Intro to Hermeneutics in under 5 minutes!

hey everybody today I'm going to talk about the topic which is a word that I have used frequently in my writings but I've gotten several comments saying you keep using this word and we don't know what it means it is a tricky concept to grasp which is why I'm gonna make this video today talking about hermeneutics what is it first of all I comes from the Greek word for interpretation so when you see the word hermeneutics all you need to do is think of interpretation now this might seem simple you know like the Bible is written in Hebrew and Greek therefore how many to do is translate it into English and to understand it however it's not quite that simple suppose that somebody is writing a letter to someone else this letter to someone else and his reason for writing is to encourage them because christmas is coming soon okay next we have the recipient of the letter this person reads the letter he just wrote and understands christmas is coming soon now in their context christmas is a good thing and they get really excited about it so he reads this letter and knows that christmas is coming so he gets excited now suppose he drops this letter on the ground and so it's just a piece of paper with some writing on it someone else comes along reads the same letter like with no context so they don't know this guy or this guy the author or the audience they read the same letter and they start to panic because christmas is coming soon and they have not done their Christmas shopping so a third party reading the exact same words however they don't know the author they don't know the original audience and they take a different meaning from the same words we now have three things that play the author the text and the reader of the text now these two readers come away with different me from the same text when we read the Bible we're kind of in a way picking up a letter intended for an original audience and we're trying to pull our own meaning out of it now let's make this even more complicated because we're the third party who he didn't know the Apostle Paul did not know who ether renault is or who you are and yet we read it and assume that we can draw some kind of understanding from it in addition to letters though the Bible has multiple genres law history prophecy Apocrypha pop apocalyptic literature letters and things like poetry and wisdom writing which would have been interpreted differently by the Hebrew and early Christian people on top of that suppose if this letter sits here for 2,000 years 2,000 years later and then gets picked up by someone and English is now an extinct language so they have to go back look at what all the English words mean figure out who wrote it who what was written to what they meant when they wrote it to this person and what the language of the time meant you also have to take into account the circumstances under which they wrote the letter under which they read the letter and try to draw meaning from that so that when we talk about hermeneutics that's why it's such a big topic because it might seem simple to say I found a piece of paper with a letter written on it I know exactly what it means however there's a lot more at play than you might think we have the author original audience the word to themselves in the context in which it was written all of this is hermeneutics and it does not just apply to the Bible either we need to use hermeneutics we're reading someone like Marx's Communist Manifesto or Anita or when were reading Shakespeare we need hermeneutics to help us understand the author the audience and the context under which those texts were written hopefully that helps you understand the concept as a very basic introduction to hermeneutics this kind of helps me understand how to think about reading the Bible many of us find this ancient ancient ancient letter on the ground and read the words and decently assume that we know exactly what they mean when it might not be quite that simple I don't know if I missed anything or skipped anything but if I did please let me know please continue to ask really good questions leave comments talk to you guys soon thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Ethan Renoe

Views: 15,537

Rating: 4.9242105 out of 5

Keywords: hermeneutics, bible, study, academic, hermeneutic, theology, biblical, exegesis, eisegesis, christ, christian, jesus

Id: -YiACCea0wY

Length: 4min 37sec (277 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 07 2019