A very good warning of the hermeneutical decline that has been ongoing since the days of Spurgeon but which is being increasingly embraced by many (if not most) conservative churches in the English-speaking world. It briefly covers specific errors of the modern hermeneutic and then provides some counter methods along with short justifications for those traditional techniques.

The book suffers, somewhat significantly, from its nearly complete lack of footnotes/endnotes and references to specific authors & books of the modern hermeneutic. Presumably intended to keep the book focused on ideas rather than attacking individuals, this has a tendency to make the first several chapters read as a screed without firm basis in reality and the reader is left wondering who exactly advocates for the modern approach outlined in the first chapters. The later part of the book improves significantly by turning its attention towards what the author advocates as the proper approach.

Two major benefits of this book are its clarity on what it means practically to embrace the older hermeneutic which is open to types, analogs, and allegories in interpretation (it does not mean seeing allegory everywhere or abandoning the “literal” interpretation even when it sees a passage as allegorical) and its quick walk through the book of Judges. There, modern interpretations see the judges as primarily flawed men; Masters takes them as primarily godly men whom we malign by deeply misreading the text. (I make no claim either to align with Masters on this point nor to reject him.)

Don’t expect to come away from this book with a strong grasp of the nuances of the hermeneutical debate or even of how to practice the historic method of interpretation; the book is doing too much in too short a space to be an instruction manual of that sort. Do expect to have a better idea of what to be on guard for and to gain a gentle jolt in the direction of the traditional method. Probably follow this book up with something more in depth (I have had Craig Carter’s “Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition” recommended to me).