Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy. (Proverbs 27:6)
Some of you have noticed that I have not been blogging very much lately. There’s a reason for that. Over the last month and a half or so I’ve been approached by several people who have more or less asked me the same thing:
Why are you spending so much energy critiquing other evangelicals? Why don’t you spend more time attacking our real enemies: secularism, postmodernism, scientism, etc.? Why pick on your brothers and sisters in Christ instead of defending them against the real bullies that are out there?
It’s a fair question and it really set me to doing some serious soul-searching. Have I really just been picking on the underdog? Have I been avoiding confrontations with our real enemies and opting to go after easy targets? Some have felt that my posts on evangelicalism and science and my posts on Scripture in particular have been unnecessarily sharp. Have I been overly critical and uncharitable towards my allies? These are troubling questions and I wanted to take some time to really work through them and make adjustments where necessary.
After chewing on this for a little while, I think some of these criticisms have been fair and that I do need to give more attention to addressing trends like secularism, scientism, etc. So you should be seeing more from me in that vein.
At the end of the day, however, I still think it important to engage some of what I see as being unhealthy and unhelpful trends in contemporary evangelical thought and life, and that for this one simple reason:
When it comes to evangelical disenfranchisement from the academy and wider culture, we are frequently our own worst enemies.
Please, don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean to suggest that there is not anti-religious and naturalistic bias in much of academia. I am well aware that Christianity’s exclusive claims are unwelcome in our would-be pluralistic universities and are not tolerated in our would-be tolerant society. But I have come to the conclusion that there are a number of Evangelical intellectual habits and material positions that are serious liabilities for us as we try to faithfully engage the academy and the wider culture:
Academia progresses by a process of critical peer review. Academics are used to the fact that we learn more about the world by refining our analyses, revising our conclusions in the light of new data, tightening up our logic, moving on from discredited ideas, and so on, and the fact that this learning process is propelled by academics’ scrutinizing and criticizing each others’ work, showing where their survey samples were too small to support their conclusions, where they had conveniently ignored problematic data, where they had committed non sequiturs and so on. It’s nothing personal. It’s just how things get done. Evangelicals have more or less opted out of this process in order to protect some of our more intellectually vulnerable (i.e., dubious) stances from serious criticism. That’s not to say that Evangelicals do not “engage” with the questions and issues raised in academic settings. But we tend to “engage” only when we can do so on our own terms, publishing almost exclusively in our own sectarian publishing houses and journals for a generally sympathetic and/or uninformed readership who either won’t or can’t argue with our conclusions. Such “academic engagement” tends to be highly selective about what data and questions it deals with (which is a bit disingenuous), and thus amounts to little more than shadow-boxing with straw-men. So long as we Evangelicals absolve ourselves from serious (self-)critical engagement, we neither deserve a seat at the academic table, nor should we expect to be offered one. But we can do better than that.- When we Evangelicals are criticized, we have a tendency to prematurely assume a defensive posture, circling the wagons and sounding the “the gospel’s at stake” alarm. And this goes for criticism coming from within the Evangelical community as much as (if not more than) for criticism from without. When someone from within our ranks raises questions–however commonsensical or data-driven they might be–our tendency is to automatically make such people out to be outsiders, questioning their Evangelical credentials (as though Evangelicalism had a credentialing office) and painting them as traitors or apostates or worse. (e.g., Read this, this, this, this, this, this, this…). This sort of knee-jerk reactionary mode of response serves only to shut down important in-house conversations and to disengage our community from, well, reality. To say the least, this is not a productive pattern of behavior. But we can do better than that.
- The “scandal of the Evangelical mind” persists. Most of the intellectual maladies diagnosed by Mark Noll in his landmark book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind have not really been addressed by the wider evangelical community. Our quirky, a-historical, literalistic biblicism, our paranoia about science, and our shallowly partisan political reflection are all intellectual paradigms long overdue for nuance, revision, critique, and even replacement. The brighter lights within Evangelical academia have moved past these paradigms, but their thinking tends not to get much press and does not really filter down to the people in the pews (not least because of point 2 above). But we can do better than that.
- Evangelicals generally lack credibility within the wider academic world because the evangelicals who speak loudest are generally those who are guiltiest of problems 1, 2 & 3 and they generally go unopposed by others within the Evangelical community. I don’t know of any other way to counteract this problem than by speaking up and encouraging others to do likewise. Otherwise people in the academy and in the wider culture will be justified in assuming that the Ken Hams, Al Mohlers, and Jerry Falwells of the world speak for all of us on every point. We need Evangelicals to regularly say to each other and before the wider world, “No, those people do not speak for me. I think they’re wrong, and I am a Christian too. I think we can do better than that.”
There are lots of reasons why we increasingly find ourselves on the margins of our society and the academy. Scientistic reductionism, methodological naturalism, secularism, creative antirealism, and a host of other cultural and intellectual forces have combined to create a general atmosphere of bias against traditional Christianity. But I believe that the hard truth is that by acquiescing in the bad habits enumerated above, we have become our own worst enemies, undercutting our ability to credibly counteract the corrosive cultural and intellectual trends of our time. Until we develop a capacity to engage in and receive constructive (self-) criticism (particularly from within our community), the Evangelical community will have little right to claim a seat at the academic table or to expect much of a hearing in the public square. If we fail to do this, I fear we will fail the next generation worse than have we failed the last.
For my part, I believe that the Christian tradition has a wealth of untapped intellectual resources for tackling the problems of today, that the Christian faith itself is both resilient and flexible enough to handle whatever might come down the pike (because, in the final analysis, I believe it is true), and that some of the nervous ticks that have characterized our community have not served us particularly well. Part of my project here is to show you what I have in mind. I hope you find it helpful. If you don’t, I am totally open to criticism.
Great post. No criticism here. But if I had, I’d definitely share it!
Posted by Chris Travis | July 13, 2012, 10:02 amThanks, Chris!
Posted by dmwilliams83 | July 13, 2012, 4:46 pmI find one of your omissions rather glaring: several of the unhelpful habits evangelicals have picked up have been picked up from the very forces that are trying to strike Christianity down. In some major ways we have stopped and accepted the rules to a game that has been loaded against us. For instance, while reductionism in science is often fought against there’s a lot of reductionism in our theology, too. We would often be better off simply saying, “No, that is not even the correct way to determine what is true,” rather than, “Ok, given those rules…”
Posted by Eric | July 13, 2012, 11:22 amGranted. Your point is well taken, and, as a matter of fact, it’s one that Noll makes in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind as well.
Posted by dmwilliams83 | July 13, 2012, 4:53 pmGreat post. I had been suspicious of my fundamentalist heritage for some time. What was a whisper in my heart became a megaphone in my ear while reading Noll’s book. One flashpoint that led me to look for a different tradition was when a seminary president noted the fact that people were leaving the church in droves. His solution? “We must get back to the things we were doing before (70 years ago)!” The congregation roared with approval. It was the most foolish thing he could have said, and everyone ate it up. A little Nietzsche bobblehead in my heart smiled and whispered “sheep,” and I left that tradition. In a sense, god died in that meeting.
Posted by Jason G. | July 16, 2012, 8:09 amThanks, Jason! My journey was slightly different from yours. I was baptized, grew up, and was confirmed in a fairly moderate United Methodist church and jumped into fundamentalism from the outside because I felt like the mainline was all soft-soap and no substance. It took me about a year to realize that I didn’t know what I’d gotten myself into and that fundamentalism was absolutely NOT the answer to theological wishy-washiness (if I may coin a term). It’s been quite a journey out of fundamentalism into Reformed Christianity and back out the other side into a high regard for the great Tradition of ancient Christianity (if your pastor had said, “We must get back to the things we were doing before [700 years ago]!,” that would have been infinitely more intriguing to me). Thanks for reading. If you’re ever in NC, we should grab a beer.
Posted by dmwilliams83 | July 16, 2012, 11:10 amLikewise, if you make it to Memphis! The BBQ’s not bad, either. If you go to SBL this year, let me know.
Posted by Jason G. | July 16, 2012, 2:29 pmI agree that evangelicals need to do a “peer review” process, appeal to one another as brothers, and correct one another. However, I tend to think that this generally should not be done sharply and publicly, lest the outside world see evangelicals as more about arguing and being critical than in what they purportedly unite around, that is, the gospel. Certainly the best response to “loudest voices among evangelicals” is not to try to be louder and shout them down.
Posted by Don L. | July 16, 2012, 1:10 pmThanks for commenting, Don. I should clarify: When I say that Evangelicals should participate in critical peer review, I mean that they should be submitting their work for publication in mainstream academic journals and publishing houses (e.g., Oxford University Press, Yale University Press, etc.) where their work will face the critical scrutiny of their not-necessarily-evangelical academic peers.
Some folks will say that that’s crazy and that evangelicals can’t get published in the wider academy because of anti-Christian bias and I’m asking them to sell out to meet godless academic standards blah blah blah whine whine whine…. That’s just not true. Plenty of faithful Christian scholars are doing work that passes peer review muster, and that is both getting published through these avenues and receiving critical acclaim. Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, Alvin Plantinga, Nick Wolterstorff, N.T. Wright, George Marsden, etc., to name a few…and to say nothing of countless Evangelical scholars quietly working away in the hard sciences…and to say nothing of some of our conservative Catholic and mainline friends.
Evangelicals submitting themselves only to the soft-ball, in-house criticisms of other Evangelicals is not the solution to this problem.
Posted by dmwilliams83 | July 16, 2012, 2:41 pmDavid, thank you for your reply. I guess what I thought you had in mind was online discourse bashing other Christians and publishing books specifically against others.
Regarding publishing in academic journals, I do think your presuppositions regarding inspiration will affect your biblical scholarship in a way that academia will not accept. For example, respected evangelical scholar Tremper Longman has a post on the NLT blog regarding Genesis 1:1-2, where the NLT translates assuming ex nihilo based on consistency with the rest of the Biblical corpus, whereas the NRSV does not, and translates based on what we understand from ANE sources. The latter will be accepted in scholarly circles, and the former rejected. I don’t think the solution to the former is that it needs to pass muster in mainstream academic journals, else it ought to be rejected. In-house evangelical discussion seems the best venue for that. Does that make sense?
In that regard, it is not altogether that of the six evangelical scholars you named, three are historians, two are philosophers, and none are Old Testament scholars. I haven’t read your blog extensively, so I don’t know what “dubious stances” you are referring to, but I would think that these stances involve topics regarding Biblical exegesis rather than history or philosophy.
Posted by Don L. | July 16, 2012, 3:23 pmAgain, thanks for commenting, Don. I think you’ve put your finger on an important part of this conversation, namely, the fact that the bibliological presuppositions of many Evangelicals have rendered them incapable of engaging critical scholarship. Evangelicals who find themselves in that position face the choices of either disengaging from critical scholarship in order to preserve their presuppositions or honestly engaging critical scholarship and allowing those presuppositions to be challenged and possibly modified…and possibly losing their jobs.
So, to take your example: To my mind, if my theology cannot handle the fact that Genesis 1:1-2 cannot be taken on purely historical and philological terms as a statement of creatio ex nihilo, then I need to modify my theology so as to take that fact into account. That’s actually precisely what I’ve done. I don’t think that the Priestly author of Gen 1 had creatio ex nihilo in mind, but I’ve come to the view that a good theological reading of the OT text may well go beyond what the OT author could have intended or even imagined in his own day. How I came to that view was by making a very self-conscious decision not to disengage my faith from, well, the real world by retreating into safe conversations with people who always agreed with me. That decision has meant that some of what I thought I knew when I was eighteen has had to be dropped or modified, but I think my faith is the stronger for having been critically pruned (often by critiques from intelligent, well-informed non-Christians) and forced to grow in new and unexpected directions.
In-house conversations can be good and even necessary from time to time. But our faith needs to be able to stand up to good critical questions, which means getting out of the house every now and then.
Posted by dmwilliams83 | July 16, 2012, 9:23 pmI think one could also avoid some of this speculation about the author of Genesis 1 (did he believe in creation ex nihilo? did he intend for his account to be consistent with it?) and simply say that translating a text to fit a theological agenda (bringing it in line with one’s interpretation of the rest of the Bible) rather than translating to do justice to the sentences as they actually are is a particular sort of distortion of the text. If, at some point, I find that a Biblical figure appears not to be too clear on creation ex nihilo it would be nice to have a text that shows that this is not clearly stated in the Genesis narrative rather than a text that pretends it is. Within scholarly circles this is even more so the case since people are not reading the translation for devotional purposes and, indeed, serious scholars will be encouraged to forgo translations entirely.
Posted by Eric | July 16, 2012, 10:37 pmHi David, I recently described my own frustration, on Facebook, with the tendency of Evangelical Christians to avoid the ‘hard’ questions and seek only comfort in the knowledge of their own salvation. Interestingly, it was one of my non-Christian friends who referred me to your article. I found the article to be somewhat encouraging – in that there are others who share similar frustrations to my own – though the discussion in the comments has also drawn my attention.
Of particular interest, to me, are your comments that appear to suggest that, if one has trouble accepting a particular interpretation of a text, it is one’s personal conception of the system of ideas that must change in order to accommodate a less troubling interpretation.
Most texts, not just biblical, have one intended meaning, and it is generally the cultural and situational contexts that help us interpret any given text, written or spoken. As a student of Linguistics, raised in a Christian household, I have a particular interest in getting to the bottom of many of the ‘textual’ issues that are raised concerning the bible.
If the author’s intent is clear, (and I believe it is difficult to see more that one meaning in Gen.1:1-2 without doing some mental gymnastics,) then whether the meaning is ‘hard’ to accept, or not, will be based upon one’s view of reality – not necessarily upon reality itself. With a finite view of reality – limited experience, limited ideation and limited language with which to express such ideation – many systemic errors are made that could be avoided through being open to the ideation and expression of others’. That is to say, we may not see something as possible within our own enculturated view of reality, but if we accept that it may be possible to express it in another’s culture then we need to be willing to accept that our culture and language may be the thing that is lacking and in need of maintenance.
So, it’s not that I have an issue with changing/modifying ones system of ideas (categorically), but rather the reason for changing/modifying a system of ideas should not be simply to make oneself more comfortable or to avoid other’s misconceptions of what you believe. The reason for change should be that one has discovered a ‘hard’ fact that does not sit well with one’s enculturated views.
In order to do better, it is often necessary to change one’s view of reality, not try to change reality to suit one’s view.
Posted by Graeme | July 18, 2012, 7:43 amThanks for commenting, Graeme. There’s a lot to agree with in what you said, though I would have some hesitations about your claim: “Most texts, not just biblical, have one intended meaning, and it is generally the cultural and situational contexts that help us interpret any given text, written or spoken.” Umberto Eco helpfully points out that texts can be “open” or “closed,” and most texts fall somewhere in between. Open texts are inherently ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations. Most novels, poems, great works of literature, and so on fall into this category. Think of Stanley Fish’s example of the sentence “Is there a text in this class?”. Closed texts, on the other hand, are designed to communicate very specific messages. Things like labels on medicine bottles, STOP signs, casserole recipes, and so on fall into this category. Most of our language is a blend of open and closed text. For my part, I think that Genesis 1, being a myth, is a lot more open than a medicine bottle but a lot more closed than, say, the Book of Job.
Anyways, the non creatio ex nihilo reading of Genesis 1:1-2 actually owes more to the Hebrew syntax and to what we know about general ancient Near Eastern thought about cosmogony: namely, that the world emerged out of a primpordial watery chaos (Genesis 1 seems to say much the same thing).
But, yes, we need to be ready to change our minds when hard facts pull us in a new direction. Of course.
Posted by dmwilliams83 | July 18, 2012, 9:02 amDavid, Umberto Eco does indeed point out that texts, in and of themselves, may be “open” or “closed” in terms of their their meaning. However, he also points out that without context of any kind, no text would be meaningful in any way. Michael Halliday, in his Systemic Functional Linguistics, demonstrates that any text that is produced, for ‘real world’ application, requires a context in order for it to be interpreted. In order to interpret Stnaley Fish’s statement, one must first of all imply a context, otherwise it is simply a string of meaningless sounds/sqiggles. The fact that more than one context may be applied to the text is the reason that we percieve it as ambiguous. Some texts are produced for the very fact of their ambiguity, jokes are an often quoted example. But the intent of an author is largely what is at question here. Most authors intend to convey one meaning only. They expect that their readership will be able to interpret the meaning of the text that they produce on the basis of previously agreed-to terms. Witgenstien, in his Philosophical Investigations, says something along these lines also.
If, then, it is the case that the author of Gen.1 expected their readership to be able to understand the text on the basis of what came before it, then we need to ask the question: what purpose does this text serve?
In order to answer this question with any sense of accuracy we should ask a series of further questions that will give us a better understanding of the text as it was written:
1. What is being described? That is, the text is he expression of the ideation of an experience. A favorite expression of Funtional Linguists here is, ” who did what to whom, under what circumstance?”
2. How do we know that this is what is being described? That is, on what basis have we made the judgements that we have made that tell us “who did what to whom, under what circustances?”
3. What are the relationships between the participants in the text? That is, are the relationships balenced or unbalanced? Who, or what, is in a position of power, if any?
4. How do we know? (You’re going to get sick of this question – I know from experience that it becomes annoyingly obvious, but it is often necessary to keep repeating it.)
5. What is the relationship between the author and the reader? As in 3. Is the relationship equal or unequal? and
6. How do we know? (Told you!)
7. What are the textual themes? And, what do they tell us about the text? That is, what is the ‘patterning’ of the text? How and where does it occur? Is there a prevalent pattern? Why is it prevalent? And, are there other texts that use the same, or similar, patterning?
8. How do we know?
While not exhastive, these questions will give us a starting point from which we can better consider the text as it was intended to be understood.
When applying these questions to the text of Gen.1, it may be surprising to find that, while a cursory reading of Gen.1 may give the appearence of similarity with the subect matter of other ANE myth literature, a closer inspection reveals some surprising differences. So much so, in fact, that we can’t necessarily equate Gen.1 as purely myth narrative.
It is understandable that Christians may ‘Circle the wagons’ when questions arise that appear to threaten their epistomological basis. But, while it is understandable, it is not always necessary. If what we are defending is a fragile sense of ourselves, then ‘circling the wagons’ may seem like the right thing to do, but what we often find, when we look closely at the bible, is that it stands as a rock, impervious to ‘arrows’, and that if anything, we should be hiding behind it. What becomes obvious, is that we are told by our ‘attackers’ that the rock is not where we think it is. So we expose ourselves in an attempt to find the ‘right’ rock, when we should have stayed where we were.
Posted by Graeme | July 20, 2012, 6:04 am*shrug* Of course texts need contexts to be meaningful or interpretable. The context of Genesis 1 is the ancient Near East and the language games it approximates most closely are those bound up with ANE mythology, pre-scientific cosmology & cosmogony, etc. There are sharp differences, to be sure: In sharp contrast to most other extant ANE creation stories neither Genesis nor any other Biblical text offers an origin story for the Creator God. In sharp contrast to other ANE creation stories, the Creator in Genesis 1 creates not through combating other gods but simply by speaking. In contrast to other ANE creation stories, Genesis 1 portrays humanity in an incredibly dignified light, and so on. There are contrasts aplenty and the theology of Genesis 1 would have been quite distinctive and radical within the ancient world for which it was written. But that doesn’t change the facts of the similarities and analogies between Gen 1 and other ANE creation stories.
Anyways, Fish’s point is that precisely within the context of the classroom the question “Is there a text in this class?” remains ambiguous. The context is not sufficient to provide interpretive closure.
I don’t think you can identify the meaning of a text with authorial intention. But that’s an argument for another day. I find Eco, Gadamer, and Searle to be most helpful here. Peace.
Posted by dmwilliams83 | July 20, 2012, 6:49 pm“But that’s an argument for another day.” Intent?
I wonder what you intended with that comment. Could it mean that you do not wish to take this discussion any further? What is it about the text that tells me this? Surely you’re not going to tell me that it doesn’t refer to the statement that comes before it, or the discussion that we have been having?
Yes, I strongly agree that we should use a peer review process, and that we should be ready to accept criticism of our arguments. But, to carry-on or turn our back, when an argument clearly contradicts itself, is the type of behavior that got us to this point of frustration to start with. So, why do we behave in this way when our position is compromised? I believe that the bible has something to say about that also.
Posted by Graeme | July 21, 2012, 6:41 am“But that’s an argument for another day.” Hmmm…what does that statement actually say? Now that I think about it, it’s a bit ambiguous. I could see how, given its context, it could be taken as implying that I wish to take this conversation no further; as a semi-polite way of saying, “Buzz off and leave me alone.”
That’s not really what I was thinking, not really what I intended to say. I was thinking, “Goodness gracious, it’s getting late and we haven’t had dinner yet. I probably need to wrap this comment up and I can’t really get into Barthes and Foucault and Eco and all that right now. And I’d probably rather save having a conversation about the meaning of ‘meaning,’ authorial intent, and the death of ‘the Author’ for a full-fledged post rather than having it buried in the comments of a post that was initially about something else. But I do sort of want to have that conversation and this Graeme guy might be a fun person to have it with. How do I concisely communicate that I disagree with the identification of linguistic meaning with authorial intent without letting myself get roped into that long and complicated discussion right here, right now?” That’s what was going on in my head. “But that’s an argument for another day,” was the best I could come up with in that moment for trying to say what I intended to say (which, looking back, I’m not sure that I was even all that clear on just what it was that I was intending to say there). But whatever I intended to say it’s not clear that the sentence “But that’s an argument for another day” (even set within its original context, etc.) successfully says it.
But that’s the point.
If I may put this in a Pauline idiom: That which I wish to say, I don’t always exactly say. That which I do not wish to say, I sometimes say. Oh, wretched writer that I am, who will rescue me from this metaphorical death (of “the Author”)?
The whole point of “the death of ‘the Author’” is that authors/speakers do not always have complete, godlike mastery over their language (and this is precisely because language can carry something like objective meanings) and their intentions are not always completely transparent even to themselves. The upshot is that authorial intent cannot be identified with linguistic meaning because an author’s language may or may not actually communicate what he or she intends (assuming he or she has clear intentions at all–often authors do not).
Anyways, not trying to shut down the conversation (though I would prefer to have this conversation in conjunction with an actual post on these matters). We’re now miles off from a conversation about Genesis 1:1-2 and even further afield from a conversation about the state of Evangelical scholarship and the appropriateness of Christians publicly critiquing Christians. We’ve gone quite a ways down this rabbit-trail!
Posted by dmwilliams83 | July 21, 2012, 9:08 amNot sure why those last three paragraphs are italicized but I don’t know how to fix them. Apparently my computer thinks they are particularly important.
Posted by dmwilliams83 | July 21, 2012, 9:11 amAre you sure that is what you intended to say? At what point do you stop doubting that what you think you said is what you actually said? And, at what point can others expect to take what you say for real, if what you think you say may not be what you actually say?
Similar principles apply to texts in the bible – if we decide that Gen.1 is purely myth, at what point can we say that the rest of the bible isn’t just myth?
It may well be that we are quite a way from the article topic, in theoretical discussion, but wouldn’t you suggest that the practice of it is more helpful?
(But, ok, if you wish to take up this discussion elsewhere, that’s fine.)
Posted by Graeme | July 21, 2012, 10:40 amI’m not sure if I’m explaining myself very well. Let’s put this in more technical terminology: Umberto Eco distinguishes between the intentio auchtoris (“intention of the author,” i.e., what the author/speaker intends to say with his text/speech), the intentio lectoris (“the intention of the reader,” i.e., what the reader/hearer takes the text/speech to say), and, most importantly, the intentio operis (“the intention of the work,” i.e., what the text/speech actually says). My point is simply that there are instances of text/speech where the intentio operis and the intentio auchtoris are not the same (e.g., slips of the tongue/pen, Freudian slips, certain grammatical mistakes, etc.). Eco’s terminology is not standard but I find it quite helpful.
I don’t know how much you’ve read in this area, but part of my masters thesis deals with these sorts of issues (i.e, with postmodern literary criticism, philosophical hermeneutics, etc.). I might be willing to send you a PDF of the thesis if you’d be interested.
As to your slippery slope argument (“…if we decide that Gen.1 is purely myth, at what point can we say that the rest of the bible isn’t just myth?”), it should be borne in mind that slippery slope arguments are logically fallacious and don’t actually get us anywhere. Look, if you’re going to say that Psalm 1 is a psalm, what’s to keep you from saying that the whole Bible isn’t just psalms? The next thing you know we’re gonna be singing 2 Chronicles in church! And if you say that the Parable of the Lost Sheep is just a parable, at what point can we say that the rest of the Bible isn’t just a parable?
Come on, dude.
The identification of Genesis 1 as myth is a comparative literary judgment of the genre of the text. That same sort of judgment identifies Chronicles as chronicles, Psalms as psalms, Proverbs as proverbs, epistles as epistles, parables as parables, Gospels as something like Greco-Roman biographies, etc. It’s a matter of taking a text and comparing it with the other texts of that time and culture to see what other texts it’s most like. Genesis 1 just looks a lot more like Enuma Elish and other ANE creation myths than like the Parable of the Good Samaritan or like 1 Samuel or like Paul’s letter to the Romans or like the Amarna letters. Hence the judgment that it is probably more like an ANE creation myth than like an epistle or a chronicle or a proverb or whatever.
Slippery slope arguments simply have nothing to offer here.
Posted by dmwilliams83 | July 23, 2012, 12:01 amI think that David has already said more than enough here, but I thought I’d add two quick cents. Author intention does not determine what is stated by the words he writes, just as speaker intention does not determine what is said by the words he speaks. Otherwise, no one would could ever fail to say what he means or fail to write what he means, as David already pointed out. But let’s consider an example. Suppose that my wife asks me what I want for dinner tonight, and I say “Mexican”. Further suppose that she picks up Mexican, brings it home, and that I refuse to eat it on the grounds that she didn’t bring Chinese. In this situation, I might be able to truly say that I meant to say “Chinese” when I said “Mexican”, and that what I really wanted was Chinese, but the fact remains that I said I wanted Mexican and not Chinese when I uttered the word “Mexican”, my intentions notwithstanding. It doesn’t matter whether I uttered the wrong word – or even whether I thought that the word “Mexican” referred in English to Chinese cuisine. What I said was that I wanted Mexican. And the same goes for writing.
There’s no question that speaker intention can play some role in what is communicated pragmatically. For example, Gricean implicature can depend on speaker intention in various ways. And there are various ways in which speaker intention should control, at least to some extent, the interpretation of some texts. Speaker intention may even play a role in fixing what is semantically expressed to some extent – e.g., where lexical ambiguity is concerned. But even here I expect that speaker intention is doing a lot less work than might be expected, and speaker intention certainly cannot override semantics willy nilly. For what it’s worth, I think that many problems in biblical hermeneutics are pseudo-problems that result from failing to draw relevant distinctions between semantics and pragmatics, between different sources of pragmatic supplementation, and between contexts of utterance and contexts of interpretation. Of course, there is a tremendous amount of debate about these things, but some distinctions need to be drawn. At any rate, speaker intention (author intention) cannot determine semantics or pragmatics willy nilly. And, even when we recognize that speaker intention (author intention) should be consulted in interpretation, that doesn’t mean that speaker intention (author intention) fixes semantics or pragmatics in any way in those contexts.
Posted by Leslie Wolf | January 5, 2013, 3:28 pm