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The Presence of God Qualifying Our Notions
of Grammatical-Historical Interpretation
by Vern Sheridan Poythress
Abstract:
Evangelical scholars have championed grammatical-historical interpretation as an objective
means of sifting truth from error. This approach has value if we use it as one focus, but
limitations if we use it as a total account. The temptation arises to think of objective
interpretation as implying total domination of the text in order to capture its meaning. God
himself poses an obstacle in several ways to hermeneutical dominance. God as master
author limits our understanding of the authorial mind. God the Spirit as inspirer of human
authors limits our understanding of human author's minds. God as archetype for man as
the image of God implies the necessity of understanding the divine mind in order to
understand the human mind. God as master of history limits our ability to confine the text
to its immediate historical and cultural horizon. God as Lord of language limits our control
on word and sentence meaning. God as present through the Spirit among interpreters limits
our control on our own minds. Various limitations can be illustrated in the challenge of
interpreting Genesis 3:15.
What is grammatical-historical interpretation? Do we know as well as we think we
know? For many scholars, grammatical-historical interpretation means an objective
procedure for determining the meaning intended by the human author through an
examination of the language of the text and its historical circumstances. But just how
objective can we make it? Objectivity, in the eyes of many, implies at least two conditions.
First, by rule-based procedures we can weigh the information from language and historical
circumstances, and on the basis of that information construct a probable total meaning.
Second, the meaning in question belongs to the human author. The divine author can
effectively be left out of consideration until after the analysis is complete.
I wish to question this second assumption concerning the elimination of the divine
author. And questioning it leads logically to revising our estimation of other assumptions
as well.
The convenience of eliminating the divine
In our present environment, the scholarly world would no doubt find it convenient
to eliminate the divine author. For if one must debate about the divine author, there is little
hope for consensus about meaning. To begin with, not everyone in the scholarly world
accepts that God was involved at all as a divine author. According to the atheist, there is
no God to supply the involvement. According to the deist, he exists but is uninvolved.
Even if God is somehow involved, the nature of his involvement might vary.
Orthodox thinking about the Bible has confessed over the centuries that the Bible is the
word of God. But there are modern alternatives. According to one kind of liberal thinking