From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Mon Mar 16 1998 - 14:37:47 EST
At 6:18 AM -0600 3/16/98, Dale M. Wheeler wrote:
>
>The problem with this whole discussion is that we have crossed over
>from grammar to theological discussion and its hard to keep our own
>perspective out of the discussion...all we can do is try the best we
>can to let the text give us our theology. ...
I think the time has come to call a halt to this discussion for precisely
the reasons that Dale has indicated. I was suspicious at the outset, when
the post initiating this thread came in, that what we were about to be
examining was justification for a theological perspective from a particular
way of understanding the Greek text. We would all like to believe that we
honestly do let the text tell us what we should believe, but the temptation
comes often enough to want to push a text, which itself may be ambiguous or
subject to more than one legitimate interpretation, toward an
interpretation which we feel is the only possible construction of that
text--and it just HAPPENS, by chance, to accord with our own theological
perspective. This is a perilous game, and I suspect that all of us have
played it, and of course it turns upon that thin line marking off what is
legitimate EXEGESIS from what must be termed EISEGESIS.
I'd better stop while I'm ahead (if I haven't already fallen behind) and
simply urge that we not continue this thread.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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