an “anything goes” authority “to say almost anything.” All three make it
clear that a responsible reading must take the author seriously. Hirsch never
makes it clear who these “anything goes” people are. Not even Nietzsche,
as radical a perspectivist as one can fi nd, thinks that Christian or Buddhist
worldviews are just as good as his own “will to power” philosophy.
Second, in response to those who fl ee in panic from anything that
smacks of any sort of relativism, it needs to be said, loud and clear, “We
are relative. Only God is absolute.” In relation to this theological implica-
tion of the doctrine of creation, it should not be surprising if our thinking,
including our interpretation of texts, is relative to our historical, social,
and cultural situation. The history of Christian thought and practice
shows that this has always been the case. We are historical as well as physi-
cal creatures. Just as we are embodied creatures and not pure spirit, so we
are embedded in traditions and life worlds that are anything but absolute.
What was said about conversation above and what will be said about the
Holy Spirit below means that this is not the whole story, but it is always
part of the story, and we deny it at our peril.
Nick Wolterstorff is helpful at this point. Like Hirsch, he is concerned
about any “anything goes” relativism, or, as he puts it, a wax nose that can
take on any shape, and he insists on an “authorial discourse” hermeneutic
to retain a dimension of objectivity. Unlike Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Derrida,
he works in an explicitly theological context in which the Bible is the Word
of God, a collection of divine discourses in which a God who is personal
enough to perform such speech acts as making promises and giving com-
mands does just that, speaks to readers of the Bible in and through the words
of the Bible. 24 Like Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Derrida, however, he denies abso-
lute privilege to the biblical authors. 25 So he calls for a double hermeneutic
(reproductive and productive, we might say) in which we ask, fi rst, “What
was God saying to them back then?”, and then ask, “And what is God saying
to us now through the very same words?” Note the change in tense! 26
For his authorial discourse hermeneutic, and on the assumption that
the Bible is the Word of God, to ask what God was saying back then is to
ask what the author was saying, what speech acts was the author perform-
ing, and how would they have been understood by their original audience.
Grammatico-historical exegesis is called for. But Wolterstorff assumes that
there is a productive dimension as well, that doubling commentary is
necessary but not suffi cient; so he does not assume that we are simply
contemporary with, say, Isaiah or Paul or the evangelists. What God is
saying to us now may be different from what God said to them back then.
SPIRIT AND PREJUDICE: THE DIALECTIC OF INTERPRETATION 25