Gadamer says that every thing that is to be interpreted gives rise toa plurality of interpretations. This is not a free-for-all but rather “the work’s own possibilities of being that emerge as the work explicates itself, as it were, in the variety of its aspects.” A reader of a . . . . Continue Reading »
Gadamer writes ( Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) ): “A person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting. He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text . . . . Working out this fore-projection [prejudice], which is . . . . Continue Reading »
Westphal has the wit to ask Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes which author died, and he gives this answer: “According to familiar versions of theism, God is Creator, and the world has all and only those features that God (intended to) put there; if there is a certain indeterminacy due to . . . . Continue Reading »
Westphal asks why Christians are hesitant to affirm the inevitability of interpretation, and answers that denying the necessity of interpretation seems to be the easiest way to affirm truth as correspondence and to preserve objectivity. If interpretation intervenes into every act of knowing, then . . . . Continue Reading »
Merold Westphal ( Whose Community? Which Interpretation?: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture) ) notes that “realism begins as the claim that the world (the real) is ‘out there’ and is what it is independent of whether or not we might think . . . . Continue Reading »
Expounding on the differences between explanation and narration, Craig Hovey ( To Share in the Body: A Theology of Martyrdom for Today’s Church ) connects them to two forms of witness: “If the eyewitness knows about the particular case and the character witness knows about the person, . . . . Continue Reading »
Wright writes that Paul’s “re-reading” of the OT is not “a matter merely of typology, picking a few earlier themes and watching the same patterns repeating themselves, though this also happens often enough.” Rather, “Paul had in mind an essentially historical and . . . . Continue Reading »
God Himself is speech, language, Word. This is implicit in the opening pages of the Bible. God created heaven and earth, and when we see how that works in more detail we find that He does it by speech. The God revealed in Genesis 1 is a Creator, Maker, Actor, but He is all these things because He . . . . Continue Reading »
In a critical assessment of Louw-Nida’s “semantic domain” approach to to Hebrew lexicography, Reinier de Blois points out that the approach breaks down when dealing with figurative language. The word cherev , “sword” is listed in Louw and Nida under the domain of . . . . Continue Reading »
It’s hard to imagine a more succinct or accurate description of typology than that of Danielou ( Bible and the Liturgy ): “That the realities of the Old Testament are figures of those of the New is one of the principles of biblical theology. This science of the similitudes between the . . . . Continue Reading »
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