and reductionistic approaches must be critically evaluated.235
Lastly, Poythress discusses hermeneutics in terms of God’s Lordship and Christ’s redemption. The Enlightenment desire for neutral, self-sufficient interpretation is impossible in understanding the Bible’s message (or anything else for that matter). God is sovereignly and personally present in all interpretive endeavors. Consequently, our thoughts in these matters are ethically related to God, under his authority.236 “We ought to have God as the standard in judging all rules in interpretation.” Without his standard, our interpretation is unintelligible.237 Moreover, his communication to us is inescapable, as it is expressed through general and special revelation, a point Van Til also emphasized.238 In short, our interpretation of the Bible must be a re-interpretation of God’s interpretation, according to his standard of that interpretation.
A key characteristic of non-Christian hermeneutics is a denial of God as the stable source and standard of all aspects of the communication process, which not only contributes to interpretive difficulties and alienations, but also opens the door for hermeneutical idolatry.239 Without God behind the communication process as the authority, sovereignly in control, and present in all, there is no way to hold its vital components together.240 Whatever approach is taken, there is an inevitable deification of creation, where one aspect of the communication process is emphasized in order to ground the whole thing.241 By leaving God out of the equation, this grounding is done merely on a human level. The end result is reductionism, in which one aspect of the process (e.g., interpreter) is deified as the autonomous ground of meaning, trumping the others. Yet, “each must fail because none can exist without the others.”242 By ignoring God’s role in the interpretive process, there is an inevitable blurring of the Creator-creature distinction. However, by acknowledging God’s lordship over interpretation, one can avoid this tendency. The various pitfalls associated with each component in terms of success in communicating truth can only be established on the bedrock of the Trinitarian communication of God, who is infinite.243 Poythress concludes: “God’s Lordship is the necessary presupposition not only of the interpretation of the Bible but interpretation of all human communication.”244
Emphasizing the redemption of interpretation, Poythress argues that Christ alone is the savior of the author, discourse, audience, and the hermeneutical circle. From a biblical worldview, interpretation cannot be separated from redemptive history. The effects of sin must be recognized and its solution taken seriously, even in the realm of hermeneutics. Poythress sums up the situation well:
Just as there is no metaphysical interpretive standpoint free of the Lordship of God, and just as no moment in interpretation escapes his exhaustive mastery, so no human standpoint is free of the conflict of sin and redemption, and no moment in interpretation escapes the penetrating influence of our relation to Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. There is no neutrality. There is no “objectivity” even, in the sense of which Enlightenment rationalism dreams. The only ultimate objectivity is also an exhaustively personal subjectivity, namely the eternal objective fact of intra-Trinitarian communion in truth, power, and personal fellowship.245
For both Van Til and Poythress, these theological realities necessarily direct hermeneutics.
I will close this survey of Van Til’s influence on those explicitly using his ideas in hermeneutics with Royce G. Gruenler. Though neither as extensive nor as innovative in his application as Poythress, he nonetheless provides a fitting conclusion to our discussion. In his response to Krabbendam’s article on the new hermeneutic, he affirms Krabbendam’s assessment and proceeds to apply what he calls “Van Til’s presuppositional hermeneutic” to Gadamer and representatives of the new hermeneutic.246 In short, there is nothing new about the new hermeneutic. He describes in broad strokes what this Van Tillian hermeneutic entails. First, we do not impose a set of dogmatic assumptions upon brute or unknowable facts, following Kant. Rather, God has already pre-interpreted and created the facts and their relation to his redemptive plan in Christ. “Common grace and special grace find their union in him.”247 He affirms Van Til’s assessment of the new hermeneutic, noting the value in his presuppositional approach, exposing the underlying assumptions being made by Fuchs and Ebeling. Various forms of human autonomy are detected and exposed as non-Christian. There is an “axe to grind”248 among non-Christian hermeneutics in which hidden agendas stack the deck in favor of certain interpretive outcomes. Only an explicitly Christian hermeneutic is sufficient for this task. Any attempt to separate one’s Christian faith from a purely descriptive, historical interpretation will fail to do justice to the content of Scripture. Gruenler explains:
This is precisely Van Til’s point and the awesome challenge of his hermeneutic. Only in humble acceptance of God’s own special interpretation of history in Jesus Christ can one properly use the tools of historical research . . . the search for the real meaning of facts in the created world of nature and history can only be achieved by the aid of God’s own “canonical” interpretation of those facts.249
God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ and the inscripturated word “is his own interpretation of the deep grammar of nature, history, and of human existence.”250 It is paramount to evaluate hermeneutical method on the level of presuppositions regarding these matters, getting them out in the open, in order to evaluate them from a Christian worldview.
Elsewhere, Gruenler calls this Van Tillian hermeneutic, “Biblicial Realism.”251 He makes it clear that interpretation cannot be isolated from how one broadly interprets the world.252 Macro-level concerns press in at every point. Ultimately, this involves God and his pre-interpretation of the world. This pre-interpretation is shared among the persons of the Trinity.253 As he puts it, “It is my conviction that hermeneutics is first of all the enterprise of God . . . truth-bearing ideas are always underwritten by the reality of God.”254 Not only has Gruenler brought Van Til and his ideas into the hermeneutical discussion, he has also identified Van Til’s approach as a hermeneutic—one that has great value in effectively evaluating and diagnosing hermeneutical methodologies.
Conclusion
Because of Van Til’s controversial reputation in some circles, he has often been dismissed without sufficient consideration. Therefore, it was necessary, albeit at some length, to demonstrate his relevance for contemporary hermeneutics for those who have tended to dismiss him, and for those who have used his ideas in the field. For the most part, Van Til has been relegated to a mere footnote in the contemporary discussion. In light of the above survey and evaluation, perhaps he should be allowed to have a more prominent voice. If so, what is his place in the current discussion? In order to establish the place where his voice can be heard most clearly and helpfully, we need to survey the current field.
