Friday, May 25, 2012

Dispensational impressionism


I’m going to make a few comments on this post:


Steve Hays has written a little post in response to part of mine on What the Bible Really Really Says.  That is fair enough since I referred to him.  Once more he is very selective, and once more he entirely disregards the same proof of intertextual continuity in regard to the land promises in the OT that I included in the article.

i) I’m selective, in part, because this isn’t the first time we’ve had this discussion. I’m not responsible for Henebury’s forgetfulness or inattention to my previous responses.

ii) In addition, Henebury has his preferred way of framing issues, and I sometimes respond by challenging the framework. That distinction has yet to sink in with Henebury.

Steve doesn’t like “the plain sense.”  He writes as though he takes it for granted.  We all do.

No, I don’t take that for granted. And that’s not how I write.

In the first place, Steve completely bypassed the thrust of my argument in the post.  Does he agree with Kevin DeYoung’s argument from “what the Bible really says”?  Characteristically, he doesn’t say.  He is just concerned to attack the notion of a “plain-sense.”  He thinks my point is nonsense.  Others whom I respect disagree with him.  He does this even when it has been shown to him that those with whom he would most agree DO speak of “the plain-sense” etc., and assume everybody knows what they mean.

i) DeYoung doesn’t confine himself to invoking the plain sense of Scripture. Rather, he presents an exegetical argument for his position.

ii) The individuals whom Henebury has cited (e.g. Beale, Poythress) don’t operate with Henebury’s hermeneutical approach.

iii) Henebury is also mounting an illicit appeal to authority. But even if they appealed to the “plain sense” of Scripture, that’s not a truth-conducive way of casting the issue. What matters is not who said it, but what they said. Not their opinion, but the quality of the argument.

But people understand that what is meant by them is that a person means what they say and say what they mean.

i) Henebury is fond of that little ditty, but it’s vacuous. What’s the unit of meaning?

Individual words have meaning. Often multiple meanings. General meanings

Sentences have meaning. Words in sentences have specific meanings.

Pericopes have meaning. Narratives have meaning. Or the flow of the argument. Genre affects meaning.

What does a word mean in relation to a clause, a clause in relation to a sentence, a sentence in relation to a paragraph, a paragraph in relation to a chapter, a chapter in relation to a letter, a letter in relation to other letters by the same writer?

There’s cumulative meaning. Where smaller units build up to the overall meaning of a passage. But this also works in reverse: how the whole passage contributes to the sense of the smaller constituents. What they might mean individually is different from what they mean in concert.

Interpretive shortcuts like “plain sense” or “face-value” are blind abstractions.

ii) Henebury acts as if the “plain sense” or “face-value” meaning of Scripture is the default meaning. Any alternative construction must overcome the presumption of the “plain sense” or “face-value” meaning.

But this assumes that we know what Scripture means even before we open our Bibles and read Scripture. That imposes meaning onto Scripture from outside Scripture. That stipulates a given, prima facie meaning apart from the actual text of Scripture.

iii) Moreover, his formula (“a person means what they say and say what they mean”) is demonstrably false. Take sarcasm, where a writer (or speaker) says the opposite of what he means to convey.

Or take double entendre, viz. Delphic oracles.

On a related note, Biblical narratives often contain dramatic or situational irony, where meaning plays off against meaning.

This is what he was doing when he ignored my question about the identification of Zadokite and non-Zadokite priests serving God in Ezekiel’s Temple.

Henebury’s entire approach to that vision is mistaken, as I detailed.

In addition, I’ve also interacted with Ralph Alexander’s commentary:


He spent acres of blog-space on pushing a semiotic “type/token” position which neither supported his contention for OT typology nor indeed had anything to do with biblical typology as understood by the likes of Goppelt or Baker or Davidson or anyone else.  All these men saw OT types linked necessarily to NT antitypes.  Hays did not follow them.

i) I’ve explicitly and repeatedly distinguished between type/antitype relations and type/token relationships. As usual, Henebury is unable to keep track of the argument, even when I lay down a trail of breadcrumbs for him to follow.

ii) And this is another example in which Henebury fails to frame an issue in truth-conducive terms. Whether or not I’m defining a type the way Goppelt et al. do is an illicit appeal to authority. That fails to judge my argument on the merits. Whether or not my approach differs from theirs is irrelevant to the veracity of my approach.

Henebury is trying to win the debate rather than win the argument. He resorts to specious appeals that play to the galleries.

Why would exegesis oppose “plain-sense”?

i) If the meaning is “plain,” you don’t need to exegete the text. You can read the meaning right off the surface of the text.

ii) What’s (allegedly) “plain,” and what is “in” the text are hardly interchangeable concepts. Something can be “in” the text without being “plainly” there.

iii) Indeed, what is “plain” is not about what’s in the text, but what’s in the mind of the reader. To say it’s “plain” is to say it’s plain to a reader. That’s a version of reader-response criticism. On that view, meaning is not “in” the text. Rather, meaning is relative to the reader, since what is “plain” to one reader isn’t plain to another.

Henebury is substituting the subjective impression of the reader for what is “in” the text.

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