Christ vs. the Hermeneutical Death Spiral part 3: Red Flags
The upshot is that mere ideas, which are independently without revelation’s explicit established contextualization and definition, are human products, not divine ones, that can and must to a great extent originate entirely within the mind, between humans alone, and die there if not proven strictly tied to ultimately foreign realities. That objectively transcendent, scriptural revelation of which I insist uses concepts for its representation, but that is an entirely different thing than saying concepts are revelation itself.
You see, I am really interested in being more fundamental than any fundamentalist, and more radical than any radical. Deception is not only an argument failing on the basis of bad premises and logic that nevertheless reaches a really attractive and desired conclusion that we wrongly accept. Deception is a conclusive idea failing because of no direct supernatural dependency but accepted because it is a child by a beautiful, grand and intelligent procedure that we love more. Deception is produced by easily exposable tricks of affection and nuanced and subtitle tricks of reason. Liberalism and conservatism are like twins fused at the hip, who also share the same brain. They represent fundamental and radical carnality, but not fundamental and radical spirituality, in which no such chimera exists.
This is the one hermeneutical rule that is, by far, the most important, because if you lose it you will begin to unconsciously handle ideas as a container, a controlling source of divine knowledge, instead of a dependent content. You cant control meaning with an artificial and dependent creation and moral choice of man. When this happens, nothing you can think or say about the transcendent will have, if it exists, a supernatural controlling premise and will be, although appearing noble and pious, ultimately worthless for the task it pretends.
God does not give ideas, God gives phenomena as the overarching magistrate over the content of meaning, and all generated ideas are supposed to strictly obey that phenomenon alone. This is to say that meaning flows directly from the observation and reaction to that appearing of the divine, and that objective divinity is not an idea, reason or a feeling about things except as accurate or twisted reflectors of it.
I point this self-evident fact out in this way not to say that Osbourne’s outline, the subjects with which he deals, and the manner in which he deals with them, are in error. I use his book to show that the solution to any subject-to-object problem in biblical hermeneutics to which he leads cannot be toward a subject or object which is motivated by or resembles “conceptual” or “propositional” “knowledge.” Not consciously misaligning them as a preface to the whole thing to show a lack of dependence upon an insular dialogic is to join it in a disastrous explanation of Christian meaning.
It may take a while for me to give you the kind of revelation about Christian hermeneutics as is expected of the theologian, to clearly point out what of divine hermeneutics he typically is not motivated, so I ask some patience. On the surface, it may seem that I am picking nits or am seriously misinformed, but I assure you, this is far from the case.
Again, going forward, to not find ourselves under the same dying tree we need to take in the whole thing with a certain blinder off and from a distance. We are not advocating against Osborune or anyone else for that matter. We are advocating for a new start upon which to reorient their approaches and make an evaluation as to the extent of their usefulness in knowing the one indispensable essential hermeneutical rule of the NT. Which, by the way, they never do broach unless to deny its existence.
Please go to the next page…
One Comment
Pingback: