Stan Porter on Hermeneutics, Interpretation, and Biblical Authority

A great read is Stanley E. Porter, “The Authority of the Bible as a Hermeneutical Issue,” Evangelical Quarterly 86 (2014): 303-24.

Porter shows that a lot of debates supposedly about “biblical authority” are largely misdirected and are really about “biblical interpretation.” Many of the debates that court controversy are really about interpretation rather than hermeneutics or authority. He weighs into the Gundry and Licona controversies and concludes that: “It is not my place to enter into the two previous disputes in order to arbitrate their outcomes. I will only say at this point that, from what I can tell, both Gundry and Licona were well within the bounds of even the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, and their opponents were applying a different standard than is called for by the statement itself, one that prejudges all issues of criticism, genre, and the like. In other words, they were applying a hermeneutical standard to a matter of interpretation” (pp. 309-10).

Porter takes what looks to me like a very Thiseltonian approach in “fusing” the horizon of text and reader in the process of finding in texts:

The authority of the Bible as a meaningful and useful concept can only come about when we fully embrace both horizons of understanding – the horizon of the original text within its context of understanding and the horizon of the contemporary subject with his or her context of understanding. This hermeneutical vortex – always attempting to get a more reasoned, articulable, and perhaps even consensual understanding of the meaning of  the text for the reader in the contemporary context – is a requirement of a robust view of authority of hte Bible in order to avoid the Bible becoming either an artifact confined to the past, with interpretation but no meaning, or simply an autobiographical reflection of the present without necessity of grounding in the past. (p. 318).

He also critiques notions of the biblical authority rooted in harmonization and self-attestation as well as attempts at establishing biblical authority in “canonical” and “theological interpretation” explanations.