Texts are musical. How? Both texts and music display a paradoxical quality. Let’s start simple. On the one hand: The sequence of words is a temporal sequence, and we couldn’t recognize a sequence of words as a sentence unless one sound or written word yielded its place . . . . Continue Reading »
Alan Jacobs gave a brilliant lecture at NSA yesterday afternoon - beautifully written and constructed, enormously informative, exploding with insight. Everything you’d expect from Jacobs. The thrust of the lecture was an exploration of the reading habits that are encouraged by the . . . . Continue Reading »
The opposition of literal v. figurative language is problematic for a number of reasons, one of them being that words can become quasi-figures without ever ceasing to be literal. Suppose I write a short story in which the word “gardenia” appears several times. In each case, it is . . . . Continue Reading »
Linguists these days tell us that an author chooses one synonym over another for reasons of meaning (one may be slightly more specific or general than the other), for reasons of common usage (one of several synonyms may be used more commonly in certain contexts), or for stylistic reasons. All true. . . . . Continue Reading »
Linguists these days tell us that when a word is ambiguous (more than one lexical definition), the default option is to assume that the author intends one of the multiple meanings. Fair enough: “I rose from bed” and “I plucked a rose” clearly use “rose” in . . . . Continue Reading »
John Webster ( Word and Church: Essays in Church Dogmatics ) notes the limits of current theories of hermeneutical “virtues.” While they push in the right direction by reminding us that “fitting reading of a canonical text requires the acquisition of moral and spiritual . . . . Continue Reading »
In his recent Paul and Scripture: Studying the New Testament Use of the Old Testament , Steven Moyise suggests that Paul’s treatment of Abraham counters the “heroic” tradition concerning Abraham by equating “reckoned righteous” with “justifies the ungodly.” . . . . Continue Reading »
Warren Gage of Knox Seminary kindly agreed to let me post his essay on Protestant hermeneutics. To find a pdf of the essay, click on “Downloads” at the top of the page and find the essay called “Crisis of Protestant Hermeneutics.” . . . . Continue Reading »
TF Torrance ends a series of articles on the hermeneutics of Athanasius by returning to a theme developed throughout the series: “Christian doctrines are not to be established or to be defended simply by appealing to Biblical texts, but by listening to the things they signify by and . . . . Continue Reading »
there is a certain discrepancy between the purity of these theoretical statements, polemical in context, and the actual exegetic practice of the Reformers. Moreover, the rejection of allegory and the insistence on one undivided sense hinged for the early Reformers on maintaining a radical . . . . Continue Reading »
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