Hebrew vs Greek Mindset in Biblical Hermeneutics

There's a common idea in the Torah and Hebrew Roots movements that pits a "Greek mindset" against a "Hebrew mindset". While there is a core of truth in this dichotomy, if is almost always applied too broadly. What is really being described is binary logic (aka "classical logic") versus pragmatic, context-dependent communication.

The Bible is not a math or science textbook. As with all other forms of communication, it assumes and mentions some facts about the natural world--you can't communicate anything at all without doing so--but it wasn't written with the purpose of communicating scientific facts.

The Bible is full of vocabulary and idioms that may have developed among people who assumed some things that aren't strictly true. The authors had no interest in correcting such idiomatic expressions because the etymology of a word was irrelevant to the idea being communicated. Every time I share a photo of a sunrise, I don't have to explain that the sun isn't actually rising so much as the earth is revolving. We all know what "sunrise" means. Explaining it would be a pointless tangent.

The Bible was written to communicate historical and spiritual truths to normal people in their own language. It conveys both binary (true/false) and complex ideas using narrative, poetry, law, and correspondence loaded with ambiguity.

Every hermeneutical system acknowledges this to some degree, but the more systematic the hermeneutic gets, the more unbalanced toward binary logic it tends to become. It starts to forget that nobody tells a story or writes a letter (or email) intending it be read like a legal contract that exhaustively defines every word. Even ancient law codes (like the Torah) assume that everyone knows the definitions of man, woman, and "lies with".

That doesn't mean that binary logic is useless for understanding the Bible. On the contrary, logic is essential. While ideas are often fuzzy and context-dependent, facts are either true or false, and ideas depend on underlying facts. Some claims of fact are mutually exclusive and can therefore be tested by the application of binary logic.

• Claim 1: "Under the law" means "obligated to keep the Law of Moses".
• Claim 2: Gentiles were never obligated to keep the Law of Moses.
• Claim 3: Christians (including Gentiles) have been set free from the Law of Moses and are no longer obligated to keep it.

Claim 3 is logically contradicted by Claim 2. If Gentiles were never obligated to keep the Law, then they can't have been set free from it. One or both must be false or else the claims must be modified to either clarify or ambiguate the meaning of terms like obligated, keep, and set free.

Be careful with those modifications, though. Such nuance tends to undermine the foundation of the claim and the trustworthiness of the claimant if it isn't solidly backed by Scripture. If your resolution just creates more contradictions with other claims in your doctrinal system, you haven't really solved the problem. You've just swapped one contradiction for another.

Sometimes the only solution is to abandon the system.