The historical-grammatical method is a Christian hermeneutical method that strives to discover the Biblical author's original intended meaning in the text. It is the primary method of interpretation for many conservative Protestant exegetes who reject the historical-critical method to various degrees (from the complete rejection of historical criticism of some fundamentalist Protestants to the moderated acceptance of it in the Catholic Church since Pope Pius XII), in contrast to the overwhelming reliance on historical-critical interpretation, often to the exclusion of all other hermeneutics, in liberal Christianity.
The Eastern Orthodox Church uses primarily a spiritual, allegorizing hermeneutic heavily dependent on the Christian fathers of the first several centuries of Christianity. The Catholic Church has no official hermeneutic, and individual Catholics range from conservative in their interpretation to full acceptance of higher criticism. The process for determining the original meaning of the text is through examination of the grammatical and syntactical aspects, the historical background, the literary genre as well as theological (canonical) considerations. The historical-grammatical method distinguishes between the one original meaning of the text and its significance. The significance of the text is essentially the application or contextualization of the principles from text.
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““I have usually found that there was method in his madness.”
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—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)