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The Presence of God Qualifying Interpretation

We scholars, like other sinners, may lack of humility. The Spirit may even have

worked great humility in other areas of our lives. But the intellect may be the last
stronghold. It is a precious gift of God, and we will not give it up, both for our own sake
and for the sake of benefiting the Christian community. The community needs us and our
intellect in order to straighten it out and move it forward.

But you see how these truths can become a subtle cover for a sense of superiority.

We desire to seek God and to love him. But that desire covers a desire to achieve
superiority in understanding both by one's own intellectual mastery of the Bible and one's
demonstration of that mastery before the rest of the scholarly world, including that large
portion of it that does not reckon with divine authorship.

Second, if we are in a dialog with the scholarly world, what would it mean to

acknowledge the presence of God in that environment of dialog? Acknowledging God's
presence leads logically to acknowledging the need for spiritual purity in order to stand in
his presence. We need hermeneutical redemption.

And that brings us right up against the

foolishness of the gospel:

For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it
pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.
...
But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is
weak in the world to shame the strong; ... so that no human being might boast in the
presence of God. (1 Cor 1:21, 27-29).

In a scholarly environment, we may rightly wonder whether bringing up the issue of God's
presence will simply close the dialog, because we have shown ourselves to be utterly
foolish by the standards of this world (1 Cor 1:26; 2:6; 3:19).

Postmodern subjectivism and uncertainty

So we must reject modern autonomous rationalism. Do we then follow

postmodernism in the opposite direction, and become champions of an autonomous
irrationalism? Does humility mean that we can never really know the truth, and must live
in radical uncertainty?

By no means. The parable of the talents is pertinent. You must use the truth that

God gives you rather than burying it, with a false humility as the excuse. You must stand
boldly for the truth, in the power of the Holy Spirit. You must oppose heretics, even as
Paul and John did. You must bear the reproach of being thought to be a dangerous fanatic
because you are certain that you hear the voice of God in Scripture, that you know God,
and that you know the one way of salvation. That one way in its exclusiveness will be
mightily resisted by the sophisticated postmodernist, who claims that one cannot ever
really know truth, and cannot ever have complete certainty, and must always be "tolerant"--
except that the postmodernist pronounces that the gospel of Christ cannot be the answer.

11 See Vern S. Poythress, "Christ the Only Savior of Interpretation," Westminster Theological Journal 50/1

(1988): 305-321.

12 Cornelius Van Til summed up the non-Christian point of view very aptly: "No one knows [non-

Christian irrationalism], but you are wrong and I am right [non-Christian rationalism: whatever may be
the case, the Christian position is radically wrong]." (Cornelius Van Til, Christian-Theistic Evidences