For some time, the godless ideologies of Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality are spreading like gangrene in our evangelical seminaries. Positionality, a fundamental tenet of intersectionality, is now being injected into the practice of biblical hermeneutics – the science of biblical interpretation.
Dr. James Lindsay writes, “Positionality…one’s gender, race, class, and other aspects of identities act on the knowledge a person has about things.” When applying this ideology to biblical hermeneutics, some teach that we can best arrive at the meaning of biblical text by listening to the voices of people from different races and genders.
Proper biblical hermeneutics involves understanding the original point of the author to the original audience. We cannot arrive at this knowledge by putting on the glasses of our own or anyone else’s ethnicity and gender. That would only serve to place an outside framework upon the text leading to the loss of the meaning of the text.
In this lecture, Dr. Tom Buck reveals the dangers of woke hermeneutics, and exposes where it is gaining ground in evangelicalism today.
The audio version of this presentation is available on Soundcloud, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, & Stitcher.
Richard Chelvan
Is there a way for me to get a transcript of this lecture? Thanks, enjoyed it on YouTube.
David Behar
Would it be wrong to ask someone who has been a missionary in the field for 30+ years to speak on Acts. Would you not expect that person to have insights into the text that others would not? Would you not invite a pastor cancer survivor to have insights into faith and suffering? I find this all very disingenuous and contrived
Mark LaCour
You ask these questions expecting us, the readers, to understand what you’re saying in the proper grammitical context in which you wrote your reply. If what you wrote is true, then according to you we don’t know what you’re saying in your reply because we don’t know what you’ve gone through in order to write what you wrote. And since no one can “really” know what another has experienced, no one can ever know what is really being said in a text. Welcome to hermeneutical gnostism! Simply put, I don’t need a missionary or cancer surviver to better understand the laws of logic and interpretation of language as it’s being used by an author. It’s all about the TEXT, not anyone’s experience with the text, in understanding what an author is saying. Period.
Darrell
It seems to me to be a crucial understanding for teaching our disciples to do Bible study not only to think from the author’s perspective, but to realize that THEY bring a perspective to their reading of the Bible. We can say “it’s all about the text” over and over again, but it is never going to take away the fact that no one comes to the text without a viewpoint.
That perspective we have may be flawed, and keep us from learning the author’s intent, and hinder our growth in discipleship because we fail to discern something. Thus, listening to interpreters from other countries, cultures, and perspectives, may give us valuable insights. That’s not “woke,” that’s just true.