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The business of the interpreter is primarily to do with words, and the interpreter of the
Holy Scriptures, with words purified, tried and approved of God. We must remember
however that words are signs, and their distinctive meanings are only binding upon the
minds of men because of common consent.
Schleiermacher puts as a rule of the first importance:
"A system resting upon principles which are immediately evident from the nature of
thought and language."
Accepting the language under consideration, our own, the Hebrew or the Greek, there
still remains some fundamental basis upon which all who are concerned must of necessity
build. This resolves itself into the necessity to hold in the mind certain fundamental laws
of thought that are axiomatic, to apply them with uniform consistency, and to realize that,
wherever a difference occurs, the error lies in some misapplication of, or fault in the
principles entertained.
What do we mean by an axiom? An axiom is some self evident proposition, not
requiring demonstration, as for example, the whole is greater than its part. It would be
useless to argue with anyone who did not immediately assent to this axiom; it lies
outside the realm of debate and its discernment is associated with the very nature of the
mind itself.
"As man could not reason with man except upon the ground of a common experience
and consciousness, and a community of ideas and language, so God could not
communicate with man, and man could not receive instruction or revelation from God,
except upon a basis of common feeling and thought." (Bosanquet).
We shall have to recur to this aspect of things when we deal with anthropomorphism
(i.e. a figure of speech which speaks of God as though possessed of the members,
passions and ways of man, such as `nostrils', `hate', etc.).
"The wisdom of God created understanding fit and proportionable to truth, the object
and end of it, as the eye is to the thing visible." (Milton).
It will be seen therefore that there must be something that is held in common by Him
Whose word is interpreted by the one who interprets it, and by the one who receives the
interpretation.
"Nearly all the treatises on hermeneutics", says Moses Stuart, "since the days of
Ernesti, have laid it down as an axiom which cannot be controverted, that the Bible is to
be interpreted in the same manner, that is by the same principles, as all other books . . . . .
these principles are coeval with nature . . . . . the person addressed has always been an
interpreter in every instance where he has heard and understood what was addressed to
him."
Should the reader feel some objection to thus treating the Word of God `as all other
books', let us remind him that we are for the moment, not dealing with its exposition,
its preaching, its application, but its simple interpretation. We cannot treat a noun as a