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The Presence of God Qualifying Interpretation

not the same as the reliability that the Bible deserves. An agreement on historical
methodology concerning biblical testimony is possible only if the unbeliever becomes a
believer. And this will happen only through the presence of the Spirit, speaking in
Scripture. Trying to eliminate the divine author means trying to eliminate the only source
through which genuine objectivity and genuine consensus could actually arrive!

Failure of the argument searching for scholarly consensus

The argument that we must eliminate God in order to achieve consensus about

meaning also fails. In fact, it fails for two complementary reasons. First, consensus about
meaning does not arrive even if we do eliminate God. The Enlightenment hoped that
secular Reason would serve as an adjudicator that would bring consensus where religious
unity of mind had failed. More than anything else, the Enlightenment triumph of Reason
stood behind the progress of the historical-critical tradition and its investigation of
Scripture.

So, did the historical-critical tradition bring consensus, at least within its own gates?

Far from it. Even within the tradition one heard increasing restlessness, as people began to
realize that, apart from a few fleeting cases of "assured results of modern criticism," the
critical tradition multiplied hypotheses indefinitely. We now know by sad experience that
the goddess of Reason does not lead to an increasing body of assured results about the
Bible. We know also, from the disruptive forces of postmodernism, that Reason itself was
a false goddess, who was subtly reconstructed by her worshipers in each eddy of critical
subtraditions.

The second failure in eliminating God is that the argument simply presupposes what

it needs to prove. The mere desire to eliminate God cannot eliminate the facts of
authorship, any more than a human desire to eliminate Paul the Apostle could change the
authorship of the Letter to the Romans. Thinking does not make it so. The alleged
practical convenience of eliminating God does not eliminate his authorship or his presence
in the biblical text.

Objectivity is a gift of God

Finally, the desire to eliminate God for the sake of objectivity misconstrues both the

nature of God and the nature of objectivity. First, consider the nature of objectivity. God
is the giver of objectivity. He gives human beings the ability to rise above their prejudices.
True objectivity aspires to know the truth. And truth is from God. Truth that we come to
know comes from God.

In addition, those who suppress the presence of God typically misconstrue what that

presence would mean. They suppose that God's presence would automatically lead to a
situation in which the reader would only consider what the text means here and now. God
would be speaking immediately to the reader, in a kind of existential encounter that ignores
anything that the text ever meant in the past.

But that conclusion does not follow. In the first place, the presence of God would

mean a growth in humility, which is one of the prerequisites for sound interpretation. And

1 See Alasdair C. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre

Dame Press, 1988).