patristic
Alexandrian Exegesis
Alexandrian exegesis reads Scripture for spiritual senses beyond the literal wording, holding that the divine author intends meanings the surface text only veils.
Methods of Theological Discovery
How theology is actually done, and how to do it
The rest of the site tells you what the traditions believe. This section tells you how anyone arrived at those beliefs. A method is a procedure with assumptions; it is never neutral, and this site does not declare one method the winner. Every method stands here as its own record: its four assumptions, its genealogy, its executable procedure, its critics, and its limits. Take any method to The Workshop and run it yourself.
54 methods in nine families. The site's stance on each method waits on the named reviewers; the criteria page states what each stance means.
Premodern and Classical Schools
The schools that read Scripture before the modern period, and the Reformation's return to the literal sense.
patristic
Antiochene Exegesis
Antiochene exegesis holds that interpretation must rest on the literal and historical sense of the text, attending to grammar, context, and the circumstances of the original events.
medieval
The Fourfold Sense (Quadriga)
The fourfold sense reads every passage of Scripture at four levels: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological or moral, and the anagogical, which concerns the last things.
reformation
Literal-Historical Interpretation (Reformation)
Reformation literal-historical interpretation holds that Scripture has one literal sense, recovered through grammar, history, and the original languages, against the medieval multiplication of senses.
patristic
Typological Interpretation
Typological interpretation reads real persons, events, and institutions of the Old Testament as divinely ordered patterns, or types, that prefigure their greater fulfillment, the antitype, in Christ and the church.
Historical-Critical Methods
The methods that reconstruct the text, its sources, its forms, and its world by historical inquiry.
19th c
Textual Criticism
Textual criticism reconstructs the earliest attainable wording of a biblical text by comparing its manuscript witnesses and judging the variants between them.
19th c
Source Criticism
Source criticism analyzes biblical books as compositions woven from earlier written sources, identifying those sources by their vocabulary, style, theology, and narrative seams.
19th c
Form Criticism
Form criticism studies the small literary units preserved in biblical texts, relating each form to its social setting in life, its Sitz im Leben, before it reached literary form.
20th c
Tradition Criticism
Tradition criticism traces how a theme, story, or motif developed across communities and generations before reaching its literary form, mapping its growth rather than its sources alone.
20th c
Redaction Criticism
Redaction criticism studies the final editors of biblical books as theologians, asking how their selection, arrangement, and alteration of sources expresses their own theological intent, or Tendenz.
19th c
History of Religions School
The history of religions school studies early Christianity within its ancient religious environment, explaining its ideas and practices by comparison with Judaism, Hellenistic mystery cults, and Gnosticism.
Literary, Rhetorical, and Social-Scientific Approaches
The text as literature and persuasion, and the social world that produced and received it.
20th c
Literary Criticism / New Literary Criticism
Literary criticism reads the biblical text as a finished literary artifact, attending to its language, imagery, structure, and effects rather than to the history behind it.
20th c
Narrative Criticism
Narrative criticism analyzes biblical stories as stories, examining narrator, plot, character, setting, point of view, and the implied reader they construct.
20th c
Rhetorical Criticism
Rhetorical criticism reads biblical texts as persuasive discourse, analyzing their arrangement, argument, and style by the standards of ancient rhetoric and by the text's own persuasive aims.
20th c
Intertextuality
Intertextuality studies how texts quote, echo, and transform earlier texts, so that meaning arises in the charged space between a passage and the texts it evokes.
20th c
Social-Scientific Criticism
Social-scientific criticism interprets biblical texts through models from anthropology and sociology, such as honor and shame, patronage, kinship, and purity, drawn from the Mediterranean world that produced them.
20th c
Canonical Criticism
Canonical criticism interprets each biblical text in its final canonical form and context, holding that the shape of the whole canon is itself a theological fact that governs reading.
20th c
Structuralist and Semiotic Analysis
Structuralist and semiotic analysis uncovers the deep structures of difference, opposition, and transformation that generate a text's surface meaning, using tools such as the semiotic square.
Theological and Canonical Approaches
Readings that begin from the canon as a theological whole.
20th c
Redemptive-Historical Interpretation
This method reads every passage of Scripture within the single unfolding history of redemption that reaches its center in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.
20th c
Biblical Theology as History of Redemption
This approach, associated with D. A. Carson, does biblical theology by tracing the Bible's own storyline of redemption across the canon while testing every synthesis against careful exegesis of individual texts.
20th c
Biblical Theology as Worldview-Story
This approach, developed by N. T. Wright, treats the Bible as one large story that forms a worldview, and reads each text as an act within that story told from inside Second Temple Judaism and the early church.
20th c
Biblical Theology as Historical Description
This position, argued by James Barr, holds that biblical theology should be a descriptive, historical account of what the biblical writers and communities believed, rather than a normative synthesis constructed for the church.
20th c
Biblical Theology as Theological Construction
This approach, developed by Francis Watson, treats biblical theology as an openly constructive theological discipline in which interpretation of the texts, in the church and before God, is itself the theological task.
contemporary
Theological Interpretation of Scripture
Theological Interpretation of Scripture reads the Bible as the church's Scripture, in the company of the premodern exegetical tradition, with doctrine and exegesis deliberately reunited.
20th c
New Perspective on Paul
The New Perspective holds that Paul's argument about works of the law was aimed at the boundary markers that excluded Gentiles from God's people, not at a Judaism obsessed with earning salvation by merit.
20th c
Apocalyptic Reading of Paul
The apocalyptic reading holds that Paul's gospel announces God's invasion of the present evil age in the death and resurrection of Christ, an event that creates a new cosmos rather than merely improving the old one.
19th c
Dispensational Hermeneutics
Dispensational hermeneutics reads Scripture with a consistently literal method, distinguishing God's distinct economies across history and maintaining a future for national Israel within his prophetic program.
reformation
Covenant Hermeneutics
Covenant hermeneutics reads the whole canon as the unfolding of God's covenant dealings, one covenant of grace administered in different ways across history, with Christ as the covenant's substance in every era.
Philosophical Hermeneutics
The philosophy of understanding itself, and what it means for reading.
20th c
Gadamerian Hermeneutics
Gadamer's hermeneutics holds that understanding is an event in which the horizon of the text and the horizon of the reader fuse, and that the interpreter's historically formed prejudices are the condition of understanding rather than an obstacle to it.
20th c
Ricoeurian Hermeneutics
Ricoeur's hermeneutics follows the long route through symbol, metaphor, and narrative, holding the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of trust together until the text projects a world the reader can inhabit in a second naïveté.
20th c
Existentialist Hermeneutics
Bultmann's program reads the New Testament's mythological worldview as an objectification of human self-understanding, and translates it, by demythologizing, into the existential decision the kerygma demands here and now.
20th c
Neo-Orthodox Hermeneutics
Barth's hermeneutics reads Scripture as the witness to the Word of God, who encounters the reader as event and revelation, so that interpretation is a repeated, obedient listening for the God who speaks in the text rather than a mastery of it.
contemporary
Postmodern and Deconstructive Hermeneutics
Postmodern and deconstructive hermeneutics treats meaning as unstable and interpretation as situated and contested, reading texts for their suppressed voices, internal tensions, and the power relations their readings sustain.
Contextual and Advocacy Hermeneutics
Readings that begin from a named social location and read with the people who stand there.
20th c
Liberation Hermeneutics
Liberation hermeneutics reads the Bible starting from the experience of oppression, treating the Exodus and the kingdom of God as paradigmatic, and measuring every reading by whether it serves the real liberation of the poor.
20th c
Feminist Hermeneutics
Feminist hermeneutics reads the Bible starting from the experience of gender injustice, exposing the patriarchy of text and tradition, recovering women's agency in the text, and testing every reading by its fruit for women's full humanity.
20th c
Womanist Hermeneutics
Womanist hermeneutics reads the Bible starting from the intersection of race and gender in African American women's experience, drawing on their literature, history, and survival wisdom to judge every text and tradition.
contemporary
Postcolonial Hermeneutics
Postcolonial hermeneutics reads the Bible starting from the experience of colonialism and empire, examining the text as both an instrument of empire and a resource of resistance to it, and interrogating the imperial interests inside biblical scholarship itself.
contemporary
Queer Hermeneutics
Queer hermeneutics reads the Bible starting from the experience of sexual minorities, challenging the heteronormative assumptions of texts and interpreters, and recovering readings in which queer lives appear as subjects rather than problems.
contemporary
Ecological Hermeneutics
Ecological hermeneutics reads the Bible starting from the ecological crisis, treating Earth and its creatures as subjects with their own voice in the text, and exposing the anthropocentrism of both the text's world and its interpreters.
20th c
African Biblical Hermeneutics
African biblical hermeneutics reads the Bible starting from African socio-cultural realities, bringing oral tradition, proverbs, and communal life into the interpretation, and resisting the universalizing claims of Western readings.
20th c
Asian and Asian American Hermeneutics
Asian and Asian American hermeneutics reads the Bible starting from multi-scriptural Asian contexts and from diaspora experience, practicing cross-textual reading with Asia's own scriptures and resisting Western universalizing interpretations.
20th c
Latino and Latin American Hermeneutics
This hermeneutics reads the Bible starting from poverty, migration, and marginalization in Latin American and United States Latino life, treating the community's daily struggle, la lucha, and its popular reading of Scripture as primary theological sources.
contemporary
Disability Hermeneutics
Disability hermeneutics reads the Bible starting from the experience of disability, challenging the ableist assumptions that equate wholeness with cure, and recovering readings in which disabled people appear as full subjects of the text and of God.
Reception History and the History of Interpretation
What readers, artists, and centuries have made of the text.
20th c
Reception History
Reception history studies what a text has done to its readers over time, treating that history of effects as part of the text's meaning.
19th c
History of Exegesis
The history of exegesis studies how interpreters in each period actually read Scripture, so that modern readers can learn from, and avoid repeating, past interpretive decisions.
20th c
Visual Exegesis and the Bible in Art
Visual exegesis reads images as interpretations of Scripture, asking what a painting, sculpture, or film claims about a biblical text.
20th c
The Bible and Literature
The Bible and literature studies how later writers take up biblical stories, language, and forms, and what those literary reworkings reveal about the biblical text.
Comparative and Interfaith Approaches
Reading across traditions, with one's own commitments in hand or in conversation.
20th c
Comparative Theology
Comparative theology reads one tradition deeply alongside another, returning to its own tradition with questions and insights it could not have gained alone.
20th c
Scriptural Reasoning
Scriptural reasoning gathers Jews, Christians, and Muslims to read their scriptures together, seeking understanding across traditions rather than agreement.
20th c
Interreligious Hermeneutics
Interreligious hermeneutics offers a theoretical framework for how people of different faiths can understand one another's texts and claims without collapsing their differences.
20th c
Cross-Textual Hermeneutics
Cross-textual hermeneutics reads the Bible alongside other sacred texts, especially Asian classics, so that each text illuminates the other without either being reduced to an illustration.
Integrative and Contemporary Frameworks
The schemes that organize the field itself, and the correctives pressed on it.
contemporary
Five-View Scheme
The five-view scheme organizes the field of biblical interpretation into five representative approaches, so that students can compare their assumptions, procedures, and results side by side.
20th c
Cambridge Companion Framework
The Cambridge Companion framework sorts biblical interpretation along three distinct axes, methods, stances, and reception, so that a reader's tools, commitments, and history can be examined separately.
20th c
Social-Scientific Critique
Social-scientific critique is a corrective framework that presses both historical and literary approaches to account for the social world of the text and its readers.