Staff Pick: "Graeme Goldworthy knows that because Jesus came everything is different—even our hermeneutics. In this superbly readable guidebook to Christian biblical interpretation, he puts biblical theology to work in the service of the Gospel to teach us and model for us how to read our Bibles Christianly. As valuable for Sunday School teachers as it is for preachers, Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics demonstrates what happens when hermeneutics 'gets saved.'"
Mark Traphagen, Westminster Bookstore Staff
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Staff Review: In Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics, Graeme Goldsworthy takes to the platform, wags a revival-preacher's finger at a tent-full of interpretive theorists, and shouts, "Your hermeneutics need to get saved!" Turning aside, he shakes a fist at the ground given up by evangelicals to secular theories of communication and interpretation. For a moment, he gives a nod of recognition to non-Christian postulations in those areas, noting that they often make valuable contributions. But soon he rises to the climax of his sermon: there is, and should be, a distinctively evangelical hermeneutic in regard to Scripture, and it is unashamedly gospel-based.

The title of the book's introduction--—Can Hermeneutics Be Saved?——is an intentional pun. On the one hand, Goldsworthy places the science of hermeneutics on the endangered species list, the result of binging on too many philosophical dead ends. On the other hand, he is quite literal about the word "saved" in a sort of ordo salutis of interpretation: "[T]he grace of God acting for us, is prior to, and is the source of, the action of God in us...This theological perspective also applies to hermeneutics. Our ability to interpret Scripture must be saved, justified, and sanctified through the gospel" (p. 16, emphasis added).
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