Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 26:1 (Mar 1983)
Article: A Response To “Methodological Unorthodoxy”
Author: Robert H. Gundry

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JETS 26:1 (March 1983) p. 95

A Response To “Methodological Unorthodoxy”

Robert H. Gundry

Anybody who believes both that truth is what corresponds to an actual state of affairs and that what the Bible says, God says, as Norman Geisler believes, might ask himself whether his understanding of inspiration corresponds to the actual state of affairs in the Biblical text. He might also remind himself that a text may address different kinds of states of affairs—e.g., historical kinds (“Jesus went into Galilee”), theological kinds (“God is spirit”), and mixed kinds (“Christ died for our sins”)—and that truth and methods of communicating it fall into separate categories. Many intermediate points mark the spectrum from purely historical reporting to purely fictional writing. To fix this or that document or passage at this or that point on the spectrum, and to do so because of a conscious or unconscious judgment concerning what method of communication an author chose to use, says nothing about truth versus error. For an author’s statements are true if they correspond to an actual state of affairs in the way he intends his words to be taken.

The exercise of hermeneutics—i.e., the application of exegetical rules for discovering the meaning intended by an author—necessarily precedes asking whether the intended meaning is true. Despite his stout affirmation that “a statement… means what the author meant by it,” Geisler scarcely sticks a toe on the hermeneutical turf, where the real debate is taking place. This failure leaves his acceptable points of argument high and dry and irrelevant. For all one can tell from his discussion, no problems of interpretation exist in the Biblical text. Either that or they have all been solved. Yet he knows they are there, for if he had not happened on them before, he heard me recite a number of them when I read my paper “A Response to Some Criticisms of Matthew: A Commentary on His Literary and Theological Art” at the ETS meeting last December. And he has a copy of that paper. (Readers may get their own copy by writing to me at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California 93108, asking for it by title and sending $1.00; it consists of fifty-one close-packed pages.)

Alongside the ignoring of textual problems stands Gelslet’s apparent insensitivity to differences in literary art. The Bible is anything but cut-and-dried. It has spice, dash, flair, variety. This fact is lost on Geisler’s argument, which would look far different if it took into account a wider range of literary possibilities.

The ignoring of textual problems and of wider-ranging literary possibilities leads to equivocation on the term “methodological.” In Geisler’s overall thesis this term refers to a device used to reach an interpretation of th...

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