The Place of the Holy Spirit in the Exegetical Process
III. Some Legitimate Limits of Grammatico-Historical Exegesis
Our objective here is not to outline a detailed exposition of this method but rather to show the perimeters of its effectiveness. We have already stated in the above discussion that Scripture indicates that even an unregenerate man can have a cognitive understanding of what God is saying. There we agree with D. P. Fuller’s observation:
Consequently, the Holy Spirit’s role in biblical interpretation does not consist in giving the interpreter cognition of what the Bible is saying, which would involve dispensing additional information, beyond the historical-grammatical data that are already there for everyone to work with.12
Making much the same observation W. C. Kaiser Jr. states:
His work, (the Holy Spirit), does not offer the believer a short-cut which avoids the perspiration of grammatical, syntactical, historical, cultural, and theological exegesis. There is no royal road to interpreting the Scriptures. He does not infuse a meaning or meanings beyond what he has already taught to the writers when they combined spiritual truths with the appropriately taught spiritual words.13
From the evidence of Scripture and experience of daily life we suggest that the time honored grammatico-historical and recent addition of syntactical analysis is indispensable and adequate for cognitive understanding of Scripture.14
Only when we recognize our God-given ability to think rationally will we be on the road to discovering God’s Word afresh for our generation. As A. Holmes notes:
Propositional revelation is by its very nature addressed to men as rational beings, capable of textual study, exegesis, and all the theological sciences. Nobody who believes in an informative revelation can consistently depreciate man’s rational powers. On the contrary, such a revelation, entrusted as it is to fallible but rational men, bears eloquent testimony to the confidence God has both in the rational powers as he gave to men and in man’s ability to make a reasoned judgment at least regarding Scripture.15
We must not be paranoid of so called “intellectualism,” thereby continuing a guise of pseudo-spirituality by sustaining a false dichotomy between faith and reason. There must be a synthesis in the old struggle between rationalism and romanticism and the effect that it has on our methodology.
But lest we be overcome with undue optimism in man’s rational prowess and be guilty of reviving a “neoEnlightenment” mentality let us heed Holmes’ sober warning:
Textual criticism is a fallible science; we can misread the text and misunderstand it even when we read it aright; our knowledge of the Biblical language may be at fault, our hermeneutic misguided, or our generalizations about a Biblical teaching incomplete; theologians err and apologists may spend their energies defending a theologian’s mistake. The problem of error haunts us still.16
Likewise we must guard against modernist tendencies that would suggest to us that a valid meaning of Scripture is different from what the author intended to communicate. We must not fall into the trap of espousing a pneumatic hermeneutic where the Holy Spirit is responsible for giving us meaning independent of sound exegesis and the author’s intended message revealed thereby. Again we suggest that the Holy Spirit’s role is not to provide the interpreter cognition of what is being said by the text but rather to move the interpreter into a place of readiness whereby he might welcome and receive what is being said.
Category: Biblical Studies, Winter 1999
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