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David Steinmetz finds Benjamin Jowett's claim that Scripture's "one meaning" is "the meaning which it had to the mind of the Prophet or Evangelist who first uttered or wrote, to the hearers or readers who first received it" to be "insufficiently historical, He argues (in Ellen Davis and Richard Hays, The Art of Reading Scripture, "Aside from the absurdity of an argument that assumes the complete passivity of the first hearers and their amazing unanimity in discerning the mind of the prophet or evangelist (an illusion easily refuted by anone who has ever lectured or preached), Jowett omits altogether from the historian's task the historian's knowledge of how things ended. But just as the defeat of Napoleon had consequences that provide an indispensable framework for a historical evaluation of his life and times, so, too, does the prophesying of hte prophets and the preaching of the apostles. Historians, no less than early Christian Fathers, worry about how things turn out."
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 19, 2006 at 08:16 AM
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