Hermeneutics = “understanding what the Bible means.” I like this definition better than “interpreting the Bible” because it puts the Bible in the driver’s seat and us along for the ride. The Bible over us, not us over the Bible.
Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief, pp. 93-96; a concise summary of classical Biblical interpretation.
Nagel: "The most important question to ask of any pericope is what is the Jesus that this text gives me that is given nowhere else? What is its proprium?"
Marquart, Doctrine for Laypeople, 70 ~: (1) Scripture is a tapestry of which Christ is the theme (John 5:39) and human salvation is the purpose (2 Tim. 3:15ff). “To tear biblical sentences out of the web of the grand design in which they are embedded is to destroy their meaning. (2) “Sentences and longer passages of the Bible are trivialised if they are taken simply as bits of information, however interesting. God’s purpose in giving His Word is no to tickle curious minds, much less to satisfy academic pedantry, but to rescue sinners by calling them to contrition and faith. A genuine encounter with God’s truth therefore dare never result in the shallow gasp ‘How fascinating!’ It must rather wring from us St. Paul’s twofold response: ‘O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord…Luther’s ITCP…In this way God’s personal address in Law and Gospel is heard, and the test does not become the plaything of cerebral games.”
??, p. 253: The early LCMS had a broad consensus on hermeneutics. That knowledge spanned from Philologia Sacra (Glass) and Clavis Scripturae Sacrae (Flacius) to Thesaurus Hermeneuticus (Pfeiffer), Institutiones Theologiae Exegeticae (Hofmann), and Institutiones Hermeneuticae Sacrae (Rambach).