Dottie Doctrinalist: If we get one doctrine wrong, it is likely to corrupt our thinking in a lot of other areas of doctrine. Look at the Roman Catholic idea of the authority of tradition. It is only one point of doctrine. But error at this one point prevented them from thoroughly breaking with doctrinal corruption and confusion in a lot of other areas.
Peter Pietist: I can see a parallel pattern in my devotional life. If I allow greed or pride to grow within my inner life, it soon takes over and corrupts the whole of my devotional life. I no longer pray as much, and my prayers start being shallow and perfunctory. My joy dries up. It spreads like cancer.
Curt Cultural-Transformationist: If a major social institution goes bad, it can frequently have corrupting effects on almost every sector of society. Look at the effects in the former Soviet Union. Bad government or economic failure put strains on the family, on education, and on the natural environment.
Herman Hermeneut: Do you think that the same thing could happen in hermeneutics, in the way in which we interpret the Bible?
We have seen that God in his Triunity is the archetype for the key distinctions and structures involved in biblical interpretation. When our knowledge of God is corrupted, we may expect our interpretation to be corrupted. At the same time, according to Romans 1:19-21, even idolaters know God. They worship idols against the background of a knowledge of God that they suppress in unrighteousness. Hence, corrupt interpretation is not as bad as it could be. Insofar as interpreters tacitly retain a knowledge of God, their interpretive results may be better than their explicit theory of interpretation deserves.
But knowledge of God inextricably influences our interpretation. The following examples may illustrate some of the influences.
As we saw in considering communication, the speaker, the discourse, and the audience are inextricably related to one another. Understanding communication involves all three as three coinherent perspectives, the expressive, informational, and productive perspectives. The three perspectives coinhere by analogy with Trinitarian coinherence. But suppose an interpreter worships a counterfeit instead of the true God. Then he is likely to counterfeit the relation between speaker, discourse, and audience.
The simplest type of counterfeit is a simple monism that assigns primacy to one of three, while trying to suppress coinherence. The speaker, the discourse, or the audience is transformed into a kind of god that becomes the supposed source of all meaning. Thus, in modern interpretive theories, we find author-centered approaches, text-centered approaches, and reader-centered approaches, each distorted by their idolatry. Yet each is a plausible counterfeit. Because God is God, coinherence still functions beneath the surface. Hence any of the three approaches can retain some of the insights found most forcefully in the other approaches.
Our knowledge of God influences interpretation in an even more obvious way, because God is present in our consideration of speakers, discourses, and audiences. Let us consider these one at a time.
First, consider the authors of the Bible. How does knowledge of God influence our understanding of the authors? There are, of course, many human authors for the various books of the Bible. But when we confess that the Bible is the word of God, we acknowledge that God is the divine author, who superintended and prepared the human authors so that they wrote just what he intended to say. The human authors in their instrumental role should not be left out of account. But we know that they should not be left out of account only because God shows it to us in the Bible. God himself, speaking to us in the Bible, assures us that he took these people into his counsel, and gave them understanding of his ways (Num. 12:6-8; Ex. 33:13; 1 Cor. 2:16; John 16:13). Hence God the divine author is right at the center of this communicating activity. To know the author is to know him. If we are darkened in our understanding of God, our knowledge of the Bible will inevitably suffer, sometimes subtly, sometimes radically. Thus in John 8 Jesus says:
Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. (John 8:44)
He who belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God. (8:47)
Though you do not know him [the true God], I know him. (8:55)
Second, in the process of understanding we must also know something about the subject matter of the communication. Foreigners listening to a conversation about American football might find it very confusing and understand little, unless they knew something about the rules of football and had seen a game in action. Likewise, to understand the Bible we must have some acquaintance with the topics that it discusses. We are bound to misunderstand some things, and to understand others poorly, unless we have some familiarity with the subject being discussed.
Of course, much of the Bible speaks about events, experiences, institutions, thoughts, and emotions that are similar to our own. Such things are, to some degree, accessible to almost any human reader. But this accessibility is still a matter of degree. For example, indignation over lying and injustice, as in Psalm 5:8-10 and other psalms, is to some extent a common experience. But on the average, it is better understood by those who have had keen and intense encounters with injustice in their own life. Birth-pangs and widowhood occur in all societies; but comparisons based on them (for example, Isa. 54:4; 13:5) are again best understood by people who have had more direct and intense experiences with birth-pangs or widowhood.
Now in the Bible all the details in various areas of knowledge are put into the service of promoting our salvation. The Bible focuses above all on communicating to us about God, who he is, what he has done, and how we are to respond. It discusses God’s salvation: our sin and rebellion against God, his promises, his saving works in history, his justification and reconciliation in Christ, his gift of new life in the Spirit, and so on. We cannot expect accurately to understand and interpret such matters without some knowledge of the subject-matter. That is, we must know salvation ourselves. We must know God, know our own sin, appropriate and trust his promises, experience justification and reconciliation in Christ, and so on. Now, to be sure, in a mysterious sense all human beings have some weak knowledge of these things. All human beings (except Christ himself) are sinners, and all know God (Rom. 1:20-21). All people experience in some form the pressures of guilt and alienation from God, and from these needs they might theoretically infer something about the nature of the remedy. Indeed, the religions of the world bear testimony even in their most distorted and deceitful forms that people feel longings for salvation. Non-Christian religions all offer counterfeit distortions of Christian salvation.
Yet without saving knowledge of God and communion with him, people stumble in the darkness of their own imaginations and wishes, which they then impose on Scripture. God sends his light in order to give us saving knowledge of God (2 Cor. 4:6). His light illumines all the areas at once. Only when we know the holiness of God do we know the seriousness of our sin. Only when we know the grace and forgiveness of God are we freed to admit the full extent of our guilt and to refuse to shift blame. Only when we know the power and wisdom of God do we see the deeper riches of his gift of salvation. Hence only people who know God deeply, and are themselves saved, know the subject-matter of the Bible with the necessary thoroughness. And even they are, in this life, only in the process of learning and coming to know more (Phil. 3:10-14; 1 Cor. 13:9-12).
The Bible itself gives some examples of the effects of knowing God poorly. Paul describes the Gentiles as “darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts” (Eph. 4:18). Peter speaks of the fact that “ignorant and unstable people distort” Paul’s writings, “as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16).
Or consider the Sadducees. The Sadducees were among the religious experts of their day, and certainly knew many facts about the Bible. But Jesus indicts them “because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God” (Matt. 22:29). Among their failings is that they do not know the power of God. Their knowledge of God is spiritually defective. Moreover, Jesus concludes his argument with the statement that “He is not the God of the dead but of the living,” another pointer to the centrality of knowing God.
Thirdly, accurate interpretation requires knowledge of the addressees of communication. In many cases such knowledge overlaps with or is included in knowledge of the subject-matter of communication. For example, “baptism for the dead” at Corinth (1 Cor. 15:29) could be analyzed either as a question of subject-matter (what issue or practice is Paul talking about?) or as a question of addressees (what were the Corinthians doing?). If we knew the answer to one question, we would simultaneously know the answer to the other.
In general, the entire set of historical circumstances of the addressees is potentially relevant to interpretation. But not all aspects of historical context are equally relevant to all types of communication. A theological treatise may have very little direct connection with immediate events, whereas a report of current events will have many connections. Particular circumstances prove to be more significant only when something in the text directly or indirectly alludes to or presupposes some aspect of the circumstances. Hence, the relevant historical circumstances are in fact simultaneously part of the necessary knowledge of the addressees and part of our knowledge of the subject-matter. The addressees, who understand the circumstances, take them into account as they receive the text, and we also must do the same in order to understand the impact of the text on the addressees. Likewise, the textual allusions to historical circumstances have the effect of including the relevant aspects of the circumstances within the circle of subject-matter addressed by the text.
In short, understanding of the addressees and understanding of subject-matter are highly correlated. Everything that we have said about understanding subject-matter therefore also applies to understanding addressees.
But there are still some particular respects in which the knowledge of God affects our understanding of the addressees. First, our knowledge of God influences our discernment of the text’s purposes and goals for the addressees. In writing texts authors aim at changing the addressees in certain ways. They aim at persuading people of certain truths, or encouraging certain attitudes, or commanding certain courses of action, or the like. In the case of biblical texts, God is the primary Author. Thus knowing him is important in assessing the purposes of the texts for their addressees.
Next, knowing God influences our understanding of the addressees themselves, and how they undertake to understand. All human addressees are made in the image of God. Just as we cannot understand ourselves deeply apart from knowing God, so we cannot understand others well without that same knowledge.1 In particular, we are likely falsely to accuse or excuse people if we are not schooled in a proper sense of God’s righteousness and mercy. God’s wisdom illumines the subtlety of sin.
But should we once begin to raise our thoughts to God, and reflect what kind of Being he is, and how absolute the perfection of that righteousness, and wisdom, and virtue, to which, as a standard, we are bound to be conformed, what formerly delighted us by its false show of righteousness, will become polluted with the greatest iniquity; what strangely imposed upon us under the name of wisdom, will disgust by its extreme folly; and what presented the appearance of virtuous energy, will be condemned as the most miserable impotence. So far are those qualities in us, which seem most perfect, from corresponding to the divine purity.2
Knowing the addressees more deeply enables us to see how through the text God works to overcome and rebuke sin, and to provide words of healing for his redeemed people.
Next, knowing God influences our perception of how the addressees’ knowledge of God affects their reception of the text. We see ways in which they may have been tempted to distort its meaning, and ways in which God provides redemptive means for overcoming such distortion.
Some of the parables of Jesus clearly exhibit this process at work. Let us consider the parable of the sower in Mark 4:2-20. This parable is, among other things, a parable about parables. It is a parable about hearing the word (4:9, 14-20, 23), and in the immediate context the word in question is preeminently the word of Jesus’ own preaching. The comments in 4:10-12 confirm this impression by indicating that the disciples want to know about the function of Jesus’ parables in general.
Now consider the interpretation of the parable recorded in Mark 4:13-20.3 This passage shows that the word undergoes a variety of receptions. Likewise in verse 11 Jesus distinguishes two categories, “you,” and “those outside,” only one of which understands the message of parables. The difference in effect is obviously due to the difference in the audience. One part of the audience is spiritually healthy while the other is not. The same point is confirmed by the mysterious saying in verses 24-25. The disciples, who “have” already through their relation to Jesus the Master, will be given more. Others, who have not, will experience further blindness. The hardening in 4:12, like that in Isaiah 6:9-10, represents not an arbitrary act on God’s part, but a judgment on the sinfulness of the people.
The central axis in the process of understanding the parable is Jesus himself. Through Jesus the disciples alone, not everyone (verse 10), received further explanation of the sense of the parable. The disciples’ relation to Jesus, together with their willingness to come to him to ask further, led to further understanding. Without this relation to Jesus, they would not have had as much understanding.
The process through which the disciples went can illustrate the more general process involved in anyone’s understanding of any parable. The ministry of Jesus as a whole provides a decisive context and orientation and illustration for his parables. Hence, those who were sympathetic with Jesus’ ministry, and who already perceived in his ministry the dawning of the saving work of God, could begin to associate the character of his ministry with the pictures from the parables, and thus provide themselves with guidelines for further reflection. Conversely, those hostile to Jesus’ ministry may have heard some of his parables and have departed tantalized but confused. Even when they finally saw the thrust of a very pointed parable, they refused to take it to heart, but rather further hardened themselves (Mark 12:1-12).
Thus the parables illustrate that knowledge of Jesus and his purposes exerted a telling influence on understanding. Understanding a parable was not a matter that could be approached in a safe, antiseptic, neutral objectivity. The addressees were already committed. They found themselves already in process, already belonging to some kind of soil, already questioned about the quality of their hearing. They were already for Jesus or against him (Matt. 12:30). Moreover, their perception of Jesus’ ministry cannot be separated from their spiritual knowledge of God and communion with him. Knowing God and knowing Jesus go together. To be for Jesus involved seeing that God was working salvation through him. This knowledge would only gradually blossom into the knowledge that Jesus was himself God (John 20:28). But even at the beginning, incomplete though it was, knowledge of Jesus was intertwined with knowledge of God. Conversely, to be against Jesus was to be alienated from God himself.
All of these areas concerning the addressees affect us more directly than we might suppose. As we listen to the Bible, we also become numbered among the addressees to whom God speaks. Our relation to God then radically influences how we relate ourselves to the address of the text. Do we see ourselves as actually addressed by God, or simply as onlookers and overhearers of an ancient text? If we remain onlookers, we may think that we escape the obligation to apply the demands of the text to ourselves. But by doing so we show that we have misconstrued the purpose of God. God calls us as well as others to repentance (Acts 17:30) and writes the text for us also (note Rom. 15:4; 4:23-25; 1 Cor. 10:11).
Thus the quality of our knowledge of God and of our communion with God affects all three major areas involved in interpretation: it affects understanding the author, understanding the subject-matter, and understanding the audience. The effects are often subtle in nature. But sometimes they are radical, as when the Sadducees misjudged the question of the resurrection of the dead (Matt. 22:23-32).
Many people who are in rebellion against God and whose knowledge of God is impoverished do still understand various facts from the Bible. They understand after a fashion. But what types of things they understand, how they understand them, and the extent to which they understand them are all inevitably and foundationally conditioned by the character of their knowledge of God.
Jesus’ parables illustrate in a particularly vivid manner the importance of our spiritual state, our relation to God. Mark 4:11-12 asserts that “the secrets of the kingdom of God” are not accessible to all. “To those on the outside everything is said in parables.” The obvious implication is that Jesus spoke in parables in order to veil the truth from those outside.4
Contrary to Adolf Jülicher, some of the parables were mysterious.5 They did not have a meaning immediately transparent to everyone. The disciples, by hearing the explanation in verses 13-20, understood a meaning that many others did not (Mark 4:34; Matt. 13:51). We cannot escape this awkward fact merely by distinguishing between meaning and application, or between technical exegesis and personal appropriation. In any ordinary sense, “meaning” as well as application is at stake here. Sinful rebels did not get either the meaning or the application. People were likely not to understand even a first-order meaning of some parables unless they were committed to Jesus. And the more they were committed, the more they understood (Mark 4:24-25).
Surely part of the point of the Parable of the Sower is that sin can have a variety of baneful effects on our reception of the word of God. For some, it can mean that they stop their ears to the word virtually as soon as they hear it, and so they never know its meaning on even a minimal level. For others, it can mean hypocrisy. They formally confess a truth but deny it in action.
What distinguishes the insiders is that they are good soil, in fellowship with Jesus the Master. The difference is holistic, a difference between two kingdoms. The Holy Spirit present in Jesus’ ministry must work comprehensive change, not merely step in at the very last stage to supervise the final harvesting of the fruit.
We may now turn to some other examples of modern theories of interpretation, asking again how knowledge of God affects these theories. We take as our first example a particularly influential form of thinking about interpretation, namely the Enlightenment ideal. The Enlightenment developed an ideal of religiously neutral interpretation. According to this ideal scholars should follow only the dictates of reason, not religious commitment. Scholarship should examine the Bible as a historical text, and determine its origins and meanings by rational canons of research with which all persons of all religious backgrounds can agree. Scholarly interpretation ought to be uninfluenced by religious commitment.
This form of interpretation has proved attractive for several reasons. First, it recognized the problems and abuses possible with interpretation dominated by a long tradition (medieval interpretation) or interpretation dominated by a theological system (as in postreformational confessional interpretation). Second, it promised a way to move beyond the theological disagreements spawned by tradition and theological systems. People hoped that reason would be a source of unity where religion has become a source of contention. Third, giving a key role to reason harmonized with philosophical and cultural trends along the same lines.
In all these respects the Enlightenment grasped some fragment of the truth. In all three areas just mentioned, it touched on truth and yet also produced a counterfeit.
Consider the abuse of tradition. Commitments to tradition or theological systems do create potential for abuse. The tradition or theological system can become an idol. The Enlightenment saw the enslavement to idols. God was bigger and more rational that what tradition or theological system sometimes represented. The Enlightenment conception of neutral reason was a shadow of the rationality, wisdom, and self-consistency of God. Hence it contained a fragment of the truth, and that fragment of truth made it attractive. But it also subtly counterfeited the rationality of God. Supposedly human beings could judge the contents of revelation independent of commitment to God. And that idea repeated Satan’s distortion of the truth in Genesis 3. Rationality became an abstract, impersonal principle of consistency, a projection into the sky from sinful human being’s ideas of rationality.
In certain respects, we may even say that the Enlightenment error concerns the Trinity. God’s self-consistent rationality is his faithfulness to himself and is therefore personal. It is the Father’s faithfulness to the Son and the Son’s faithfulness to the Father, through the Spirit. Moreover, the wisdom of God is his Word, in whom all things hold together (Col. 1:17). But since the Trinity is incomprehensible, this sort of rationality is not acceptable to rebellious human beings. They project a unitarian abstract principle, whether this bears the name of God or Reason or Logic.
Second, the Enlightenment promised unity. What fragment of truth is represented in this promise? According to John 17:20-27 and Ephesians 4:1-16, unity in the truth is indeed God’s goal for renewed humanity. But counterfeiting mixes itself with this fragment of truth. According to the Enlightenment ideal, unity among human beings comes not from increase in fellowship with Christ through the Spirit, but by scholarly independence from religious commitment. The Enlightenment at this point postulates reason as a savior more promising than Christ the Savior. Reason is supposedly better for the purpose of overcoming human contention and alienation. But this new savior is still close enough to the truth to be attractive; reason is a counterfeit for Christ the wisdom of God.
Third, in the Enlightenment the primacy of reason harmonized with certain philosophical and cultural trends. Because God is one, all truth is in harmony. Thus, here also there is a fragment of truth. But here also the truth is distorted, in that the philosophical and cultural trends do not undergo redemptive transfiguration through Christ.
The effects of Enlightenment principles on biblical interpretation show a mixture of truth and its counterfeit distortions, just as we would expect. Consider, for example, the issue of historical research. The Enlightenment’s suspicion of tradition resulted in pronounced emphasis on recovering the original events as they actually were, before tradition reworked them. This emphasis had a fragment of truth: God’s authority implies an irreducible importance for the origin of his speech in a particular historical setting. At the same time, the Enlightenment counterfeited God’s rule over history by assuming that miracles were incompatible with the idolized reason that it projected.
Or consider the issue of meaning. In accordance with the principle of rationality, the Enlightenment postulated an original unity of meaning. We should assume that rational speakers have proclaimed what made sense. Given a reasonable amount of background information, one could recover the sense; and even if the background information were insufficient, one could rationally weigh the possible alternatives.
Here again there is counterfeiting. On the one hand, this unity of sense is close to the truth. There is stability of sense according to the intention of the Father. But in accordance with the rationalistic unitarian idolatry of the Enlightenment ideal of reason, this unity tended to be conceived as self-sufficient, independent of the knowledge of the Triune God. Unity of sense was regarded as isolatable from coinherent perspectives involving application and import. Thus the Enlightenment distorted and counterfeited the truth about God’s meaning.
Idols inevitably fail. God breaks them and shows them to be worthless. Because they are counterfeits they are derivative in character. Like Satan himself
, they can never match God. Hence those who serve them cannot find satisfaction.
So with the Enlightenment ideal. Abstract reason projected by human beings is part of an on-going tradition, a tradition that grew and developed in human philosophical systems. As such, it fails to free us definitively from the worship of tradition. Rather, it simply subjects us to one more tradition, the tradition of rationalism. But in the long run this very tradition fails to deliver the hoped-for unity and stability for human beings. The projections of different human beings are subtly different, according to the selfishness of their sin. Hence people cannot agree even about what reason itself is. Biblical interpretation fragments. Historical reconstruction becomes problematic, and rationalist interpreters cannot agree with one another about the meaning of a text.
By contrast, within a Trinitarian context, meaning coinheres with import. The sense of a particular text coinheres with the senses of all other biblical texts. The senses of the particulars are never understood apart from the import of the whole plan of God. Hence differences about the sense of a particular text reside within a larger framework, in which often the differences are more like nuances within a larger whole. In agreement with Augustine, we regard as secondary the question concerning which truth is taught in a particular text, provided that we acknowledge truth as a whole. If my brother finds another meaning here, it is often nevertheless a meaning that I find, not here, but elsewhere. On the other hand, if we are committed to a unitarian ideal of rational truth in isolated meanings, the failure to agree is catastrophic, because the perspectives of import and application are not understood to be available to maintain practical unity in the midst of disagreement in detail.
We may find similar problems in dealing with the relation among speaker, speech, and hearer, or among expressive, informational, and productive aspects of communication. Enlightenment rationality most easily conceives of communication as informational. And indeed it is. Thus, there is a fragment of truth. At the same time, there is counterfeiting: expressive and productive aspects tend either to be overlooked entirely or reduced to and absorbed into the informational.
Over time, the unsatisfactory character of the reduction tends to produce reactions. Romanticism exalted the feeling and expression of the artistic genius. Not information but expression was primary. Modern reader-response theories react to the boring claim of unitarian meaning by multiplying meanings through the different interpretations of different readers. Liberationist interpretation reacts to the now boring claim of neutral objectivity in scholarship by pointing to the personal and social and economic commitments that drive scholarly activity in certain directions.
As a second example, therefore, let us consider liberationist interpretation. Liberationist interpretation reacts to some of the deficiencies of the Enlightenment. In doing so, it affirms some of the truths that the Enlightenment eclipsed. Over against the Enlightenment’s preoccupation with information, liberationists emphasize the productive aspect of communication. Communication is in the service of a goal, whether of oppression or liberation. Over against the individualist tendency of the Enlightenment, liberationists stress the corporate, cultural influences on all interpretation. Over against the Enlightenment preference for the rational interpretation by the educated, privileged intellectual, we find an emphasis on interpretation among the poor.
Often God raises up a prophetic voice within the church to warn people of sin. But he can use pagans as well. At times non-Christians may see Christians’ sins more clearly than the Christians do (in a manner parallel to the perception of Jewish sin by pagans in Romans 2:24). Surely God has used non-Christian Marxists in this very way.
Thus one may find a good deal of truth in liberationist analyses of the sins of the powerful. Among these sins we must include the sins of Christians in power and Christians trying to protect or preserve the privileges of power and wealth. In all this analysis, liberationists are but imitating the analysis of the idolatries of power, wealth, and pleasure contained in the Book of Revelation. They are longing for the liberation that God brought in the exodus and supremely in Christ.
But liberationists, like everyone else, can be snared by counterfeits of the truth. How then shall we separate the counterfeit from the true original within liberationist theory and praxis? Again we are confronted with a subtle combination, as subtle as the subtlety of sin and the devil. The task is immense, which is why whole books can be devoted to it. It is a worthy task. But for the moment I must confine myself to a few simplicities based on Scripture.
Revelation offers an analysis, critique, and remedy for the sins of the powerful and the wealthy (Rev. 18). It equally offers a remedy for counterfeiting idolatries. The powerful invoke counterfeit ideologies to protect their status (Rev. 13:11-18). This critique applies to liberationist ideologies as well as others! Liberationists as well as others construct counterfeit idolatries that nourish their social needs. Both suggestive and disturbing are Karl Mannheim’s and Michael Polanyi’s analyses of why Marxism attracts alienated intellectuals by satisfying some of their unique longings.6
Revelation’s hermeneutic of suspicion applies also to our own interpretation of Revelation! The Book of Revelation cannot simply be equated at every point with our human interpretation of it. Even in the interpretation of Revelation, we are in the midst of spiritual warfare. We encounter the God of Revelation; but we also fall prey in subtle ways to the idolatries that Revelation depicts. These idolatries have corporate as well as individual dimensions. Social, economic, political, and Satanic realities penetrate our existence. Hence there need be no denying that sinful interpreters can transform the Bible, and Revelation in particular, into an ideological weapon to promote pride, hatred, and oppression. Such perversion, sinful as it is, is yet a further confirmation of the truth of Revelation.
Despite the difficulties in faithfully interpreting Revelation, it remains the prime tool for reformation in society for at least one fundamental reason: it is the pure and reliable word of God, even when we do not receive it so. God sits on his throne, and the Lamb reigns in his presence. Through God and the Lamb, whom we meet in Revelation, we receive definitive purification, yes, resurrection, from the ways of the world. The ongoing liberation in the presence of the God of Revelation surpasses all the counterfeit imitation liberations of this world, and ultimately encompasses within itself whatever powerful insights and freeing actions the liberationisms of this world have parasitically claimed for themselves.
In reader-response interpretation we see another reaction to the deficiencies in the Enlightenment ideal. There are a variety of reader-response theories, and we can here discuss the whole area only in a highly simplified way. In general, reader-response theories emphasize hearers and readers, over against the tendency from the Enlightenment to reduce everything to information. The person of the reader makes an irreducible difference.
We also find in reader-response circles variations on liberationist concerns. The Enlightenment postulates a single abstract unitarian meaning that is always boringly the same. This sameness is a counterfeit distortion of the stability of God. Over against this distortion, reader-response approaches champion the divine creativity. We can become creative in our response to texts, rather than being tyrannized and oppressed and straitjacketed by the demand that we reiterate one meaning and nothing more. We see here both an element of truth and a counterfeiting of the truth. The truth is that God is creative and that he invites readers to respond creatively in application according to the particularity of their being and their circumstances. The counterfeiting occurs if we then pretend that this creativity eliminates the stability of God and our obligation to submit to fixed demands. God with his unchangeable standards is present in the realm of interpretation as well as elsewhere.
Deconstruction also counterfeits. It utilizes the truth of coinherence of perspectives. Odd perspectives and starting points may yet be perspectives on the whole of truth and the whole of a text. Deconstruction constantly uses the coinherence of language, truth, and persons. Deconstruction then throws light on us and on texts; and it may show the creativity of God reflected in us. But it also appears to denounce all stability and “logocentrism.” It wants to destroy the idols of which it is sick, and in this respect it shows truth. But it does not detect the most fundamental idol of all: man-centeredness in contrast with the biblical call to God-centeredness and Christ- (logo-) centeredness. And thus it is only a counterfeit of Christ, who is able truly to destroy our idols.
As we have already seen, we who consider ourselves orthodox Christians are not totally free from the snares of idolatry. We can see the effects of idolatry even in the way that we react to contemporary trends in interpretation. Typically, we orthodox scholars have absorbed some of the older idolatries of the Enlightenment. But these idolatries have become so thoroughly and subtly diffused through the world of scholarship that we are no longer aware of them. We repudiate the new idolatries in liberationist, reader-response, and deconstructionist interpretation. But we do so for mixed motives. We repudiate the counterfeit and the idolatry, to be sure. But we do so partly because the new movement threatens the old idol to which we are attached, the idol belonging to the Enlightenment.
Or, if we are more sophisticated, we may concede that there is some fragment of truth in the new approaches. But we still fail to see the full radicality of the new. The new approaches do not call for mere tinkering with the old. They do not say, “Add decorations and peripheral modifications and cosmetic improvements.” Rather they say, “Destroy the idol that you followed.” And they offer a fundamentally new perspective on the whole of interpretation. (Even though the new approaches are counterfeits, they are plausible, because coinherence makes it possible for one starting point to offer a vision of the whole.)
Now, mere tinkering modifications of the old Enlightenment approach do not yet move beyond a unitarian idol. That is, the old rationalism of the Enlightenment demanded that one epistemology and one hermeneutical theory must provide unity without diversity. This idea of hermeneutics with unity of structure but without diversity is still unitarian at bottom. There is still an idol here, and tinkering does not overthrow it.
At the same time, other people, even among Christians, adopt the new approaches too uncritically. We become so aware of the idolatry present in the old ways, but we are not yet aware of the idolatry in the new ways. Or we may modify the new ways to eliminate the most blatant manifestations of idolatry. But here too we are content with peripheral changes, changes that still leave the root of idolatry untouched.
At this point liberationists have seen a fragment of the truth. Social critics can warn us that it is easy to be content with the status quo from impure motives. We want to protect, not the truth, but our own comfort. The ideal of reducing interpretation to technique is partly a product of Enlightenment rationalism, partly a product of twentieth-century fascination with technique, because of the power of technique in areas of applied science. There is some truth here. Our abilities to accomplish tasks through technique display the faithfulness of God and the skill of human beings made in his image. But this sort of ability gets counterfeited. And then we look to technique as a god. From technique we want a guarantee of success. We use technique as a counterfeit for God’s promises. And we want this guarantee to bypass suffering. It must bypass crucifixion.
The same truths hold in the area of interpretation in particular. The growth of technique and of technical detail in interpretation may snare us into idolatry. We want interpretation without crucifixion. We trust in technical expertise and in method, in order to free ourselves from the fear of the agony of hermeneutical crucifixion. That is, we do not want to crucify what we think we already know and have achieved. We want painless, straightforward progress toward understanding, rather than having to abandon a whole route already constructed.
But the way of Christ is cross bearing. Christ offers us resurrection power, and hence the hope of renewing rather than losing the old. But the renewal always involves crucifixion. Many of us are too comfortable to be willing.
The Book of Revelation, in its vision of spiritual war, may once again aid us to see our situation rightly. God is present in the whole arena of earthly life. The issue of true worship is at stake at every point in life. True worship is at stake also in every area of biblical interpretation. The Trinitarian nature of God is at stake, since over and over again the basic structures of interpretation derive from who he is. Each chapter in this book may be considered as a chapter about spiritual warfare, since each chapter traces out ways in which God’s character is at issue. And thus the counterfeiting of idolatry is bound to affect not one aspect only of interpretation, but all.
1 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.1.2.
2 Ibid.
3 For various reasons, not to be discussed at this point, I believe that the interpretation in Mark 4:13-20 is not a later addition at variance with Jesus’ own purposes, but supplies Jesus’ own private interpretation to the disciples. The mainstream of biblical scholarship has enveloped itself in unnecessary confusion at this point. There are several contributing reasons. For one thing, the mainstream has lost confidence in the divine authority of some aspects of the Gospels’ message. Second, it does not recognize the signs of its own spiritual unbelief in relation to the personality and consciousness of the real Jesus of Nazareth (see Geerhardus Vos, The Self-Disclosure of Jesus [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954]). Third, it has fallen into methodologically erroneous practices with regard to historical procedures in analyzing the passing on of tradition.
4 In particular, the word (“so that”) at the beginning of verse 12 is to be interpreted as an expression of purpose (Robert H. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993], 202; C. A. Evans, To See and Not Perceive [Sheffield: JSOT, 1989], 92-99). Yet even if this part of the interpretation is not correct, the general thrust of 4:11-29 points in the same direction.
Some scholars argue against these conclusions on technical grounds and offer alternative interpretations of the key verses. (For example, see the discussion in Gundry, Mark, pp. 195-204.) But note that parallel ideas occur in Isaiah 6:9-10, in Mark 4, and elsewhere, all authored by the Holy Spirit, who is not in tension with Jesus the Son. In view of the other evidence, we can see that Jesus could well have intended his parables to have a veiling function. This interpretation best fits the context of Mark 4.
I would suggest that scholars themselves are not neutral in this matter. Some may be attracted to alternative interpretations because this “veiling” interpretation does not match their idea of Jesus. Defective ideas about God, and therefore about what may be expected of Jesus, have contaminated scholarship at this point as well. In fact, at times when scholars err out of tendentiousness, they are themselves one more illustration of the principle of the parable!
5 On Jülicher’s role in parable interpretation, see Madeleine Boucher, The Mysterious Parable: A Literary Study (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1977), 3-10; also Craig Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1990); Leland Ryken, How to Read the Bible as Literature (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984), 99-154.
6 See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 136-46, 215-22; Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 3-21; Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 226-43.