Conclusion
Biblical Epistemology and Hermeneutics
No one need suggest that secular academia should read texts as Christians do; but Christians as Christians should embrace a distinctively Christian way of reading Scripture. The secular approach of reading with common historical ground rules is a helpful way of reading for that setting; it allows people from different perspectives to dialogue together about the texts. 1 The common ground rules mean that none of us can prove to everyone’s satisfaction everything that any of us believes beyond that common ground. A system does not have to be perfect, however, to offer a useful function.
But we need not settle for that limitation when speaking within the community of believers; Christians may read biblical texts in a specifically Christian way. Speaking descriptively at least, interpretive communities read texts according to the rules within those communities. Secular academia has its way of reading; the church has another. Here I do not speak simply descriptively about how churches often read texts, but rather urge us to consider what the prophetic and apostolic voices in Scripture suggest about reading approaches (cf. further chapters 13–16). Indeed, Scripture indicates that God will ultimately call people to account for not believing the truth (e.g., 2 Thess 2:10), including the truth found in Scripture (Luke 16:29–31; John 5:45–47).
Scripture offers models and worldviews that we can appropriate only as we read with faith. Without ruling out valuable historical insights from other forms of research, we can learn to read Scripture at a fuller level or mode that trusts and looks for the divine purpose there. When one adopts a thoroughly believing reading, embracing God’s message, one reads as a believer.
In our postmodern culture, metanarrative claims appear offensive. Such reservations have some value: we “know in part” and recognize that no moral or theological merit secures for us God’s gift in Christ. Nevertheless, the apostolic message regularly presents Christ as the one way of salvation (and not only in John 14:6; Acts 4:12) and offers a compatibly offensive particularist epistemology. 2
In Scripture, spiritual experience can seem insane to those who do not share it (1 Sam 19:24; 2 Kgs 9:11; Acts 2:13; 12:15; 26:24; 1 Cor 14:23; 2 Cor 5:13). 3 Even the resurrection testimony, which transcended ordinary expectations from human experience (Acts 26:8), was initially disbelieved (Luke 24:11). Indeed, those with worldviews that rule out some sorts of divine action will often question even their own spiritual experience (Matt 28:17; Luke 24:37; Acts 12:9), as I can unfortunately testify.
Paul plays at length on this idea in 1 Corinthians and especially in the first part of 2 Corinthians, in the latter work responding to suspicions concerning his apostolic ministry. Apostolic suffering resembles the cross, the epitome of weakness and foolishness to those who are perishing even though it was really the supreme sign of God’s power and wisdom (1 Cor 1:18–25). True wisdom thus appears as foolishness to the world. 4 But Christ’s apostles share his suffering, appearing to the world as foolish and weak (4:9–13, esp. 4:10).
In 2 Corinthians, Paul announces that Christ leads his apostles as prisoners in his triumphal procession (2 Cor 2:14); hearers of this letter in Corinth, a Roman colony, probably understood that such prisoners were executed after the procession. Paul thus speaks of his ministry in terms of dying, following Jesus’s example and sharing his sufferings (1:9–10; 4:7–12, esp. 11–12; 6:9). To believers, the mortal hardship of apostolic ministry is the aroma of life; to those who are perishing, it is simply the stench of death (2:14–16). Only from the standpoint of new creation do we understand even Christ’s suffering (5:16–17). That is, only believers look at the cross and see the resurrection.
Faith here is a perspective, a worldview that, provided it is directed toward divine truth, allows us access to that truth. 5 Everyone brings presuppositions and thus an interpretive grid to reality, based on past experiences or teaching; some are more open to adjusting their interpretive grid than are others. Skepticism, no less than faith, involves presuppositions, an interpretive grid.
We may have different names for different philosophic and religious approaches that reject a biblical message, but all of these approaches appear counter to Christian faith in Scripture. That is, whether someone disbelieved Paul’s message because Roman imperialism made the cross look foolish, because they already had many deities (cf. Isa 46:6–7; Jer 10:14), or because Paul’s gospel did not fit the worldview in their synagogue (1 Cor 1:22–23; 8:5–6), Paul would say that the god of this age had blinded them (2 Cor 4:3–4; cf. 3:13–14). 6
From a Christian perspective, whether one should prefer faith or skepticism with regard to a given proposition depends on what is true. In response to Kant’s separation of subjective faith from objective reason, Kierkegaard conceived of faith as a leap in the dark. This construction made sense in his philosophic context, but it is not what Paul means by faith. Biblical faith is not a Kierkegaardian leap in the dark, but a deliberate step into the light of the truth.
At the same time, although truth is often amenable to exploration from various angles, human epistemologies have their limits, as does the information to which people have access. Apart from consideration of the role of God’s infinite Spirit, we always have to commit our trust with incomplete, finite knowledge because that is all that is available to us. We should be supremely grateful that we have at least enough information to justify our trust in someone infinitely wiser than we are. That is not to repudiate the importance of seeking knowledge to the best of our ability (cf. Prov 18:15; 22:17; 23:12; cf. wisdom in 2:4; 8:17); it is merely to reaffirm that fearing God is the beginning of knowledge (Prov 1:7)—the sound interpretive grid and foundation, especially for knowledge about God and God’s activities.
Scripture sometimes depicts faith as a sort of sense; Heb 11:1 may describe it as proof, evidence, 7 reality or confidence. Infrared illumination and night vision goggles can allow people to see images at ranges on the electromagnetic spectrum that people could not normally see without them. Biblical faith is like another sense, a spiritual sense, that allows us to see what is genuinely present yet is hidden from those who do not believe (2 Cor 4:3–4). That truth remains concealed from them in part because their interpretive frameworks do not allow them to see it, e.g., because their worldview excludes divine activity from consideration. (For this reason Paul is concerned to correct false ideologies; cf. 2 Cor 10:5). Biblical truth, then, is perceived and embraced by trust and dependence on the God who reveals it.
Faith can certainly be naïve and misplaced if its object is not true. A religious suicide bomber or people who kill alleged child witches may believe in what they are doing, but we are convinced that their beliefs are false. Scripture emphasizes not faith in simply anything but faith in God and in Christ, faith warranted by the evidence of the first witnesses and the continuing witness of the Spirit. (In fact, with only a few exceptions such as 2 Thess 2:11, Paul employs the language of faith almost exclusively for faith in the truth.) When people treat biblical verses out of context like magical formulas to get what they want, their faith in biblical texts is misplaced (although in some cases God might nevertheless honor their genuine faith in Christ). By contrast, God is reliable as an object of our trust.
Beyond believers starting with a Christian worldview or perspective, the Spirit adds an epistemic dynamic that provides conviction. In the Gospels, especially Matthew and John, Jesus affirms that he is with his people and that his Spirit continues his presence with us (Matt 18:20; John 14:23). In practice, because we accept the truth of the affirmation’s source, this should lead us also to affirm his presence. It often consequently yields an experience of being conscious of God’s presence (recognized by faith, not by feeling, although the recognition may well generate or be conjoined with feelings). That does not mean that our consciousness of his presence is what makes him present; but through living faith in the reality of his presence, we can live our lives in the light of his presence. 8
The Spirit bears witness with our spirit (Rom 8:16) and offers boldness for proclamation (Acts 4:31). One may object that this assurance is too subjective and personal to convince others, but the dynamic of the Spirit who assures us can also provide conviction to others through our presentation of Christ (1 Thess 1:5; cf. 2:13; John 16:7–11). A Spirit epistemology insists that it is not ideal merely to inherit the right worldview; we need the frame of mind given by the Spirit (Rom 8:5–7; 1 Cor 2:9–16).
Early Pentecostals applied this approach to some spiritual gifts the way their radical evangelical precursors applied it to healing and faith for provision on the mission field. Although sometimes their insistence became excessive (a common trait among most young movements excited about distinctives), they tried to confirm in their experience the worldview they found in Scripture. It was a faith in Scripture usually not based so much on debates about the precise meaning of biblical passages as on the reality of the biblical worldview. The Spirit both empowers and responds to such faith or desperate prayers (Luke 11:13) for what is biblically normal to become our own normal experience.
The vast majority of scholars today recognize that all interpreters bring presuppositions to the table, whether the interpreters recognize their assumptions or not. Most interpreters from renewal traditions argue that their worldview, which accepts as real biblical approaches to the supernatural, comports better with reality than the often uncritically antisupernaturalist bias that tends to pervade modern critical scholarship. 9
Biblically, fidelity to God even in the face of potentially persuasive competing worldviews shows love for him (Deut 13:3); love demands trust and loyalty. Biblical faith is not blind, as if we lack supporting evidence for what we believe; faith is, as we have noted, sound only insofar as its object is reliable. Yet neither does biblical faith lack commitment. The semantic range of the Hebrew term translated “faith” in Scripture includes not simply assent to propositions but fidelity, or faithfulness. 10
The Bible often addresses our inability to apprehend divine truth. Although theologians between and within various traditions debate the nature and extent of total depravity, Scripture is clear that human depravity affects our ability to perceive divine truth. Some depict this depravity as corruption of reason; others specify a fallenness of the will that resists divine truth. Still others, including myself, would doubt that will and reason are so easily disentangled.
Some Examples of Sin Darkening the Mind
Pharaoh’s hardened heart, mentioned above, provides one example. Probably his erroneous theology—his idea that his inherited ancestral gods were far greater than the one god of his slaves—remained a factor in this hardening; thus God’s plagues struck Egypt’s gods (Exod 12:12; Num 33:4). God hardened Pharaoh’s heart (Exod 4:21; 7:3, 13), yet Pharaoh also remained responsible for choosing a hard heart (7:14). Pharaoh was often hardened whenever God relented from pressure against him (8:15, 31–32; 9:34; 10:20).
Another factor in his initial hardness, however, was the theological belief that particular alternative explanations were equally or more plausible, despite their limited scale—his magicians could duplicate the first signs (7:11–13, 22; cf. 8:7). Eventually God made clear that polytheistic and natural explanations were inadequate, even beyond Moses announcing in advance the plagues and often the relief. Pharaoh’s magicians could no longer imitate the signs (8:18–19; 9:11); Pharaoh learned that the plague did not affect any of Israel’s livestock (9:6–7); and God selected each family’s firstborn to strike down (12:29). Yet Pharaoh, inconsistent with coherent reason outside his inflexible worldview, still remained hostile (14:4–9).
If anyone thinks that such hardness is inconceivable, one may simply marshall in the public square some conspicuously strong evidence for God’s truth and observe the responses. Pharaoh staked everything on the truth of his theology, which included his divinity. Many today likewise stake everything on God being false, not open to persuasion otherwise. Those who underestimate the stakes involved might want to reckon with Pascal’s wager: if one’s belief might prove false, the risk in rejecting God is higher than the risk in following him.
Another example of sin blinding the mind appears in the prophet Isaiah. Here God responds to his people’s resistance by ironically commanding them to remain blind (Isa 29:9); by this point, he had prevented them from even receiving truth through prophets and seers (29:10). (As a noncessationist I would suggest that where the true prophetic voice is silenced today, we should heed the silence; sometimes it means that we have exhausted our warnings and dulled or suppressed the warning system.)
Yet Isaiah is not implying that God has not reached out to his people; instead, God has abandoned them to their own excuses. Some might refuse to recognize his message because they could not read; others, because it was sealed (29:11–12). That is, they could not hear the prophetic voice because they had already chosen not to receive it. Their mortal wisdom was not God’s truth (29:14); God is the one who has perfect knowledge (29:15–16). The truly wise heed him; there is no true wisdom against him (Prov 21:30; Isa 29:14; Jer 8:9).
Blindness on a Corporate Level
“We know that we are from God,” John writes, “and the entire world lies in the sphere of the evil one” (1 John 5:19). John goes on to affirm that, by contrast, Jesus has given us understanding so we could know the true one (5:20).
As already noted (on p. 162), Rom 1:18–32 describes in part how humanity began deliberately suppressing the truth about God until their worldviews became so distorted with regard to divine matters that they became incapable of recognizing truth about God. Eventually, those who have become most proficient in blindness become fools while asserting themselves to be wise (1:22).
In Paul’s day, as in Pharaoh’s, the distortion came through multiplying deities and reducing the divine image to images created by people. Today the distortion sometimes comes through eliminating deity altogether and attributing everything to chance (even to the extent of resorting to a practically infinite number of universes to evade belief in an intelligent creator). As distorting God’s image led to distorting human sexuality in Romans 1, it leads to the same today, where many humans stripped of any transcendent dignity pursue purely animal passions. Reducing human personhood or identity to the product of pure random chance offers humanity no transcendent purpose. 11
Three times Paul emphasizes in Rom 1:18–32 that God hands the world over to the choices it has already made. This passage depicts corporate sin, which affects those surrounded by such worldviews and the corresponding choices they make within that framework. One of the horrors of sin is its corporate effects: millions of people in today’s world starve, die of treatable diseases or become refugees because of others’ selfishness and greed. There is enough food available in the world to feed everyone; because of inequitable distribution, however, people starve and die of malnutrition.
Information access is likewise inequitably distributed, as are veridical paradigms. When some justify their beliefs by means of falsehood, they silence God’s voice not only in themselves but also for those who trust them. Those who slaughter others in hopes of achieving paradise normally follow a falsehood of others’ making. Those who live and die without hope in a world that they perceive as godless also follow falsehoods of others’ making.
Paul elsewhere speaks of a spirit of lawlessness (2 Thess 2:7), so that God gives over those who took pleasure in wickedness to a deluding influence so they would believe what was false instead of true, so they would not be saved (2:10–12). 12 In other words, when people love their sin more than they love truth, God causes 13 them to become so blind that they cannot see the truth.
As already noted, Paul speaks generically, but does not necessarily mean that everyone is equally blinded. Like Romans 1, Ephesians 4 speaks of Gentiles being darkened in their minds by ignorance and hard hearts leading to sexual immorality (Eph 4:17–19). 14 Yet Paul acknowledges here that his own audience was converted from this darkness (4:20), suggesting that Paul does not in fact regard such corporate blindness as impenetrable. 15
Jesus describes an open-minded scribe as “not far from the kingdom” (Mark 12:34); and Mark apparently depicts Jesus’s disciples (in contrast to his enemies) as merely half-blind (8:17–18, 23–25; contrast 4:11–13). It should also go without saying that our responsibility to people who do not understand is to be kind, gentle, and patient, even toward those who not merely do not comprehend but who oppose the message (2 Tim 2:24–25). Our role is to reason gently; God is the one who can grant them the repentance that can bring them to know the truth, with a sound way of thinking (2:25–26). When those who call themselves Christians feel the need to browbeat nonbelievers (even in response to some nonbelievers browbeating them), one wonders whether these Christians remember that they have what they have only by grace (cf. Luke 15:25–32; 18:9–14; Acts 11:3, 18; 1 Tim 1:13–16). Then again, focusing on the resistant can be nonproductive (Mark 6:11; Titus 3:9–10).
Years ago I often dialogued with an agnostic friend who would raise various intellectual objections against Christianity to see if I could answer them. In each case, the answers I gave did manage to satisfy his protests, although I readily recognize that I do not have answers to all available questions. The conversation would always climax the same way, with my friend admitting, “You’re right. I just don’t want to give up my sin.” His mind was not completely incapable of receiving truth, however, in that he could at least perceive the reasonableness of the answers to his case.
Some others, who have usually refused civil dialogue, have seemed unable to even grasp that they have presuppositions, and that a Christian vantage point is no more a bias, from a neutral, agnostic perspective, than is their own. Still others may maintain skepticism because of inherited presuppositions, yet abandon those premises when confronted with a reality that dismantles their worldview. (That is what happened to me at my conversion from atheism, though many aspects of my unbelieving worldview remained to be dismantled subsequently.)
In practice, unbelief ranges from less culpable ignorance of God’s truth to apparently benign neglect to deliberate rejection, and from tolerance of it to various degrees of hostility. Overt persecution of believers is a conspicuous form of hostility, 16 but in Western academic circles it is expressed more often by dismissing or attempting to discredit genuinely reasoned arguments without needing to consider them.
Most of my readers could easily illustrate such hostile bias, so I will limit examples to this section. I initially pursued scholarship expecting an objective hearing but was quickly disillusioned by the politics of academia. (It is not my intention in this book to embrace or reject wholesale everything said by postmodernist interpreters, as if all of them would even necessarily agree with each other, but in this instance postmodernists can rightly respond, “We told you so.”)
Often some critics dismiss as “uncritical” any scholar who comes to more positive conclusions about many claims in Scripture. They are quick to do so even when the more positive scholar’s work displays more research, more interdisciplinary connections, and a thorough interaction with various positions. The critic, meanwhile, may normally read only “critical” sources, by which they mean those that agree with their conclusions (or what they learned from their own respected mentors). Of course, this sort of bias is not a matter of one’s position, but of one’s disposition; it is an uncritical fundamentalism (in the pejorative modern sense of the term) whether it occurs on the left or on the right end of the theological spectrum (and I have witnessed it on both ends).
Reviews are one place where scholars can often observe such dispositions, though often the general academic respect for objectivity helps restrain them. While many scholars across the theological spectrum do honor the honorable liberal virtue of fair-mindedness, most of us have read some reviews so unfair that it seemed unbelievable that they addressed the same book that we had already read. Some reviewers apparently write reviews to pad their resumés, without noticing even the main points of the books they are reviewing. (Sometimes, consumed with their own academic focus only, they will elaborate extensively on a point of disagreement that consumed at most a single page in the book.)
One noted, senior, mainstream scholar lamented to me, undoubtedly with some hyperbole, that he had never yet had a reviewer read his book before reviewing it. 17 Another friend, lamenting a review he had received, shared the unhappy joke about a scholar who responded to a query, “No, I haven’t read that book yet, or even reviewed it.” 18 Even scholars who attempt to be fair cannot escape presuppositions, but traditionally part of academic critical discipline is to evaluate fairly based on common standards of one’s discipline. 19
Still, even somewhat hostile scholars are nearly always fairer than the worst comments posted after articles or blogs on the internet, which may provide a clearer illustration of hostile bias. Whereas scholars are normally trained to try to be fair or at least to guard their own reputations by not appearing overtly biased, anonymous comments on the internet may provide a clearer indication of unrestrained human dispositions. One anonymous critic offered an inexcusably hurtful “comment” to a teenage woman who had posted herself singing: “You’re ugly; go kill yourself.”
For examples more related to academics, when scholars write popular-level posts, self-assured popular critics often counter in comments sections with preposterous assertions. Sometimes they will “prove” their case against the scholar by citing as authoritative another misinformed popular source, or perhaps a genuine source that the scholar, whose scholarly work the anonymous critic has never read, addressed at length elsewhere. 20
I was not surprised that some critics on the internet refused to believe eyewitness miracle testimony; to believe that it was both accurate and represented a genuine miracle would violate their worldview. What surprised me was a comment that denied believing even that I had ever been beaten for my faith—although it is a predictable occasional outcome of some urban evangelism when a miracle does not happen. I take this to illustrate that part of human freedom is that, instead of critically evaluating claims to seek truth honestly, people can abuse their critical faculties to reject any claim that is inconsistent with their worldview—even when, from the veridical divine perspective, their worldview may be wrong.
Presuppositions are inevitable, and they are not always expressed in hostile bias. Scripture is repeatedly clear, however, that worldviews biased against God are damaging. Whereas one solution in the Old Testament was to eradicate societies biased against God for the purposes of judgment and of preventing the contamination of God’s people, 21 the teachings of Jesus and the apostolic church (and for that matter, Israel during the exile) are quite different. God wants his people to be a light and to make a difference in the values of their societies by charity and persuasion, not by coercion. 22
From the start, John’s Gospel divides the world into those who embrace the truth and those who resist it. When God’s light shines in darkness, the darkness could not “apprehend” it (John 1:5); the Greek term here carries potential nuances of both understanding and overpowering (the former perhaps being more relevant here). The world could not recognize its creator when he came among them (1:11), but those who did receive him became God’s children, being born from God (1:12–13). God could be fully understood only when God became human and revealed his heart (1:18).
Nicodemus could not even see God’s kingdom until he was born from above (3:3); heavenly truths remained beyond his full understanding even when aided by some earthly analogies (3:10–12). Nicodemus’s condition appears characteristic of what we should expect with regard to the world even after Jesus’s exaltation. The world cannot receive the Spirit of truth because it neither recognizes nor knows him (John 14:17).
Johannine epistemology divides humanity into Jesus’s followers and “the world.” In John’s epistemology (John 3:19–21, NRSV), the judgment is “that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”
Jesus thus warns his interlocutors that “You cannot understand” (John 8:43), because they still belong to a hostile spiritual sphere. (Paul offers a similar idea in 1 Cor 2:14.) They cannot understand him, Jesus explains, because they cannot hear his message (John 8:43). They have a fleshly, worldly perspective, whereas he has a heavenly one (8:15–16, 23; cf. 3:11–13). Jesus speaks to them in circular riddles, leaving them in a blindness that could only be superseded by a direct experience with God (8:19, 24–25). They are not morally qualified to recognize Jesus’s truth (8:45–46); they cannot hear God’s words truly because they are not from God (8:47). They fail to recognize that Jesus’s words cannot be understood on a mere fleshly level, but only on the level of the Spirit and divine life (6:63). 23 The only way beyond this epistemic impasse is for them to continue in Jesus’s message and thus know Jesus and his Father (8:19, 31–32), a knowledge that constitutes eternal life (17:3).
Many of the Johannine narratives that emphasize witness also emphasize a personal encounter with Jesus. Thus, having met Jesus, Andrew invites his brother Simon to meet him (John 1:40–42). The shepherd who calls his sheep by name, who knows them and his sheep know him (cf. 10:3–5, 14–15, 27), then calls Simon by name (1:42) and so makes him a disciple.
By noting that Andrew “found” his brother (1:41), after “seeking” Jesus (1:38), John connects this paragraph with the next one. 24 There Jesus “found” Philip, inviting him to be a disciple (1:43). Philip then “found” Nathanael (1:45). As Jesus had invited Andrew and his friend to “come and see” (1:39), so Philip now invites Nathanael to “come and see” (1:46). 25 Although Philip’s testimony about Jesus’s identity prepares Nathanael for an encounter with Jesus, it is the encounter with Jesus—who knows Nathanael’s heart as he knew Simon’s—that convinces Nathanael (1:46–51). Likewise, Jesus reveals himself to a Samaritan woman and also something about her identity (4:17–18, 25–26), and then she invites her people to “come, see” Jesus (4:29). As a result, they declare, they (like Nathanael before them) believe him not because of testimony but because they have met him for themselves (4:42).
Epistemology is central in a key scene in the book and Jesus’s following warnings. (John’s two favorite words for “know” appear some 140 times in the book, constituting this topic as a central motif.) In John 9, one who has experienced healing cannot answer all the critics’ questions; there are matters that he does not know (9:12; cf. 9:20–21). Nevertheless, he knows enough to question their skepticism: he knows his experience, that he has gone from blindness to sight (9:25). His dogmatic critics, who hold a position of intellectual social power, are more arrogant about what they know: they “know” that Jesus is a sinner (9:24) and that God has spoken to Moses (9:29a), but they dismiss Jesus’s significance precisely because they do not know his place of origin (9:29b). 26
When the healed man exercises the intellectual independence to think for himself, affirming that “we know” that this man could not have done this miracle if he were a sinner (9:30–31), they scoff at his lack of scholarly learning and exclude him from the community of God’s people (9:34). John’s first target audience probably experienced expulsion from or marginalization in their synagogues, 27 but any of us who have been scoffed at for our faith can identify with this man. Ultimately, however, it is not these members of the elite who can determine whether anyone belongs to God’s people.
Defending this man, Jesus contends that he came to give sight to those who recognize their blindness and to blind those who think they see—those who claimed to know better than others (9:39–41). The dividing issue here is Jesus’s own identity. God’s true sheep recognize their shepherd and resist the self-appointed, false leaders of God’s people (9:35–38). Jesus’s own sheep—God’s true people—know his voice and know him (10:4–5, 14–15; cf. 10:27). Although Jesus no longer walks among us in his flesh, the Spirit continues to make Jesus present (16:7–15). As Jesus revealed to his disciples what he heard from his Father (15:15), the Spirit continues to reveal what he hears from Jesus (16:13–15). The scenario of John 9–10 thus continues to play out, with diverse responses to Jesus in every period of this age.
Although not as heavily as in the Gospel, the Johannine epistles make heavy use of the two Johannine verbs for knowledge (thirty-four times in these seven chapters, the vast majority in 1 John). 28 The epistemic claim in 1 John 4:6 sounds circular, unless it is informed by trust in the apostolic witnesses that rests on a genuine experience of the Spirit: “We are from God. Whoever knows God heeds us; whoever is not from God does not heed us. This is how we can distinguish the Spirit of truth from the spirit of error.” 29
Outside the in-group, such reasoning appears to beg the question. It is premised, however, on prior knowledge of God—experiential knowledge. John’s circle of witnesses could distinguish which spirits accorded with the Jesus who came in the flesh because they had known the Jesus who came in the flesh (4:1–3). 30 Those who had the experience of the Spirit recognized the truth (3:24), and they knew that the Spirit they experienced was the genuine one because this Spirit’s testimony accorded with what the authentic human witnesses reported about Jesus (4:2–3; cf. John 15:26–27). Those who experienced God were also those who loved (1 John 4:7–8), presumably in contrast to those whom John’s letter elsewhere criticizes, who had abandoned the community of believers.
Johannine Dualism Uses Ideal Types
At this point it is important to add a caveat. Although Johannine epistemic dualism is most relevant to my present chapter’s chief concern, it is not the only biblical perspective on the world. Elsewhere in Scripture, Egyptians oppressed God’s people in Moses’s day, but embraced God’s people in Joseph’s day. Joseph and Moses married members of families of Gentile priests. Daniel experienced divine revelation even though he was also trained in the wisdom and learning of the Chaldeans (Dan 1:4–5; 2:19). Paul was on positive terms with Asiarchs, some of whom may have also been prominent in the region’s polytheistic civic religion (Acts 19:31). 31
Likewise even Johannine dualism, like the binary contrast between the wise or foolish in Proverbs (or Stoicism), or the contrast between those in the Spirit and in the flesh in Rom 8:3–11, is something of an ideal construct. 32 Even for John, it does not mean in practice that everyone either fully understands or fully misunderstands; John’s narratives in fact present various levels of understanding and misunderstanding. For example, Jesus understands fully, the disciples understand somewhat, secret believers such as Nicodemus are searching, and the authorities are fully blind. 33 What Johannine dualism offers us, however, is a stark reminder that worldviews and backgrounds do shape much discourse and debate, more than some are willing to recognize.
How does this exploration of unbelief as a worldview—surveying some of the biblical theology of cognitive depravity—relate to the theme of Spirit hermeneutics? Most important exegetical methods can be applied by either believers or nonbelievers. 34 But whether we read the text with faith or not is closely related to the worldview that we embrace. The Holy Spirit inspires the correct framework at even the basic level of confessing Jesus as Lord (1 Cor 12:3; 1 John 4:2), as well as empowering the perspectives and approaches of divine wisdom (Acts 6:3, 10; 1 Cor 2:13; 12:8; Eph 1:17; cf. Exod 31:3; 35:31; Isa 11:2). Fuller empowerment of the Spirit to boldly stand and build on those premises also comes from the Spirit even in the face of opposition (Acts 4:8, 13, 31).
A Spirit epistemology, foundational for a Spirit hermeneutic, embraces God’s truth. Although evidence matters, so do presuppositions; apart from the regenerating, empowering and renewing work of the Spirit, a fallen worldview becomes a lens that inevitably distorts reality. Not every society’s or individual’s worldview is equally corrupted, but only the omniscient God has a complete worldview, so submitting to his revelation is the wisest course. God’s Spirit can help us not to bring inherited hostile biases against God’s wisdom. At its best, this epistemology goes beyond believing secondhand; it rests on a genuine encounter with Christ.