What does Isaiah 7:14 mean?

Ask any crowd of OT scholars and before you get any answers to your question, you’ll be told most emphatically that it doesn’t mean Isaiah was prophesying the birth of Jesus. The context of the passage and the historical situation of Isaiah will be invoked, and any hint of a New Testament reference will [...]

More than propositions

From Stephen Chapman’s essay ‘Reclaiming Inspiration for the Bible’ in Canon and Biblical Interpretation:
The decisive objection to the idea of propositional revelation is not that the biblical books fail to communicate concepts: it is instead that the biblical literature does more than convey concepts. The Bible also influences and forms its readers in a [...]

Hmmm….

You know sometimes you read something and you can’t quite believe it says what you thought it says so you have to read it twice? This is from an article by a very youthful John Piper (originally written in 1976 for JETS, but now available on the Desiring God site) explaining why the grammatical-historical [...]

WTS and conversational theology

For anyone without the time or inclination to read the 146-page pdf file now available on the WTS website, Joel Garver has provided a helpful summary and analysis of the documents. He reads between the lines to discern some of the deeper issues that have led to the current crisis.  The following paragraph is [...]

‘Without Lyra we would understand neither the New nor the Old Testament’

Shelley King appropriates this quote from Martin Luther which originally referred to the mediaeval interpreter, Nicholas of Lyra, for her essay on exegesis, allegory and The Golden Compass. This playful use of an earlier text is entirely appropriate for a discussion of Pullman’s work which depends so heavily on references and allusions to earlier [...]

If you haven’t read…

…David Steinmetz’s article on ‘The Superiority of Pre-critical Exegesis‘ then do so now! I first read it when I was writing my Song of Songs dissertation and again today when we discussed it in History of Interpretation.
Steinmetz offers what I described as a ‘goal-evaluated’ view of interpretation and what Dr McCartney suggests might be [...]

Words and things

What do we mean by symbolic language? Words signifying things, or things signifying other things? Often, it seems to me, people confuse these two. Not Nicholas of Lyra:
For God who is the author of this Scripture, not only employed words to signify certain things, but also things by words of signification. [...]

Speech act theory and the bible

I’ve blogged before about the limitations of the grammatical-historical methods of exegesis.
But I was struck last week in my History of Interpretation class by Augustine’s approach to the problem of interpretation. He is almost entirely goal-centred. For him, the purpose of the scriptures is to engender love for God and love for one’s [...]