interests, which one is the live danger for you, and what habit from this lecture answers it?
The charge of Galatians 5:25: since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. The interpreter's first orientation is not a method but a Person.
The lecture's own commendations: Rosscup's chapter on interpretation in Rediscovering Expository Preaching, James Orr's The Progress of Dogma and Berkhof's History of Christian Doctrine for how the church reached sound teaching, J. I. Packer's In Step with the Spirit, and his own study of the vine and the branches, Abiding in Christ. And the standing counsel: after your own observations, read three or four good commentaries and let them humble you.