In November 2008 I published a short reflection on this blog titled “Pre-understanding Scripture.” It was not technical. It did not speak of teleo-spaces, determinability, or the excess of meaning over form. It was an attempt to name something that many pastors and thoughtful Christians were feeling but struggling to articulate: the sense that Scripture no longer appeared with the ontological confidence it once had.
Over the last twelve months that small piece has received nearly 1,000 reads.
That fact alone is worth reflection.
In that 2008 post, I argued that what had shifted was not merely interpretation but pre-understanding. The Bible had ceased, for many, to be pre-understood as that upon which the ultimate significance of one’s being depended. It had become one important text among others—valuable, even cherished—but no longer ontologically decisive. The internal clarity of Scripture could not arise because Scripture was no longer encountered as the kind of thing for which clarity was at issue.
I leaned heavily then on Heidegger’s account of pre-understanding. We dwell within contexts of significance. We do not construct them at will. The Reformers inhabited a world in which Scripture was already trusted as authoritative and therefore could display itself as internally clear. Our world does not share that pre-understanding. I ended starkly: hermeneutical helplessness is not neutrality.
Reading that post now, nearly two decades later, I recognize both its strength and its incompleteness.
Its strength was phenomenological honesty. It named the fissure between text and trust. It recognized that pre-understandings are not engineered by evidence or intensified by technique. It sensed that the question of Scripture’s clarity is inseparable from the ontological horizon within which Scripture appears at all.
But it did not yet provide a full ontological account of that horizon.
In 2008 I could describe the loss of ontological confidence, but I had not yet articulated what must be the case for Word to count as Word. I had not yet developed the distinction between formal derivability and semantic satisfaction. I had not yet argued that intelligibility itself is real, irreducible, and not constituted by subjectivity. I had not yet named the teleological space within which determinate claims can appear as meaningful rather than merely asserted.
In short, I had diagnosed the darkness without yet offering a disciplined account of light.
The work of the past years has been an attempt to do precisely that. What ontological conditions must obtain for Scripture to bear meaning that is not reducible to historical reconstruction or communal projection? Why is intelligibility not simply a product of interpretive communities? Why can clarity not be manufactured, and yet not be merely nostalgic?
The older post remains relevant because the problem it names has not disappeared. We still inhabit a cultural world in which Scripture often appears as one document among many, where authority is functional rather than ontological, and where clarity seems implausible because trust seems implausible.
But the answer cannot be exhortation. It cannot be the repetition of slogans about sufficiency. Nor can it be engineered by spiritual technique.
The task is deeper. It is to clarify the conditions under which clarity is even possible.
If “Pre-understanding Scripture” continues to find readers, perhaps it is because it touched the right question, even if it did not yet have the full conceptual architecture to answer it. The thread is continuous. The early reflection named the fracture. The later work seeks to articulate the ontological ground that makes Word possible at all.
The problem has not changed. The tools have.
And perhaps that is why a short piece from 2008 still quietly circulates.
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