Shedding our Biases Along the Hermeneutical Spiral

A summary of Preunderstanding of the Interpreter from Klein, Bloomberg, and Hubbard’s Introduction to Biblical Interpretation

Can one approach the Scriptures without bias?

This is a fundamental question that confronts biblical interpreters, whenever they would approach the Bible, because whether we like it or not “we all have certain suppositions or assumptions of the word based upon our prior experiences based on these presuppositions”. In their book Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, the authors Klein, Bloomberg and Hubbard, defined this phenomenon as preunderstanding: an occurrence upon which knowingly and unknowingly we construct a body of beliefs and attitudes that we use to interpret or make sense of what we experience, which according to them play a very significant role in shaping the way we construe reality –therefore functioning as an arbitrary hermeneutic that we tend to use whenever we would try to draw out meaning at a given text.
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