"If the Bible is God’s word, then there is no more important mandate for the people of the book than to understand and respond to what God is saying. The authority of the Bible must be not only professed but lived out. All the treasures of divine wisdom count for nought unless the church knows how to make withdrawals from the deposit of truth in order to formulate its doctrine and apply its life-giving light to new issues and contexts. Evangelicals have tended to follow the Reformer’s principles that, first, the authoritative sense is the literal sense, and second, Scripture interprets Scripture. Debate has centered on the meaning of the literal sense: is the most relevant factor the human author’s communicative intention, determined by grammatico-historical exegesis that recovers linguistic meaning by reconstructing the author’s historical context-of the divine author’s intention, which is best determined in light of the canonical context? The second principle is handy for resolving any ambiguities: read unclear passages in light of those that are more clear. The overall aim is to recover what the authors, as commissioned mouthpieces for God, are saying rather than to read one’s own ideas and interests into the text. Because evangelicals believe that God’s message for the church is applicable to every age, there has been a tendency to apply apparently time-bound passages by isolating the universally valid principle behind the text in order to find its equivalent present-day cultural clothing. The same principles thus get applied to new particular cases. Here, too, the main impulse is conservative or, better, ‘preservative’’: namely, preserving divinely revealed truth. Yet evangelicals also want to bring biblical authority to bear on new problems, and some are looking for ways of interpreting the Bible with creative fidelity that go beyond “principlizing.”"