Here's what I mean.
A "kerygmatic hermeneutic" is one that begins with the confession that Jesus is "Lord and Christ" (Acts 2.36). Only when we've made that confession do we then begin to read the Law, Prophets, Writings, and even the rest of the New Testament. The confession -- the kerygma, or proclamation, as Peter and Paul and the rest call it -- is fundamental. It comes first. The essential element to Scripture is not the words on the page themselves. What makes Scripture, Scripture, is that confession. Without it, the Church's commission to interpret Jesus in the words of the text falls flat.
I know, of course, that this way of putting things makes a good deal of conservative and liberal friends nervous.
That's because I think this kerygatic hermeneutic is the hermeneutic of life. Scripture takes its power not from the words themselves, but from Jesus.
What's more, this kerygmatic hermeneutic, I think, is at the heart of all the New Testament's readings of the Old Testament. Whereas Judaism (and Islam after it) are engaged in practices of reading the text centered in the life of Abraham in the Tanak, Christians re-read these ancient texts in light of the Master's death and resurrection, and they find that the Christ's career has taken place "according to the Scriptures". So we set a new course in reading these texts only after we make the confession that Jesus is both "Lord and Christ".
The Christian practices of Scripture aren't grounded in certain methods (whether allegory or history -- depending on whether you're a liberal or conservative); the Christian practices of Scripture are grounded first and most fundamentally in who Jesus is and what Jesus does. Scripture is, to put it succinctly, a Christological practice.
What I'm drawing on here is CH Dodd's notion that the New Testament is shaped and transformed by the "apostolic preaching". A word centered on the death and resurrection of Jesus that still sees itself as both the same "Kingdom of God" Jesus had originally preached. Scripture for Christians is the practice of connecting the story of Israel in a dialogical story of the cosmos' salvation: "In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us in a Son" (Hebrews 1.1-2).
The Church is so confident of that connection that texts with no obvious messianic referent are subsequently seen to refer to events in Jesus' career. Think about Acts 2's use of Joel 2.28-21 and Psalms 16, 132, and 110. Or the puzzling quote of Hosea 11.1 in Matthew 2.15. What both those uses of the Old Testament demonstrate, I maintain, is that the confession of Jesus as "Lord and Christ" is fundamental to reading the Old Testament.
The short-hand way of saying this is: Christians begin with Jesus first, then read the Bible.
This is very different, I think, from what I call "the hermeneutics of death". The Christian way of understanding, reading, and interpreting Scripture is confessional. Then there's "ideological hermeneutics", or "the hermeneutics of death". This is the practice of Scripture from any other stance besides that of confession. Here, the reader embraces any one of a number of generalized principles of interpretation -- say particular exegetical techniques like allegory or historicism, reader-response or structuralism -- and allow those to normalize the text. (This also happens when a reader embraces a defective version of kerygma, one informed by philosophical rather than Christological categories. Yes, I'm glaring at all the Bultmannians in the room.)
When I read the history of biblical interpretation, there are both of these hermeneutical stances available in a variety of places. Alexandria, Antioch, Wittenberg, Zurich, take your pick. But they're also present in American evangelical hermeneutical strategies, too.
For all that Origen got right, biblical interpretation wasn't one of them. It was Augustine who rightly won the day and brought allegory into its proper role as the servant, rather than the master, of the kerygma. The twofold or fourfold Augustinian scheme -- literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical -- draws from an incarnational semiotics and a Pauline teleology grounded in the apostolic kerygma itself: The letter of Scripture is to be interpreted according to the Spirit, and more precisely the rule of faith, the encouragement of hope, and the law of charity (1 Corinthians 12.27--13.13).
It wasn't until the rise of "historical-criticism" (what I call the "Wittenbergian hermeneutics of death") that most of us moderns began to think of Scripture as containing only one meaning of the text, and disconnected that meaning quite often from the saving work of Christ of which these texts were meant to bear witness. It was Luther's demand for a "literal sense" of the Scripture that ultimately led academic theologians to divorce the practices of Scripture from the Church's confession.
The Protestant practice, then, of allowing readers access to these texts without the training in the confession, resulted in the stripping of these texts from their confessional context. Luther had to depend upon a notion of the "literal sense" to arrive at the Church's confessional theology that was grounded in the living Christ moreso than in the text itself.
Luther could find what he needed in the text utilizing his "literal sense", but he couldn't get his Anabaptist, Calvinist, or even Catholic friends to see the same. The warfare -- both real and metaphorical -- that resulted from the Protestant Reformation issued in a consequence that Luther himself couldn't anticipate: The historical-critical method.
This child of the Renaissance and Reformation matured under the Enlightenment, that period that sought intellectual certainty and universal objectivity in a war-torn European culture. But it flourished in the hands of those who found it theologically plausible -- most notably German universities. The human Jesus and his historical career became subject to questions the text was never designed to deal with, much less answer.
The evangelical response, at least since the mid-nineteenth century, has been to this movement. The insistence that the text is "inerrant and infallible" is a reactive to what's perceived to be the divorce of the confession from the text.
But it's interesting to me that to insist the text is "inerrant and infallible" is to insist things about the words that those words weren't meant to do. Rather, the place often afforded to the Bible Christians have historically insisted belongs only to Jesus. So I hear rather odd statements like, "I believe in the Bible".
When I respond that I don't believe in the Bible, folks give me odd looks. But it's true. My faith is in the crucified and risen Lord and Christ. He alone is the object and subject of my Christian faith. The text is one means -- I would maintain it's even the primary means -- of that faith. But the Scripture is still only a means. The confession of Christ still shapes the practices of Scripture, not the other way around.
The theological pressure of pietism and the cultural pressure of individualism often force us to treat Scripture as a means, but as a means toward our own existential ends. The Bible ceases to be normed by our Christological confession and becomes nothing more than a religious horoscope, so it's ultimate hermeneutic is less Jesus and more me. The emphasis moves from a sign that points toward our common confession in Jesus as Lord and Christ, and exclusively toward the relativistic "application" to our lives.
Small groups become nothing more than practices in reader-response reflection, and awkward biblical texts will always get the slight. The Old Testament is reduced to a double-columned edition of the Psalms and Proverbs, the Gospels become adventures with Jesus, the epistles become self-help manuals, and the Revelation is nothing more than an apocalyptic psych-drama in which the point of faith is not to be left behind.
And the understanding of any authority of Scripture slides into religious positivism. Inerrancy and infallibility are about defending modernist propositionalism, in which Christianity is reduced to a core of ideas (whether it's Fundamentalism's "fundamentals" or Modernism's essentials "love and acceptance"). The Bible, once divorced from its confessional norm, is nothing more than someone's storehouse of facts. So the historical-method reigns in things like The Chronological Bible or The NIV Study Bible or The Oxford Annotated Bible. But these Bibles have nearly no -- even if any -- accountability for "the faith once delivered". The Case for ... or Evidence That Demands a Verdict or some-such books only proliferate this propositionalism, and further promote removing the Bible from its confessional foundations.
Ten Commandments prop up courtrooms and Gideon's New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs contain images of the American flag, only to further divorce the Bible from its Christological and attach it to even murkier obligations, like political imperalism. The Church becomes consumerist in order to win its consumers, and relegates the responsibility of teaching the Bible to other entities, thereby further undermining its already fragile teaching office. In so doing, evangelicalism becomes modern perspectivism.
I'm a sucker for drama, but I'm not a pessimist. There's a way out of this morass. But it means letting go of this hermeneutics of death and embracing the hermeneutics of life.
The first thing we have to do, then, is take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians, and relearn spiritual disciplines that make the life of faith more vital, and the reading of the Scriptures supportive of the claim we all make: Jesus is both Lord and Christ.