Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 51:1 (Spring 1989)
Article: New Directions in the Hermeneutical Debate
Author: Royce Gordon Gruenler

WTJ 51:1 (Spring 1989) p. 133

New Directions in the Hermeneutical Debate*

Royce Gordon Gruenler

In this valuable collection of essays on the focal issue of biblical inspiration and authority, companion to a similar volume compiled by the editors under the title Scripture and Truth,1 D. A. Carson leads off with an essay on “Recent Developments in the Doctrine of Scripture.” Critiquing a revisionist historiography which restricts inspiration to matters of faith and practice, Carson documents how the uncoupling of faith from science had its roots in the second half of the seventeenth century and removed itself from the mainstream of historic Christianity. Engaging modern representatives of this uncoupling in debate, Barr and Dunn among them, he argues compellingly that biblical inerrancy is a conceptual view that highlights not problems but Scripture’s pervasive truth-claims about external reality. Arguing for objective realism he deflates the rhetorical criticism of Alan Culpepper’s Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel,2 which takes the currently popular view that the only way to rescue the religious truth-claims of a Gospel like John is to interpret it through the genre of the nineteenth and twentieth-century novel. Carson observes that such an approach brings substantial loss both in accuracy of exegesis and in the Gospel’s real authority, and a two-tier attitude toward interpretation by which greater emphasis is given to the subjective appropriation of story than to the objective referent of Jesus Christ incarnate (p. 32).

Other contemporary conceptual grids come under criticism before Carson concludes that at the deepest level the new hermeneutical approaches are epistemological. With sophisticated exegetical techniques they provide the means of making Scripture support almost any point of view except that of historic Christianity.

Kevin Vanhoozer’s “The Semantics of Biblical Literature: Truth and Scripture’s Diverse Literary Forms” (chap. 2) traverses territory (especially British

* D. A. Carson and John Woodbridge (eds.), Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986. xii, 468. $20.95).

WTJ 51:1 (Spring 1989) p. 134

language analysis represented by Austin and Searle) that may be unfamiliar to some readers but is of considerable importance in understanding the relation of persons and their speech acts. This has particular relevance to the revelatory words and works of Jesus, although Vanhoozer does not make the application but steers the discussion in the direction of the multiple genres of Scripture. He warns exegetes not to make a priori decisions about biblical genres, a...