EVANGELICAL VIEWS ON ILLUMINATION OF SCRIPTURE AND CRITIQUE

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 2006 by Kennard, Douglas

(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes formulae omitted.)

The contemporary evangelical views of illumination emerge through Lutheran pietism. Phillip Jakob Spener replaced the concept of verbal inspiration of the Scriptures with a personal inspiration or illumination of the believing interpreter, fostering a major controversy with orthodox Lutheranism.: In 1685, Johann Quenstedt reframed the view as a hermeneutic.2 In 1707 David Hollanz echoed the view that the Holy Spirit is promised to every Christian so that they might understand the biblical text better.3 Around 1701, August Herman Franke introduced the illumination of the Spirit as a "living" knowledge of the biblical text that will bring about spiritual affection.4

Evangelicalism has largely owned Spener, Quenstedt, and Hollanz's cognitive illumination view, with others in evangelicalism joining Franke's spirit transformational illumination view. This raises the possibility of an internalist authority of interpretation on the level of a divine intuition. Unlike Spener, and Schleiermacher after him, this pietistic evangelical view attempts to remain orthodox in claiming a legitimate verbal inspirational view for the production of the biblical text.

Liberalism took illumination in the inspirational direction. For example, Schleiermacher developed a psychological side of the hermeneutical process, echoing Spener's personal inspirational view, including this illuminational inspiration to motivate the reader to depend deeply upon God. This liberal interpretation view of illumination (as inspiration) was championed by Cardinal John Henry Newman through his "illative" (or confident intuitive) sense.5 Some these days may view this illumination through Michael Polanyi's tacit intuitional way of knowing. That is, whether conservative or liberal, the illumination from the Holy Spirit is seen as rendering clear the authoritative message of the Word of God.

Such an illumination aid would be hermeneutical. Usually evangelicalism sees this hermeneutical aid functioning individually. For example, the 1982 evangelical Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics includes as the fifth article: "WE AFFIRM that the Holy Spirit enables believers to appropriate and apply Scripture to their lives. WE DENY that the natural man is able to discern spiritually the biblical message apart from the Holy Spirit."6 This statement indicates in its denial a cognitive illuminational element while in its affirmation the transformational illumination is highlighted. This statement reflects the emphasis in evangelicalism that the Holy Spirit aids the individual's use of hermeneutics.

However, occasionally in contemporary evangelicalism this illumination is taken as communal. A contemporary advocate of this communal conservative illumination view is Donald Bloesch. He identifies that the Bible's revelatory status "does not reside in its wording as such but in the Spirit of God, who fills the words with meaning and power."7 This view provides a post-textual subjective meaning. Kevin Vanhoozer also extends this into community illumination of the Spirit: "Only a prayerful reading that invokes the Spirit can perceive the true meaning in what is otherwise a dead letter. Such Spirit-led exegesis 'restores the interpretive activity of the spiritual community as the connecting link between text and reader.'"8 Within this view, the authority is the Holy Spirit within the corporate communal intuitive process of illumination. Vanhoozer develops the gain and need for this illumination as follows:

The Spirit illumines the letter by impressing its illocutionary force on the reader. Thanks to the illumination of the Spirit, we see and hear speech acts for what they are-warnings, promises, commands, assertions-together with their implicit claim in our minds and hearts. In so doing, the Spirit does not alter but ministers the meaning: "The spiritual sense is the literal sense correctly understood." The distinction between "letter" and "spirit" is precisely that between reading the words and grasping what one reads. Likewise, the difference between a "natural" and an "illuminated" understanding is that between holding an opinion and having a deep sense of its profundity.9

It is my contention that such speech-acts as commands and promises are clearly indicated in the divinely accommodated biblical text itself without the need of an intuitive work of the Spirit to render this clear. Most speech-act theorists would agree that the meaning of the statement is apparent in the contextualized textual statement, rather than through this evangelical appeal to illumination, which is why they place the meaning on the speechact itself.

In conservative circles these illumination views are often supported through textual appeals to John 14:26; 16:12-15; 1 Cor 2:6-16; and 1 John 2:27. Elsewhere, I argued that these texts do not in fact teach such an illumination view.10 The remainder of this article explains why I do not think that the Bible teaches illumination as a hermeneutical aid and why it is our responsibility to sensitively interpret the Scriptures.