To receive is to prepare, just as to receive guests for a dinner party is
to clean the house, do the shopping, cook the meal, and set the table.
Hermeneutically speaking, perhaps the best name for this preparation is
spirituality. To engage in the various spiritual disciplines, beginning with
private prayer and public worship, is an essential part of being open to the
teaching of the Spirit. 35
Fourth, unless we assume that the Holy Spirit has been on vacation
through most of church history, we will have to conclude that divine guid-
ance in understanding the Bible has taught different aspects of a truth too
great to be encompassed by any single theology or interpretation to dif-
ferent Christian communities in various settings and circumstances. This
means that one of the spiritual disciplines needed here is an ecumenical
spirit, an openness to the possibility that traditions different from our own
may have insight into facets of God’s truth that we might incorporate into
our own understanding. 36 Gadamer calls this the “fusion of horizons”; it
doesn’t signify becoming identical with each other but rather a process of
mutual enlargement of vision. Do I need to repeat that the idea that the
Holy Spirit presides over a holy pluralism is not an invitation to an “any-
thing goes” relativism?
Finally, given the above qualifi cation of “passive,” we can think of the
dialectic of active and receptive as the dialectic of scholarship and spirituality.
If we are not to be hermeneutical Docetists or Ebionites, we will have to take
the two poles with equal seriousness. As the saying goes, “Pray as if every-
thing depends on God and work as if everything depends on you.” Of course
this doesn’t mean working in the morning and praying in the afternoon.
There needs to be a perichoresis , a mutual indwelling of scholarship and spiri-
tuality, so that our biblical interpretation will be at once the best work of
which we are capable and, more than that, the result of an ongoing divine
teaching. Then we can be grateful for gifts of insight without arrogantly
assuming that we have the complete and fi nal truth. We can leave it to the
Enlightenment to assume that we have somehow become the Holy Spirit.
NOTES
- Scripture references are from the NRSV.
- So far as I can see, no particular theory of inspiration is required by this
text. - Perichoresis is a term developed by some of the patristic writers to signify
the mutual indwelling or co-inherence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
SPIRIT AND PREJUDICE: THE DIALECTIC OF INTERPRETATION 29