Group thinking

Reading the Bible with new eyes is not easy to do | Andrée Seu

Illustration by Krieg Barrie

A big determinant of your hermeneutics is the people you sit next to in church. Calvin, Barth, Bultmann, and Meredith Kline have all trickled down to you a little, but they don't hold a candle to the influence of Joe, Steve, Liz, and Mary. Hermeneutics, in other words, is mainly taught incarnationally.

Nobody knows this, of course. We all think we're just believing what the Bible says. But as the fish is the last to know he is in water (because of the ubiquity of the water), so each church swims in its own soup, that only an outsider can see. Without anyone ever having to lay out the rules of interpretation, we assimilate the views of the group we inhabit, with the precision of a child's mimicry of his parents' accent.