From: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Limits to Criticism: response
Date: 9 Sep 92 08:28:02 GMT
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services


     Response to clh:

     I appreciate these thoughtful remarks.

     I will separate out a few lines from the early part of your essay for
     comment; the last part, devoted to the thesis that these issues tend to
     arise when the church is under attack, and especially the interesting (but
     to my mind very idealistic) conception that a reader of the Bible left to
     himself/herself would not necessarily adopt an inerrantist
     position,  I will leave for others to comment on.

>[I have a feeling that you may be misreading the phrase "wisdom's 
>children".  This simply means those who are wise.  It's a Semitic  
>idiom.   
>  Lk 7:35 Yet wisdom is justified by all her children. 
>  Mat 11:19 Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds."   
>The point is the wisdom is vindicated by its results, those things   
>done by those who are wise.  I would guess that Mat. has reworded the 
>passage to avoid the Semitic idiom, which might be confusing to Greek 
>(and English) speakers.  So this passage says nothing about children.] 

     Have I perhaps been taken for naive because I defended the naive? ;-) The
     use of the idiom involving "children" to mean "product" or "result" surely
     does not entail that this passage says nothing about children, for there
     is structural evidence to the contrary; perhaps I should have forestalled
     this by giving the entire parable, which begins:

          To what shall I compare the men of this generation, 
          and what are they like?  They are like children sitting in the
          marketplace...

     and ends:

          Yet wisdom is justified by all her children.

     I do have an exegesis of the entire parable to propose, but it probably
     doesn't belong here; note however the repetition of "children" at the end
     of the parable.  Perhaps (alternatively to your suggestion) the use of the
     idiom (with a different word for "children") was intentional on the part
     of Jesus, which the author of Luke understood, but the author of Matthew
     did not.  The translators of the NEB must have had an interpretation in
     mind similar to mine and perhaps that of Luke:

          And yet God's wisdom is proved right by all those 
          who are her children.

     As we know, word plays are all over the place in the Bible; the wonderful
     phrase translated "the truth shall make you free" is "merely" a Greek pun
     but is put to special use in the NT.  And so on, and on.

>[However the point that Christianity does not require a Ph.D. is clear 
>from other passages, such as I Cor 1:19ff.  God's wisdom is not the 
>same as the University's.]

     I Cor i, 18-25 is a key passage for the question I am trying to
     articulate,
     and it is tempting to quote it here, along with the comments of Erasmus on
     it in the Adages which are fascinating and helpful.  But I would much
     rather have your exposition of it as you see it, if you are willing.  Can
     you say what the difference is, as gleaned from I Cor i, 18-25, between
     God's wisdom and the wisdom of the intellectuals?

>[Yet I think the University's wisdom is not 
>valueless, when it is also used in accordance with God's wisdom.  God 
>can make use of all of our talents and experience.]

     Is not what the University is really saying, quite clearly, the opposite:
     that God's wisdom is perhaps not entirely valueless, when it is used in
     accordance with modern scholarship.  For which annotates which?  (What I
     am trying to do here might be called annotating in the opposite
     direction.)

>[Jesus uses a child as a model for faith.  Yes, we should have the 
>innocent trust in God of a child.  But passages such as Heb 5 make it 
>clear that we are expected to combine this childlike faith with a 
>mature understanding.]

     I must say with all due respect that as far as I can see Hebrews
     v  does not
     help us here; but I would be very interested in your exposition of it. 
   
>[I do believe that the basics of salvation are obvious on a quite naive 
>reading of the Bible.]

     Surely the situation is rather that the Bible itself, from the viewpoint
     of scholarship, is naive, *especially* with regard to its own uses of
     earlier texts.  Consider Paul's linguistically misguided analysis in
     Galatians iii, 16: 

          Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring.
          It does not say, "And to offsprings," referring to many; but,
          referring to one, "And to your offspring," which is Christ.

     Berkhof points out that "the Hebrew word to which he refers cannot be used
     in the plural to denote posterity."  I suggest that Paul, who surely knew
     Hebrew,  did not *care* about the grammatical point.  Our task is to try
     to see why. 

     In sum: I am concerned, ultimately, with how *meaning* comes to be in the
     Word.  There is so much to say and ask here that it really can't be dealt
     with in this format (and we would have to bring in Barth who dealt with
     this of course extensively), but very roughly: in one of my fields
     (pragmatics) we want to know whether the meaning of a piece of language is
     what the author/speaker intended to convey, what the
     reader/hearer  actually
     perceives, or both.  Recently we have an interesting, somewhat newer
     conception: 

          meaning is what the author/speaker intends the 
          reader/hearer to perceive.

     Applying this to biblical interpretation, and applying also the above line
     of questioning, we have two propositions: (a) the meaning of the Word is
     what God intends for us to find in it, and--as to who "us" is--(b) the
     unmistakable message of the gospels is that revelation is aimed primarily
     at the simple and unlettered: that we have more to learn from them than
     they from us.

********************************** +.............................+
*- Ken <miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>* :All opinions expressed herein:
*There is no privileged position.* :are my own and are not to be :
*	-God, Derrida, others    * : attributed to my employer   :
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