Meaning

Herman Hermeneut: Now what about meaning? What do we mean by “meaning”?

Missy Missiologist: Meaning depends on the culture of the hearer.

Oliver Objectivist: I grant that different cultures may have their biases. But meaning is the same through all cultures. It is the fixed content of what is said.

Amy Affirmationist: But couldn’t the same verse mean different things to different people? Couldn’t every one of the meanings be the work of the Spirit?

Curt Cultural-Transformationist: Meaning has to be worked out in action, or it means nothing—it’s mere hypocrisy.

Laura Liturgist: Real meaning can be discovered only through participation in worship.

Doctrinalist: It’s all about what God has in mind.

Objectivist: It’s all about what the human author has in mind.

The differences that we have already seen in the Bible discussion tend to spill over and propagate themselves when it comes to the issue of meaning. So we need to consider the question of meaning. If all particular truths cohere with one another, and are perspectives on one another, do texts have one meaning or many?

And what do we mean by “meaning”?

Consider a particular example. John 17: 4 says, “I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do.” What is the meaning of this verse? How does its meaning relate to other verses of the Bible? What is its meaning for us?

Unity and diversity in content

John 17:4 says something definite. Other verses do not simply repeat John 17:4, but say other things. At the same time, all the verses of John and all the verses of the Bible fit together to teach coherent truth. Two verses never contradict one another, but say things in harmony with one another. As there is unity and diversity in truth, so there is both unity and diversity in the meanings. As usual, God’s Trinitarian character provides the archetype for our understanding the unity and diversity in truth and meaning. The truths and meanings of different verses are different, yet they go together into a larger whole.

We could understand this unity and diversity by developing an analogy from the earlier idea of one originary truth and multiple manifestational expressions. But instead, let us develop a new triad of categories.

The Word, in his incarnate life, manifests who God always is. He is God. Hence everything he does manifests who God is. At the same time, he is a particular Person of the Godhead. He manifests God in a particular way. He is the Word become flesh. The Son and not the Father became incarnate. In the incarnation the Son shows that he is a particular Person, distinct from the other Persons of the Godhead. There is both unity, one God, and diversity, the particularity of who the Son is in his incarnation. We may associate with this unity in diversity a triad of three categories.

First, we may express the unity in God by speaking of a classificational aspect of the revelation of God in the Word. God is one and the same God throughout history. Every particular act of God is a manifestation of the class “God.” It is the same God who is revealed. The classificational aspect is the aspect of “sameness” of unity in all the instances revealing who God is. Of course all three Persons of the Godhead remain the same through all history. But it is preeminently the Father who remains the same, through the diversities of the coming of the Word in flesh and the pouring out of the Spirit at Pentecost. We associate the classificational aspect with God the Father.

Second, we may express the diversity in God’s acts by speaking of the instantiational aspect of the revelation of God. By this we mean that every act of God has its own individuality. One act is distinguishable from other acts at other times. It is an “instance” of God’s action. The Word who became flesh (John 1:14) is an instantiation of God. We associate the instantiational aspect with the Second Person of the Trinity.

Third, we may express the unity in diversity and the diversity in unity by speaking of an associational aspect. By this we mean that different instances of God’s action are all in harmony with who God is: they cohere with God’s unchangeable character and they cohere with other instances of God’s action. In the associational aspect we focus on the relation between instances and the general class. The associational aspect is expressed in the statement, “The Word was with God.” (John 1:1b). The Word has an association with God. As we have seen, this association consists in mutual indwelling (John 17:21). It is mediated through the Spirit. So we link the associational aspect with the Holy Spirit.¹

We thus have three categories, classificational, instantiational, and associational. Together these form a triad of coinherent perspectives.²

Now, each particular event in the earthly life of Christ is an instantiation or manifestation of the one God, who is classificationally the same. The presence of the Holy Spirit guarantees that the particular instantiations are all instantiations associated with the one God. They manifest who this God really is.

The particular truths about the particular events are like instantiations. One God knows all these truths, which therefore classificationally belong to the single category truth. Moreover, all the truths coinhere or are concurrent.

Suppose that we consider two truths. God is righteous. God is all-knowing. These statements are distinguishable and are particular. At the same time, they describe one God. Each casts light on the other. God’s righteousness is all-knowing righteousness. And God’s knowledge is righteous knowledge. We do not properly understand God’s knowledge if we think it is knowledge in unrighteousness; nor do we understand God’s righteousness if we think it is uninformed by complete knowledge. Hence, the two statements inform one another and are deeply involved in one another. Each in a sense presupposes the other. In this way the two statements coinhere. They are aspects of a unified truth, namely that God is God.

The two statements in their relation to one another therefore show classificational, instantiational, and associational aspects. Classificationally, they point to one unified truth, the Godhood of God. Instantiationally, they each say a particular thing; the particular thing that they say is distinct from what the other statement says. Associationally, they interpret and expound each other through coinherence.

In like manner, the record of individual events of the life of Christ in the Gospels contains so many instantiations. Each individual statement or incident is particular, exhibiting the instantiational aspect. Second, each fits into a narrative whole expounding the character of the one Christ, who is the same in all these events, thus exhibiting the classificational aspect. Finally, the different statements and incidents interpret one another and mutually expound one another, thus exhibiting the associational aspect.

In agreement with the nature of the Trinity, the classificational, instantiational, and associational aspects coinhere in the Trinity. By analogy, they coinhere in the particular manifestation of Trinitarian truth in the Bible. Hence, we know that classificational, instantiational, and associational aspects coinhere in each and every truth found in the Bible, and in each and every meaning expressed in the Bible.

A triad for meaning

Now let us apply this triad, consisting in classificational, instantiational, and associational aspects, to a special area. Let us focus on the message of a chosen passage of the Bible. The message has classificational, instantiational, and associational aspects. Because this topic is so important for us, we will employ more terms. We will speak of the sense, the application, and the import of the passage.

Let us call the classificational aspect of the message of a passage the sense of the passage. We can reexpress the sense through paraphrase, but we still intuitively know that it is the same sense. Any particular expression of the sense involves a particular series of words or sentences uttered at a particular time and place. We may rephrase the same truth in different words. But the sense that we express remains fundamentally the same. God is the same, and remains faithful to himself throughout all time. The truths of God are the same. Hence, God is the guarantee of the stability of sense, throughout all the ways that we may choose to expression that sense.

For example, John 17:4 says what it says. The Son, not someone else, has brought glory to the Father. He has done so specifically “on earth,” not in some other location. He has accomplished a particular work rather than being idle or independent. The particular truth here is the sense of the verse.

Second, let us call the instantiational aspect of the passage its application. Application is a most apt term to use in the case of imperative passages. “Pray continually” (1 Thess. 5:17) is instantiated or applied when a particular person prays continually. Their praying is an “application” of the command in 1 Thessalonians 5:17.

We want to stretch the word “application,” however, to cover other kinds of use as well. The teacher may teach “pray continually” either by saying those words, by a paraphrase, or by an illustration. Each such act of teaching is an “application” of the content that is taught. Each inference from a truth of the Bible is an application of the truth. Application, in this use, includes not only obedience to commands, but appropriate cognitive, verbal, behavioral, and attitudinal responses to assertions, questions, commands, meditations, and all kinds of communicative modes in the Bible. An application is any instantiation of a passage in word or deed; it is an illustration or realization or unfolding of the consequences of a passage within a particular context in the world. Now the applications are first of all what God in his wisdom plans and foresees. God knows all possible applications before any human being even hears the text. Applications are ultimately what God has in view, not what human beings succeed in doing.

Finally, let us call the associational aspect import. The import of a passage then resides in the multitude of its connections with other passages and other truths, so that each throws light on the other. John 17:4 is a good illustration of this process. In the phrase “completing the work” Jesus alludes to the entire course of his earthly ministry. The meaning of the phrase is filled out by perusing the rest of the Gospel of John and seeing what particular works Jesus had in mind. The expression “you gave me to do” is supplemented by all the other passages in John that talk in one way or another about the Father sending and commissioning the Son. By putting together 17:4 with the rest of the Gospel of John, we understand more than we could from reading John 17:4 merely in isolation.

Thus we have a triad of “meanings”: sense, application, and import. As usual, the three coinhere and offer perspectives on one another. Nevertheless, for many people, “meaning” naively has associations very like our idea of “sense.” “Meaning” is any paraphrased restatement of the obvious point or main point of a text, taken more or less in isolation. If we chose, we could of course define “meaning” as identical with “sense.” The important point is not how we label any of the three elements of our triad, but rather that we see that the three coinhere.

Application presupposes sense. Application is an application of something, namely the sense. Concrete particulars only make sense in the context of the general meanings or senses that they illustrate. Conversely, sense presupposes application. No sense can be grasped without application, without some ability to grasp ways in which it would make cognitive, ideational, and behavioral differences in particular instances. If a child could parrot the words, “You shall not steal,” but could not paraphrase or explain it, and could not exhibit behavior illustrating it, we would rightly say that the child did not yet really understand.

Sense also presupposes import. Sense exists and makes sense within a surrounding context, both historical and textual. The context in its relation to the sense constitutes import. Conversely, import presupposes sense, in that import arises from relation among senses. Sense arises out of the particularity of application, import out of the particular senses that relate to one another. Application becomes possible only within a context of import, and context of other meanings that guide the interpretation of the relation of a sense to a particular situation in which it is applied..

It follows that understanding a passage always involves an interplay of sense, particular application, and the associational richness of contexts (import). People instinctively follow this interplay all the time when they read and understand. But some theories would prefer a world in which sense could be rigidly isolated, and considered independently of an indefinitely large context of applications and associations.

Depth in import

The associations of one text with its larger context extend out indefinitely. Hence, sense, though definite, coheres with import that is indefinitely deep. Let us illustrate by considering John 17:4 again. John 17, as we saw, is not merely the word that God speaks to us, but the word that God speaks to God. The Son speaks to the Father.

To be sure, John 17 is written by John to us. It is a record of the speech that the Son earlier gave. But in the record John points us to the speech itself. Through the perspective or window of John’s written record, we hear the speech, not merely a record empty of value. Since John is inspired, the perspective faithfully reveals the original.

Now, in the divine speech of the Son to the Father, expressions like “I brought you glory,” “completing the work,” and “you gave me” have infinite meaning. We know that they do because in fellowship the Father and the Son share infinitely rich knowledge, and that knowledge is summed up in the expressions in question. The expressions do not lose anything in their definite sense; rather, they gain in rich allusions.

As human beings, we in our reading of the John 17:4 do not suddenly obtain infinite depth of knowledge. But we know that we can grow in understanding indefinitely. As the Lord gives us knowledge of himself through other passages, in the course of our whole life, we come to know God more and more, with more and more depth (John 17:7, 21, 25-26). As we come to know God more, we see more and more the implications contained in the divine communication between the Son and the Father in John 17:4. Thus, in this passage, an indefinitely deep richness extends also to us.

In John 17:4 it is quite evident that sense, application, and import coinhere. They are not neatly separable. The applications include all the particular “works” that the Son accomplished on earth. These do not exist in pure isolation, but enjoy what meaning that they have in the context of a unified work, “the work you have me to do.” The sense of the verse involves this work. All the applications are implications of the one sense, that is, the general claim that the Son makes. If the Son “completed the work,” he completed by implication all the particular works. He turned the water into wine, he conversed with Nicodemus, he conversed with the Samaritan woman, he fed the 5000, and so on. The implications, according to most views, are part of the “meaning,” and thus are included in the sense.

But the sense, understood accurately, is not simply any sense that could be attributed to the words in John 17:4. Rather, it is the sense that they actually have when spoken by the Son at a particular time and place. The sense can be interpreted only through context. We are tacitly invoking import when we reckon with the other passages of John that speak of the particularities in the “work” of the Son. Conversely the import comprised by all the passages taken together can be appreciated only by appreciating the sense of each particular passage. Sense, application, and import interpenetrate.

Meaning and application

How does my view of meaning and application compare to other views? It is important to underline three features of my approach. First, God gives stability to meaning and to sense. Because God exists, because he is the ultimate source of meaning, meaning is not just mush. It is not just a human invention that we manipulate as we may.

Second, God is not only the author of the words of Scripture, but their interpreter as well. This fact is most obvious when God explicitly speaks to God, as in John 17. But by virtue of the Holy Spirit’s role as “hearer” (John 16:13), we can infer the same conclusion with respect to other passages.

Third, unlike some popular versions of meaning-application theories, I insist that meaning and application coinhere. Each is a perspective on the other, and neither can in the end be understood or even discussed or identified without tacit understanding of the other.³ God plans and intends that his words should have the effects on readers that they have. This intention includes all the details of all the applications through all history. The applications are part of God’s intention. Hence, in the usual approach that identifies meaning with authorial intention⁴, all the applications are part of the meaning. Conversely, each application, if it is an application at all, is an application of something: it is an expression or instantiation of the intention of God, an intention that covers more than one application. Hence the very idea of application presupposes the unity of meaning through the unity of God’s plan.

In short, we can associate meaning with the classificational aspect, and application with the instantiational aspect. We also have a relation of meaning to application using the context of other truths and other meanings: we have the context of import.

We can achieve the same triadic division starting from another point of view. Consider the fact that God is a lover. In analogy with human loving, God’s loving shows fidelity, creativity, and intimacy. In fidelity God remains stable and faithful to his promises. In creativity he delights us with surprises. And in intimacy he shares himself and his presence. These three aspects of loving display attributes of God, namely, his faithfulness, his creative power, and his omnipresence. As we might expect, they are also analogically related to the Persons of the Trinity. God’s sameness or fidelity we can associate with the Father. His creativity we associate with the Son, who executes the plan of the Father in time; he brings about newness not only in creation but in the incarnation, the crucifixion, and the resurrection. The Holy Spirit corresponds to God’s intimacy, in that one of his central tasks is to indwell us and thereby be intimate with us. The three aspects, fidelity, creativity, and intimacy, thus coinhere and are perspectives on one another.

With this triad in hand, we may distinguish aspects of meaning and application. The stability of meaning or of sense corresponds to God’s faithfulness. The multiplicity of applications and the challenge to apply God’s word in new situations corresponds to God’s creativity. And God’s involvement in holding all truths in relation to one another corresponds to intimacy. Meaning, application, and import form an image in the operation of language of God’s fidelity, creativity, and intimacy. These three in turn form an image of the Trinity. Hence, meaning, application, and import coinhere.

Evangelicals have rightly maintained that secularist reader-response theories threaten to undermine all stability in meaning, leading to a situation where every man does “that which is right in his own eyes.” By contrast, God provides stability to meaning. Since God does not change (Mal. 3:6), neither does the meaning of his word change. God knows the end from the beginning (Isa. 46:10; cf. Ps. 139:16). He possesses all import in the infinitude of his divine wisdom.

Now one aspect of God’s wisdom is his plan for history. Events develop in time. To human beings on earth, import becomes accessible only gradually. We compare later events with earlier. By using the import perspective, we can understand the grain of truth in reader-response approaches. The Holy Spirit continues to speak and teach Christians today (2 Cor 3:16-18; 1 John 2:20-27; cf. John 16:7-16, which applies primarily to the apostles but secondarily to all believers). The canon of the Bible is complete, but redemptive history continues to unfold through the reign of Christ. Consequently, our understanding of the Bible continues to change and grow. This growth takes place through God’s continuing to speak through Scripture. What he says does not change, but he continues to instruct us by saying it. In this sense, the communication is not over. From the standpoint of historical development, from the standpoint of the experience of individuals and the experience of the church, the “import” for human beings is incomplete and dynamically changing. Closure comes with the Second Coming (1 Cor. 13:12).

Divine and human in the Bible

We have derived richness in meaning from reflecting on the fact that it is God who speaks. What now is the role of the human speaker or author?

God made man in his own image (Gen. 1:26-27). Human language mirrors divine language. We may expect that it has a derivative richness mirroring the richness of divine language. Human speaking involves sense, application, and import. Human assertions and commands have a stable sense expressed in a particular manifestation or application, in the context of a larger network of meanings making up import.

Now what is the relation between the divine and the human? What is the relation between divine and human in the Bible? Each book of the Bible has a human author as well as the one divine Author. Do the two authors, divine and human, mean the same thing or different things?

We may use as our model the way that Christ speaks in John 17. Christ who is God the Son speaks, and simultaneously Christ the man speaks. By virtue of the unity of the one Person of Christ, we may rightly say that one Person speaks. The particular speech in John 17 is thus a single speech from a single Person, simultaneously divine and human. As divine utterance, verses like 17:5 have infinite meaning, as we have seen. As human utterance, they express finite knowledge on the part of the utterer. As God, the Son knows all things (Matt. 11:27); as man, his knowledge is limited (Luke 2:52). How can we possibly comprehend this mystery? We cannot. It is the mystery of the incarnation.

Through this mystery we may nevertheless come to understand what God has revealed in Christ. We see a harmony between divine and human. Christ the man does not know all the details of God’s plan, but he does know the basic facts of his own role, including the presence of his divine nature (John 17:5). In his human nature he knows that there is more knowledge in his divine nature than what he knows. In words he alludes to that infinite knowledge in John 17:5. In his human nature he uses language that includes the divine infinite.

Conversely, Christ the eternal Son knows all the details of God’s plan. Included in that knowledge is the knowledge of his human nature, and of the concrete role that he plays with respect to his human nature in the events of redemption, “completing the work you gave me to do” (John 17:4), “while I was with them” in incarnate state on earth (John 17:12). God the Son affirms the particular significance of the actions of his human nature. By implication, he affirms the significance of the limitations in knowledge that accompany the speech of human nature on earth. Within the infinitude of the divine plan, this and not that bit of knowledge is singled out to be communicated to Christ’s human nature, and to his disciples.

What we have here is unique, because it belongs to the uniqueness of Christ’s incarnate state. But at the same time, Christ’ unique incarnation reveals who God always is. We have here an instance of the operation of the triad of imaging, consisting in originary, manifestational, and concurrent perspectives. The originary perspective in this instance arises from Christ’s divine nature; the manifestational perspective arises from Christ’s human nature; and the concurrent perspective arises from the unity of the two natures in one Person. Starting with any one of these, we end by affirming all. All are inextricably involved in one another.

To put it another way, the finite meanings of Christ’s human nature point to and are in union with the infinite meanings of his divine nature. Each is a perspective on the other.

We may now extend the lesson from John 17 to all of the Bible. Christ is the Final Prophet (Acts 3:20-26). As such, he is absolutely unique. But he is thereby also the model for how all prophets functioned throughout the Bible. Only through the mediation of Christ may we sinners receive the word of God and yet live. The ministry of other prophets thus presupposes the ministry of Christ, and is theologically founded on him.

The prophets, then, tacitly affirm the presence of God in their speaking. When they say, “Thus says the LORD,” it is not merely they as human beings speaking, but God speaking through their speaking. Conversely, the Lord affirms the significance of the prophets, in directing our attention to them and not merely to his voice in bare isolation: “If anyone does not listen to my words that the prophet speaks in my name, I myself will call him to account” (Deut. 18:19).⁵

2 Peter 1:20-21 explicitly combines divine and human action:

Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

In prophetic inspiration divine and human aspects enjoy inner harmony. But divine and human are not strictly identical or indistinguishable. Christ as man points beyond the limits of his human knowledge in John 17:5, without having to exceed the limits of finiteness of his human nature. Christ as God knows the limits of his human nature, without being confined to those limits when as God he addresses the Father in John 17:5.

We cannot, then, strictly limit ourselves to the “human” Christ when we read John 17. John 17:5 explicitly forbids it. What can we infer about Scripture? Christ has a divine and a human nature. Scripture has divine and human speaking. The analogy is not exact. But it is still suggestive. We cannot strictly limit ourselves to the human speaking when we interpret Scripture. The phrase “Thus says the LORD,” on the prophet’s own lips, explicitly forbids it.

Now let us return again to the question of infinitude of meaning. As we have seen in John 17:5, when God addresses God, we deal with an infinitude of meaning.

But an objector says, “Wait! John 17 is the word of John the Evangelist to us. We can limit ourselves to the finite meaning of John the Evangelist.” No, we cannot. The Evangelist intends that we should hear the Son speaking. The Son indicates his deity in John 17:5. The Evangelist is then in effect confessing that, though he does not comprehend the depths of infinite meaning in John 17:5, he invites us to join with him in contemplating that infinitude. His intention is to reveal to some extent an infinitude that he does not himself fully comprehend. To be loyal to the Evangelist’s intention we need to realize that his intention is, as it were, to “go beyond his intention,” or more precisely to go beyond his comprehension. The human mediation of John the Evangelist, like the human mediation of Christ on which it is built, does not block off infinitude but gives access to Him.

We have arrived, then, at a partial answer to Oliver Objectivist. Objectivist located meaning exclusively with the human author, and insisted on the precise stability of one meaning. He is right in seeing the importance of the human in God’s message to us. And he is right to insist on stable meaning, that is stable sense. But sense is coinherent with application and import, so that it is illusory to try to deal with sense in pure isolation. Moreover, the human meaning of the prophetic authors coinheres with divine, so that it is illusory to try to restrict oneself to a purely human level.

Diversity in the mode of divine authorship

John 17 furnishes not only a model for understanding the divine and human, but for understanding the diversity in divine modes of address. Divine speaking includes God the Father speaking, the Son speaking, and the Spirit speaking. They speak in relation to one another and in relation to human beings. John 14-17 reveals a striking diversity in mode of address, because of the plurality of Persons in the Trinity.

An analogous diversity appears when God addresses human beings. God can address people in an audible voice, as at Mount Sinai (Ex. 20:18;19). God can write with his own finger on tablets of stone (Ex. 24:12; 31:18; 32:16). He can also raise up a prophetic mediator, like Moses (Deut. 6:22-33; Deut. 18:15-18). The prophet can say, “Thus says the LORD,” and then speak for the Lord in the first person (Ex. 32:27; Isa. 43:14; etc.). He can also quote what the Lord has said to him: “The LORD said to me, ‘I have heard what this people said to you’ ” (Deut. 5:28).. He can also speak back to the Lord in his own voice, “But now, please forgive their sin—but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written” (Ex. 32:32).

Naively, we might suppose that only the address of God to the prophet is really the divine voice. The prophet then speaks in his own voice to the people. But that is not correct. The prophetic speaking to the people is still divine speaking, not merely a quote from the past divine speaking to the prophet. The prophetic word to the people not only quotes God, but carries forward to the people the word of God to the prophet. The prophet passes along what he has heard. This passing along is analogous to what happens in John 17: the Son’s word to the disciples passes along the Father’s word to the Son. His word is also the Father’s word. The prophet’s word to the people is also God’s word to the people.

Consider another mode represented in John 17. When the Son speaks to the disciples, his speaking includes the Father speaking by dwelling in the Son (John 14:10). Likewise, the prophet speaking to the people in the name of God includes God speaking to the people through the prophet. The Son speaks back to the Father concerning the disciples and the Father’s plan for them. Likewise, under inspiration the prophet speaks back to God concerning the people (Ex. 32:32).

We need, then, to head off the idea that only one kind of speech, such as “Thus says the LORD,” constitutes the “real” divine speaking. Within Scripture the genres of speaking may be quite diverse. For example, in the psalms human psalmists pour out to God their remarkably human struggles, doubts, and expressions of trust. These psalms represent human beings speaking to God. Some interpreters have then taken the next step and concluded that the humanity excludes deity: these psalms, they say, are not instances where God speaks to human beings. But such a conclusion is false. John 17 is the speech of a human being to God, but is also the speech of God to God. Likewise, the psalms are speeches of human beings, but these human beings were “carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21), so that the words are also divine. The psalms are divinely perfect examples for the people of God to imitate, examples pointing forward also to the perfect speech of man to God in the Person of the God-man, Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit groaned within the psalmists, after the manner of Romans 8:26-27, so that God and man speak in the same act of communication. They do not, however, speak in the same way. The “I” of the psalms is directly the human suppliant; the Holy Spirit speaks in the psalms not by being literally the “I,” but by instructing the psalmist and us concerning the manner in which we are to pray. The joint speaking is possible because of indwelling, that is, an Old Testament precursor of the New Testament indwelling that we see after Pentecost.

In sum, we need to do full justice to the fact that not all Scripture presents itself to us in the same way. The texture differs according to whether God addresses human beings or human beings address God, or human beings quote the address of God. We do not flatten all these textures into a boring monotone. The diverse textures, far from eliminating the divine presence, confirm the rich Trinitarian character of that presence.

This richness is wonderful. But it does confront Oliver Objectivist with certain difficulties. On whose meaning do we focus? Not only do we confront the dwelling of the divine in the human but the dwelling of divine in divine. We deal with the distinct voices of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. We must obviously try to appreciate and understand all three, in unity and in diversity. Such is not the original program that Objectivist had in mind, when he used a picture of a single meaning that would be simply one without Trinitarian diversity.

The concerns of scholars

The concerns of Objectivist are of broader interest. Objectivist thinks in the same way as many scholars do. Ideally, in their view, objective interpretation pursues an objective meaning that is “there.” By accumulating sufficient information about language and historical background, and by sifting this information with sufficient intellectual acuity, according to the proper techniques, scholars may hope to discover the objective meaning. Safety resides in cutting the objective meaning loose from the subjective response of the interpreter. Are the concerns of these scholars valid?

Such desire for objectivity raises many questions. Which is primary, sense or import? Meaning or application? Stability or living interaction in interpretation? Objectivity or subjectivity?⁶ Being intellectual or emotional in our response to the text?

All of these questions seems to produce a dilemma. But they are all false alternatives. In fact, responsible biblical interpretation includes the two seemingly incompatible poles in a harmony. As God purifies us, we as subjects begin to listen humbly to the objectivities of the textual message. The objective message in turn has the power to transform us subjectively. Diligent application leads to sanctification. When we become godly, we obtain a firmer grasp of the sense. Deeper absorption of the sense leads to diligent application and godliness.

Thus we reject both kinds of one-sidedness. We need sense, application, and import, all three.

First, we need the sense. We need to pursue God by listening to what he says. We need to grasp the sense of each passage more and more accurately and more and more deeply. The Holy Spirit is never in tension with what God has said once and for all. The Holy Spirit speaks “only what he hears” (John 16:13). Moreover, the Holy Spirit as Creator has supplied all the good resources that we find in language and culture. The Holy Spirit produces all godly scholarship. Thus, the best tools of godly scholarship play a valuable role in grasping this sense.

Second, the Holy Spirit leads us into application. We do not rightly interpret the Bible if we ignore its demand to be applied. “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says” (James 1:22). Application brings us into conformity to Christ, so that we know his mind. Then we interpret more accurately.

Third, the Holy Spirit uses import in instructing us. We need a grasp of the overall texture of the Bible, not merely a jumble of details. Lest Corinthians miss the main point, Paul summaries the whole of his message in 1 Corinthians 15:1-4.

The Holy Spirit is our teacher in all these aspects (1 John 2:20-27). But we are still on the way. We are not always good at bringing the different poles together. If you will permit me to exaggerate, I may draw the following caricature. The Christian church splits into scholarly and nonscholarly parties. The scholarly party cares only for objectivity, rigor, and the recovery of grammatical-historical sense. The nonscholarly party tries to apply devotionally whatever ideas come into the mind when the Bible is read, and does not ask itself whether God could be saying one definite thing. But both of these responses are recipes for stultification.

Fortunately, people do learn from God and from other members of the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12). The potential split that I described is continually being healed. But there are still tendencies in these two directions.⁷

The scholarly party is small in number, but it is educated and privileged. We tend to draw a flattering picture of ourselves. Naturally, as the educated, we “know” what is the problem with the masses and what they need. They need to follow us. We are the leaders, the vanguard. We see and understand the teaching of the Bible more deeply.

I sympathize with one aspect of this picture, namely the desire that others should profit from scholars’ insights. But there are at least two things wrong with this picture. First, we who are scholars are not as well off as we think. We still have spiritual deficiencies. We who are scholars need to know God, and to apply this knowledge to every aspect of our scholarship as well as our everyday lives. The application to our lives in turn influences the skills and fruits of scholarship.

The second problem with the scholar’s self-portrait is that it subtly depreciates the work of the Holy Spirit among nonscholars. The Holy Spirit dwells in other believers as well as scholars, and guides them into the truth.

In particular, we need to look carefully at the ways in which nonscholarly people use God-given insight on biblical texts. Scholars tends to see in nonscholarly imagination only ignorance and uncontrolled subjectivity. And of course sometimes they are right. But often something very profound is going on here. What looks suspicious to many scholars may actually be a work of God.

Illustrations using analogy

When nonscholars engage in the most subjective flights of imagination, they use analogies. A passage of the Bible calls to mind a situation that they were in, or a saying that they have heard, or a theory that they once had. They can do such things only because they too, like the most careful and exacting scholar, are roaming about in the richness of the connections among the truths of God (the associational aspect). They are exploring remote regions of the import of a passage.

Now we must be careful. Human beings on earth are sinful. God does not endorse whatever comes into our minds. But we are dependent on God for our minds. And we are dependent on God for the associations that we can make between truths, or between opinions that we take to be true. Even in the midst of our error, we do not escape relying on connections that God himself has established and ordained.

Hence, the connections that people find, however strange, were not created by them but by God. God thought these connections before any human being ever did. God made sure that these connections were of such a kind, and in such contexts, that people could discover them.

Hence, people can discover truths of God in strange ways. They may wildly misunderstand the sense of a text, and yet arrive at a conclusion endorsed by other parts of the Bible. If we have been in Christian circles for awhile, we have all seen this sort of thing happen. For example, a newly converted young man reads Acts 18:2, “Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome.” He decides that God is commanding him to move out of his girlfriend’s apartment and stop sleeping with her. The conclusion is biblical, but it is supported by other passages, not Acts 18:2.

Let us consider a more complex example. We start with the passage in Isaiah 54:4-5:

Fear not, for you will not be ashamed;

be not confounded, for you will not be put to shame;

for you will forget the shame of your youth,

and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more.

For your Maker is your husband,

the Lord of hosts is his name;

and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer,

the God of the whole earth he is called.

I once heard a widow testify how much this passage had comforted her. She said that when she lost her human husband, the Lord had given her this passage promising that He would be her husband.

Scholars who examine the original historical context know that Isaiah is speaking to Jerusalem, pictured as a widow and personified (Isa. 52:9-10). Jerusalem in turn stands more broadly as a exemplar of God’s dealings with the people of God as a whole. The sense of the passage concerns the spiritual and physical restoration of Jerusalem and the people of God, not the comforting of a widow in the literal sense.

In this type of case, the woman’s interpretation looks to the scholar like a totally arbitrary leap. But of course there are loose, analogical associations between the various ideas. If there were no such associations, the woman herself would probably not have seen any connection between the passage and her conclusion. She would not have been comforted by going back to it.

The analogical associations are associations between various elements in the truths of God. Many of these truths are taught somewhere in a particular passage of the Bible. Other truths we infer from a large number of passages, taken together. For instance, according to 2 Corinthians 1, God undertakes to comfort his people in many types of circumstances. Widowhood is one such circumstance. Hence, the Lord does promise to meet the woman’s need in her widowhood.

The woman is not wrong in her conclusion. Neither is she wrong to think that there is at least a loose association between the comfort-in-widowhood complex in Isaiah 54:4-5 and the comfort-in-widowhood complex in her own life. She would be wrong, of course, if she insisted that the sense of the passage was precisely her comfort, nothing more, nothing less. But it is very unlikely that she is actually claiming anything this precise. She is rather saying, “This is how the Lord applied the passage to me.” Nonscholars do not usually invoke the technical idea of sense. They do not make precise distinctions between sense, import, application, and loose association. The widow does not carefully distinguish these aspects, but unconsciously weaves them all together.

Is the Holy Spirit involved in what happened to the woman? The woman learned a biblical truth, even though the truth does not attach primarily to the sense of the passage in Isaiah 54:4-5. How do we describe this situation? Is it the work of God? Did the Holy Spirit use the loose association to bring home to the woman a definitely biblical truth, namely that God comforts her in her widowhood?

I say yes. But how do we know? We know because God is sovereign over the operations of the human mind, including this widow’s mind. And from 2 Corinthians 1 we know that the final effect is biblical. Her conclusion does not contradict but rather conforms to the teaching of Scripture as a whole.

In fact, in this particular case, the loose association with Isaiah 54:4-5 is not so loose as we might suppose at first. Galatians 4:27 indicates that the promise to Jerusalem in Isaiah 54 is fulfilled in the heavenly Jerusalem, the church. Our widow is a believer. She belongs to the heavenly Jerusalem. The benefits that Christ purchased for the church flow to her also, since she is united to Christ. Christ is the husband to the church, as Ephesians 5:22-33 points out. If she is a member of the church he is a husband to her in particular. The imagery of widowhood in Isaiah 54:4-5 is in fact especially appropriate to her, because she is in need of comfort in a way pointedly analogous to the comfort of which the passage speaks. When we take into account enough biblical context, the passage (with its context) does apply to her, and applies in the way that she understood.

People without professional training are often unable to fill in all the steps here. The widow might not be able to cite Galatians 4:27, Ephesians 5:22-33, and a theology of New Testament fulfillment in order to defend her interpretation. But the Holy Spirit knows all these connections and all the possible supporting arguments. Most important, he knows what he is doing with the woman.

In short, this woman’s conclusion from Isaiah 54:4-5 is fundamentally sound. But can we endorse just anything that people come up with? Clearly not. Sinful human beings can come up with heresies and distortions when they read the Bible. How do we tell the difference between the woman’s conclusion and a heretical conclusion? We must go back and examine the Bible, just as we did when we appealed to Galatians 4:27 and Ephesians 5:22-33. The Bible must remain our ultimate standard. Any conclusions in tension with it must be rejected.

Thus it is not true that anything goes. We do not just accept anything, in the way that Amy Affirmationist is tempted to do. But we can acknowledge that the Holy Spirit sometimes teaches people in mysterious ways, through associations as well as through self-conscious logic.

We can extrapolate from cases like the widow to even stranger analogies. We may include even the “misuse” of Acts 18:2 to suggest that a new convert should stop living with his girlfriend. The Holy Spirit uses texts as a spring-board to enlist and stimulate believers’ spirits. The Holy Spirit as Creator and sovereign ruler over language establishes and superintends all associations and analogies. He includes in his domain not only the “tight” analogies used when scholars reexpress the sense of a passage, but the loose metaphoric analogies that we associate with the function of spiritual intuition. Import extends out and ultimately embraces all the truth in the entire plan of God.

If people’s spirits are tuned to loving God, and if the Holy Spirit guides them, people arrive again and again at biblical conclusions. The scholars say that these things are “unsound.” But the Holy Spirit is Lord, over scholars as well as everyone else. In agreement with scholars, we must acknowledge that there is a distinction between paraphrase and other dimensions of language. We acknowledge the stability of the sense of a passage. In agreement with intuitive nonscholars, we acknowledge that there are a host of other pathways of analogy, all of which may be pathways for discovering the truth of God.

Augustine makes similar observations:

Since, therefore, each person endeavours to understand in the Holy Scriptures that which the writer understood, what hurt is it if a man understand what Thou, the light of all true-speaking minds, dost show him to be true although he whom he reads understood not this, seeing that he also understood a Truth, not, however, this Truth?⁸

In the first half of the sentence Augustine focuses on the concern of scholars for understanding the sense: “that which the [human] writer understood.” But in the second half Augustine acknowledges that God may choose to teach another truth by means of the passage. The legitimacy of the effect is based on the unity of truth in one God.

He who knows the Truth knows that Light; and he that knows it knoweth eternity. Love knoweth it. O Eternal Truth, and true Love, and loved Eternity! Thou art my God; to Thee do I sigh both night and day.

If we both see that that which thou sayest is true, and if we both see that what I say is true, where, I ask, do we see it? Certainly not I in thee, nor thou in me, but both in the unchangeable truth itself, which is above our minds.⁹

We must add one further point that Augustine presupposes. There is a difference between truth and error. We must sift conclusions that we reach, whether we have used logic or whether we have used intuitive connections. Not all the thoughts of all human beings are equally acceptable. Human beings are sinful. God uses preestablished analogies to trap the fool in his folly as well as to encourage the faithful.

Moreover, though there is a principial antithesis between those who serve God and those who do not, within this world we are all inconsistent. Just because we are believers, we ought not to abandon ourselves to all kinds of folly. We must not fondly hope that our imaginations are now so impeccably good that God endorses whatever pops into our heads! We ought not to be naive about our remaining sinful inclinations, the temptations of Satan, and the sin of testing God (for example, when Satan calls on Jesus to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple). We ought not to endorse every strong impression, and equate the moving of the Holy Spirit with our feeling that the Holy Spirit is moving us. Church history is strewn with the wreckage of spiritual movements that yielded themselves uncritically to a supposed direct “inspiration of the Spirit.”¹⁰

How then do we tell the difference between ideas and associations that God endorses and approves, and those that he does not? Once again, God’s word itself, the Bible, is our standard. And the more directly available sense of a passage is the proper starting point for further reflection. The Bible is clear: “The statutes of the LORD are trustworthy, making wise the simple” (Ps. 19:7). God disapproves of whatever stands in tension with the Bible’s teaching.

We must also bear in mind that God judges attitudes of the heart, not merely outward actions and not merely theological conclusions. Suppose a person uses an outlandish association between texts of ideas, and nevertheless happens to conclude with something that is biblical in content. God endorses the conclusion. But he does not endorse the process of traveling toward the conclusion, as if it were an ideal example of biblical reasoning. Nor does he necessarily endorse the person. People with good, active intuitions may easily use their gifts as an excuse to become lazy. Their attitude is then sinful, even though their conclusions may be orthodox in particular instances.¹¹

I conclude, then, that God intends to use, and often does use, the loose associations within his system of truth, even the most strange, to accomplish his purposes. If these are an aspect of his intention, they are also a part of import. The import and application of Scripture are exceedingly broad. In their outermost reaches they encompass the entire truth that God teaches in the Bible. The truth of the whole in this sense coheres with any one passage. At the same time and in harmony with this expansive import, the sense is stable. All God’s purposes are stable with the very stability of God.

We can reinforce the same conclusion by pointing to our earlier reflections on concurrence. All God’s truths dwell in him, since he indwells himself exhaustively. They are then concurrent to one another. The thought of any such truth leads naturally, through its revelation of the divine being and glory, to the thought of all other truths, insofar as these are accessible to human beings, that is, insofar as the Holy Spirit may reveal them to us. All “leaps” from one biblical truth to another, however strange they may appear to scholars, have their ontological basis in the unity of God’s plan and the unity of his wisdom. Every truth is concurrent with every other, on the basis of the omnipresence of God and his self-presence to himself through the Spirit (1 Cor. 2:10).

Creativity

We should also remember that God is the Creator. He can surprise us with what is new. God is not the prisoner of mechanism. What God says at a particular time is not merely a mechanical effect of what he has already said. God addresses new circumstances. The love and faithfulness of God guarantee that what he says to us will be accessible to us. But what he says becomes accessible through his presence as a person as well as through the stability of his verbal content. Content and personal presence are complementary perspectives on communication, and neither can simply be eliminated in favor of the other.

Hence in God’s communication the import of a whole passages is indicated by its parts and its context, and simultaneously exceeds purely mechanical calculation. Our access to this import takes place through the operation of rational faculties and simultaneously through the creativity of the human spirit and the superintendence and control of the Holy Spirit.

People have from time to time touched on these realities when they say that interpretation is an art, not a science. That is, it is not mere mechanical technique. It is not a procedure that can be carried through with confidence and accuracy regardless of our spiritual state. For that matter, science and scientific study are themselves not mere technique. But we would deflect from our main point if we pursued this claim.¹²

Hence, we may view present-day interpretive “leaps” from the standpoint of creativity. When such leaps land on results and applications that are biblical in character, we may see them as aspects of the creativity of the Holy Spirit superintending the creativity of the human spirit. But, as we have observed, leaps do not always land in safe places! Only some, not all, conform to Scripture.

The diversity in the body of Christ

Finally, we must reckon with the diversity of the body of Christ. Though the sense of a passage is unified, its applications are diverse. There are diverse people to whom the passage applies, and there are diverse circumstances to which each person applies the passage. Missy Missiologist is right in stressing that applications may differ from culture to culture.

Applications can arise from one passage or from many taken together. When a passage is tied to a particular application by close and obvious analogical connections, we are comfortable in saying that the application is an application of this one particular passage. For example, if I refuse to cheat on my income tax, that result is an application of “You shall not steal.”

In other cases, we come to a conclusion by listening to many passages. For example, I have to decide whether to have two cars in the family or one or none, when to buy a new or used car, and what kind to look for. God guides me in the Bible through instructions about materialism, use of money, use of gifts, care for one’s family, care for the poor, reliance on God, the importance of motives, the value of other people’s counsel, prayer, and so on. All these instructions I bring to bear on circumstances that in their details are not quite the same as anyone else’s. “You shall not steal” has broad implications for care for property, both mine and other people’s; hence many godly decisions about property are in a sense applications of that commandment. But the application requires creativity, imagination, and vision in understanding God and how he sees my needs in my circumstances.

A closer examination even of an easy case, like income tax, shows that it is not a trivial application. Contextual elements from other places in the Bible come to bear. I need Romans 13:1-7; Matthew 22:15-22; 1 Peter 2:13-17; and similar passages to teach me that the government has a legitimate right to taxes, instead of governmental taxation itself being a form of theft that I ought to resist. Such passages become even more important if the government is using my money for unrighteous purposes, such as to support atheism or abortion. I may also be helped by reflecting on the truthfulness of God, and seeing that I ought to tell the truth on my income tax report.

Thus, it is hard to find a case that is “merely” an application of a single passage, with no attention to a larger sweep of context. In fact, in the strict sense it is impossible, since it is impossible even to make the first step in deciding the most basic sense of a passage without some interaction with the truth of God, and hence some interaction with all kinds of contextual dimensions. Even the simplest-looking applications of one passage invoke more than this one passage; they rely most basically on knowledge of God. Application depends on contextual relations, that is, on import, the larger family of truths.

Conversely, it is hard to find a case of application, even the most complex, that does not amount to an application of one of the ten commandments. All discussions of theological doctrine are applications of the commandment, “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” As John Frame argues, each of the ten commandments can be seen as a perspective on who God is and what his will is for all of life.¹³ Hence, all of life is an application of any one of the commandments.

Inevitably, interpretation differs from person to person, and from culture to culture. Through Scripture God speaks to each person in order to apply his word to that person in many particular situations. The applications differ from person to person, and even from one time to another in a given person’s life. The implications of God’s word are not exhausted by any one person or any one time of life. They include the whole of God’s plan for the whole of history. At the same time, God discriminates between good and evil. His word distinguishes righteousness from unrighteousness. Not all supposed applications are legitimate. All legitimate applications harmonize with the sense of Scripture.

Remember that God is intimate with us. Even a human lover may speak intimacies to his beloved. A human speaker may be skillful enough to speak to a diverse audience so that everyone in the audience remains interested and receives something, but not all receive the same thing. Jesus’ parables illustrate an analogous effect in the case of God’s communication. But now we can see that at the level of detailed application, God’s communication always has some of this type of effect. It differentiates its effect into the many diverse applications made by different people.

The oneness of God’s being is the irrefragable foundation for the oneness of his truthfulness, the oneness of his purpose, and the stable oneness of sense when he speaks to us. But we may also affirm the reality of plurality. The mysterious Trinitarian plurality in God’s being is the foundation for the plurality of the world, the plurality of history, and the plurality of particular purposes that God accomplishes in history. The diversity of types of people in the body of Christ image the richness of God’s Trinitarian love. The diversity of applications in different people’s lives does not contradict God’s unity, but is in harmony with it.

Of course, some people may use these facts as an excuse for reasserting human autonomy. They say, “I may do what I want, since what I think and how I act does not have to match anyone else.” We need to remind such people of the distinction between God’s approval and disapproval. I have been speaking about “applications,” but I have in mind legitimate applications, approved applications. Genuine applications take place in obedience to God. Not all supposed “application” is genuine obedience. We must be alert to the devil’s deceit and the possibilities for our own self-deceit. Excuse-making may conceal sin from human beings, but it does not escape God.

When God traps the sinful and the foolish in their self-deceit, he is also using his word to do so. Hence even sinful misinterpretations of the Bible are “applications” in this broad sense. However, they are not applications with which sinners may be comfortable! In such cases of application the word judges sinners, curses them, and brings them into judgment. The word applies to them as the two-edged sword of the warrior, that brings destruction as well as grace. We find salvation from our folly only as God pursues us so that we may begin to pursue him.

Positive role of scholarship

Though I have said a good deal about the possibilities for the Spirit’s work among ordinary people, it should be clear that I affirm the value of sense. And with that affirmation I also affirm the value of scholarly study of the Bible, when we conduct this study in a godly fashion, subject to the word of the Lord. Scholarly study helps refine the whole church in its grasp of sense. Such was true particularly in the Reformation; such can be true now.

We must avoid driving a wedge between creation and redemption, in such a way as to despise one in favor of the other. The Holy Spirit plays a key role in both creation and redemption. He was instrumental in creation (Gen. 1:2; 2:7). The Spirit is the source of all intellectual gifts and faculties in creation. He is also the source of true redemptive understanding (1 Cor. 2:8-16). Appreciating the Spirit implies appreciating both his creational and his redemptive gifts—among them intellectual ability as well as humility, spiritual discernment, and ability to fight the devil’s deceits.

The unbelieving scholar makes a mistake when he prizes intellectual gifts but neglects the necessity of repentance, humility, spiritual discernment, and renewal of the mind (Rom. 12:2). But conversely, the believing simpleton makes a mistake when he prizes repentance and spiritual discernment, but neglects intellectual gifts as if they were innately “worldly.” In fact, gifts relating to teaching and communicating the gospel have a particularly prominent and leading role in the total process of the growth of the body of Christ, as Paul indicates by singling out such gifts in Ephesians 4:11-16. But the relative prominence of such gifts does not undermine the importance attached to the fact that “each part does its work” (Eph. 4:16). The two sides belong together, in exactly the manner in which they appear together within a single body in the description in Ephesians 4:11-16.