Dialogical Approaches to the Meaning of Scripture

The word “dialogical” refers to the idea that interpretation involves a type of dialog or discussion between the reader and the text. The basic idea is that the text has an objective meaning, but that this objective meaning is best discovered through a subjective interaction or dialog between the reader and the text. We see an example of this kind of dialog in Psalm 119:18, where the psalmist made this request of God:

Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law.

In this psalm, the Psalmist was talking about the way that he regularly mediated on Scripture. And he expressed a fundamentally dialogical view of interpretation. First, he believed that objective meaning could be found in the law. But at the same time, he realized that he needed a subjective, eye-opening experience in order to understand the law rightly.

The Psalmist wasn’t asking God to eliminate his subjective influences, but to improve his subjective perspective by increasing his insight. And as the broader context of this verse shows us, the Psalmist kept returning to the text of the law in order to improve his understanding; he maintained a dialog with Scripture that continually improved his grasp of its meaning.

Interpreting the Bible is like having a dialog with the most authoritative figure we can imagine, God himself. It’s a dialog because it involves a type of conversational “give and take” between readers and the Scriptures. On the reader’s side of the dialog, we all come to the Bible with many questions, preconceptions, cultural backgrounds, and personal experiences. And each of these things influences what we understand from the Bible. On Scripture’s side of the dialog, God continually speaks to us through his Word, sometimes confirming what we believe, sometimes correcting it.

When we submit to the Bible’s authority, we expect to receive wisdom, instruction, and encouragement from it. We trust that the Spirit can, at his discretion, illumine us more and more to the actual meaning of Scripture and enable us to apply it more faithfully to our lives. So, the more we read and interpret the Bible responsibly, the more we can expect our understanding to be correct — and the more our gifts can be strengthened, our thinking challenged, our cultural backgrounds evaluated, and our personal experiences transformed.

It’s crucial that we submit to the authority of Scripture because our doing so reflects a disposition to submit to the authority of God. As the very words of God, when we do or don’t submit to the authority of Scripture, we’re saying something about our disposition towards God himself. And so, we want to be careful that we do not come to the Scriptures as the judge of them, but underneath their authority, because we come underneath God’s authority in the first place. [Dr. Robert G. Lister]