Scripture, Semantics, and Ontology

A Philosophical Map of Biblical Hermeneutics

Abstract

This essay offers a philosophical map of biblical hermeneutics, tracing the major intellectual trajectories that have shaped the interpretation of Scripture from the classical Christian tradition to the present. The ultimate argument presented claims that disputes about interpretation are never merely disputes about method. Beneath the familiar debates over historical criticism, literary analysis, narrative reading, and theological interpretation lies a more fundamental question: how does theological language relate to reality? The essay surveys the premodern integration of exegesis and theology, Luther's account of the nova lingua of scriptural discourse, the Enlightenment displacement of theology by method, the rise of nineteenth-century historicism, the emergence of philosophical hermeneutics in Heidegger and Gadamer, and the Anglo-American trajectory through literary criticism, canonical approaches, and speech-act theory. Additionally, and examination of Hans Frei's recovery of the plain sense of biblical narrative occurs before the argument that even the most sophisticated theological responses to modern hermeneutics leave unresolved basic semantic questions: how do biblical terms denote, how do theological predicates apply, and under what conditions do scriptural sentences bear truth? Drawing on model theory in the technical sense developed within modern logic, the essay proposes that hermeneutics opens onto semantics and semantics in turn onto ontology. The interpretation of Scripture belongs not merely within biblical studies but within the wider vocation of philosophical theology where questions of reference, predication, truth, and reality cannot be avoided. The essay concludes firstly by connecting the model-theoretic argument to Luther's insistence that the nova lingua of theology demands not semantic indeterminacy but semantic seriousness, and secondly to the classical claim that the intelligibility of scriptural language is grounded in the Logos as the ontological condition under which language, world, and truth belong together.