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The Presence of God Qualifying Interpretation

Enlightenment has changed the circumstances. And I now wonder whether evangelical
scholarship, for the sake of dialog with the mainstream of scholarship, has absorbed the
influence of the Enlightenment. In practice do we have a model of objectivistic
grammatical-historical interpretation of human meaning, a model that is at odds not only
with the tradition of the church, not only with the fact of divine authorship, but at odds with
God himself, and with his purposes for his inscripturated word? The wheel revolves full
circle back to us, and we hear ominously echoing, "You know neither the Scriptures nor the
power of God."

Other evangelicals may already have become disillusioned about the influence of

the Enlightenment, and now seek a remedy in postmodernism. But postmodernism
perpetuates the problem of the Enlightenment by rejecting the presence of God. Typically,
it tries to confine itself to a horizontal analysis of human readers embedded in human
societies and human interpretive traditions. In doing so, it denies the possibility of divine
revelation and the accessibility of real, solid truth as a gift from God. In this respect, it has
not really broken with modernity's systematic blindness to divine presence and divine
speech.

So let us take seriously the presence of God both in the giving of Scripture and in

its modern reception. How will it affect our hermeneutical approach?

Limits on understanding the human author

God in his providence does take up the human author. He speaks to people back

then and there in the past, and that fact can now be the basis for our receiving light from
reflection on the past and its environment. But there are notable limitations. God created
each human author in his own image. We cannot expect to understand man in general, nor
the human authors in their particularity, without reckoning with the presence of God in
human life. "In him we live and move and have our being," Paul reminds us (Acts 17:28).

What were Adam and Eve like when they heard Genesis 3:15? What were the

Israelites like? What was the writer of Genesis like? Were they merely complex, animated
biological machines? Did they live merely on the surface? Then perhaps in Genesis 3:15
they saw only an explanation for the age-long human fear of serpents, and a promise of
continued domination over them. Nothing in the immediate context forces us to see in this
verse anything other than an observation about literal serpents and their literal offspring.
Estimating the nature of human nature figures into interpretation.

The rise of pluralism and postmodern reflection on pluralism have made more

evident what should have been evident all along, that different religions and different
worldviews include different conceptions of the very nature of humanity. One's view of
God, or one's substitute for God in the form of various mental idols, has its influence on
one's view of man. And from there it trickles into judgments about what one can or cannot
rightly expect from human authors.

Modern secularism assumes that the human mind operates in normality. But it is in

6 Since the Bible is the Word of God, it provides a foundation for true belief and lived certainty

concerning God and his message to us. But this foundation is not foundationalist, because the believer
does not receive it through autonomous power and self-possessed perfect purity of insight, but through
the grace of the Holy Spirit, who in his ministry gives truth to the humble and needy who trust in God
through Christ. All the while believers remain finite and contaminated by the remnants of sin. Neither
foundationalists nor antifoundationalists seem to have a clue about the Holy Spirit.