Welcome back to Part Two (Part One here).

These criteria laid out, the six options on the table, five false and one true, can be inspected, checked to see if they live up to their judges’ high bar. Doubtless means could be found to show how each of the false possibilities violated all of these principles- to break one part of the law is, after all, to break its whole- but the most salient points alone will suffice. The two extreme options come first; then the possibility of meaning inherent to the words; and then the personal options, ending finally with the author-origin theory.

First, the Bible could be assumed to possess no meaning; while this would not prevent the perception of meaning within it, it would rule out that perception being rational. Polished and mutated forms of this idea can be found in the objections posed by some philosophers to the ability of language to carry meaning regarding the transcendent (Reymond 17-18). This denial of the meaningfulness of Scripture, however, removes its practical and actual infallibility, removes the ‘total meaning’ of God, placing ultimate authority within hands not hallowed of God, the hands of man and his delusions (Rushdoony 23). Furthermore, even aside from its obvious common-sense ridiculousness, this denial of meaning inherently denies the Bible is communication by removing the meaning which person A transfers to person B. The Bible is no longer the Word of God; it is instead a physical arrangement of atoms which for all its proper impact on humanity might as well be a tulip or a midden heap. This possibility contradicts the clearly-stated nature of God’s Word and must therefore be utterly abhorred.

Second, the meaning of the Bible could, in theory, possess no source at all. Just as the universe, according to evolution, popped into existence out of nothing, so the meaning conveyed by the Bible popped into existence out of nothing, presumably somewhere between the initiation of the writing process and the first reader’s first look at the page. This hypothesis not only entirely removes Person A from the communication triad, rendering the author little more than a random-word-generator machine, it eliminates authority, infallibility, immutability, objectivity, sufficiency, and God as Creator. For authority, because the meaning has no origin, it has nothing to provide it credibility (which derives from the origin, not the message), thereby removing all moral obligation; as Max Stirner points out, ‘right can be bestowed only by a spirit [a supra-physical authority]’ (Stirner 31). Infallibility, immutability, and objectivity, meanwhile, break for similar reasons: for the Bible, as a product of random chance, in a universe now without any assurance of rationality, in a universe already corrupted by sin at its time of origin, no reason exists for its spontaneously appearing meaning to be correct (corresponding to reality), self-consistent, universal (non-subjective), or immutable. Furthermore, because it has no assurance of these things, because its source’s nonexistence renders it incapable of possessing the knowledge or self-knowledge which renders infallibility and sufficiency possible, those two traits would be stripped from the Bible, and all because of the imposition of something not created by God (as He would otherwise be the source, immanent or removed) (Rushdoony 26). In short, a less correct possibility would be impressive indeed, as the sourcelessness hypothesis neatly cores out every central attribute of the Bible (those listed here being merely a selection).

The third option is the last impersonal option, that the meaning is inherent to the words, not sourced from without. This claim not only requires a sort of geographic and temporal relativism but veers oddly close to the author-origin hypothesis, given that it places the author in the role of arranging the meaning, simply not in the business of creating it. Yet, when inspected, if adopted at any level beyond the superficial, this possibility does not allow for true communication; here, Person A arranges meaning, and Person B receives meaning. The origin of the message may or may not perceive the meaning; whether he does is truly irrelevant. A computer, capable of information storage and not knowledge, could carry out the process just as well. This process flat-out air-gaps the author from the authored. Further, words in themselves have no authority, moral or otherwise; they are merely arrangements of atoms into letters or soundwaves, merely symbolic representations which are in themselves empty (Stirner 31; Potter). So, while some small kernel of truth does linger in this idea (God could be termed as having created words with meaning attached- though this is His authoring or creating them, not them possessing truly inherent meaning), ultimately the word-inherency hypothesis breaks the chain of communication and invalidates Biblical authority; it cannot therefore be adopted.

Fourth, and first in the possible personal sources, is the possibility that an external, personal entity is responsible for imbuing meaning into a text. This entity cannot be God- He is the Author of the book in question- and cannot be the human authors He inspired. Angels are similarly disqualified, as their communication is explicitly inferior to the Bible’s (Galatians 1:6-9).  By elimination, only human and demonic sources are therefore possible, and the second can be discarded as blatant, unvarnished blasphemy (which possesses the problems of the first regardless). This hypothesis, then, posits that a man or men other than the reader or human author provided the meaning of the Bible. The question arises of how the external entity possesses knowledge of the text without being a recipient of it; if some odd relational relativity were pled, in which the entity provided meaning to the text only when not in relation to itself (in order to avoid the recipient hypothesis, of which this is in all honesty a variant), this would leave Scripture meaningless with respect to its origin of meaning, placing that origin outside the authority of God’s Word to govern, clear heresy (Rushdoony 47). Even with this difficulty excepted, any pretension by an extra-Biblical source to being integral to the interpretation of the Bible would violate His sovereignty as a usurpation of His authority. Should the interpretive aspect be retired, replaced by a mere silent imbuement of meaning, the problem of authority remains, because here the creature is providing the meaning to a work of God the Almighty, separate from him (inspiration without writing being clearly unsupported, as per 2 Peter 1:20-21) (Reymond 37-38). To so assume the authority (as well as, by implication, the infallibility, objectivity, etc.) of God is blasphemy, and therefore this possible source of meaning must be immediately discarded.

Fifth, and likely the most popular option among modern Christianity’s heretics, the meaning of the Bible could derive from the recipient, from the reader and the hearer. This theory, a form of standpoint epistemology, utterly destroys both infallibility and objectivity by placing the origin of meaning in fallible man, who cannot produce good of himself, in mutable man- for when man changes, his meaning will inevitably change with him, being bound under time to a creature rather than to a timeless, eternal Creator (Num. 23:19). The Bible is thus assured, in this scheme, to have a meaning both flawed and changing, removing its inerrancy and emplacing subjectivity as the only standard, for not only will the meaning change from day to day but from person to person. Even as a human author may write a work with a meaning he did not intend, so will these readers, in writing the meaning into the Bible, write it fallibly, as all men do, and without His authority (Ex. 20:19). Furthermore, by making the recipient, rather than the writer, the origin of the meaning, all possibility of communication is removed; the Bible becomes a mirror rather than a message. This property of the theory, this resultant reliance by the Bible on its reader for meaning, obliterates the assurance of sufficiency. Sufficiency, when the meaning derives from the person whom it must be sufficient to, requires that the person be sufficient to himself, not requiring even God, requiring at most the metaphorical poke of the Bible’s literal letters-on-a-page to perfect him. This possibility being clearly anti-Biblical- for Paul says, “.. we hold that one is justified by faith [in God] apart from works of the law”, the only alternative which remains is to deny the sufficiency of a Bible vivified by such a source of meaning (Rom. 3:21-31). Thus, despite its popularity, because it fails to uphold the truths of the Bible, this possible source must be set aside, for it places man, sinful man, as an authority equivalent to God, relying on the internal religious experience for redemption rather than the redemptive work of God (North, 25,27).

The sixth and final possible source for the meaning of Scripture is the author thereof, God, and its human authors, as instruments used by God to write the inspired words, whose meanings were ultimately derivative from and given by God (Talbot, Lecture 2, 1:00-7:00). As any orthodox Christian theologian of the past two millennia would testify, God provides meaning to God’s Word, through the medium of His chosen authors. This truth is not merely arrived at by process of elimination; this answer accommodates all the criterial traits. The Bible is the authoritative Word of God, with its authority descending from God. That God should imbue the meaning into it is, therefore necessary, as giving that meaning His authority, for any other origin could not justify that imbuement. The Bible is objective upon the basis of God’s immutability and omniscience; here, again, God in providing the meaning assures its truth- for He does not lie and cannot be mistaken- and as the standard for the truth, He does not change, ensuring that the truth He gives does not change (Num. 23:19). Further, by His providence, He maintains the truth of the Bible, His truth, unmutated and unaltered (Luke 16:17). This truth too assures man of His Bible’s infallibility, that it is not just inerrant, lacking error, but incapable of error, even as He Himself is incapable of error, the Bible being a work of His hand, mediated through humans Providentially created for the task (Berkhof 47-49; Talbot, Lecture 3, 9:50-10:15). Sufficiency flows not only from these truths but from the nature of God as Creator of man, the Being in whose image man is made (Gen. 1:26). The confluence of these facts is the assurance that when the Scriptures proclaim themselves sufficient, they are indeed sufficient, given in perfect truth by One who is Himself supreme in knowledge and power. The nature of the Bible as communication is also here encompassed: God delivers meaning to man via the instrument of His Word. Finally, the role of God as singular Creator of all is upheld in the theocentric nature given to the world by its primary and central narrative, found in Scripture, being of God (Rushdoony 26). All six criteria are thus met and met in full measure; this answer cannot but be correct and in accordance with God.

The implications of this truth are many, but three will suffice for now: the possibility of maintaining authority beyond the original autograph, the ability of the Bible to guide its own interpretation, and the separation of application from interpretation (particularly when contrasted with the recipient theory). The first, the possibility of maintaining authority beyond the original autograph, seems like a solution for a non-problem. If meaning, however, were given to the autograph by a source other than the Author of the text and the Origin of the meaning’s authority, no connection between the three could guarantee that a copy of the autograph would possess the meaning and authority of the original (in proportion, obviously, to its correspondence thereto)- in the word inherency hypothesis, for instance, the words are not guaranteed to possess the same meaning in every instance of their appearance. Without this connection, indeed, the goal of textual criticism, the nearest possible approximation of the autograph’s wording, would be potentially useless, as the meaning or the meaning’s authority could be entirely absent from this copy (Carson, 68-74). The same would hold true for man’s works, if the author and the originator (though secondary in the creature’s case) were separated, though admittedly authority is a less necessary component of human writing. Further, because the meaning is co-originated with the text, it can be used as a guide to the text’s true form, as in parts of textual criticism (29-31). As a result of these factors, the sum of Biblical manuscripts in existence today relies upon this assurance, as without it, their meaning would lack the assurance of authority which renders it God’s Word and not merely irrelevant.

The second implication, that the Bible itself can guide its own interpretation, reflects the fact that the identification of the Author of the Bible with the source of its meaning allows the Author and the source alike to be trusted to teach how that meaning is to be extracted from the text authored, as is Biblically averred (Berkhof 134). After all, if the source of the meaning were separated from the source of the text (the author), the reader would not be able to trust that the text could teach how to interpret itself, as he could not be assured the text actually correspond to the meaning or the meaning to the text, given their separate origins, and would have no reason to believe that by analyzing the text he could reach the meaning, the source of the meaning having no full conception of the Source of the text. Therefore, only the author-source hypothesis can justify trust in the hermeneutical method taught by the Bible in passages such as Hebrews 1, Luke 24, and Matthew 2:16-18. Even the use of reason for interpretation could be suspect, no longer supported by passages like 1 Corinthians 10:15. Furthermore, this interpretation justifies the search for a word-accurate reproduction of the autograph, for the closest as can be accomplished to this, due to the Bible’s emphasis on the importance of the minute details of its own text (Matt. 5:18; Carson 73-74).

The third implication, the separation of application from interpretation, seems another odd lesson to draw, but in light of the implications of the recipient theory so popular nowadays and theologies such as that of the Hegelian dialectic, its explication is meet. The recipient theory, by its emphasis on the reader’s perception rather than the reality, would include in the process of interpretation any part which could modify the reader’s attitude or thought towards the text, including application. Examples of this in the concrete include elements of Higher Criticism, particularly the desire to reach the experiential as interpretation, and the dialectal process espoused by Hegel, Marx, and their ilk (Lindsay, 40:00-45:00; North 25, 27-28; Rushdoony 52). Deriving the Bible’s meaning from the Bible’s Author, however, ensures that the reader’s experience is not an integral part of interpretation, because the reader is the recipient only, not the recipient and origin. While experience may influence interpretation or catalyze it, may be temporally simultaneous to it, the actual process of interpretation, in theory and when carried out properly is conceptually separate from application, being the process of receiving communication, not the process of putting oneself into the mirror and pulling oneself back out. In other words, the reader is listening to the radio broadcast, not assembling it, feeding it into the broadcaster, and playing it off for their own amusement.

 Biblical hermeneutics requires a commitment to the authorial imbuement of meaning, to God’s role as the origin of the Bible’s meaning. Modern interpreters lusts after a ‘instant revelation, just add water’ version of the Bible; they hope that by changing the hermeneutic of the Bible, they can avoid its infallible judgment of their lives. Some false teachers even proclaiming a belief in infallibility as they befoul the name of Christ with a hermeneutic which destroys all authority and truth in the Scriptures they profess (Rushdoony 64). They seek, in reality, to escape and deny and abolish God (47; White, 9:10). The Christian is not, cannot, and should not be so. He must proclaim Christ and Him crucified, Christ and Him resurrected, Christ and Him reigning on high, all on the basis of an infallible Scripture given both form and meaning by God, a Scripture whose words can be trusted to mean what they say because the omnipotent and sovereign definer of reality and of Himself wrote them by means of His children’s hands and preserved them, in part by the same, through trial and tribulation, even to this present day.

God bless.

Sources:

Augustine. Augustine: Confessions. Translated and edited by Albert Outler. University of Pennsylvania, 2023, <https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/hum100/augustinconf.pdf>.

Berkhof, L. Principles of Biblical Interpretation. Baker Book House, 1990.

Carson, D.A. The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism. Baker Books, 1979.

Lindsay, James. “The Dialectal Faith of Leftism.” Youtube, uploaded by Sovereign Nations, 5 August 2022, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqj-MKG9Sn>.

Madrid, Patrick & White, James. “EPIC Debate on Sola Scriptura w/ Patrick Madrid & James White.” Youtube, uploaded by Pints with Aquinas, 15 June 2020, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlLlzDBHhhA>.

North, Gary. The Hoax of Higher Criticism. Institute for Christian Economics, 1989.

Potter, Colson. Implication of Anathema: On Baptismal Symbolism (Full). Creational Story, 2023, <https://creationalstory.com/implication-of-anathema-on-baptismal-symbolism-full/>.

Reymond, Robert L. A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith. Second edition, Zondervan Academic, 1998.

Rushdoony, Rousas John. Infallibility: An Inescapable Concept. Ross House Books, 1978.

Stirner, Max. “Max Stirner: from The Ego and His Own.” The Anarchist Handbook. Edited by Michael Malice, 2021.

Talbot, K. BBL101-Lectures. Whitefield College, 2023.

White, James. “The Confusion Between Sola Scriptura and Exegesis.” Youtube, uploaded by Dividing Lines Higlights, 27 July 2020, <youtu.be/o5xLZ1M3Pqw>.