What Does “Hermeneutics” Even Mean? (And Why You Should Care)
If you’ve ever heard a pastor or theology professor use the word “hermeneutics” and quietly nodded along while thinking, “I have absolutely no idea what that means,” you are not alone. It’s one of those words that sounds intimidating, like it belongs in a seminary classroom or a book with a thousand footnotes. But here’s the thing: hermeneutics is something every Christian is actually already doing, even if they don’t know it.
So let’s take the mystery out of it.
The Simple Answer
At its most basic level, hermeneutics is the task of interpreting Scripture. It’s the process of figuring out what the Bible means, not just what it says. And while that might sound straightforward, anyone who has sat through a Bible study where five people read the same passage and walked away with five completely different takeaways knows it’s a little more complicated than it looks.
Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard offer a fuller definition in their Introduction to Biblical Interpretation: “Hermeneutics describes the principles people use to understand what something means, to comprehend what a message—written, oral, or visual—is endeavoring to communicate.”1 When we apply that to the Bible specifically, we’re asking the question: what were the biblical writers trying to say, and how do we understand it faithfully today?
Three Voices in the Room
When you open your Bible and read a passage, there are actually three different “voices” worth paying attention to. There’s the author who wrote the text. There’s the original audience who first received it. And there’s you, the interpreter, reading it thousands of years later.
All three matter. But I would argue that the author is the most important starting point.
Here’s why. The biblical writers weren’t just putting their own thoughts down on paper. They were divinely inspired. At the same time, and this is important, God didn’t bypass their personalities and turn them into human typewriters. He worked through them. Theologian Mark Thompson, writing about B. B. Warfield’s view of inspiration, captures this tension well: “The Reformed Churches hold, indeed, that every word of the Scriptures, without exception, is the word of God; but, alongside that, they hold equally explicitly that every word is the word of man.”2
That means the person who wrote the text made choices. They chose these specific words. They had a specific intention. They had a specific audience in mind. Understanding who they were, what they were facing, and who they were writing to gives us the foundation we need to interpret well. Holding an inerrant view of Scripture also means that the Biblical authors are without error in their original writings. Of course, we do not have the original manuscripts, but there are copies that are thousands of years old that have faithfully preserved what the original authors wrote. The process of interpreting the message must begin with the authors.
Locution, Illocution, and Perlocution
These three words sound like a spell from a fantasy novel, but they’re actually pretty simple once you break them down.
Locution is just the words on the page. Exactly what it says.
Illocution is the intention behind those words. What was the author trying to accomplish by saying it that way?
Perlocution is the outcome that the author was hoping to produce in the reader. What did they want their audience to walk away thinking, feeling, or doing?
Why does this matter? Because we can’t ask Paul, Moses, or John to sit down with us and explain what they meant. We only have the text itself. As Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard put it, “Only by means of the written text itself (the locution) in its context can we hope to reconstruct the meaning of the utterance (considering both illocution and perlocution) the author most likely intended.”3 The words aren’t the finish line. They’re the starting point.
Why This Matters for Regular Christians
You might be thinking: “Andy, I just want to read my Bible. Do I really need to know all of this?”
Yes. And here’s my honest reason: bad interpretation has caused real harm. When we ignore the context, the author, and the original audience, we end up reading our own assumptions into the text instead of drawing God’s meaning out of it. And that leads to everything from minor misunderstandings to full-blown false teaching.
The goal of hermeneutics isn’t to make Bible reading complicated. It’s to make it trustworthy. It’s the difference between reading Scripture and actually hearing what God said.
This is exactly the kind of thing Not Forsaken Ministries exists to help with. You don’t need a seminary degree to read your Bible well. You just need a few good tools and the willingness to take the text seriously.
Sources
William W. Klein, Craig L. Blomberg, and Robert L. Hubbard Jr., Introduction to Biblical Interpretation: 3rd Edition (Zondervan Academic, 2017), 40.
Mark D. Thompson, “Warfield on Inspiration and Inerrancy,” The Reformed Theological Review 80, no. 1 (April 2021): 35.
Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 46.