Since
the Protestant Reformation liberated the Bible for the common man’s reading,
scholarship of variegated quality has developed to consider the content of the
Bible. And that presented numerous techniques. Often the evolution of Biblical
critical analysis has been presented in a linear historical fashion with
several parallel threads of inquiry and methodology. The philosophical progress
developing insight into the nature of language and logic has made retro-causality
of the methods of Biblical criticism apropos however when revision of
historical methods is required because of newer insight. Biblical criticism
does not therefore simply build up as an evolution to higher and more
sophisticated levels of understanding of the gospel books and epistles, it also
may neutralize elements of method and schools of interpretation of the Bible
from any preceding era to revise or restore them.
The philosopher W.V.O. Quine, P.F. Strawson
and additional analytic philosophers developed understanding of the nature of
language as a tool of communication. Literary criticism and the trend toward
subjective interpretation of language accelerated by Dewey added unto an
existential paradigm taken out of its historical context of rationalism was
applied to Biblical criticism. There were several schools of thought about what
method was right for interpreting the Bible and the person of Jesus Christ as
an historical figure or as a divine being. Analyzing the Bible as history was a
field for-itself. The Bible it ought to be recollected is language and language
is communication. The authors of the Bible intended to communicate to others.
Therefore some clarification about modern theories of communication from a
philosophical point of view.
Analytic
philosophy developed early in the 20th century and continued to the third
millennium. W.V.O. Quine eventually published ‘The Two Dogmas of Empiricism’
and overturned the analytic-synthetic distinction between intentional and extensional
concepts. To make a long story short Quine demonstrated that language is
wholistic and a phenomenon of communication. It isn’t –possible to draw a sharp
line between words that refer to material objects as scientists might prefer
and subjective psychological concepts.
Language
exists of course as sounds and symbols that represent objects experienced
fundamentally. Communication is a shared cultural phenomenon. Words and
lexicons compile in ontologies of
meaning understood generally by the users within a given language
Universe-ontology. The Bible is a compilation of communication that a reader
may interpret for-himself extracting whatever message he does from it. That
message is not entirely subjective though since language is never entirely
subjective or everyone would have a language of their own comprehensible only
for-themselves. There is persistence of memory within language enabling
individuals to understand what select words, sometimes even the preponderance
of words mean in texts thousands of years old.
Language
is inexact and flexible to a certain extent in order to accommodate numerous
meanings. It is the build-up or construction of more complex structures that
brings more specific meaning to communications though particular words can be
in-themselves acute. A red apple presents a crisp image for instance, while an
ark requires more elaboration of size. Noah’s ark brought Noah, his family and
the fauna of Mesopotamia through a great flood
evidently (according to the interpretation of the meaning of the literal terms)
while the Ark of the Covenant brought Moses and the Jewish community fleeing
from Pharaoh and the warriors of that evil empire through thee desert to the Promised
Land. An ark’s exact appearance is not quite as plain an image to form in the
mind of the readers in either case as that of a red apple.
There
are numerous ways to interpret the communication that is the Bible and there is
objective content in it in accord with the nature of linguistic ontology of
shared understanding. Kripke in ‘Naming and Necessity’ offered the opinion that
words have a neo-Platonic character with meanings that persist for-themselves
while others held language to the nominal and representational with no
realm-of-forms style Platonic element whatsoever. Cultural continuity of
communication does create the appearance of a functional neo-Platonic realism
for words. Articles such as the Great Vowel Shift in the development of the
English language and the evolution of language-for instance the appearance of
the word ‘church’ from circe in the migration from Germany to England offer
evidence of the flexibility and adaptability of language to meaning and
understanding of communication. Biblical criticism running on toward the
posture of excessive critical analysis sometimes may lose sight of the
practical communication meaning of the Gospel and the epistles with
overly-erudite analysis.
The
assembly of historical New Testament of the Bible and its order of appearance
and construction is known well enough to recognize it as largely complete by
the end of the first century. Several
fields of scholarship have arisen to interpret theologically the new testament
as history and in other ways with various presumptions about what it is and how
it occurs.
Hegelianism
and the evolution of a world-Spirit through history is a way of putting the
Bible into a context of causal explanation. For those just learning something
about the history of theology I should mention that there are differences
between Bible based theology, systematic and scholastic theology (such as
Thomas Aquinas practiced) and dogmatic theology as perhaps Barth and Tillich
put to paper. Theology that is not proximally arising from the Bible itself is
not Biblical theology. St. Anselm’s ontological argument is greatly
entertaining yet it isn’t Bible theology. What then is an example of Bible
theology?
The
doctrine of the Trinity is an example of Bible theology. One can find
statements of support for various positions on the question if God, Jesus
Christ and the Holy Spirit are one person with three roles or three persons
with one substance or in sundry configurations sufficient to invent
monophysitism and other possible heretical doctrines.
One obviously needs to accept that the
communication of the Bible is represented more or less accurately for one’s own
interpretation before advancing into those difficult theological sailing waters
with shoals that leave one suddenly ashore here and there. The writers of the
books of the Bible had different skills and knowledge of writing
communications. Obviously the advantage of providing four gospel accounts with different
techniques for composition allows a parallax device for learning more about the
writers themselves and what they intended to communicate. The words of the Lord
and Christological inferences given in the gospels have different meaning too
according to the reader’s belief criteria and interpretive assumptions.
I
ought to mention that like the question of the nature of past, present and
future (are they one time or three different times) the answer is perhaps a
problem of the criterion wherein the question is posed. God probably has the correct
particular communication form expressing the matters of fact in either case.
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