RECURSIVE RIDDLES REVEAL: BIBLICAL RECURSION AS A TEST …rbsp.info/WTS/NT993-ii.pdf · Robert Sheldon, NT993 Draft: Recursive Riddles Reveal 3/33 is represented by language, science,

WESTMINSTER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

RECURSIVE RIDDLES REVEAL: BIBLICAL RECURSION AS A TEST AND PARADIGM OF HERMENEUTICAL METHODS

Submitted to Dr. V. PoythressIn Partial Fulfillment of NT 993 Hermeneutical Foundations

Robert B. Sheldon (Box 454) Spring 2009

Robert Sheldon, NT993 Draft: Recursive Riddles Reveal 2/33

Table of Contents1. Introduction.......................................................................................................................................2

A. Art and Language.........................................................................................................................2B. Reformation Dialectic..................................................................................................................4C. Approach of this paper.................................................................................................................6

2. Philosophical roots............................................................................................................................7A. Classical Roots.............................................................................................................................8B. Hermeneutical Roots..................................................................................................................10C. Hegelian Roots...........................................................................................................................12

3. Linguistic Analysis..........................................................................................................................14A. Morphemic.................................................................................................................................14B. Lexical........................................................................................................................................18C. Syntactical..................................................................................................................................22D. Textual ......................................................................................................................................24

1) Parables..................................................................................................................................242) Proverbs.................................................................................................................................253) Job..........................................................................................................................................26

4. Trinitarian Synthesis........................................................................................................................27A. Recursive Deconstruction..........................................................................................................27B. Recursive Reconstruction ........................................................................................................30

Bibliography........................................................................................................................................33

1. Introduction

A. Art and Language

We begin with the deceptively simple observation that a picture, though worth a thousand words,1

conveys meaning quite differently than those thousand words. For a picture is mute; it cannot tell us

what it meant. As an exercise, remove the titles from a collection of modern art and then take a poll on

their meaning. Similarly, colleges have courses in “Art Appreciation” but none in “Language

Appreciation.” This divide between the eloquent and the dumb is replicated in theology as the divide

between Special and General Revelation, between Biblical and Natural Theology, with far reaching

consequences. This is not to say that art has no meaning, or that art is completely relative, but only that

there is a unique and very special role for language, indeed for anything that can explain itself. In an

earlier work, I argue that the imago dei is represented by Cro-Magnon art, but that Adam, the filius dei

1 An advertising slogan for graphics, not a scientific statement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_words accessed 5/26/09.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_words


is represented by language, science, and culture.2

Now the difference between Special and General Revelation has been discussed by the Church for

millennia culminating in the Reformation creed sola scriptura, so there is little need to stress the

primacy of Scripture over Reason, or the importance of Word over Act. This Reformation doctrine has

become so internalized, that Gadamer's reemphasis of aesthetics as a paradigm for language has taken

several decades to absorb, for Gadamer spends the first third of his hermeneutical magnum opus, Truth

and Method, on a critique of aesthetics, applying these insights to textual materials.3 That is, he treats

the text as a quasi-mute object with which the reader interacts, rather than a self-revealing subject

which needs no interpretation. I gloss over the nuances of his identical critique of the objectivist /

historicist school, pointing out that he could not have done the reverse, applying literary criticism to

aesthetics, because aesthetics is subset of textual criticism, just as Cro-Magnon is a subset or subhuman

form of Adamic Man.4 His essential point is that the text, like art, is in some meaningful sense dumb,

requiring pre-understanding and tradition to be understood properly in the fusion of the author's and the

reader's horizons.5

So in one sense, this paper is an attempt to show the opposite relation, to discuss the manner in

which literature is wholly different from art, and the ways in which Gadamer's approach fails to do

justice to the text. That is, if art is a subset of literature, then there are portions of literary theory not

explicable by aesthetic theory. Our approach then, may seem like a reactionary return 16th or 17th

century Reformation dogma, but we are explicitly taking Gadamer's (and Wittgenstein's and Hirsch's)

critique into consideration. All of these men have made progress, and without disparaging their

2 Robert Sheldon “A Scientific Study of the Imago Dei...” at http://rbsp.info/WTS/ST761-ii.pdf accessed 4/20/09.3 Anthony C. Thisleton “The Two Horizons” p293. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980.4 Robert Sheldon “A Scientific Study of the Imago Dei...”.5 David Couzens Hoy “The Critical Circle” p74, Berkeley: U of California, 1978. “Gadamer's Truth and Method itself

begins with a long discussion of the history of aesthetics and only develops the distinctly hermeneutical theory toward the end. To think of the hermeneutic theory of interpretation as a narrow part of aesthetics would, however, be misguided....Hermeneutics is not a part of aesthetics, but on the contrary, aesthetics will in a certain sense be part of hermeneutical philosophy.”

http://rbsp.info/WTS/ST761-ii.pdf


contributions, we want to consider the parts of literary theory they cannot easily incorporate. This is

dialectic, since historically we began in the Reformation with the advantages of Special Revelation,

succeeded in the Enlightenment with the advantages of General Revelation, followed in the 20th post-

Kantian century with the disadvantages of General Revelation, and now in the post-Hegelian century

we want to add, by the disadvantages of Special Revelation.

Dialectic is by its very nature a careful path between extremes. It must avoid the dualities that led

to the previous impasse all the while finding safe passage through their minefields. In doing so,

dialectic is self-limiting, self-aware, and careful to avoid logical traps by making new and finer

distinctions. Thus dialectic is always recursive, which is its strength as well as its mortal weakness. For

when the task is itself recursive, for example, when the goal of dialectic is self-actualization or personal

salvation, then the double recursion of method and meaning, of performance and purpose, produces

inevitable instability. For just as negative feedback will stabilize an amplifier until one introduces an

active (recursive) element into the circuit, the hermeneutics of meaning is stable until recursive text

introduces an active element, short-circuiting Hegel's dialectical program for progress.6 The purpose of

this paper is to demonstrate the inherent instability caused by recursion for all these hermeneutical

philosophies, and the necessity of a Frame/Poythress synthesis to stabilize and bring hermeneutics back

full circle into the fold of Reformation doctrine.

B. Reformation Dialectic

For the Reformation doctrine of perspecuity, which asserts that the text is self-explaining (shared

only with God and Man), is the only potential escape from the hermeneutical circle. That is, one of the

trenchant critiques of the Protestant Reformation was that the abandonment of tradition and the

authoritative community to interpret Scripture would lead to heresy and schism, a truly prophetic

prediction. The Reformers response was that Scripture alone was sufficient, self-interpreting,

6 Robert Sheldon “The Bimodal Parables...” at http://rbsp.info/WTS/ST721-ii.pdf accessed 5/26/09.



perspicuous, open to those who had the Spirit. But then how did one know which were the authoritative

books of Scripture and avoid heresy? By the self-revelation of Scripture itself. Thus recursion and its

consequences lie at the very center of Reformed theology.

Self-explaining text, however, is not a general solution to the circulus vitious because it may not

always bring enlightenment even when translation and fusion of horizons is trivially resolved (say, in

explaining one's own words), for how is one to proceed when the self-explanation is wrong, misguided,

or merely deceptive? For example, I once had a job translating a software program from one computer

to another, where the comments that ostensibly clarified the code were more hindrance than help. But

what does one do when the comments are the code? Does one correct the code to agree with the

comments, or the comments to the code, or perhaps ignore both? Where does the meaning (the purpose

of the computer program) lie: in its stated objectives, in its computer function, or in the user's

application?

Once again, notice how this problem doesn't arise for art, because art cannot state its own

objective, nor function without an observer, so that meaning collapses to the user and whatever he

wants to do with it.7 But for texts, for literature, this self-referential and hence recursive dilemma

affects all levels of meaning: the authorial objective, the computational function, and the user's

application. Nor is it just a secular problem for literature critics only, but for Biblical scholars as well.

Therefore the doctrine of perspecuity is as much a curse as it is a blessing, for even as it solves the

hermeneutical circle by explaining itself clearly, it can also deny meaning to those “who are of the

flesh.” And by most accounts, there are more denied than those given understanding. But how can this

be? Can we not make progress in hermeneutics if we can learn from past mistakes, if we can

7 Richard Rorty p375 “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” Princeton: Princeton U, 1979. argues that the tendency for philosophy to use ocular analogies for certainties of knowledge arises from this confusion of art and meaning. P375, Lack of mediation is here confused with accuracy of mediation. The absence of description is confused with a privilege attaching to a certain description....Or to shift to visual metaphors, it is the notion of having reality unveiled to us, not as in a glass darkly, but with some unimaginable sort of immediacy which would make discourse and description superfluous.


objectively analyze the text, if we can categorize approaches? The purpose of this paper is to

demonstrate how the personal nature of recursion confounds objective analysis, how the incarnational

nature of recursion confounds functional analysis, and how the atemporal nature of recursion

confounds historical analysis. For perspecuity is a doctrine far deeper than perhaps even the Reformers

realized, and indeed, presupposes the entire Trinity.

C. Approach of this paper

The traditional goal of interpretation was that of stability, finding the objective meaning of a text

that is true for all people at all times. E.D. Hirsch places the intention of the author as the stabilizing

meaning of the text, which we, the scholar, approximate as we understand the words themselves.8 In

contrast, L. Wittgenstein abandons the abstract search for authorial intent and pragmatically asks how a

text functions, finding the meaning in the practical application of the text.9 H. Gadamer prefers to see

the greater significance of a text not in the misty past of the author's mind, nor in the mundane use (or

uselessness) of the present, but in the dynamic fusion of the author's horizon with that of the reader, all

the while respecting the historical path connecting the two,10 a fusion, in S. Fish's view, which becomes

that of the reader's community.11 V. Poythress, following J. Frame's trinitarian categories,12 sees these

three main views –author, function, response—as characteristic aspects of a threefold communication

act,13 where the reason for the three-foldness lies in correspondence or analogy to the God who created

communication and embodies the ideal of communication.

While this is a neat solution to the three views, it seems a little too tidy, as if it is an external

theological category imposed upon the data. Poythress, following C. Van Til14, uses a theological a

8 Eric Donald Hirsch, “Validity in Interpretation” New Haven: Yale U Press, 1967.9 Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Philosophical Investigations” New York: Macmillan, 196810 Anthony Thisleton “The Two Horizons” Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980.11 Stanley Fish, “Is there a text in this class?” Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 1980.12 John Frame “The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God” Phillilpsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1987.13 Vern Poythress, (unpublished) “Our Meaning: A God-Centered Approach to Language.” 2009.14 Cornelius Van Til “An Introduction to Systematic Theology” Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1974.


priori to establish his trinities, but why should non-theological documents or non-christian scholars

agree to the number three instead of the numbers two or four? R. Sheldon has argued that there is a

mathematical necessity for trinities whenever dealing with recursive (and therefore, holy) subjects, the

principal ones being God, Man and the Word.15 Since communication acts can easily be recursive, as

well as incorporating any of the three holy things, it would seem that Poythress' trinities are a necessary

though perhaps not a sufficient condition for a complete description of a communicative text.

To illustrate or justify the Sheldon hypothesis concerning the Poythress conjecture, we analyze

recursive text from the Bible, showing how there remain serious difficulties with Hirsch's,

Wittgenstein's or Gadamer's approach. We then attempt Poythress' trinitarian multiperspectival

approach to see if the issues raised can be adequately solved. This analysis demonstrates that a

trinitarian view is not just convenient, but required to properly understand the meaning. And in some

cases, it introduces new meanings, new functions, new responses that were not accessible through the

other, singular methods. We begin with a historical summary of the three philosophical views in

section 2 showing their convergence to a problem addressed by C. Van Til, and then turn to a linguistic

analysis of recursive text in section 3 demonstrating the deficiencies of the various methods. Finally in

section 4 we attempt a synthesis, that hopefully demonstrates the necessity of a trinitarian foundation,

and thereby a defense as well as a return to the Reformation doctrine of perspecuity.

2. Philosophical roots.

Although we describe authorial intent as Hirsch's, or functional use as Wittgenstein's, or reader

response as Gadamer's, each of these hermeneutical philosophies draws on a taproot of preceding

philosophy. Thiselton (1980) and Hoy (1978) expend considerable pages of their respective books

tracing this connection, and somewhat surprisingly without quoting the other, they derive roughly

15 Robert Sheldon, “The Holy Grail of Post Modernism” at http://rbsp.info/WTS/The_Holy_Grail_of_PoMo.pdf accessed 5/26/09.

http://rbsp.info/WTS/The_Holy_Grail_of_PoMo.pdf




similar intellectual genealogies. Rorty (1979) also discusses the lineage, but as a practicing

philosopher, his purpose is more polemical than historical. Here is our brief historical survey.

A. Classical Roots

The Medieval and Classical tradition in philosophy, whether of Platonic or Aristotelian flavor,

saw Truth/Knowledge as a unitary goal of educational Trivium: Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric.

Whenever any of these disciplines sought a different goal, they were roundly criticized. Both Plato and

Aristotle seemed to reserve their greatest invective for the Sophists, who valued Rhetoric for its social

and political benefits (what it does) rather than its spiritual and unifying benefits (what it is). With the

Christianization of the Roman world, all of these techniques came over into Christendom, merely by

exchanging the Greek goals with Christ. Although there was much development throughout the

Medieval period, the first major crisis came with the Enlightenment, and the breakdown of the

Medieval synthesis. Manifold induction vied with unitary deduction for the claim to truth, and rhetoric

lost its pre-eminent position in the Trivium since argumentation could easily be trumped by

experimentation (eg, Aristotle's arguments that heavy objects fall faster than light objects could be

disproved in 15 seconds with an experiment in Pisa.16)

In other words, the pre-Socratic dilemma of the one-and-the-many had resurfaced, and

philosophers were at a loss to reconcile the new sciences with the old synthesis. Just as in classical

Greece, skeptics proliferated in this now uncertain environment with the most famous being the

apostate David Hume. Later on it would be called an epistemological critique, but the Medieval

synthesis did not compartmentalize its philosophy, it was equally a critique of ethics, of theology, and

of metaphysics, which is what made it attractive to atheists. In this environment, Kant's 1781 Critique

of Pure Reason marks a watershed, solving the confusion of skepticism (as well as rescuing theology

16 The Pisa experiment, at http://www.endex.com/gf/buildings/ltpisa/ltpnews/physnews1.htm accessed 5/26/09.

http://www.endex.com/gf/buildings/ltpisa/ltpnews/physnews1.htm


from the atheists, he believed) with an essential duality between Science and Thought.17 That is, the

world of science and experiments was irrevocably separated from the world of mind and logic by the

untrustworthy senses that mediated between the two. Kant's solution was not universally admired, and

this led to Hegel's development of idealism (~1816) and his lectures on history (1822-23), that inverted

the role between the mind and the sciences, arguing that there was a dialectic of Mind working through

time that ever produced dualities and braided their syntheses back together again.

Therefore by the middle of the 19th century, we had three basic solutions to the problem of

knowledge: an (monotheist) Enlightenment faith in Science; a Kantian Dualism; and a (pantheist)

Hegelian faith in Mind/Process. It was also at the same time, and perhaps under the same influences

that Hegel sought to find a historical solution to the one-and-many problem, and that Historicism was

founded as a way to resolve the vacuum left by the vanished Medieval synthesis. That is, with a

progressive belief in the self-improvement of man, old traditions seemed empty and worthless, yet

without traditions, much of 19th century life made no sense. (It was only in the 20th century that a

complete sociological break with Christianity was accomplished.) Out of that vacuum came the need or

the desire to define humanity historically, accepting both his past and his future as definitive of his

being.18 Unlike the skeptics or the atheists, it was these historicists who made the first attempt to

reintroduce Biblical traditions back into the definition of man, yet without a distinctly Medieval

synthesis. (Both Catholic and Protestant traditions of the time were still essentially Medieval in their

use and application of the Biblical texts.) Not unsurprisingly, the methodology of using Biblical texts,

or the “hermeneutics” of the historicists divided up into the same three camps we have identified for

philosophy. This is the juncture at which Hoy and Thiselton pick up the story.

17 Immanuel Kant, “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics”, transl. Gary Hatfield, Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2004. at http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521535359 (accessed 11/7/08).

18 Thiselton p71, quoting Lord Acton “The historical revolution of the nineteenth century was a bigger event, a bigger change in the character of human thought, than that `revival of learning' which we associate with the Renaissance.”

http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521535359


B. Hermeneutical Roots

The three main camps tend to appropriate phrases and concepts from each other, muddying their

emphases. So while they may all be characterized as “post-Kantian”, they would put different stresses

on the dualism, effectively making it either all Science, all Mind, or essentially incompatible.

The “objectivists” I would say were the inheritors of the Enlightenment skeptics, the camp that

included Herder, Ranke, Troeltsch, Dilthey (and Bultmann, by most evangelical critiques), who

emphasized the objectivity of science as the proper way to do history. They tended to view with

suspicion the miracles of the Biblical texts, and saw their role as being objective critics standing over

history. While it perhaps does disservice to Husserl and Hirsch, the desire for making “intention” as

objective as possible is clearly in this same tradition.

The “dualists” followed in the tradition that included Kant, Schliermacher, Ritschl and many

Lutherans, (Thiselton includes Bultmann in this category19) who saw piety as removed from facts, and

therefore psychologized the Biblical texts. These men hated atheism, and earnestly sought piety, so that

the importance of the texts lies in their subjective use, not in their objective reality so that the one-and-

the-many problem is transferred from epistemology and metaphysics to ethics and morality. Truth is

ultimately about behaving properly. For lack of a better organizational structure I put Wittgenstein in

this category, simply because when he departed from positivism, he embraced a functional relativism

with pietistic overtones, yet grounded in an objectivist linguistics.

Finally, we come to a more recent group of Hegelian idealists that find history itself to be a

unifying theme. These would probably include Marxists, Karl Barth and Neo-Orthodox, present day

post-modernists, and Wolfgang Pannenberg, for whom Thiselton shows great deference. Once again,

for lack of a better category, I would place H.-G. Gadamer in this category as well, though of course,

19 Thiselton p 75, quoting Pannenberg “Under the influence of positivism and neo-Kantianism....Bultmann carries out this distinction by relegating the early Christian Easter message totally to the significance side...”


much more nuanced than the Marxists. But because we are in the midst of a Hegelian renaissance,20 this

category is amorphous and tends to be a catch-all for philosophers who aren't “objectivists” or “neo-

Kantian dualists” and have a deep respect for “process”.

Hoy divides up the pie somewhat differently, looking instead at where the authors place their

epistemological confidence in their need to escape the “hermeneutical circle”.21 Since Kant located

epistemology in the realm of the mind, Hoy calls Kant an intentionalist, someone who locates meaning

in authorial intent. Then those who agree with Kant, such as Schliermacher, Dilthey, Husserl, Betti, and

Hirsch, or those that depressingly conclude that because the world of the mind is disconnected from

science that it can never be useful, Nietzsche, Freud, and the positivists, are all alike intentionalists.22

This would collapse our Thiselton categories of “objectivists” and “dualists” into one.

Then Hoy carves out from this group those who hold the intention of the author to be meaningless,

including later Wittgenstein and modern literary theorists,23 Wimsatt and Beardsley, in this category.

However something has to take the place of the unifying intention, and the objective linguistics of the

black-on-white text or “structuralism” of Saussure and Levi-Strauss is the answer. Fish mounts a

devastating critique on structuralism,24 which in the 21st century now appears to be a fad that failed to

take root, nevertheless, Wittgenstein remains a potent critique of intentionalist and objectivist

positions.25

Finally, Hoy classifies as “historicists” those who look neither to the structure, nor to the intent,

but to the process itself, to history and tradition to find the meaning, including Heidegger, Gadamer and

20 Lane Tipton in his admission interview was asked what was the greatest danger to the church. He replied “Hegelian Idealism”. He argues that while Machen battled Schliermachian post-Kantian theology, VanTil was consumed with Barthian neo-Orthodox Hegelian idealism. Today's battles are much more frequently with a neo-Orthodox or Post-Modern Hegelianism than Machen's battles.

21 Hoy, p522 Hoy p 1123 See a classification in Robert Scholes p 15 “Semiotics and Interpretation” New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982. 24 Stanley Fish “Is There a Text in this Class?”25 Hoy p 37


Hoy himself in this class.26 The debt to Hegel needs to be paid, which Thiselton acknowledges, even if

Hoy seems reluctant.27 This aversion to acknowledging Hegel is quite revealing, for Hegel melded

philosophy with religion, presenting his analysis with evangelical zeal. To use Hegel without reference

then, is to misrepresent his philosophy as separate from his faith, which Hoy (and his colleague Richard

Rorty28) as tenured university professors must insist, while Thiselton as tenured theologian must deny.

C. Hegelian Roots

Rorty, along with Thisleton and Hoy, counted himself a supporter and expositor of Heidegger and

Gadamer, but with yet another way to slice up the pie. Since Rorty was a Professor of Analytic

Philosophy, Hoy a Distinguished Professor of Humanities (as well as Professor of Philosophy), and,

Thiselton a theologian, it is helpful to arrange them on a continuum, with Rorty being the logical

counterpoint to Thiselton with Hoy in the middle. Taking his cue from Wittgenstein and Kuhn, Rorty

argues that there are “normal” or “commensurate” forms of conversation or science or dialogue, and

“abnormal” or “revolutionary” or “paradigm changing” forms. Epistemology is the former,

hermeneutics the latter. If by using our existing methods we can understand what is being said, we

don't need hermeneutics. It is only when we encounter something abnormal, incomprehensible, out of

reach of our limited toolset that we then begin to employ hermeneutics.29

26 Hoy p6327 Hoy p67 writes in classic Hegelian terms “Dialogue cannot be just a question of persuasive rhetoric and self-

gratification in the winning of arguments. The purpose is not to win arguments but to seek the truth. Accordingly in hermeneutical understanding a text can also be brought into dialogue if the interpreter really attempts to follow what the text is saying rather than merely projecting his own ideas into the text.”

28 Hoy, publishing in 1978, gives Rorty two footnotes and an acknowledgment, whereas Rorty, publishing in 1979, mentions Hoy only in the acknowledgments, perhaps because he concludes by saying Hoy's approach is fundamentally flawed.

29 Rorty p316 “Thus epistemology proceeds on the assumption that all contributions to a given discourse are commensurable. Hermeneutics is largely a struggle against that assumption....Hermeneutics sees the relations between various discourses as those of strands in a possible conversation, a conversation which presupposes no disciplinary matrix which unites the speakers, but where the hope of agreement is never lost so long as the conversation lasts. ..Epistemology sees the hope of agreement as a token of the existence of common ground, which perhaps unbeknown to the speakers, unites them in a common rationality. For hermeneutics, to be rational is to be willing to refrain from epistemology--from thinking that there is a special set of terms in which all contributions to the conversation should be put--and to be willing to pick up the jargon of the interlocutor rather than translating it into one's own. For epistemology, to be rational is to find the proper set of terms into which all the contributions should be translated if agreement is to become possible. For epistemology, conversation is implicit inquiry.


Rorty goes on to make a second distinction, orthogonal to and independent of the one between

epistemology and hermeneutics, a distinction between “systematic” or “constructivist” philosophies,

and “edifying” or “deconstructivist” philosophies. The former have a view, the latter have an attitude.

The value of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, he says, is their concern for edification, not education; they

don't pretend to give us knowledge, but exhort us to a love of knowledge.30

Combining these two distinctions, then, Rorty praises Gadamer (and Goethe, Kierkegaard,

Santayana, William James, Dewey, the later Wittgenstein, the later Heidegger) for providing an

impetus for abnormal or paradigm-changing conversations in a way that edifies or improves the

meaning we obtain through other means. What Gadamer doesn't provide, says Rorty, is another scheme

for extracting meaning.31 And here is where Rorty parts company with both Hoy and Hegel. For Hegel

saw the purpose of dialectic, the purpose of all this conversation, as leading to a knowledge of the

Absolute, while Hoy writes in his foreword that hermeneutics is the foundation for inquiry and

essential for humanistic thinking.32 For these Gadamerians, it would seem that the greater the

philosophical rigor, the less the admission that the conversation, the dialectic, the journey possesses a

purposive goal; and conversely, the more religious the profession, the less the admission that this focus

on process relativizes the product.

For hermeneutics, inquiry is routine conversation. Epistemology views the participants as united in what Oakeshott calls an universitas--a group united by mutual interests in achieving a common end. Hermeneutics views them as united in what he calls a societas--persons whose paths through life have fallen together, united by civility rather than by a common goal, much less by a common ground.

30 Rorty p372. One way to see edifying philosophy as the love of wisdom is to see it as the attempt to prevent conversation from degenerating into inquiry, into an exchange of views. Edifying philosophers can never end philosophy, but they can help prevent it from attaining the secure path of a science..

31 Rorty p380 I have been insisting that we should not try to have a successor subject to epistemology, but rather try to free ourselves from the notion that philosophy must center around the discovery of a permanent framework for inquiry. In particular, we should free ourselves from the notion that philosophy can explain what science leaves unexplained.

32 Hoy p. vii. Whereas in earlier hermeneutics the circle is used primarily to describe the understanding of texts, in the hermeneutic philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer the circle becomes a fundamental principle of man's understanding of his own nature and situation. Understanding, and with it the hermeneutic circle, becomes a condition for the possibility of human experience and inquiry. The discovery and description of such conditions are the task of critical philosophy. The term "critical" in the title, then, suggests that the circle is not a merely adventitious feature of the criticism of literary texts. On the contrary, it is a category discovered by critical philosophy to be essential and indispensable to all humanistic thinking.


VanTil's critique of all these philosophies, whether they be content or process oriented, is that they

have polarized either into the objectified, homogenized, rationalized, depersonalized, monist “truth” of

scientism, or into the subjective, schizophrenic, pantheistic, temporalized “truth” of the process, or

worst of all, both simultaneously.33 And while VanTil is criticized for not having provided a solution

for his critique, his students John Frame and Vern Poythress have attempted to do so.

Therefore it would appear that whether Hirsch, Wittgenstein or Gadamer's heremeneutics, or

Rorty, Hoy or Thiselton's analyses are examined, they all have their roots in 18th and early 19th century

philosophies, they are all addressing the problem of the one-and-the-many, they are all invoking truth/

meaning at the author, text or reception level, they are all confronted with Van Til's Trinitarian critique

of epistemology/metaphysics,34 they all fail the recursive test, and they are all incorporated into the

Frame/Poythress constructive response.

3. Linguistic Analysis

In linguistic terms, there are several types and sizes of recursive text found in the Bible. Recursion

at each level challenges some of the assumptions made by the 19th century philosophies and the 20th

century hermeneutics. We begin with the smallest scale and work up to the larger scales that dominate

the philosophical discussions. This is not an exhaustive list, but one that I hope will stimulate thinking

about recursion and its ubiquity, as well as its use in riddles.

A. Morphemic

A text can be recursive even at the level of morphemes. The opening poem of Margolin's “The

Little Pun Book”35 began, “I should be punished for every pun I shed,” which clearly refers back to

itself at the morpheme level, though a little reflection shows that it also needs the lexical and semantic

levels to achieve its humor. The ambiguity of a pun requires the listener to reprocess the morpheme in

33 VanTil “Introduction..”34 Lane Tipton “” PhD Thesis.35 Robert Margolin “The Little Pun Book” Peter Pauper Press, 1960.


his mind, and in so doing, draws attention to itself. This occurs at the level of morpheme processing,

though in this case, the lexical definition refers to this recursion, making it doubly recursive.

The higher level recursion doesn't absorb or dissolve the lower levels, but rather enhances them,

making puns a useful way to draw attention to words and meaning. It is perhaps impossible for

recursion to avoid involving larger linguistic units, simply because recursion itself involves semantic

and textual recognition. And as I endeavor to show in this paper, recursion purposely entangles larger

meanings with smaller units, providing either a compact way to say several things in the space of one,

or a way of making closed statements open-ended.36 In both cases, meaning is multiplied by recursion,

ambiguity is increased, while precision is reduced.37

In the Bible morphemic recursion is particularly found in the Old Testament, which may perhaps

be due to the Semitic practice (unlike the Greek practice of building upon roots with prefixes) of using

three letter roots for all verbs without vowels so that one can find multiple meanings for the same set of

consonants.38 Some of the more famous examples occur in the prophets,39 where it is God himself who

uses puns! Amos 8:1-3a (ESV):

This is what the Lord GOD showed me: behold, a basket of summer fruit. And he said, "Amos, what do you see?" And I said, "A basket of summer fruit." Then the LORD said to me, "The end has come upon my people Israel;”

36 Both Gadamer and Derrida make a point of language being open-ended. And while heavily employing recursion in their argumentation, they fail to see recursion as being the linguistic unit that causes this condition. Thus they indiscriminately think all language is a “game” with open-ended outcomes, rather than very special types of language. That is, they do not discriminate the holy from the profane. Hoy p 84 “Derrida's insistence on openness is similar to Gadamer's notion of openness....Both Derrida and Gadamer reject the possibility and utility of projecting a totalization of experience. Gadamer wishes to avoid the notion of a Hegelian completion to experience (in absolute self-certitude) and the final end of history. Derrida argues that totalization is impossible not because of an empirical impossibility, but because of the finite nature of the game."

37 Scott B. Noegel, “Puns and Pundits” Bethesda: CDL Press, 2000. ( p163) writes “There is an element of deception inherent in word play. It masks other menings and when employed frequently and in close proximity, it can confuse readers and compoel them to interpret the ambiguity in ways that might mislead. Moreover, word plays manipulate memory by forcing readers to recall through association and to bring into contrast figures, themes, and events.”

38 Gary A. Rendsberg (Noegel p 154) “While every language in the world has the potential for word play, the Hebrew language is particularly well suited for this device. I refer to the fact that various sets of proto-Semitic phonemes have coalesced in Hebrew. The Hebrew s, for example, represents three proto-Semitic phonemes /s/, /z/ and /d/.”

39 Stefan Schorch “Between Science and Magic: The function and roots of paronomasia in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible” in (Noegel p205) “The choice of the corpus of prophetic books and my restriction to them seems appropriate insofar as the attestations of puns are most abundant and widespread in these texts.”


The Hebrew “end” ַהֵקץ and “fruit” ָקִיץ, were near homonyms, which makes the visual image a

symbol for a more abstract concept less conducive to graphics. Notice how the construction of a

symbol is based on a morphological ambiguity, how higher level semantic meaning is constructed out

of lower level recursion. Also note that near homonyms are generally considered poor puns,

“groaners”, examples of humorists straining to make something funny which wasn't.

Applying our three schools of philosophy to these examples, we see the difficulties engendered by

puns. Hirsch would say that a pun was the author's intent to say one thing and mean another, so that the

text and intent become separated. As most foreigners can attest, humor is the most difficult aspect of a

foreign language to grasp, so that often the intent may be lost entirely. And in the case of “groaners”,

even mother-tongue speakers may find the intention unworthy of consideration. Since the entire humor

of a pun hinges on the temporal disconnect between reading and rereading, Hirsch's insistence on a

direct connection between intent and meaning effectively destroys humor, as well as flattens the

sharpness of a double-entendre into a gray mush of simultaneous ambiguity. More precisely, if an

author can say one thing and mean another, then there is theoretically no end to the plurality of

meanings that can be extracted from a well-constructed pun (e.g. James Joyce's Ulysses), mixing

authorial intent with uncertain reader response.

We pass over the structuralist (and Derrida's anti-structuralist40) difficulties with puns whose

humor is contingent upon the ephemeral vocalized context 41 and not the text-as-such, and ask with

Wittgenstein how the pun functions in communication. So in the first example, the pun is used as

humor, light reading, entertainment, or perhaps in cocktail conversations. Puns are certainly not used in

American society for legal texts, academic discourse, or any serious communication where ambiguity

is shunned. Then the use in Amos is puzzling, for it does exactly what we said we would never do,

40 Hoy p 82.41 I once told a German colleague that my father's favorite Latin motto was “semper ubi, sub ubi”, and achieved only a

blank stare. Puns must be verbalized to be understood.


inserting ambiguity into a prophetic, apocalyptic, deadly serious discourse. Wittgenstein might object

that Amos was a different “language game” from modern English, but then a second difficulty arises,

because the pun is used to fashion an image, a symbol.42

For symbols by their nature are not functions, just as subjects are not verbs. That is, just as

Saussure argues that words are symbols for something else, and finding that mapping is the function of

linguistics, so Wittgenstein focusses on the mapping, the function as the key to meaning. But what we

find in Amos is the opposite process, the pun being mapped to an image that becomes an even bigger

symbol for something else. If we attempt to find the meaning of a symbol by describing its function,

and its function turns out to be making a symbol, then have we found the meaning? And in a deeper

sense, many of the prophecies in the Bible have larger symbolic meaning than the surface use, so that

Wittgenstein's approach can never finish without becoming a systematic theology of the entire Bible,

which would then be indistinguishable from Hirsch's approach.

Finally, we consider Gadamer's response to puns. A pun makes us laugh, or more often, groan.

Laughter is a complex emotion, usually arising from a time-delay in comprehension of discordant

ideas. That's why comedians work so hard on their timing. But few comedians want “groaners” in their

shtick, because the audience won't tolerate it. That is, if the discordant idea is too discordant, or too

delayed, the audience turns from enjoyment to disdain. Audiences, as every comedian knows, are

fickle. So where in Gadamer's fusion of historical horizons, is this millisecond timing, this thing that

changes the audience response? Gadamer strains to prove that his historicism will neither turn into

relativism nor into Hegelian totalization (the principal critiques against his method), and yet a pun

42 Schorch (Noegel p205-207) writes a chapter on the function of puns, arguing that a Wittgenstein approach is needed to balance the purely descriptive discussion that preceded. He argues against Hirsch, “A pun, therefore, is a menace to the textual coherence of the “grammatical” text (the “main” text) on the one hand, but may generate a new text on the other....With regard to the intention of the utterance, this text competes with the grammatical text. In some cases, the sense of the “pun-text” even may superimpose he sense of the grammatical text. The following functions of puns can be distinguished: (1) emphatic; (2) exegetic; and (3) symbolic. In the first case—the emphatic function—the pun is arbitrary and only underlines the sense of the main text in which it is embedded. In the second case—the exegetic function—the pun creates a new semantic level. In the third case—the symbolic fuction00the pun-text is the symbol of a non-linguistic phenomenon.”


destabilizes his carefully constructed position. Fickle audiences demonstrate complete relativity of

meaning, and conversely, millisecond timing makes his tempered historicism appear as eschatological

as Hegel's.

The open-endedness of a pun also undermines Gadamer's carefully constructed textual meaning,

slipping dangerously toward Derrida's denial of meaning altogether. This of course, was Hirsch's

critique, to which Hoy's defense of Gadamer becomes a group confession of the inadequacy of all three

methods.43

B. Lexical

Silva points out that of the 8000 words in the Hebrew lexicon, a full 1300 can be considered

hapax legomena, appearing only once.44 He proposes that the redundancy of language means that any

word should carry the least amount of weight possible.45 Which is to say, one attempts to discover the

meaning of a hapax from the context, rather than resort to neighboring languages or entymological

analysis.46 In practice, this means there is a circularity in the definition of words that makes them

recursive.47

With such hapax, Hirsch's “authorial intent” is apparently lost forever. Wittgenstein's use is

limited to the gyrations of creative scholars who make a living finding ever more obscure meanings for

the words. And Gadamer's readers generally yawn and move on. There just is precious little to be

43 Hoy p43-4 Furthermore, the appeal to the coherence with the rest of experience allows his potential opponent to point out that experience also supports the idea that literary texts of past ages are understood differently by different ages. There is, in fact, intuitive evidence from both historicism and objectivism. Hirsh's first objection, therefore, cannot be persuasive, for the appeal to normal intuitions works both ways.

44 Silva, p 42.45 Silva (p154) refers to this as “Joos Law” and argues that modern communication theory dealing with noisy signals

revealed “the need for redundancy in communication.”46 I have actually heard sermons that use the Alfred Nobel's patented neologism “dynamite” to explain the meaning of the

Greek dunamis, as Silva (p45) records.47 Silva p137, in a chapter entitled “Determining Meaning”, writes “In either case, our student will eventually realize that

while we are in some sense dependent on Bauer for our exegesis, Bauer himself was priorly dependent on the work of exegesis. This problem is but one more manifestation of the phenomenon we often dignify with the phrase `the hermeneutical circle.'”


gained in studying hapax either in isolation or in the canon of scripture, which amounts to the same

thing. Perhaps in a wider ANE context one can say something, but then it is not the text of the Bible

that is doing the communicating, which was the whole point of these philosophical approaches.

However, it is not only hapax legomena that have this recursive property, but well-attested words

that by all accounts should have no debate. An early example is eretz, “Earth”, occurring 2499 times in

2188 verses, and found in the Gen 1:2 phrase “the earth was formless and void,” wahaaretz hayetah

tohu wabohu, ְוָהָאֶרץ ָהְיָתה ֹתהו ָובֹהו, where tohu appears 25 times in 19 verses, and bohu (ignoring the

waw consecutive) appears 3 times. The problem is that this appears to be a description, or a definition

of eretz, but 8 verses later we are given another definition that contradicts this one, Gen 1:10 “God

called the dry land eretz.” which he had just taken out of the waters, hence the contrast with “dry”.

Now it is not unusual for a word to have two or more subheadings, what is unusual is to have two,

somewhat contradictory definitions in the span of 8 verses. Nor are these definitions peripheral to the

plot, for the opening line of the paragraph, of the book, indeed of the entire Bible, begins with the well-

known phrase, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the eretz.”

We have seen countless Sunday School illustrations that show a smiling Adam standing behind a

bush with a blue sky above him, and Gen 1:1 emblazoned across it, but how could this be “the Earth” if

it were “formless and void”? At best we can say that eretz changes as we go through the chapter, as

God increasingly adds to and modifies His creation. Perhaps it would be more accurate to translate Gen

1:1 “In the beginning God evolved the heavens and the eretz.” Or perhaps if the referent clearly

changes, it is inaccurate to give it such a fixed lexical meaning and we should search for a more general

term to carry the temporal change. Perhaps it is better to translate “In the beginning God created

spacetime and matter,” making the resonance with Augustine and Einstein explicit, while undermining

the entire debate over 6-day creation.


Linguistically speaking, are not 2498 attestations nearly solid proof that eretz means “Earth”? Yes,

but even more compelling is the logical contradiction of Gen 1:2, where eretz is defined to be formless

and void, something that no definition of “Earth” ever is or was. Furthermore, why should the eretz that

exists from Genesis 2 to Revelation 20, be the same as the eretz of the second verse? Is not the whole

meaning of Genesis 1 that God was doing something to the eretz which will not be undone until the end

of time? Then the current stasis of the word cannot be normative of the doctrines of Creation and

Consummation, lest it distort their meaning and theology.

But notice what I have just claimed. I have just said that the notion that God changed a referent

means that we must augment the lexical meaning of a word used in an obscure phrase. But when did

we become aware that the referent was changing? Only in the past 100 years as cosmology and

geochronology became developed. So a changing science leads to a changing understanding of God's

eternal words and thus a changed lexicon which then informs and changes our science.48 The

hermeneutical circle operates even at the lexical level.

Hirsch, were he to argue from a secular viewpoint, would say that Moses (or JEDP) was the

author of Genesis, and could no more intend to convey Einstein's spacetime-matter creation than he

could intend Augustine's ex nihilo creation. These were not options available to the author, and

therefore cannot be valid meanings of the text. And whatever tohu and bohu mean with respect to eretz,

they are forever obscure, hidden in the mind of the author.

Nor could Wittgenstein find any use of this text to support modern cosmology, though he would

no doubt be amazed at the sheer number of uses this text has been put to.49 As the foundational text not

48 The influence of the Bible on modern science is profound. Many books can be filled with anecdotes of scientists who drew their inspiration for their scientific innovations from the Bible. But the simplest indicator of that essential influence is to note, as the late Stanley Jaki wrote, that modern science, despite promising beginnings, did not develop in the civilizations of China, India, Greece or Islam, but in the Christianized West. (Stanley Jaki, “The Savior of Science”)

49 This is the funniest anecdote I heard on this text. It appears that a WTS Mdiv student always wrote sermons critical of the Catholic Church. Tiring of this, his homiletics prof assigned him Gen 1:1 for his sermon text. On the appointed day, he began by reading the text, then preaching. “We learn two things from this passage: that in the beginning God created the world; and that He did not create the Catholic Church.”


just for the Bible but for all creation, it has been called upon by every doctrine and heresy since Moses.

One wonders if Popper's positivist dictum50 also applies to Wittgenstein, “a text that has been used for

everything is useful for nothing.” That is, Wittgenstein's attempt to find meaning by examining

function is drowned out by the noise.

It would appear that Gadamer is the most smug with this passage, happy to see the many uses and

applications of the text. If a text is intended to change people and cultures, this is the text for it.

Nevertheless, it should trouble him that opposite and conflicting conclusions are drawn from the self-

same text. Young earth creationists take the fixed and well attested lexical meaning of eretz and yom to

mean that science must be wrong, that there was no development from Gen 1 through Rev 20. Rather,

the poorer attestation of tohu and bohu must be modified to make them consistent with a fixed eretz,

and not the other way around. Old earth creationists, such as Hugh Ross, find the ordering of Genesis

only explicable by the Big Bang, with eretz adjusted to fit tohu and bohu. Thus different lexicons are

being constructed out of different readings of the text, until the self-same text is virtually

unrecognizable in its two interpretations.

The two solutions of YEC and OEC are fusions of the historical horizons of past and present, yet

the widely divergent horizons are temporally simultaneous, suggesting that time is not the only factor

controlling interpretation. These antagonists are spatially distinct, the same person does not read from

two lexicons, but if it is possible for two opposite hermeneutical positions to arise from theologically

identical twins, then there can be no limit to the number of potential “fusions” and no avoiding the

stigma of relativism. Therefore from a thousand such lexical nicks and cuts, Gadamer's ideal of a

general hermeneutical method degenerates into incoherence and noise. Recursion is a tremendous

amplifier, and if there is no external control, feedback inevitably produces noise. On the other

50 Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, London: Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1963, pp. 33-39. at http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html accessed 4/17/09. See also Hoy's comments on the superiority of Popper's falsification over Hirsch's positivist verification principle (Hoy, p34.)

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html


unfortunate hand, Hegel's strict control for noise resulted in Absolute Idealism, which Gadamer is

studious to avoid. So we see again how riddle words destabilize Gadamer's method.

I think you can see that what I am calling recursion, is just a special case of the hermeneutical

circle, one that is tighter than usual, looping back on itself more compactly. As we move toward larger

linguistic units, the difference between recursion and the circle will become more distinct, moving

away from the philosophical problems that interest Hirsch, Wittgenstein and Gadamer, and moving

toward theological categories.

C. Syntactical

A text can be recursive at the sentence or syntactical level. To a certain extent, Gen 1:2 was a

syntactic recursion, because the two parts of the sentence didn't seem to hang together, though I

classified it as lexical because the conflict is resolved at the level of words. Some sentences, however,

can't be cured with a lexicon. For example, Epimenides was a Cretan philosopher who loved to tease

his audience with the recursive sentence: “Cretans are always liars.” Paul quotes him approvingly, with

the inspired gloss “What he says is true.”51 We are now left with a recursive conundrum, curiously the

same one which left Bertrand Russell speechless 19 centuries later. For if Epimenides is truthful, then

he is a liar; but if he is a liar, he cannot be truthful.

Now admittedly, Russell wanted desperately to prove that religion was a misuse of language, and

if one obeyed the rules of positivism (no synthetic a priori) then all metaphysical mumbo-jumbo would

vanish, and textual meaning would be even more obvious than Hirsch says. So what this recursive

sentence accomplished, with the help of Gödel's mathematical treatment, was the demonstration of an

essential ambiguity along with the conversion of Wittgenstein from a disciple of Russell to a proponent

of “language games.”

51 St Paul in Titus 1:12-13 (ESV) “One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, "Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons." This testimony is true.”


For Hirsch, the intention of Epimenides was to not make sense, whereas the intention of St Paul

was to make sense of it, and since these two authors cannot be reconciled, the text will take on a Post-

Modern existence with eternal “scare quotes.” In essence, this was both Hirsch and Wimsatt &

Beardsley's solution when they considered the lying subject, and invented a virtual speaker for the text,

one who believed the lie.52 This was also Russell's approach to the logical contradiction, inserting yet

another layer of logic between the syntax and meaning that declared “recursions aren't really logic”. So

also Bahnsen's PhD thesis described how inserting buffer layers enables humans to lie to themselves.53

But in an elegant mathematical proof, Gödel demonstrated that no amount of buffers can remove

the force of the contradiction. 54Applying his approach to Hirsch's attempt to establish a virtual speaker,

Gödel would then construct the sentence “Virtual speakers of contradictory statements are always

liars.” There is no escape from logic, or as St Paul would say, from the wrath of God against those who

suppress the truth.

Wittgenstein finds no use for people who misuse language, insisting that only “natural languages”

are worth discussion not these artificial philosophical constructions, preferring to discuss what the liar

is doing than what he means. But one feels that Russell's downfall was responsible for Wittgenstein's

cynicism, his about-face on positivism, and his pessimistic abandonment of truth.

Even Gadamer finds himself in a peculiar difficulty with liars, because a fusion of horizons does

not appear possible. Derrida takes the same Heidegger emphases and concludes that the horizon of

Aristotle's Law of Non-Contradiction must be abandoned, fused with a post-modern world of multiple

truths. Yet this solution undermines the entire project of Gadamer's to rediscover meaning in the

historic sense of the text. Two thousand years have passed since Epimenides, and Gödel demonstrates

52 Hirsch, p300?53 Bahsen, Gregory Lyle, “A conditional resolution of the apparent paradox of self-deception”, PhD Dissertation,

University of Southern California, 1979.54 Gödel, Kurt, “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme, I.” Monatshefte

für Mathematik und Physik 38: 173-98, 1931. see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incompleteness_theorems (accessed 11/7/08).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems


his paradox is further from resolution than ever. History has failed us.

D. Textual

So far we have looked at morphemic, lexical and syntactical recursion, now we consider recursion

on a paragraph or textual level. These can be as short as the parables of Jesus, or as long as the book of

Job. What they have in common is an essential ambiguity that causes interpreters to come to widely

different conclusions.

1) Parables

The previous analysis of Sheldon, suggests that double-valued solutions are a necessary

characteristic of a positive feedback recursion, and that the parables of Jesus almost invariably

demonstrate positive feedback.55 Which is to say that the parables are often talking about themselves in

such a way that the interpreter must accept or deny the proposition. Because of this feedback, any slight

presupposition or pre-understanding is amplified by the parable into one of two distinct and opposite

positions. When the disciples asked Jesus why he spoke in parables, his answer was revealing, Lk 8:10

To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’

Hirsch would not appreciate that the intention of an utterance was to be misunderstood. What if by

accident, one understood a parable? Then one had lost the intention, and according to Hirsch, had

missed the meaning.

Wittgenstein might say that the function of a parable was to separate the sheep from the goats, a

litmus test for residents of the kingdom of God. Yet even after recognizing the function, it was still

impossible for Pharisees to play this language game. It was a game whose rules excluded certain people

from playing, which would be odd if it were not also so deadly. It makes the word “game” appear lame,

as if Wittgenstein also was one of the people who did not understand, who was himself excluded from

55 Robert Sheldon “The Bi-Modal Parables of Jesus”, at http://rbsp.info/WTS/ST721-ii.pdf accessed 4/17/09.



the kingdom by claiming it a triviality. Thus merely by analyzing the function of a parable, he finds

himself being judged by it. The security Wittgenstein sought in holding language at arm's length has

entrapped him, making his very tools into weapons of his destruction.

Finally we come to Gadamer, who, while rejoicing in the transformational power of parables,

would be completely at a loss to understand the quote of Isaiah. For how can a parable transform if it is

intended to condemn? And how can a parable condemn, if its interpretation is written down and made

freely available? That is, if pre-understandings determine our response, then what is to prevent the

education of our pre-understandings? If Gadamer's work is itself an explication of this process of

acceptance or response, presupposing that an audience can understand Truth and Method, then what is

to prevent him from explicating the parable? If Wittgenstein is trapped by his arm's length objectivity,

Gadamer is trapped by his cosy spiritualization.

2) Proverbs

In a similar manner, the Old Testament wisdom books demonstrate positive feedback leading to a

bimodal result. For example the opening verses of Proverbs proclaim Prov 1:1-7,

The proverbs of Solomon...to know wisdom and instruction...to understand a proverb and a saying, the words of the wise and their riddles. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.

So the book defines its purpose as declaring wisdom, and the first wisdom it declares is a fear of

YHWH, pagans need not apply. But then it turns around and says you are a fool if you don't want

wisdom (and YHWH). It is a black-and-white world, and if I come to the book to rummage around for

some Solomonic gems, I am confronted by the stern owner who demands I either buy the book or leave

the premises.

There is even a version of the Epimenides paradox found in Prov 26:4-5,

Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.


But with the added twist that it is in the form of command that compares us to fools. Hirsch, like

many Bible commentators would assume that the author must mean two different things in the

duplicated first stanza. But somehow our best efforts seem to not quite silence the feeling that Solomon

is laughing at our attempts, telling us that we do not escape the fool's self-condemnation. Nor is

Wittgenstein any help here, for it would seem that Solomon uses this to test whether we are fools or

not. And Gadamer, despite his best intentions to edify us, cannot escape its opposite, our condemnation

as fools. Wisdom literature has a way of refusing to box cleanly at arm's length, but puts us in a clench

and sweeps out our feet from under us.

3) Job

Likewise, the book of Job begins innocently enough with a pastoral narrative that builds our

empathy for the main character. But just when we begin to identify with him, a storm of calamities

descends and we are left gasping with Job at the end of the first chapter (1:21) “The Lord gives and the

Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Like a cliffhanger, we can't stop there, and read the

next chapter where it gets worse, ending with the three friends who sit with Job in shocked silence for

seven days and nights “for they saw that his suffering was very great.” Finally they begin to speak, and

Job's comforters say many theologically sound and proverbially wise things, whereas Job sounds

emotional, angry and often ungrateful. Just when we have given up on Job, God shows up.

The book is profoundly unsatisfying on multiple levels, not least of which is the “problem of evil”.

We might argue that each of characters take a different hermeneutical approach to the problem of evil,

with Elihu dismissing it as a metaphysical non-problem since God can't be evil; the three dualist friends

balancing good and evil; and Job defending a process view, with God and evil coexisting. Yet no

resolution is given to these different views, and instead God gives an eighth-grade quiz on the physical

sciences. The right answer escapes us, and I would venture, escapes Hirsch, Wittgenstein and Gadamer


as well. It is a riddle about a riddle.

4. Trinitarian Synthesis

A. Recursive Deconstruction

From the preceding section, we have shown how Biblical riddles stretch the hermeneutics of

Hirsch, Wittgenstein and Gadamer, because frequently recursion is used in the definitions, and

invariably in the polemic. This makes their own constructions sensitive to parasitical recursion. As we

discussed with regard to parables, the introduction of “active” circuit elements in a recursively

stabilized (negative feedback) argument will almost always destabilize it.56 This is how Gödel very

effectively demolished Russell's attempt to rationalize mathematics and language.

In our examples, we saw how Hirsch's “authorial intent” approach was destabilized by a lying or

deceptive subject, producing Epimenides paradox. Yet this is true even without moral approbation, as

Proverbs 26 or Luke 8 demonstrate. The problem with Hirsch, I would argue, is that he assumes that

he, the reader, is on a par with the author. He assumes that the author wants to be understood. He

assumes that the meaning is independent of the reader. In other words, Hirsch never views the author as

a living partner in a conversation that could be about himself. He does not treat the author as a person.

Recursion also neutralizes the baton Wittgenstein used to tame Epimenides; the wry smile that

says “I know the game you're playing”. For what if the game is “not letting Wittgenstein play”;

surrounding him with a hall of mirrors? What if the game involves something very important to him—

his honor or his life—would it still be a game? Proverbs holds out no hope for a fool, and yet to be

wise requires abandonning all fun and games in fear of the Lord. For recursion reveals to Wittgenstein

that language may be more than a game, it may be himself. It is this identity between the word and man

that makes his baton deadly. It is the incarnation that disarms him.

56 Sheldon “Parables of Jesus” at http://rbsp.info/WTS/ST721-ii.pdf accessed 4/13/09.



Finally, recursion is the undoing of Hegel, who had seen the polarities of form and instance, of

ideal and particular, of intent and function argued since the Academy, and concluded that the dialectic

was unending, but the process eternal—there was no solution but time itself. Not wanting to abandon

purpose, he proposed that the dialectic was the process that led to God, and in some sense, ordained by

God and part of God. Gadamer (and Heidegger, Hoy, Rorty and Thiselton) in advocating his primacy

of process, find themselves caught in yet another dialectic; unwilling to admit the relativism of

promoting the particulars on the one hand, yet even more unwilling to admit Hegel's panentheistic

Absolute Idealism on the other, they tiptoe along a tightwire between, where recursion tosses them a

pair of fighting cats.

Job tells us that sometimes it isn't the journey, it really is the destination that is important, and we

have to grasp the right meaning or suffer loss. For time can be our enemy as well as our friend,

demanding decisions that do not wait, bringing unwanted judgment. Hegel's optimism is unwarranted,

for to quote the deinspirational poster, “It is always darkest just before it goes pitch black.”57 or the

prophet (Amos 5:18), “Woe to you who desire the Day of the Lord”. Recursion shows us the

uselessness of dialectic, the end of our history.

With all this destruction caused by recursion, we are tempted to exclude it from our analysis,

carefully excising its cancerous verses. Except it is impossible to evade recursion, as Job reminds us

and as Gödel demonstrated with Russell. Therefore stability of meaning necessitates the presence of an

arbitrary (or contingent) external adjudicator, one which is itself not susceptible to the recursive

deconstruction. It requires revelation.

Like Barth, we are tempted to invoke a deus ex machina, a miraculous revelation from God that

overcomes this barrier, but even that would remain a linguistic revelation. That is, we are tempted to

request that revelation as a vision, as tablets let down from heaven, as something that could impress its

57 Http://despair.com/despair.html accessed 5/26/09.

http://despair.com/despair.html


truth upon us without the ambiguity of language. But Rorty worked hard to show that there were no

alternatives to a linguistic revelation. Despite the apparently non-verbal nature of ocular data, “seeing is

believing”, there are no privileged media of observation, no epistemic “necessary” truths.58 It is a denial

of our responsibility, says Rorty, to think that there are any shortcuts to belief that bypass language. Or

to say it another way, the essence of our thought and beliefs is verbal, so no matter what the mode of

experience, it will undergo translation into words. Therefore any revelation is as verbal as we are, and

subject to the same hermeneutical analysis.

Barth would object that God can overcome our linguistic barriers, writing his law directly on our

hearts. But if we grant Barth this sort of miracle, why then does God not perform the miracle a few

levels up in the word itself? Why even mess with words at all? If the word means so little to him that he

violates its limits for every elect, why are we not instructed with silent movies, or behavioral

conditioning, or genetic imprinting instead? Rather, we were given his word, which he exalts above his

name. And the circle remains unbroken.

It may seem as if we are chasing our tail, finding and losing and finding and then losing again an

escape from the circulus vitious, but persevere, for we are on the verge of a breakthrough. To

summarize the argument so far, all interpretation of texts seems to suffer from the hermeneutical circle:

needing to understand it in order to interpret it. Several tools have been developed to break the circle,

the three main schools represented by Hirsch, Wittgenstein and Gadamer, which we argue, rely on the

58 Rorty 374. Lack of mediation is here confused with accuracy of mediation. The absence of description is confused with a privilege attaching to a certain description....Or to shift to visual metaphors, it is the notion of having reality unveiled to us, not as in a glass darkly, but with some unimaginable sort of immediacy which would make discourse and description superfluous. If we could convert knowledge from something discursive, something attained by continual adjustments of ideas or words, into something as ineluctable as being shoved about, or being transfixed by a sight which leaves us speechless, then we should no longer have the responsibility for choice among competing ideas and words, theories and vocabularies....In the visions of the epistemologist, this incoherent notion takes the form of seeing the attainment of truth as a matter of necessity, either "logical" necessity of the transcendentalist or the "physical" necessity of the evolutionary "naturalizing" epistemologist. From Sartre's point of view, the urge to find such necessities is the urge to be rid of one's freedom to erect yet another alternative theory or vocabulary. Thus the edifying philosopher who points out the incoherence of the urge is treated as a "relativist", one who lacks moral seriousness, because he does not join in the common human hope that the burden of choice will pass away.


18th century philosophies of rationalism, dualism, and idealism or Descartes, Kant and Hegel. We point

out that the circle can also be broken by self-explaining texts, so that we need not understand the whole

to understand the explanation. The future looked bright.

But self-explanation is not a panacea, because self-explanation can also be deceptive or

purposefully puzzling. And when it is, it not only makes the circle worse, but subverts the usual

hermeneutical tools by introducing recursion. This may not be true of most texts, but it is true of the

Bible. Since the Bible is riddled with recursive words, statements, parables and entire books, it would

appear that there are no straightforward (as in “autonomous algorithmic”) means of extracting meaning

from the Biblical text. Nor does it appear that some sort of Barthian external revelation will help,

because the problem is within us, within our language-limited brains. The future looked bleak again.

All is not lost, however, for an examination of the failure modes of the standard methods reveals

the characteristics of the solution, the properties required of the liberating revelation.

B. Recursive Reconstruction

What then must be the nature of this revelation? We have already sketched the requirements: a

personal objective truth, an incarnation of word and deed, an eschatological presence of eternity in

time. “Well that's easy,” exclaims the evangelical, “those are characteristics of the Christ who is the

Word!”

Now evangelicals might be forgiven if they find in Scripture the perfect expression of these

requirements, and therefore believe they can appropriate all these methods. As Poythress points out, the

problem with Hirsch or Wittgenstein or Gadamer, is that they all elevate one aspect of the

communication triad, making it an idol. That is, only God's word can fulfill the demands they make on

author/text/reader, which attract naive evangelicals to embrace their idolatrous methods.59 What I have

59 Vern Poythress “God's Lordship in Interp” WTJ 50, (1988) at http://www.frame-poythress.org/poythress_articles/ 1988GodsLordship.htm accessed 5/26/09.

http://frame-poythress.org/

http://frame-poythress.org/1988

http://frame-poythress.org/1988


attempted to show is that even for the Bible, even for the one text that can invoke God without being

idolatrous, even overlooking the smuggled autonomy of their 18th century philosophy, these

hermeneutical approaches fail to comprehend the recursion of the Bible.

This is not for lack of effort, nor even for lack of holiness, but is a fault of their construction, of

their presuppositions. That is, no matter how righteous the expositor, or how brilliant the scholar, these

methods can be seen to fail by the even the most pagan critic. I want to expunge the thought that the

objections of VanTil or Poythress are merely “spiritual”, a form of theological snobbery that refuses to

consider solutions “not invented here”. Rather, there are serious problems applying these standard

techniques to the quite extraordinary text of the Bible.

The solution has never been far from our sight. VanTil demonstrates how the Trinity revealed in

Scripture solves the one-and-many problem that has dogged philosophy since the Greeks.60 Frame

expresses it as a solution to the transcendent-immanent dilemma.61 Poythress refers to it as a way for

control and meaning to both be present, or a way for unitary origin and manifold manifestation to

cohere.62 All these are solutions to the problem, but there remains a nagging worry that the Christian

solution is not unique. Perhaps there are other solutions, perhaps Buddhism or Hinduism would work

as well? Poythress inadvertently contributes to this uncertainty by producing multiple triads and

comparing them with analogous triads of Frame, which he admits are “asymmetric”.63 Could they be

made so asymmetric as to resemble Zoroastrianism?

In another paper,64 Sheldon argues from mathematical considerations that the minimal complexity

required to establish a self-referential foundation is three members. All dualities are unstable, as Hegel

noted in his dialectic 200 years ago. Since monism cannot handle recursion, nor can panentheism, and

60 Van Til, “Introduction”61 John Frame “Doctrine of the Knowledge of God”62 Poythress, “God centered Biblical Interpretation”63 Op cit.64 Robert Sheldon “The Holy Grail of PoMo” at http://rbsp.info/WTS/The_Holy_Grail_of_PoMo.pdf accessed 5/26/09.



dualism is unstable (as would be double-dualism or “quadralism” and even higher numbers), we show

by elimination that only triads can provide a solution to the Bible's recursion. By examining the failure

modes of the leading hermeneutical methods, we can further identify the properties of the triads, and

rapidly the economic Trinity comes into focus.65

Now I would be the first to deny that this amounts to a philosophical proof of the Trinity, for one

thing, it relies on the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture to make the recursive arguments. But it

does demonstrate that the Trinity is a necessary doctrine for understanding Scripture, and not just a

contaminating Greek syncretism. It also demonstrates that if the Bible is to be understood, if it is to be

perspicuous, then the full Trinity must be involved in its explication. The Reformation, and its desire to

be rooted in the Scriptures, stands or falls on the doctrine of the full Trinitarian nature of God. Van Til's

stubbornness on the necessity of starting with the Trinity, even in the face of internal and external

criticism is fully vindicated. The separation of Biblical Theology from Systematic Theology can be

seen for what it is, a descent into incoherence.

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Documents

RECURSIVE RIDDLES REVEAL: BIBLICAL RECURSION AS A TEST …rbsp.info/WTS/NT993-ii.pdf · Robert Sheldon, NT993 Draft: Recursive Riddles Reveal 3/33 is represented by language, science,