Hermeneutical Myopia in Centuries of Scholarship

In an introductory chapter on "a literary approach to Old Testament theology" in his book Dominion and Dynasty, Stephen Dempster speaks of the "hermeneutical myopia of the last few centuries of biblical scholarship." This hermeneutical myopia has come about through "presuppositions that magnify the texts and minimize the Text. One of the philosophical assumptions that has produced this situation has been a diminution in the belief that the Bible is the Word of God. . . ."

Dempster continues, saying that there has been "an enchantment with the minute details of the biblical text rather than with its more global features, which ipso facto cannot exist. The concern for studying smaller and smaller sections of the biblical text and the increasing specialization of scholars studying the minutiae of philology and morphology have resulted in a loss of perspective." [1]

I've found this to be commonplace in my dealings with biblical scholarship. In an effort to take the human authors seriously (so they say), extremely bright PhD types forget the Author behind the authors and the whole larger work—the whole canon, the big Book of which the smaller books are but chapters. So the Text of which Dempster speaks is the whole Bible. And the texts (individual books) are not rightly understood, more strongly stated, are distorted and twisted if it is not considered how they are to be understood in the light of the larger narrative framework provided by Genesis through Revelation. 

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[1] Stephen G. Dempster, Dominion and Dynasty: A Theology of the Hebrew Bible (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2003), 28.