Lewis Ayres gave a wonderful paper on early church hermeneutics at a recent conference at Regent College. Part of the point was to place the early fathers - Irenaeus, Clement, Origen, and Tertullian - in their original context, and ask what they were responding to. Predominantly, they were . . . . Continue Reading »
The NASB renders Deuteronomy 30:9 this way: “Then the Lord your God will prosper you abundantly in all the work of your hand, in the offspring of your body and in the offspring of your cattle and in the produce of your ground, for the Lord will again rejoice over you for good, just as He . . . . Continue Reading »
Schleiermacher saw language as self-expression. Not unnaturally, on that theory, interpretation of language retraces the path of language back to the source, to the author’s intention. But Schleiermacher’s view of language is of a piece with his liberal experiential-expressivist . . . . Continue Reading »
Gadamer from Truth and Method : “Every age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way . . . The real meaning of a text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience. It certainly is not identical with them, for it is . . . . Continue Reading »
Not Wesleyan Methodism, but against the methodism attacked by Gadamer. As Anthony Thiselton notes (in his essay in The Promise of Hermeneutics ), Gadamer’s life work is summed up in this sentence from a late essay: “It is the Other who breaks into my ego-centredness and gives me . . . . Continue Reading »
Fairbairn gets patristic interpretation exactly right: He admits they were “overly exuberant,” but argues that they were excessively excited about the right thing: “They correctly understood that the key to good interpretation is discerning the whole message of Scripture well, and . . . . Continue Reading »
Back to Christian Smith’s Bible Made Impossible, The: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture : Smith’s argument against Biblicism rests on the “pervasive interpretive pluralism” evident among evangelical Biblicists. Despite their claim to understand . . . . Continue Reading »
Augustine asks exactly the right questions: Why did God do things in the particular way He did, when plenty of other options were open? And, why did the writers of Scripture record just these details, from among the infinite details they might have included, and why specific details that are not at . . . . Continue Reading »
The relation of language and thought has been a contested issue in philosophy and linguistics for several centuries. Guy Deutscher’s contribution ( Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages ) sorts through what we know and what we don’t know . . . . Continue Reading »
Umberto Eco ( On Literature ) explores the phenomenon of the “quality best seller,” the book that gains a wide readership for compelling story or characters, yet at the same time employs sophisticated literary devices that entertain and delight more serious readers. This is . . . . Continue Reading »
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