Does Inspiration Destroy Hermeneutics?

The NT writers' use of the OT can be a complicated issue. I don’t pretend to have it all figured out. However, the Dispensational approach to this is quite extraordinary.

Matt Waymeyer has written an essay called “Don’t Try this at Home: Today’s Interpreter and the ‘Apostles’ Hermeneutic.” The title gives away his conclusion, namely, that we should not even attempt to find interpretive principles in how the NT writers used the OT. I’m amazed at how brazenly this is stated.

Waymeyer gives three reasons for rejecting the NT writers’ hermeneutic. Each of these is problematic, but the third reason is the most objectionable:

“The difference between human interpretation and divine inspiration separates the modern-day exegete from the NT writer in such a way that the former is not able to employ the methods of the latter.”

Waymeyer is assigning the NT writers’ hermeneutic to inspiration and not to correct exegesis. That is, the NT writers were not interpreting the OT, they were redefining it through inspiration. Since we aren’t inspired, we cannot copy their methods.

Here’s Waymeyer again: “In other words, when the apostle Paul quoted or alluded to the OT in his epistles, he wasn’t applying God-given hermeneutical principles to various passages in the Old Testament.”

This magical view of inspiration forces Dispensationalists into a false dilemma: either the NT writers were inspired or they were good exegetes.

Isn’t it possible that the NT writers were inspired and good exegetes. Or, to be more precise, the NT writers were inspired by God to get the OT right.