Let the Reader Understand

A Guide to Interpreting and Applying the Bible

Dan McCartney, Charles Clayton

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781629951638
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Études bibliques

The book suggests ways to understand the Bible's various literary genres: theological history, law, prophecy, parables, epistles, and apocalyptic. It demonstrates how to apply Scripture to worship, witness, and guidance.

part one

The Foundation of Understanding:
Presuppositions

Can a Christian and a Jew agree on the meaning of Isaiah 53? If they suspend their Christianity and Judaism, are they then able to agree? If so, is it because they have come to the text without presuppositions, or is it because they now share a new presupposition (e.g., rationalism)? Is the new presupposition inherently superior to the Christian or Jewish one?

The Reformer John Calvin began his Institutes of the Christian Religion with the observation that to know God one must know oneself, and to know oneself one must know God.1 Something like this is true as well for interpreting the Bible. We must begin by asking who we are who read the book. In other words, we must look at ourselves rather critically, to see what kind of intellectual baggage and what sort of ideological agenda we are bringing with us consciously or unconsciously, and how these presuppositions influence, for good or ill, our understanding of the Bible.

Interpreting any text involves two different types of assumptions. First, underlying all our thinking and interpreting are our presuppositions about life and ultimate realities, our worldview.2 These provide the basic foundation for how we understand everything. Second are the assumptions that we make about the nature of the text we are reading.

Because they are so central to our understanding, the first of these are held tenaciously; to relinquish or change our basic presuppositions would mean a reordering and reevaluation of our lives. It would call into question all that we think we know.

On the other hand, our assumptions about texts are usually held loosely, and are easily adapted according to the character of a text. When we start reading a book, we have in mind a certain paradigm or preconception of what the book is about. If we think the book is history, and then discover it has the marks of fiction, we simply discard the first paradigm and reorder our understanding of the book according to the new one.

But in the case of the Bible, which deals with the fundamental questions of our lives and worldviews, our assumptions about the text move into the first category of presuppositions. The Christian presupposition is that Isaiah 53 is part of God’s revelation in both the Old Testament (OT) and the New Testament (NT); the orthodox Jew presupposes that God’s revelation is in the Hebrew Bible as mediated through the Talmud. The Christian believes that the OT is primarily a prophetic book that leads up to a historical fulfillment in Christ; the orthodox Jew sees his Hebrew Bible as primarily a law book that provides the constitution for the Jewish people. Hence, the Jew and the Christian are going to see Isaiah 53 differently. And for either one to change views on the nature of the text would mean a complete reordering of worldview.3

But why do we not simply suspend all our presuppositions and stick to the facts? Would this not remove the uncertainty in interpretation and provide an unshakeable ground upon which to understand things?

We will argue later that there is a right way to understand Isaiah 53 or any other passage, and that the right way is indicated by the nature of the text itself. However, discerning this is not a matter of escaping or suspending our presuppositions, but of changing and adapting them. We really cannot escape them. Since the things we presuppose are to us self-evident, we may be unconscious of them, but they still determine our understanding, and without them there is no understanding. Anytime we find meaning in a text, we arrive at that meaning by fitting it in with our previous knowledge. And this involves assumptions or presuppositions about such things as the nature of the text we are reading, the meaning of life, and how we know things. All our interpreting activity in life involves assumptions, just as in geometry each theorem can be proved only on the basis of previous theorems and “self-evident” assumptions.4 Presuppositions form the basis of the interpretive framework by which we understand things.

Jesus says in Matthew 6:22, “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” Jesus was talking about the root commitments around which one orients one’s life—what we are calling basic presuppositions.5 If the principles which enable us to “see” and understand are wrong, then our understanding is no understanding at all.

This is a devastating judgment. Which of us has all his or her presuppositions right? Fortunately, we do not have to have all our presuppositions right in order to begin. There is a difference between blindness and the need for wearing glasses. But we do need to make sure our eyes are working. In other words, we must make sure that our most basic presupposition, whether conscious or unconscious, is sound. But what should this most basic presupposition be?

For most modern people, the conscious or unconscious starting point is their own existence and their own reason. The philosopher Descartes basically set the tone for the modern way of thinking when he decided that the only thing he could not doubt was the fact that he was doubting, and concluded that, since he was thinking, therefore he must exist. People thus start from themselves, and assume that only their own human reason can decide whether something is true.6 But more recently philosophers have realized that reason never exists apart from a person who is reasoning, and thus that reason is subject to other interests of the reasoner. Otherwise, all reasoning human beings would be able to agree on everything.

Further, if humans claim to be the ones who ultimately decide what is true, they are claiming to be able to make an absolute judgment. But to make an absolute judgment,

man will . . . have to seek to make a system for himself that will relate all the facts of his environment to one another in such a way as will enable him to see exhaustively all the relations that obtain between them. In other words, the system that the non-Christian has to seek on his assumption is one in which he himself virtually occupies the place that God occupies in Christian theology. Man must, in short, be virtually omniscient.7

But no human can ever have all the facts, and further, as we shall point out in chapter 2 (under “The Relationship Between General and Special Revelation”), facts can only be stated in relation to other facts. So how can anyone know anything on this presuppositional basis? This is why non-Christians today frequently deny that there is any absolute truth.

The Christian, on the other hand, affirms the validity of human reason, but maintains that it can have a proper ground only if we acknowledge first that God the Creator exists, and that he has communicated with humanity, and that he constituted our reason as an effective tool to comprehend language and everything else in the created world.8 This Christian starting point is not a groundless assumption. According to Romans 1:19–21, all human beings are constituted such that they know the essential attributes of God, because the creation screams at them that it, and they themselves, have been made by God. That is, everyone has a built-in ability to recognize the plain, self-evident God by the created universe. But rather than proceed on the basis of this self-evident presupposition, unregenerate men and women prefer other starting points for reason, and in the process destroy the real ground for reason.

When it comes to the Bible, this means that the modern non-Christian’s basic presupposition will result in an approach different from that of the Christian. For non-Christians, statements claiming to have come from God cannot be allowed to escape testing by a human reasoning process that has begun by assuming that it has no need of God. They assume that reason would operate the same way whether or not the true God exists. Thus, many modern students of the Bible evaluate whether biblical statements are true on the basis of criteria that are external to the Bible itself,9 and this cuts them off from having their own thinking critiqued by God’s Word. This is like children who cannot learn because they believe they know everything already. But Christians are persuaded by the Holy Spirit that the Bible is God’s true voice.10 Christians, under the Holy Spirit’s tutelage, use reason to decide what God is saying in his Word, and their reason, starting from the correct presuppositions, can recognize the wisdom and truthfulness of what is said,11 but they do not use reason to decide whether what he says is true on the basis of some external criteria. What criteria could be more ultimate than God’s speech? Are our thoughts higher than God’s thoughts?

For Jesus, as well as all other NT writers, Scripture is inviolable (“Scripture cannot be broken,” John 10:35). We cannot decide whether it is true on the basis of some external criteria. Yet the evangelists like Paul and Apollos “argued . . . from the scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead” (Acts 17:2–3; see also 18:28; 19:8).

If truth exists outside of ourselves, we will not know it by pretending that we have no presuppositions, nor will we attain it by embracing all our presuppositions as unchangeable parts of ourselves; we will achieve understanding only if we submit ourselves, presuppositions and all, to the One who understands and interprets all things rightly. The goal therefore is to become, not presuppositionless, but presuppositionally self-critical. Obviously, we have been presupposing a great deal. But if the Bible communicates the truth, and if we wish to learn it from the Bible, we must at least share that most basic of its presuppositions, which is that submission to the God who speaks in his Word is the first step in understanding him. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of both knowledge and wisdom (Prov. 1:7; Ps. 111:10).

It is not only our most basic presupposition that should be brought into line with that of the biblical writers; subordinate presuppositions need to be examined as well. Of course, this too is never easy, because our presuppositions are going to influence how we look at our presuppositions—but it is not hopeless. Although it is an exceedingly difficult process, the attempt to recognize one’s presuppositions and evaluate whether and to what degree they are in harmony with those of the Bible, must continually be undertaken throughout life. In fact, we could say that the key to interpreting the Bible is to allow it to change and mold our presuppositions into an interpretive framework compatible with the Bible.12 P. Stuhlmacher has written in a similar vein: “Whoever wants to penetrate the texts of the Bible theologically and reach their core of truth must interpret them in the way in which they themselves demand to be interpreted and to be prepared to tailor the method of interpretation to fit the individual character and individual significance of the texts.”13 We would stress, however, that it is more the presuppositions about a text than the methods that must be tailored to the text’s character and significance.

What causes our presuppositions to change? More to the point, what causes our assumptions regarding the meaning or interpretation of the Bible or a part of it to change? If a paradigm or set of assumptions about a text is yielding little understanding, we may eventually shift to a new set that works better. Elements of discord, or cognitive dissonance,14 may also provoke a reevaluation of assumptions. In mystery novels, a good detective who is bothered by the “little” discords in the “obvious” solution is often thereby motivated to discover the correct solution. The hermeneutical process is similar. Even if our rock-bottom presupposition is right, constant reevaluation is still a necessary and healthy process, and should continue throughout life. It is what enables us to understand the truth and to grow in our understanding of God’s Word.

We can think of this as a “hermeneutical spiral.” Although one must know the forest in order to understand the trees, it is also true that a knowledge of the trees builds up the understanding of the forest. Our presuppositions about the overall meaning of the Bible, and life in general for that matter, form the interpretive framework for understanding particular texts of the Bible, which in turn act as a corrective to the overall interpretive presuppositions. This continual interaction moves us up a spiral toward a “meeting of meaning” and understanding of the truth.

Unfortunately, in our day the very relevance of this task is seen as rather questionable. Many people not only deny the existence of absolute truth, but also claim that even if there were absolute truth, it would be incommunicable, because language is relative. Although this notion has been around for quite a while, it is particularly acute in this postmodern era. So our first chapter will look at general presuppositions about truth and language. The discussion may get a bit technical in this chapter, but the reader is urged to persevere, because all the discussion these days about hermeneutics has largely to do with presuppositions about truth and language. In chapter 2, we shall focus on presuppositions about the Bible, and chapter 3 will raise the question of how presuppositions relate to our methods of interpretation.

1

Truth, Language, and Sin

When we approach the Bible, there are three aspects of our worldview, of our general outlook on life, that profoundly affect and even determine what meaning we find there. The first of these is our view of truth: is there such a thing as absolute truth, and, if there is, are we capable of knowing it?...

Table of contents

• Contents
• introduction
• Part 1: The Foundation of Understanding: Presuppositions
• Part 2: Interpretation in Theory
• Part 3: Interpretation In Practice
• Appendix A: Where Is Meaning?
• Appendix B: The Historical- Critical Method
• Notes
• Index of Persons
• Index of Scripture