BEN: I can’t imagine St. Paul suggesting ‘let your conscience be your guide’ as some moderns do, but it is interesting the way Paul thinks sunedesis works. At a simple level he sees the term as referring to bare awareness or consciousness or things. At a more complex level he sees it as a moral awareness that can either approve or disapprove of certain things. He does not see it as a sort of purely negative hall monitor that wags... Read more

BEN: As I’m sure you are aware, Methodists over the last half century have talked about Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience as the ‘Quadrilateral’, though Albert Outler later said he wished he had never come up with the term because he did not wish to give the impression that these are four equal sources of truth or authority for our faith. I am on record as saying reason, tradition, and experience can be seen as avenues into the central truth... Read more

BEN: Let’s talk about reason and faith a bit. I’m all for the careful use of our minds and reasoning to understand our Christian and to be able to give ‘a reason for the hope within us’. My problem is that a good deal of what the Bible tells us is inherently paradoxical, for example—how exactly did the divine pre-existent Son of God confine himself to the limitations of normal human nature such that he could even be tempted like... Read more

BEN: On p. 86 you refer to Heb. 4.12 and its reference to ‘the Word of God’, but you take this to be a reference to Scripture as a text. It is not. It is a reference to the oral proclamation of the Gospel and its possible effect on the hearer. In fact, every use of the phrase logos tou theou in the NT is either a reference to the oral proclamation (see e.g. 1 Thess. 2.13) or to Christ... Read more

BEN: Many years ago, I taught some classes at Duke whilst Stanley Fish was also teaching there, offering up his reader-response criticism to one and all. The thing that struck me the most about his work, is that when some reviewer would critique it, he would say ‘well, that’s not quite what I meant or intended’. What eventually struck me about extreme forms of reader-response criticism, is that it was inherently self-contradictory. You can’t say, on the one hand that... Read more

BEN: You talk about practicing a hermeneutic of suspicion when it comes to the notions and assumptions we bring to the reading of the Bible, and a hermeneutic of submission when it comes to accepting God’s Word at face value. How does one get these two things together? It would seem that if one doubts one’s own assumptions about the text, that would spill over into doubts about the text itself, all too often. Part of the problem for scholars... Read more

BEN: I once had a more Pentecostal student approach me frustrated with all the exegesis stuff and the requirements to read commentaries and study the Bible in its original contexts who said to me ‘I don’t know why I need to learn all that stuff, why I can just get up into the pulpit and the Spirit gives me utterance!’ My reply was: ‘Yes Charlie you can do that but it’s a shame you are not giving the Spirit more... Read more

BEN: One of the things I have noted again and again, perhaps especially when it comes to conservative Protestants is that they approach the text in very individualistic, sometimes even narcissistic ways, assuming that the text means ‘what it means to me’. Underlying this is the problematic notion of ‘the individual right of interpretation’, an idea I don’t find anywhere in the canon, not least because all these Biblical books were written in cultures where corporate identity was primary and... Read more

BEN: Explain a bit about what you mean by the phrase “hermeneutical realism.” I take it you are not denying we are all active readers of texts and bring much to the reading, but want to insist that there is an objective meaning in the text which the author intended and put there. Right? RHYNE: Yes, exactly. My use of the phrase “hermeneutical realism” has its origin in two influences: Tom Wright and Kevin Vanhoozer. Wright’s discussion of critical realism... Read more

BEN: Rhyne, first of all, thanks for your book When Doctrine Divides The People of God, it’s a brave book, in various ways. What prompted you to jump into the fray and write it? RHYNE: This idea grew out of (1) my interest in theological method and (2) my frustration with the behavior of self-identifying evangelical Christians on social media. In this country, we have always had polarizing political differences, but social media, which gives everyone a public platform to... Read more