Listen as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical interpretation in this address from The Gospel Coalition sermon library.
We’re going to attempt an impossible amount today. I want to say a few things to finish off what we did last day. That is, I’m going to assume now that we’ve laid out the kind of inferential, inner-canonical connections we laid out last day, the kinds of things that tie the Bible together. I’m going to assume that base now, and if that base is correct, if that is the way at least in part in which the Bible really does hang together, then there are some things that can be said in the light of those connections. Four in particular.
I want to go through them rather quickly so I can get on to the question of literary genre, which has been advertised for some time. The alternative, of course, is to invite me back next year and I’ll just do it next year instead. I didn’t do it last year and I haven’t done it this year. Maybe by the eschaton I’ll get around to it. Four points then finishing off last day.
1. Does any of this mean somehow the Old Testament is depreciated in the Canon?
What is precisely the place of the Old Testament in the Bible if the connection it has with the New Testament is along the lines I’ve sketched in? Doesn’t this have the affect of so depreciating if you don’t really need it? Now that the fulfillment is here, who needs the prophecy?
One could become very cynical, and I would want to say if you push that line of reasoning too far you can use it in some measure for almost any Christian view of the Old Testament. I mean, you could take the same sort of reasoning and say, “Right. Under standard Protestant views in this matter, who needs the ceremonial bits of the Old Testament? Who needs the civil bits of the Old Testament? All we need is the moral law.”
But, of course, if one goes along that line, one has a truncated Old Testament. Marcion strikes again. Marcion was a man in the early church who not only said the whole Old Testament wasn’t necessary but much of the New Testament wasn’t necessary either when it comes right down to it. He liked Paul and wasn’t too sure about much else. Truncated Luke and bits and pieces here and there, but he didn’t want anything that had any Jewish flavor.
If you push that line of reasoning, one has to say you’ve got to push it on quite a lot of fronts and then you have a ridiculous reductionism nobody is going to buy into. What then positively can be said? The Old Testament still functions in a number of extremely important ways. First, it provides much of the early part of the Bible’s story without which the last part doesn’t make sense.
For example, if you don’t have a doctrine of creation, a doctrine of fall, or a doctrine of covenant, it is going to make it extremely difficult to make sense of the New Testament. If it is in a more philosophically materialistic line, if it’s in a frankly atheistic line, modern thought sees human beings as having arisen from the primordial ooze more or less by statistical accident and, thus, without transcendent significance.
It also sees human beings as, finally, not bad, merely structured by genes and behavior and society and that sort of thing, but not intrinsically bad. The Bible disagrees fundamentally on both points. It says we are extremely important. We’ve been made in the image of God. Unlike all other sentient life, we have been made to live with him even despite our sin. There has arisen a Redeemer for fallen men and women but not for fallen angels.
Thus, the creation and the fall form the kind of backdrop to everything else that takes place, and if one doesn’t see that, then one begins to distort the gospel. It happens sometimes in presentations today where we’re trying to sort of be with it and scratch where people itch and so we start like this: “Are you lonely? Turn to Jesus. He’ll be your friend.” “Is your life the pits? No real meaning? No feeling of transcendence? Come to Jesus. He’ll give you the abundant life.” And on and on and on.
Thus, we use the modern feelings of alienation as the grid into which to fit Jesus. What begins to filter out unwittingly is the fact that all of these things which are real problems in contemporary society are from the perspective of biblical theology tied profoundly to our alienation from God, our sin, our rebellion, our moral anarchy, and the root solution of the gospel is not to address feelings of loneliness but to address problems of real guilt before a real God who made us and who will ultimately be our judge.
Unless we see that is the base of the story line, the plot line of the whole Bible, then when we get to Jesus we end up distorting the gospel again and again and again and again. It just gets transmuted into whatever is a current shibboleth for contemporary society. What you tend to avoid, then, again and again and again is the high point of all the Gospels, the cross … the cross … the need for a Savior who will atone for our sins. There’s the plot line.
In addition, there is an enormous moral value even in the Bible stories. One has to be careful here. You know the kind of preacher who goes through Old Testament history along this line: “This was a good king; therefore, be good. This was a bad king; therefore, don’t be bad. This was a good king; therefore, be good. This was a bad king; therefore, don’t be bad.”
You can get a lot of preaching like that of the life of David sort and life of Abraham sort. “Abraham got it right here. This is what we do. Abraham got it wrong here. We don’t do that.” Thus, the whole Bible becomes nothing much more than a kind of source book for moralisms. Well, push to the wall. That just goes much too far.
What it fails to see is the kind of intrinsic theological connections between the Old Testament and the New that are very important. For example, in the case of Abraham, you’re into all the questions of covenant: how are we children of Abraham, the tie to Galatians 3 we see, the tie to Romans 4 and circumcision, the relationship between Abraham and Moses, the way that covenant ends up in the gospel? There are all kinds of theological connections as well.
Yet, at the same time, the New Testament does sometimes make use of the Old Testament stories to draw moralizing lessons. Thus, for example, in 1 Corinthians, chapter 10, that’s exactly what is done regarding the way the people rebelled at the time of the exodus. “These things were written for examples for us on whom the ends of the ages have come.”
In that sense, one of the purposes of these things is precisely to give us concretizations of moral principles, and you’d lose an awful lot of them if you cut them all out. I think, too, if the Canon is held together more or less along the lines that I was trying to argue last day, then you do see, once you begin to see the kinds of threads that are there, and I just began to sketch them in …
You begin to glimpse, I think … Maybe I’m just too close to the subject, but I think you begin to glimpse something of the glory of the mind of God, don’t you? All the strands coming together. They’re all worked out centuries, millennia, in advance, but they come together with such perfection, sometimes subtly, sometimes boldly. What a loss it would be to lose all of that!
In the fourth place, I think, too, there is a much greater diversity of literary genres if you include the Old Testament, and that has some bearing about which I’ll say more in part 2.
2. There is a place for an a posteriori definition of moral law but not, in my view, an a priori definition of moral law.
What I mean by that is, in the standard Protestant line I was describing a couple of days ago, I said law is divided up traditionally since Equines into moral, civil, and ceremonial law.
The moral law is defined by definition it is presented. That is, this is the definition you take going into your Bible study. It’s an a priori definition. That is not a definition that comes out of the text itself but a definition you bring in from your philosophy of religion. It’s an a priori definition of moral law. Namely, that it is the law of God which does not change. That then becomes, under standard Protestant view, the principle, an a priori principle, which distinguishes what continues as law across the covenants, across the Testaments.
For reasons I’ve already tried to elucidate, at least briefly, I’m not sure quite that’s the way the Bible itself treats its continuities and discontinuities. In the Sermon on the Mount, we saw Jesus does not say, “Not a jot or tittle from the moral law will pass away,” but “Not a jot or tittle from the law will pass away until all is fulfilled,” and so forth.
I’m not sure the New Testament writers looked back on the Old and said, “I’ve got it sussed out. The way we decide what is continuing is this: everything that is moral law as defined by this a priori definition continues; everything else does not.” I mean, there’s no feel in the New Testament that’s the way the connections are drawn.
On the other hand, does this mean, therefore, that I’m advocating a position in which there is no moral law? Wouldn’t that be fun to go home and say, “I heard a word alive that Don Carson doesn’t believe in moral law”? Well, that’s not quite right either. I do, but I don’t think it’s an a priori definition; I think you can construct an a posteriori definition.
That is to say instead of bringing a definition out of your philosophy of religion before you address the text, I think after the fact, after you have put your Bible together along the lines I’ve tried to suggest, with this prophesy-and-fulfillment connection, with these typologies and that kind of thing, after you’ve put those kinds of things together, if you look back from hindsight across the Testaments and say, “What is it in God’s demands on his people that changes least in its form?” and define that as moral law, then you have an a posteriori definition. That is, a definition that emerges from the connections you’ve made already within the text.
The fact of the matter is you will then end up with a moral position very close to the other one in terms of what you do and don’t do. What you view as enduring or not is only a whisper from the other position. The big difference will be your view of Sabbath, and the reason for that is all sides agree every moral issue that crosses the Testaments is rearticulated under the New. It continues as least changing items. The Sabbath issue is disputed and has been disputed in the history of the church. We’ll come to that one, too. I think there’s a way forward there, but we’ll come to that in a moment.
3. It is important, then, to reflect on how and why we make moral decisions from Old Testament texts.
If this is the way the Bible hangs together, it is important to reflect on how and why we make moral decisions from Old Testament texts. For example, what shall we say about homosexuality?
Some of the argumentation used today from the traditional conservative side would simply be, “Don’t do it. It’s an abomination. Here are the texts.” Then you quote a whole lot of Old Testament texts. The more liberal side or licentious side … That’s not meant to be a cheap shot. I would say the same thing about heterosexual promiscuity too, but sometimes we unfortunately give nice words to bad positions.
Some of us, I suppose, don’t want to go around being thought liberal, but when it comes to your giving do you want to be thought illiberal? Ah, we’ve given all the good words to positions we don’t like. “They’re not liberal; they’re unbelieving.” In fact, in most seminaries I know of the more “liberal” persuasion, they offer less liberal education than conservative schools. They just give you their side. In a conservative school you’ll get more sides than that that you’ll have to come to terms with. That’s better liberal education in the good sense of liberal.
Be that as it may, it’s still important to try to figure out what kind of conclusion we should come to on a test case like homosexuality. What the more licentious side would say on this particular issue is, “You don’t have the right to pick up some of those Old Testament texts prohibiting homosexuality when there are other Old Testament texts prohibiting other things which you do not equally impose on the church like stoning perpetually rebellious children.” I haven’t heard any great pressure group advocating that recently. Probably too many of us have them. I don’t know.
What do we do? What we’re really saying, then, is how do these things look forward? How do God’s rules, God’s laws (moral, civil, or ceremonial) look forward to the New Testament? How are they taken up? How does this tie into the flow of redemptive history? I would want to argue there are all kinds of ties here.
On the one hand, it’s tied back to creation itself. God made Adam, and God made Eve, one flesh, an established marriage which is then picked up again and again and again in Scripture as a certain kind of model, so when it comes to polygamy what does Jesus himself say? “In the beginning it was not so.”
In other words, these things are put together even at that level. It’s not just a question of, “How can I read the Bible so I can get away with what I want to get away with?” Some of these things are built right in. As one wag has put it, “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” It’s not a friendly way of putting it, but there’s some point.
Then when you get to the other end there are passages in the New Testament and likewise, you see, that start saying something about homosexuality. Thus, this is one of those commands that changes least as you go across, whether you take a traditional, Protestant view coming from Equines, which is pre-Protestant, or you take the kind of links in the Testaments I’ve tried to establish. You still end up in Romans, 1 Corinthians, and other places that still say in the realms of God’s demands these things change least.
Because it is such a sensitive issue, I think I should take two or three more minutes here just to expand a little more fully on a holistic view of homosexuality. May I do that? This is off-topic a little, and there are other groups I know in Word of Life that have dealt with this topic elsewhere, so one wants to be careful. I’m quite certain in a crowd this size some of us here are homosexuals, whether practicing or by temperament and orientation. I’m quite sure of it, and I have no desire to land on you with both feet as if you have committed the unforgivable sin and all the rest of us are home and dry.
Moreover, there is a great phalanx of voices in our society that insist homosexuality is built right into the genetic structure so that you cannot blame anybody for a sexual orientation, and that view is so widely circulated, propounded, held, and assumed that if you start saying otherwise, they simply assume you’re ignorant.
What does a Christian do to respond to that? First, I think it’s very important to say in circles that look at this thing closely and objectively, Christian or otherwise, the actual physical evidence is not nearly as convincing as people think. For example, the associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School just is not convinced by the evidence at all.
For example, there was a recent bit of experimentation done, an analysis done, on corpses of prisoners who had been homosexuals, and their hypothalamus was a little smaller than the hypothalamus of heterosexuals, so it is judged likely there is some sort of connection. There were only nine cases that were done, but it’s judged likely there is some sort of connection between brain stem and sexual orientation.
It may be. I’ll come to that in a moment, but there’s another whole school of thought that looks at the same evidence and says there are all kinds of experiments that have shown parts of the brain, including the sub-brain, develop in line with appropriate stimulation as people grow up, so if your eyes were blinded, for example, for the first three years of your life, there are parts of the brain that control sight that would not develop appropriately.
Some people think the jury is still out on whether the small hypothalamus is due to sexual orientation built in genetically or is due instead to inappropriate structuring in the home as the child has grown up. The jury is out on that one. I’ll come back to it in just a moment. What is quite clear, however, from study after study after study of massive sorts is that the overwhelming majority of homosexuals, where thousands and thousands and thousands of cases have been studied and sorted against control groups with double blind studies and that sort of thing, fall into one of two groups.
In the case of the male, about 66 percent (give or take a percentage in the different studies and statistical error and so on) come out of homes where there is a very strong, domineering mother and a father who isn’t there or who has the backbone of a dishcloth, or alternatively, where there is an abusive father, a real, hateful, powerful, physically vengeful, abusive father and a mother who is someone you just wipe the dirt with.
You can understand the psychology working in both cases. In the first case, you see the boy is growing up and wants the softness element and finds it in his father. He doesn’t find it in his mother. In the other case, a flip takes place, and what you have is, “I don’t want to be associated with a creep like that who everybody just walks on. I want the strength of the father.”
You get a similar reverse pairing with respect to lesbians and parental roles. There are lots of studies on that. More recently, people don’t publish them quite so boldly, but I could give you bibliography on it. There’s a lot of it around. What that suggests is, first, it’s a statistical study. It does not say just because you’ve been brought up in a home like that you will end up that way. That’s the first thing.
The second thing it says from a Christian point of view is the sins of the parents are visited on the children. You build sinful structures into your home and you’re going to get sinful structures in your kids. It’s important to see that. The third thing it suggests is if it’s not genetic here, if it’s patterned behavior it is reversible.
I know the media often say you cannot undo a homosexual. I’ve counseled too many of them and seen them change. I can introduce you to former homosexuals whom I’ve counseled who are happily married with two kids today. I have never seen an ex-black. I’ve seen a lot of ex-homosexuals. I’ve never seen an ex-Chinese or an ex-white. That’s genetic, and it’s one to one.
There are groups like Exodus International, for example, that will open their files to you and introduce you to many, many, many people (some will have their names confidential but many people will allow their names to be used) of thousands on their files of ex-homosexuals. It’s a Christian group that helps people once they’ve been converted to make the transition, and it usually takes some re-patterning.
The person genuinely becomes a believer and is troubled by all of this, and then there is a re-patterning that can take place usually in the context of a Christian community with good solid models around and some accountability and this sort of thing over a period of time, but it can be done.
Let’s take the hardest case. Supposing it is demonstrated at some point that you can have a genetic factor that makes reversal for some cases impossible, what would Christians say about that? I don’t think the evidence is there at the moment to quite go along with the affirmation that is the case, but it’s possible. It wouldn’t destroy my faith or anything. Why not?
Because this is a fallen and bruised world. Part of the entailment of the fall is that you get all kinds of horrible things. You get Downs Syndrome babies too. You get all kinds of terrible things, and when those things happen (the entailment of the fall), then it is important still for those individuals to live out as responsibly as they know how a faithful life before the Lord looking for his grace.
Supposing you were born a eunuch, supposing you married and then the week after your marriage your wife was hit in a traffic accident and became so mentally damaged that she had the mental IQ, if people still use quotas today, of about a 2-year-old, emotionally unstable, and had to be incarcerated for the rest of her life.
Would that give you the right to go and play around? Nope. You vowed before God for a whole life commitment for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health till God separates you, so help you God. He’s sovereign. He can give you grace in the time of need. He can give a homosexual grace in the time of need, too. I don’t think homosexual lust is intrinsically worse than heterosexual lust, so even if you came to that situation, what you have to say is, at the end of the day, you can’t get married. You can’t have an affair with a person of the same sex (not if you’re a Christian).
Then it would be necessary for the church wisely to provide support, help, friendship, a clap on the back rather than simply writing people off because of some bugaboo word. That’s the kind of line I would take then to treating something like that, and there are a lot of test cases that could be introduced, but I thought it was probably worth treating one of the hardest ones last.
One of the places, then, where this approach to the unity of the Canon does affect Christian conduct as I’ve indicated is the Sabbath Sunday issue, so I should say at least a word about that. In the Reformed tradition, in the Protestant tradition, generally we have to admit there has been a divide.
For example, if you come down the Westminster Confession line which follows Equines in this moral-civil-ceremonial law-divide, then the Ten Commandments are the high point of moral law, and since the Sabbath is part of it, that’s a moral law too, in which case what you have to do when you come to the New Testament is either become a Seventh Day observer as a few Puritans did, or, more commonly, insist Sunday is the Christian Sabbath, in which case the onus is upon you to demonstrate there has been that kind of transfer-of-day theology in the New Testament.
The alternative tradition you find, for example, in the Heidelberg Catechism (equally reformed) does not say Sabbath should be treated that way but cites passages like Romans 14, “One man views one day above another; one man views all days the same. Let each be fully persuaded in his own mind,” and insists the Ten Commandments are the apex of the Law but not the apex of moral law.
Thus, there is no particular need to put Sabbath under the a priori category of moral law which cannot change, in which case you work inductively through some of the kinds of passages that dump you into, finally, Hebrews 4, which we looked at yesterday where ultimately the anti-type of Sabbath seems to be salvation itself, the Sabbath rest of God.
Then, you see, you would point out, “Paul says, ‘Let each man be fully persuaded in his own mind. One man regards one day above another; one man regards all the days the same. Let each be fully persuaded in his own mind.’ ” Paul does not say, “One man commits adultery; another man does not commit adultery. Let each be fully persuaded in his own mind.”
In other words, you have some biblical criteria for establishing what has enduring significance and what does not on an a posteriori basis. That is, after the fact as you look back through the text. Do you see? When you trace these two reformed positions back to Calvin, Calvin says both. It depends on whether you look in his institutes or in his commentary on Genesis. I don’t think he sorted it out! A wise man.
What does this mean in practice when it comes to the Lord’s Day Observance Society or “Keep Sunday Special” or something like that? Again, lest one offers simply the choice of strict legalism or strict licentiousness or strict antinomianism, there are other alternatives. What Christians surely will want to say in either case is something like, “If this really is the Law of God and if the transfer of theology is well enough established by New Testament text, if you believe that, then you’re bound to observe it.”
Fine. If it’s not, so that for you Sunday is not quite Christian Sabbath, even though you recognize the early Christians did regularly meet on Sunday in a Roman world where, in fact, they operated in the Greco-Roman part very often on a 10-day cycle, Christians nevertheless kept the 7-day cycle of the Jewish heritage and met early in the morning or late at night as Christians very commonly without the transfer theology quite being there, you would say, “Clearly the Christians did meet even if it’s not prescribed somewhere in a specific text. They did meet on the first day of the week for worship and prayer and gratitude to God and for communion and this sort of thing.”
You would say, “Meanwhile, in our country this is the way it is operating. God tells us to make best use of our time (“Redeem the time for the days are evil”). He tells us to spend time in corporate worship. He tells us not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together. He tells us to spend time with our families. He tells us to take certain rest.” All of those things are there! This is a great opportunity to do it, so that functionally you may come out in exactly the same place.
My father … You’ve probably had enough of my father. My father, when we were quite young, was really quite strict on all of these matters. There were all kinds of things we didn’t do on Sunday, but it was a fun day. It was a family day when he wasn’t preaching. Then when I was about 12 or 13, it came to what we call Mother’s Day, Mothering Sunday to you.
Dad … I don’t know where he got the money. Normally, he didn’t have enough for this sort of shenanigan, but on this particular Sunday after the morning service he smiled and said, “Today we’re going to a restaurant because it’s Mothering Sunday and mom needs a rest.” My jaw fell open.
“Dad? Sunday?” And he said, and I quote, “Well, if you’re conscience offends you, you can stay home.” I think he got that about right. In other words, the discipline was built into the family and so on as part of family policy. It wasn’t, “You have to do this because the law demands it.” We asked him growing up. “This is the way we do things. We’re honoring the Lord this way. It’s time together. That’s the way we do it.”
At the same time, as I was growing up and becoming a teenager and so on, he loosened things a little bit too. I think in retrospect it was pretty shrewd. Now if you really are committed to a Sabbatarian view of Sunday, you won’t view it as shrewdness; you’ll view it as compromise. I view it as shrewdness.
In this particular element of the Reformed tradition, I confess I am a little more comfortable with the Heidelberg position, but I have to tell you, where the rubber hits the road, I’d probably do what you do anyway, and that too has to be said. It’s one of the reasons why Sabbath Sunday is a very interesting test case for systems of theology. Whether you think the issue is of transcendental importance or not, it’s a good test case for theology.
Then when it comes to something like “Keep Sabbath Special,” if I were voting I would vote with keeping Sunday special, not though because I think that is morally bound upon us, but I think because it’s shrewd for the country. It’s wise, it’s right, and all the reasons on the other side are basically debasing. That’s the way I would vote. I might not vote for exactly the same reason as some of my more Westminster oriented brothers and sisters, but it’s still the way I would vote.
Have we had enough of this one? May I go on to literary genre? There are other topics I could introduce here that some of you have brought up and asked me to do so, but there’s just not time without taking away everything from literary genre. I’ve had two or three notes. One of them said, “Have you written a book on combining Old and New Testament passages?”
The short answer is no. I haven’t. The slightly longer answer, however, is that my longer commentaries on Matthew and John devote a disproportionate amount of space everywhere in those commentaries where an Old Testament passage shows up just because it interests me, so I keep pouring out more pages of black ink whenever that sort of thing happens.
If the Lord spares me, I have a dream somewhere down the line of doing a two-volume work in this whole area, but I don’t know enough yet. I need to do a commentary on Galatians and a commentary on Hebrews and perhaps a commentary on the apocalypse. They’re picking up certain areas the way the Bible is used differently in each one. I teach those things in courses in Greek at the seminary, but I need to do them to have the command of the text and know what’s going on before I do the synthesis. You have to have the bits and pieces first, and I don’t have all the bits and pieces.
Now we come to literary genre. I want to say a word first of all about the importance of recognizing different literary genres. In other words, this is not merely an academic study, something for armchair theologians who don’t have anything better to do. I want to say something about the importance of thinking this sort of thing through. The point is different genres can determine meaning.
Let’s take an example away from the Bible, first of all. This is an example that comes, in the first instance, from Stanley Fish. If you don’t know who he is don’t worry about it. Can you see that? It’s a series of names. Stanley Fish put this series of names up on an overhead or on a blackboard for students in his class saying that by the next class, which was a class on religious epistemology, he wanted them to read the essays in the Jacobs-Rosenbaum Symposium, the essays by Levin, Thorne, Hayes, and Ohman.
He put a question mark after Ohman because he couldn’t remember at that moment whether Ohman had two “n”s or one “n” at the end. Then, Stanley Fish being Stanley Fish, he realized it would be great fun to put this out another way, so when the next class came in, which was also a religious class on symbolism but not on epistemology, he left it on the board, put a box around it, and “Page 43” on the top.
He said to them, “We’re talking about symbolism in this class. This is an obscure poem on page 43 of a book I’ll mention in a moment.” He was lying through his teeth but was giving certain authenticity. “Can you tell me, please, what you would make of this poem? What does it mean?”
Religious students being religious students and theologians being theologians, “Jacobs: there’s some connection with the Old Testament covenant or God. Rosenbaum: Rose. Baum. German for tree. Rose and tree. The resurrection and the tree. Jesus coming from the seed of Jacob, dying and rising from the dead. Levin. Some pun on living maybe? Thorne? Oh, yes. That’s pretty clear. You’re back at the cross again, aren’t you?”
They even got down to the last one (Ohman), and it’s sort of a voice of praise. “Oh, man!” His point in all of this was that literary genre determines meaning. In other words, if you’re told it’s a certain kind of list of authors, then you read it one way. If you’re told it’s a poem, then you read it another way. You might stretch a bit to make sense of it, but that’s what you’re doing. You just unwittingly go that way, don’t you?
Take another example. This sentence was found in a physics textbook. I quote, “And hence no force however great can draw a cord however fine into a horizontal line which shall be absolutely straight.” A physics sentence. Boring for everybody but physicists, but somebody has noticed that, whether planned or not, it has the meter and flavor and rhyme of a Tennyson-like poem.
“And hence no force however great can draw a cord however fine into a horizontal line which shall be absolutely straight.” Clearly I’m not much at Tennyson. I’ve heard of poke holes in it, but you can see the point. One can have a lot of fun with these things. You can manipulate these things all day.
Somebody not liking Stanley Fish’s first example says, “Yes, but in all fairness this is not straightforward. I mean, Stanley Fish wants to infer from these sorts of evidences that the way you read texts is entirely dependent upon your community. You have a community of assumed literary and cultural values. Thus, there’s no objective meaning in the text; it’s all inferred from the kind of literary heritage into which you have been born and what you have assimilated.”
There is a standard joke offered by (well, it’s not a joke; it’s painful) Paul de Man on this one that’s probably worth commenting on. He’s talking about Archie Bunker. Does that name mean anything to you? Archie Bunker? Those exposed to the degenerating American culture are familiar with it. Otherwise, you might not be exposed.
Archie Bunker is a figure in a television program that is now off the air except in reruns, but Archie Bunker was a sort of traditional redneck: bigmouth, right-wing, ignorant, very funny. It was a very funny comedy. It was very funny. His wife … He’s the Alf Garnett of America. Oh, the British win again. “The English, the English, the English are best; I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest.” I know my Flanders and Swan too. I’d sing you the rest of it, but it would just ruin the rest of the afternoon.
They take an example then from Archie Bunker. His wife, who is a bit of a milksop, says, “Archie, do you want your shoes tied over or under?” She’s just cleaning, you see. He says, “What’s the difference?” She says, “Well, the difference is when you tie them this way …” She misunderstood what he meant. What he meant was, as Paul de Man analyzes his sentences, “I don’t give a damn.” That’s what he meant, but that’s not how she has taken it.
How she has taken it is, “I don’t know what the difference is. Would you explain it to me, please?” So the audience is roaring laughing. From this, Paul de Man says, “Do you see? Language is so complex it can be interpreted so many different way.” He goes pages and pages and pages of analysis. Then he finally ends up, “This shows even the simplest sentence exposes us to a vertiginous, multiplicity of complex interpretations.”
Give me a break! The problem with that analysis is the only one who doesn’t get it is Ethel and maybe Paul de Man. The point is for it to be funny you have to see it both ways. A pun is a pun. You can’t go to this endless flexibility just because there’s a pun in the text. You can’t do that. It is inferring too much from the admitted complexity of language. It is inferring just too much trying constantly to prove the complete relativism of all things.
Likewise, somebody not liking Stanley Fish says, “If you are really trying to put a proper frame for the list of books, it would actually read like this: ‘For next Thursday, read the essays in the Jacobs-Rosenbaum Anthology by Levin, Thorne, Hayes, and Ohman.’ Then you couldn’t possibly turn that into a poem.”
In other words, the thing has been manipulated. Nevertheless, it still does show the importance of form to interpretation. Let me give you an example. I think this one I may have given last year, but this one is so good I just can’t help doing it again. Jeremiah, chapter 20. [Audio cuts off]
Try Before You Buy: FREE Sample of TGC’s New Advent Devotional
Choosing the right Advent daily devotional can be tough when there are so many options. We want to make it easier for you by giving you a FREE sample of TGC’s brand-new Advent devotional today.
Unto Us is designed to help you ponder the many meanings of this season. Written by TGC staff, it offers daily Scripture readings, reflections, and questions to ponder. We’ll send you a free sample of the first five days so you can try it out before purchasing it for yourself or your church.