Hermeneutics — how Scripture is read.

Read the text in its original language, in its original historical and cultural setting, with its original audience in view.

The dominant approach in modern Protestant exegesis since the Reformation. Asks: what would the original author have meant, and how would the first hearers have understood it? Tools include lexicography, syntax, ancient-Near-Eastern background, and historical context. Treats the human author's intent as authoritative for meaning, with the divine author speaking through that intent.

Apply the same critical tools to Scripture as to any other ancient text — source, form, redaction, and tradition criticism.

A family of academic approaches developed in nineteenth-century Germany, now standard in mainline biblical studies. Source criticism (Documentary Hypothesis, Synoptic problem) reconstructs underlying sources. Form criticism classifies units by genre and Sitz im Leben. Redaction criticism studies the editorial shaping of received material. Brackets confessional commitments to focus on historical reconstruction.

Read the literal sense as pointing beyond itself to spiritual realities and to Christ.

The dominant patristic and medieval approach. Allegory (Origen, Ambrose) treats narrative details as symbols of spiritual truths; typology (Justin Martyr, Augustine) treats Old Testament persons and events as foreshadowings of Christ and the Church. The medieval Quadriga formalized four senses: literal, allegorical, moral (tropological), and anagogical (eschatological). Often dismissed by post-Reformation Protestants but central to Catholic, Orthodox, and patristic reading.

Read each passage in light of its place in the unfolding history of redemption that culminates in Christ.

Developed by Geerhardus Vos and refined by Herman Ridderbos, Edmund Clowney, and others. Closer to typology than allegory: takes the literal-historical sense seriously and asks how the passage advances the Bible's overarching narrative arc (creation → fall → Israel → Christ → new creation). Common in confessional Reformed preaching, often called biblical-theological method.

Read Scripture as the Church's book, with the rule of faith and the historical creeds as guides.

A late-twentieth-century recovery (Brevard Childs, Kevin Vanhoozer, Stephen Fowl) of pre-critical reading practices. Resists the historical-critical assumption that the trained academic stands outside the text. Reads canonically, with attention to the analogy of faith, and treats the rule of faith (Apostles' Creed, Nicene Creed) as a hermeneutical norm rather than a later imposition.

Read each book in its final canonical form rather than reconstructed prior layers, and each passage in light of the whole canon.

Brevard Childs's signature approach. Accepts source-critical findings but treats the final form of the text as the locus of theological authority. Reads Genesis as Genesis, not as a hypothetical J/E/P/D mosaic. Often paired with theological interpretation, though Childs's project predates the broader TIS movement.

Read biblical narrative as literature: attend to plot, characterization, point of view, repetition, and irony.

Developed by Robert Alter, Meir Sternberg, Adele Berlin, and others from the 1970s onward. Brackets historical-reconstruction questions to focus on the artistry of the received text. Has reshaped how scholars read Genesis, Samuel, Ruth, and the Gospels, and is now part of the standard toolkit across schools.

Read Scripture at four levels: peshat (plain), remez (allusion), derash (homiletical), and sod (mystical).

The classical rabbinic and medieval Jewish hermeneutic. *Peshat* is the plain or contextual sense; *remez* is allegorical or typological allusion; *derash* is the moral or homiletical extension developed in the midrashim; *sod* is the mystical or kabbalistic depth. The acronym PaRDeS — also Hebrew for 'orchard' — gathers the four. Rashi's commentaries privilege peshat; Ramban often integrates peshat and sod; the kabbalistic literature foregrounds sod.

A "fuller sense" intended by God beyond what the human author consciously knew.

A Catholic category developed in the twentieth century (Andrés Fernández, Raymond Brown) to describe how Old Testament passages can carry messianic or sacramental meanings the original author did not intend but God did. Distinct from allegory in that it is grounded in subsequent canonical revelation, not in interpretive ingenuity. Generally accepted by Catholic and many evangelical scholars; resisted by strict grammatical-historical readers.

Take seriously how readers — and which readers — shape the meaning a text releases.

Includes feminist (Phyllis Trible, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza), liberationist (Gustavo Gutiérrez), womanist, postcolonial, and other contextual hermeneutics. Asks whose interests have been served by dominant readings and whose readings have been excluded. Often paired with literary criticism. At its strongest, surfaces patterns the dominant tradition missed; at its weakest, can collapse the text into its readers.