As in modernity appropriation has become more important than dedication and communication, the modern Narcissus, captured in self-relation, sees only his own projections. A change of the polarity of our attention is therefore necessary: from the human who appropriates to the God who communicates, who is himself a hermeneut. This means that neither Schleiermacher's nor Bultmann's hermeneutic of regression should be followed; both are shy of talking about the God who is not only already in us, but who comes to us – and this advent is mediated through creaturely means. God the creator is – in accordance with the Nicene Creed – the ‘Poet’, the one who does what he says, and says what he does. This communication needs a space of hearing and reading; its text vindicates the relative autonomy over the author as well as over the reader. The human being in its modern subjectivity ignores this and either transcends the text (Hegel and Barth) or goes behind the text (Schleiermacher and Bultmann). Instead, the aim should be to have a relationship, an engagement with the text, to have, quite frankly, ‘intercourse’ with it, as Luther translates ‘meditatio’. The crucial question is therefore not: ‘How do I understand the given biblical text?’, but ‘How does the given biblical text give itself to me to understand it – so that I am understood?’