On such questions as divorce, alcohol, homosexuality, and the role
of women in the church, post-biblical Christians have claimed to hear
in Scripture something different from what can safely be attributed to
biblical writers, without anything like the virtual unanimity that exists on
the question of slavery. The claim is that the God who spoke through
the prophets and apostles in Scripture speaks to us today in and through
their words, and sometimes says something different to us than what
they understood by virtue of the different situation in which we fi nd our-
selves. Such a claim is bound to be controversial. It is by no means self-
authenticating, but it cannot be ruled out a priori if Wolterstorff is right.
One way of putting this is to say that the task of theology is always “an
incomplete task, because each generation needs to become mature in its
thinking, which wouldn’t happen if Paul, Athanasius, Aquinas, Luther,
Barth or anyone else had closed off the questions with answers that could
then simply be looked up.” 30 The name of Paul stands out in this list, for
he has an apostolic authority that the others lack. 31 The cases we’ve been
examining in which we might understand what God is saying to us today
on the basis of what the biblical writers have said, but differently from
their intended meanings, are the extreme and rare cases of a double her-
meneutic informed by speech act theory.
By far the more typical are the cases in which we are open to the pos-
sibility that what God is saying to us now is different from what God was
saying to them back then, not through the words of Scripture directly, but
through such post-biblical interpreters as Athanasius, Aquinas, Luther,
Barth, ____, or _____. 32 At issue here are different under-
standings of the authors’ original meaning, which may or may not involve
the kind of situation illustrated by Mom’s double speech act. For example,
N.T. Wright himself is engaged in what Derrida calls doubling commentary
and Gadamer calls reproduction. He offers an interpretation of what Paul
was saying to his readers back then that differs quite dramatically from those
readings that take justifi cation by faith to be the heart of his theology. 33
That theology is an inherently incomplete task is due to both a divine and
a human factor. Paul points us to the divine dimension. “O the depth of
the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his
judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (Rom. 11:33). 34 Philosophical
hermeneutics points to the human factor. Just because we are historical
creatures embedded in tradition-borne prejudices, we are bound to see
the biblical writers from our own perspective. This is true when we are
engaged not only in Wolterstorff ’s second hermeneutic but also in the
SPIRIT AND PREJUDICE: THE DIALECTIC OF INTERPRETATION 27