Journal: Faith and Mission
Volume: FM 22:3 (Summer 2005)
Article: The Integration of General and Special Revelation in Applied Hermeneutics
Author: Stephen Mizell

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FM 22:3 (Summer 2005) p. 51

The Integration of General and Special Revelation in Applied Hermeneutics

Stephen Mizell

M.Div. with Advanced Biblical Studies Student
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
Wake Forest, North Carolina 27587

עזרי מעם יהוה עשׂה שׁמים וארצ
(Ps. 121:2)

Introduction

In 1670, Spinoza commented on the practice of biblical interpretation of his day in his Theological-Political Treatise:

On every side we hear men saying that the Bible is the Word of God, teaching mankind true blessedness, or the path to salvation. But the facts are quite at variance with their words, for people in general seem to make no attempt whatsoever to live according to the Bible’s teachings. We see that nearly all men parade their own ideas as God’s Word, their chief aim being to compel others to think as they do, while using religion as a pretext. We see, I say, that the chief concern of theologians on the whole has been to exhort from Holy Scripture their own arbitrarily invented ideas, for which they claim divine authority. In no other field do they display less scruple and greater temerity than in the interpretation of Scripture, the mind of the Holy Spirit, and if while so doing they feel any misgivings, their fear is not that they may be mistaken in their understanding of the Holy Spirit and may stray from the path to salvation, but that others may convict them of error, thus annihilating their personal prestige and bringing them into contempt.1

Had such a statement appeared in the latest issue of Time magazine, one would think that is was composed by a contemporary critic of Christianity, for it has unfortunately also come to characterize the hermeneutical scene of the twenty-first century. Hermeneutics is one of the most hotly debated topics among scholars today, even in evangelical circles; and much literature has been hurled back and forth in an attempt to find some solid ground for the interpretation of biblical truth. However, the tendency of most is to produce a hermeneutic that will accord with one’s own personal bias as to what Scripture should say, which consequently has led

FM 22:3 (Summer 2005) p. 52

to a muddled form of interpretation that fuses the grammatical-historical method of textual hermeneutics with general revelation. It is often stated that this fusion is a necessary element of hermeneutics—one that answers the epistemological dualism of Kant. Because of this confusion and the number of divergent and questionable interpretations that it yields, it is asserted by som...

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