to the double question, “How can we know that the Bible is the divinely
inspired Word of God and thus read it as Holy Scripture?” and, more
to the present point, “How can we know what it means?”, the Catholic
answer has been the magisterium of the Church. It is on the authority of
the church hierarchy that I know the Bible to be Holy Scripture and know
just what it teaches me to believe and to do. This does not preclude the
role of the Holy Spirit; it is rather the claim that the Spirit only speaks
authoritatively through the magisterium.
The Reformers rejected this claim, seeing the church as human, all too
human. Instead, they appealed to the inner witness of the Holy Spirit
in the life of each believer. Calvin addressed himself to the fi rst of the
two above questions. “Scripture must be confi rmed by the witness of the
Spirit. Thus may its authority be established as certain; and it is a wicked
falsehood that its credibility depends on the judgment of the church.” 4
Luther addresses the second hermeneutical question, “How can I know
what the Bible teaches?” He writes, “No one can correctly understand
God or His Word unless he has received such understanding immediately
from the Holy Spirit ... the Holy Spirit instructs us as in His own school,
outside of which nothing is learned but empty words and prattle.” 5 By say-
ing that the Holy Spirit teaches us “immediately,” Luther is not denying
that the preaching and teaching of the church can play any role at all. He is
rather claiming that the church is human, all too human and subject itself
to correction and instruction by the joint authority of Word and Spirit. As
Kierkegaard might have put it, every individual believer and every church
hierarchy ought to read the Bible in fear and trembling, knowing that it is
a precious, divine gift, but also that in our fi nitude and fallenness, we are
all too prone to misread it.
A third theory about the role of the Holy Spirit in understanding the
Bible is found in what I call the Enlightenment project in philosophy of
religion. It can be described, using the title of Kant’s religion book, as
“religion within the limits of reason alone.” For my money, the best ver-
sions of this project in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth cen-
turies respectively are those of Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel. Each of them
in his own distinctive way explicitly identifi es the Holy Spirit with human
reason. Thus, for example, Spinoza says that when Paul speaks of the Spirit
of God, “he means his own mind.” 6 This radical reinterpretation of the
Reformers’ inner witness of the Holy Spirit guides each one’s radical rein-
terpretation of both God and the Bible.
SPIRIT AND PREJUDICE: THE DIALECTIC OF INTERPRETATION 19