So if you would turn to Matthew 5, we're going to start looking at the sermon on the mount. I think this time and next we're going to spend 10 minutes maybe total on the sermon on the mount. So this isn't going to be a very in-depth. But I want to highlight some things here in terms of the theology of Matthew. Remember because that's one of our themes here. We're looking at particular New Testament authors and seeing their theological infacies. We're expecting these to cohere with the rest of the New Testament. So I'm not trying to say that Matthew should be pitted against Mark or Luke or anything like that at all. But there are some infacies that are made. And you can see this already when you get to the sermon on the mount. Actually you can see it well before. We talked about worship in Matthew chapter 2. But in Matthew chapter 5, we enter into the sermon on the mount. This very famous three chapter series of sayings and teachings of Jesus. Now, one of the ways we see that this is distinct from the other authors is if you were to compare Matthew, say to Mark in his respect. Matthew has collected together a whole bunch of the teachings of Jesus, many of which are not found in Mark. The same plot line is in both. In fact, there's some very striking similarities between Mark and Matthew. But Matthew has a bunch of teaching isolated in five major discourses. And this is the first of five major sets of teachings of Jesus in Matthew. If you were to compare that to Luke, you'll see that many of the same teachings appear in Luke, but they're spread out over the ministry of Jesus. Whereas Matthew seems to bring them together in these great, sermonic passages. Luke tends to have Jesus saying the same things as he's walking along with his disciples, especially as they are on their way to Jerusalem at the very end of Jesus' ministry. The bulk of the gospel of Luke is Jesus walking with his disciples on the way to Jerusalem on his way to the cross. That's what's going on in Luke. Now, probably, well, I mean, it's almost certain that Jesus taught these things repeatedly. That's certainly what you would do if you were a traveling teacher in the ancient world. And it's what you would do if you were a rabbi in the ancient world. And so we can well expect that Jesus said these things a lot. And he probably said them as long sermonic discourses as well as with his disciples on the way to Jerusalem. So I don't find these pitted against one another. But one of the results in Matthew is that you have these coherent sermons that tend to be topically organized. So one of the last sermons that Jesus does that's also in Mark, by the way, has to do with the eschatine. That's towards the end of Matthew. It's in Matthew, chapter 24 and such. Here, we have something that is a little bit more... I want to say scatter. That wouldn't be appropriate. But there's several different themes that come up throughout the sermon on the Mount. It's not like it's all on one topic. It's not a single sermon like we think of a sermon. Okay, I've got my topic for the day and I'm going to drill it home. But there's several themes that come up and we see these at the beginning of Matthew, chapter 5 and the Beatitudes. Now again, we're going to go through the Beatitudes in two minutes, which means we can't do them justice. So I'm going to just highlight one of the Beatitudes. I'm going to highlight the one that I think Matthew is highlighting. So let's read these together. Matthew, chapter 5, verses 3 through 12. Actually, I'll give you the setup. And when he, that is Jesus, saw the multitudes, he went up on the mountain and after he sat down, his disciples came to him and opening his mouth, he began to teach them saying... Now, by the way, who is he teaching? Disciples. It says disciples here. There are multitudes around, but there are also the disciples. So he's got certainly the disciples in front of him, it's possible that he has a wider audience, but he's speaking especially to his disciples. And he says the following. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure and hard, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when men cast insults at you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely on account of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. Now, each one has a, except for the last, each one has a basically a parallel structure. There's a blessing pronounced on a group of people that are identified by a certain kind of character trait. And the blessing is then rooted in a rationale, because it says what they will receive because of that character trait. So, for instance, blessed are the poor and the spirit. Well, the poor and the spirit, these are the people who are blessed, and then for the reason for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Now, one of the things that we like to do with this is work out these almost as if they're separate groups of people. Okay, there's those who are poor in spirit, there are those who mourn, there are those who are gentle, there are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. But that's clearly not Jesus's intent. Let me give you a couple of reasons for it. One, the results that accrue to people are all basically results that are relationally connected to God. For theirs is the kingdom of heaven, for they shall be comforted by whom, presumably by the Lord, because he is the great comforter, especially that in Isaiah. For they shall inherit the earth, for they shall be satisfied, for they shall receive mercy, for they shall see God, for they shall be called sons of God. Is there any difference between seeing God and being called sons of God? Now, there's a heightening that's going on in terms of the results, the blessings that are accruing to these people. So these are all the blessings that accrue to God's people and if that's the case, then these are the character traits that God's people are to manifest, being poor in spirit, mourning, being gentle, hungry in thirsting for righteousness, being merciful, being pure in heart, and being peacemakers. So you can see that all of this fits together. So you can't pick out and say, I'm going to be a peacemaker and somebody else is going to be the person who's gentle. Or I'm going to hunger in thirst for righteousness and that's different in some way from being pure in heart. These all fit together. You can see that, right? Now, I said that the one I really wanted to study is the one that I think Matthew is going to highlight here and he does so because Jesus highlights it in the passage. If you look through this whole passage, what would you say Matthew is highlighting? Random guess. Everybody's blessed. Which of the blessings is the most emphasized, what do you say? When you're persecuted. Why do you say that? Because there's a lot more material there. And it's the last one. My Bible sorts this out into eight blessings. The question is whether the verse 11 constitutes a ninth blessing or not because it has the same theme. Blessed are you. But there are some reasons to set this out as a group of eight. In particular, if you count them down. So we go one, two, three, four, three, four, five, six. The fourth blessing is blessed are those who hunger in thirst for righteousness. Then we count another set of four, seven, eight, nine, ten. Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness. And you see this term righteousness comes up both times. So it's possibly structured along a series of four. That is not to say that he's reiterating, you know, one, two, three, four, and then he goes back through the same four. But it's that at both times he ends up with righteousness. The first time they are thirst for righteousness. The second time they are persecuted for the sake of righteousness. When we think of the Beatitudes, I mean, honestly, I get kind of a warm fuzzy feeling in my heart. It's kind of like Beatitudes. Jesus is blessing his people and he is doing that. But it's important to realize that part of his blessing to his people is in the context of a warning that they are going to be persecuted and he's blessing them in the midst of that persecution. Now this, of course, cohere's very, very well with what you see going on in Matthew because very soon after this, Jesus has had it okay up to now in Matthew. But there is soon going to be a turn when part of God's people, part of God's people Israel are going to turn against the Messiah. And those who follow are going to increasingly see the kind of persecution that they're going to be called dendur. And so therefore Jesus at the beginning of his sermon on the Mount is not picturing this kind of rosy Christianity. He's picturing a very real, in fact, I mean, let's use the word brutal Christianity where people are persecuted. And yet in the midst of that, there is great blessing for theirs as the Kingdom of Heaven. Kingdom of Heaven is commonly used in Matthew, whereas Luke often says Kingdom of God in the very same kind of sitting. One of the things that's going on there is Matthew is a much more Jewish feel to it. He's probably speaking to Jewish Christians. I mean, we'll talk more about that later. And one of the things that you didn't want to do if you were Jewish is say God in America, we'd say God all the time. God bless you. It's on the back of our cars. God bless America. It's always a God, God, God, God, God. You don't have any problem with saying it. Well, among Jewish people, it was a much more holy thing to pronounce God's name or even refer to Him. So instead of saying God, God, God, you use various circumstances. So where does God dwell? Heaven. So when you refer to the Kingdom of Heaven, you're referring to the Kingdom of God. So that's what's going on here. So those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. And blessed are when you, when men cast insults at you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely, on account of me, rejoice and be glad for your reward in Heaven is great, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. So you see this theme of persecution of God's people. Now this is only our second day of class and that's kind of a downer way to start a class. I recognize that. And yet at the same time it's a very important theme in Matthew and I would ultimately argue it's a huge theme throughout the New Testament. And it's one that we don't tend to identify with very well because we don't endure that kind of suffering and we can be thankful to the Lord that that's the case. And yet at the same time there are Christians all around this world who are persecuted greatly for the faith. And we should see that as instead of this, I mean we should certainly pray for them and pray for their release from persecution. And yet in the midst of that we recognize God's blessing on them too. So a few words there and also another theme that we see in the gospel of Matthew. Can I lead us in prayer? The Father is we come before you. We are thankful. We are thankful that you pronounce an eschatological blessing on your people, that you promise your people even the kingdom of heaven, that you promise your people, that we can be called sons of God. And we promise and that you promise your people that in the midst even of persecution there is great blessing. Father, we would pray for our brothers and sisters around the world and even if there are some brothers and sisters in this room or listening on this videotape who are undergoing real persecution. We pray that you would comfort them with these words of Jesus that indeed there is blessing and indeed that eschatologically speaking in a few years they will know for sure the abundance of the kingdom of heaven. Father, may we live in light of that eschatological blessing and may we be agents of spreading that blessing to others as they recognize and bow the need to our Lord Jesus Christ in his name we pray. Amen. Okay. Last time we had taken a turn that you may not have expected. I cast some doubt, at least I acknowledge that other people cast some doubt on whether you can actually get to know what the author says and what the author intended to say in Holy Scripture. So if you will look at lecture number two you will recognize the diagram that I had put on the board before and I will put it up again. And you see that the marker is a little dim. You see that? Okay. Author, text, reader. Okay. And you will remember that I said that in contemporary teaching about literary theory especially and this is drastically affected New Testament studies. And then there has been meditation on the degree to which the reader can really get inside the mind of the author. And some people have pronounced what they call to be the intentional fallacy. I can't get in your mind let alone get in the mind of somebody two thousand years ago to know for sure that I understand what you are intending to say or what Matthew was intending to say in the first century. That is physically impossible to do so therefore we should just acknowledge that fact and not try to understand the intention of the author. And then what we are really dealing with is we have a text and we have a reader and yet we have seen in, you have not seen in your own church, how when people approach the text of Scripture sometimes they come up with very different interpretations of what that text is trying to say. And people have said that that is an inherent part of our subjectivity that we are subjects when we approach Scripture and we approach it subjectively. As people who have presuppositions and therefore when we come to Scripture all we see in it is basically a mirror of ourselves reflecting back to us our own presuppositions. Therefore although the reader approaches the text what really matters here is the reader. Because the reader is the only one who can really have in his own or her own mind what is going on. And that means that every reader who approaches a text has to recognize that they are approaching it, the validity of the way that they are approaching it is self-referential. In other words whatever I think the text means is what it means for me. Now I think that is a common understanding in our society increasingly. You see it all the time, you watch a movie and somebody says well you know what I got out of the movie was this and somebody else will say well I got out of the movie this and nobody, well few people are trying to say well you know what I am trying to figure out is what the director was trying to convey to us by the movie. It is much more kind of internally I got this out of it. And so that is how readers are approaching movies, readers are approaching texts that way too. You study Moby Dick now and instead of trying to figure out what was Melville trying to say often people are approaching Moby Dick and they are trying to figure out what am I supposed to get out of this. Not a bad question, application, that is good but as that all there is, that is the question that we want to frame today. Now what I would like to do is to break it down into four different questions and have you interact with me on this. The first question is what do we think of this idea of the intentional fallacy? The author intends something but we can't get inside his or her head. So does that mean that we should therefore not talk about the author's intention? That is what the intentional fallacy is alleging. Since it is impossible, don't even try. Now I am interested in what you guys think. So what do you think about this intentional fallacy bit? Do you think that is accurate or not? Yes sir? Okay. I am going to put your thoughts up here. So the intentional fallacy pardon me I am sure no one can read my writing but it gives me something to do. We will exercise here. Intentional fallacy, so you feel like it is an overstatement. Maybe would you say a drastic overstatement or just I am trying to exit you which is fairly drastic overstatement. Okay. Anybody else? Yeah. Okay so I think the if statement almost conveys the whole of what you are trying to say. If God is the author. Now if God is the author, then there are a whole variety probably of ramifications. One of which is that we are duty bound to figure out what God wants to say. Okay. So if you look at the historical context, then you can get to know something more about the author. So with Matthew who speaks to Jewish people and Luke who is probably speaking to a more Roman audience, you get a sense that because you are more of a sense of their purpose. Very good. Yeah. Okay. That is a very interesting word. I have not had somebody say that before but there is something really right about that. This seems incredibly selfish to say that I don't care about what the author is saying anymore because it is really about me and you wanted to put it in more relational categories and say that you want to relate to the author. And so it is almost like if you were sitting across from your friend, can I make an analogy here to kind of eliminate it? If I am sitting across from my friend and we are having a conversation and he keeps wanting to talk about how much he enjoys mustard on his hot dogs. And I am talking about you know, Kantian philosophy. I mean there is something unfair to him in the process about that besides I will not only put him to sleep. Okay. So even if we don't know fully, we can still know partially and that in and of itself we may know a large part actually but that in and of itself is a valid goal. Good. Good. Yes. So the author is seeking to communicate. So actually there is a lot of ramifications for that. I mean that makes us kind of a little bit more ethically obligated to not be so selfish and to try and understand what he wants to communicate. But it also means that if you know can I can I add something here that if I'm an author and I'm trying to communicate and I have any capacity at all. Then I am going to be able to use words in a way that you can presumably comprehend. It's not like I'm just speaking gibberish and it's up to you to understand. I'm actually trying. I'm making me attempt reaching out. So bouncing off of you. Did you want to add anything to them? Is that good? That's good. Okay. Good. Thanks. Yes. Okay. So you find this to be dishonest and impractical. Very good. It's dishonest and impractical in part because you seek to understand what the person is trying to convey anyway. And there's a sense too in which try as hard as you will. It's hard to miss some blatant points. So you give the example of the Warren commission. It's pretty hard to miss the big picture of what they were trying to convey even if you don't understand all the details. Okay. This is very helpful stuff. Just for a sake of time, I'm going to move us on to the next question in a moment. I'm going to give you a couple of my thoughts to hear. What I'm going to do is read down my notes. And some of this is going to just reiterate what's already up here. Some of it might add to it, but I'll just. It's quicker if I just read through the notes. So here we go. Some of my thoughts on whether you can attempt to understand the intention of an author. It is true that we cannot get into some ice head. So, you know, there is some truth to this. I am, I like this idea of it being a drastic overstatement because there's some truth to it. But it seems like we're pushing it too far. And this is because authors reveal themselves in their writing. If I am a good communicator, I am trying to reveal what I'm thinking in my writing. For one thing, this is the very basis of communication. The most basic assumption of communication is that a speaker can communicate to his audience. I mean, why try any, if it's not possible, if it's not possible for a speaker to communicate something to an audience, then you know, we should just all give up and go home. You could get as much out of watching some random shows on TV and having your own thoughts, then just being here, right? So, and by the way, when I speak of a speaker, that's a technical linguistic term to say that in a text, we have an attempt by a speaker to communicate to an audience. So, even in a text, a speaker is trying to speak because there's real communication attempted there. So, for one of the things, this is the basis of communication. Next, between a speaker and a listener, there exist areas of commonness which make communication possible. So, for example, you guys speak English, I speak English too. And although words can have ranges of meanings, they're basically agreed ranges for each word. So, I can't say shoe and suddenly speak of, you know, the top of the Empire State Building. You know? It just doesn't make any sense to you that shoe would have something to do with the top of a building. Shoes has a certain range of meanings. And so, society itself constrains what is permissible in terms of communication. People will disobey the rules. People do disobey the rules sometimes. But when they do so, they quickly recognize that either they are just simply challenging the status quo for the sake of challenging it. Or they are being very unsuccessful in their communication. And for people who want to succeed in their communication, they use the areas of commonness in society, use the kind of the societal way that it's construed the language in order to communicate their thoughts best through that area of commonness. Another area of commonness, this came up earlier. Somebody mentioned historical context. And we'll get back to this. But if I say to you guys, you know, how about if we go down to the bread company and pick up some coffee? Unless you haven't been in St. Louis very long, you probably understand that. But let's say if you were from Zimbabwe. And I said, let's go down to the bread company. I mean, what would you think of bread company? Presumably, it's someplace where you make bread. But if you've been in the country for a while or you've been in the city for a while, you understand that the bread company is the St. Louis bread company not to give any commercials here. But it's that. And it's a place where you can get it. Okay, cup of coffee. And so you know what I mean when I say that. Well, why do you know that? It's because we're working in the same historical framework in context. So that shows that communication is possible if you're working with some of the same basic common presupposition is also a bit of a warning to us that because we're living 2000 years after the time of the New Testament, that to the degree that which we don't properly understand that culture, we might miss some of the communication that's going on there. I'm going to return to that in a few weeks because that's going to be a big theme here. But but that makes communication possible. Next, the careful speaker works within these areas of commonness to produce sentences which can convey his or her thoughts to the listener. I mean, you really try when you communicate because you want to be understood. So you self reveal. You make sure that you say things in a way that really let people into what you are thinking. And a text is the record of the author's attempt to write these sentences. In that respect, the text becomes our point of contact with the author who's revealing himself. Now, the more that you know about a person, the more you can understand their communication. That's one of the reasons why it's a lot easier to understand what Paul's trying to do in Philippians than what Jude is trying to do in the epistle of Jude. Because we have a whole lot of Paul. We got one little short letter from Jude. That's just reality. But the more you know about somebody, the more they have self revealed something, the more you can get into their mind if you would, and try and think like they are thinking. That's part of our task as interpreters. Now, I think that's enough. I think with this, which is really good stuff. You know, you can see that this intentional fallacy is a drastic, indeed a drastic overstatement. And in fact, it doesn't let us play fair with what the author is trying to do. Speaking of fairness, I mean, if you wrote something, you write an essay for me at the end of this class on First Peter. And I come back to you and I say this was an awful essay on oranges. You have every right to, you know, throttle me, right? Because you have tried to put into there something that I will understand about what First Peter is doing. And if I come to it and just, you know, make it say what I wanted to say, that's not being fair to you. That comes back to the kind of the ethics of communication, the selfishness, this relational aspect of communication. So I want to suggest that to the degree that the Christian and the evangelical church right down the road opens up Matthew 5 for a little devotional time and it warms their heart in a certain way. And they have never asked what was Matthew trying to do, but simply what do I get out of it in my devotional time? That they have not played by a good ethical rules. They have not been fair to the author. And the same is certainly true in the university today when they've completely dispelled the author in the process. Is that good? Anybody want to add anything to that before we move on to the next question? Does the text cohere? Now, here let me give you a little background in terms of contemporary literary theory. There was a movement 50 years or a little more than that ago called structuralism. And structuralism sought to show that especially in, say, fables. A lot of this was done in Russia, but like with the Grims fairy tales. You take a fairy tale. And there are certain archetypes within fairy tales. You always have the evil stepmother. So there are certain archetypes that show up. And what they tried to say was that the meaning was not so much in the individual words as in the very form of the expression itself. So I got a fairy tale. And as soon as I started into the fairy tale, and I say once upon a time, and I bring in the evil stepmother, the meaning is not in the text itself, it's kind of behind the text. That's what was going on. Now, just as a quick aside, that doesn't seem right to me. I want to say that there's a difference between say Hansel and Gretel, and the ancient story of the mermaid, the little mermaid. They have different intents. But I do recognize some structural similarities. It seems to have been a pendulum that swung too far to one side. Well, as often happens in the world of academia and actually in the world of just life, people then want to react and go over here. So there has been what is known as post-structuralism, which ultimately issued into what is called deconstruction. And it's sought to show that, if you pay attention to texts, instead of there being this overarching form which constrains the meaning, if you look at the text itself, there are always some gaps in the text. There's stuff that's not fully explained. So if you're reading Hansel and Gretel, you read about this little stream of bread crumbs going along. And the father is able to eventually follow the bread crumbs and all of that. They're able to find the followed bread crumbs back. That's how the story goes. It's been a while since I've done Hansel and Gretel. You have questions about that. Wouldn't the birds have eaten it up the first time? Why did they eat it up the second time? Why weren't the squirrels involved in the process? And things like that. So you can play around with texts like that and show that there's gaps, things that don't make full sense if you're having to make some connections. You can especially see this in movies. But you'll go from one scene to a movie to another scene in the movie and there will have been passage of time. But in the movie, it's just been a second. So you move from one scene to another scene and there's this gap there. Now the movie wants you to fill it in in a certain way. So for instance, you're in an office setting and in the person's at home, well you're supposed to fill in the setting by, you know, he drove home. There's ways that you kind of are expected to fill in the gaps. The same is true in any narrative or anything like that, the idea. What the post-structuralist likes to do, the deconstructionist likes to do, is to show that society is constraining you to fill in those gaps in a certain way. But society could be wrong because there are gaps in the text and you could fill them in in different ways. And so let's play with this a little bit, you know, just what happened on the way home. And you could change the meaning of the text by, instead of him driving home, you know, he stops in at a liquor store in the way home, gets a little plastered. Other text doesn't apply that, but let's throw it in. See what happens, play with it. And then when you start playing with texts like that and filling in gaps in random ways, the text unravel. Instead of doing what they seem to have been trying to do, you can make it all disintegrate. And we're playing with texts like that. I'm putting in a very crude terms, but this is basically what Jacques Derrida was trying to do in France, if you know about Derrida and so. And this has impacted a major American University. So let me give you an example of this. This is my one of my very first forays into professional scholarship. I was studying in seminary, planning on going on for PhD studies, and I was studying in Chicago. And just down the street in Chicago was going to be that the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. The Society of Biblical Literature is a major professional society. I belong to it. Most teachers of Bible belong to it. But it's very broad in terms of different theological viewpoints, different backgrounds of the people who are involved in this. It can be exciting in that way, but it can also be quite shocking at times. As a little naive seminary student, since the annual meeting happened to be in Chicago that year, my friend Dave and I, we said, okay, we're going to go to the annual meeting. We're going to go off and be PhD students eventually anyway, so let's go and we're going to do this. It was a great time. We've got to see a lot of things, but it also was eye-opening at times too. So for instance, we went to the presidential address. You've got a picture. This is one of the largest conferences. Well, it's certainly, it's huge by my standards. I don't know how it compares to others, but there's about 5,000 people that attend this conference. Every year there's the presidential address, because every year there's a president, and usually at least 2,000 people show up to the presidential address. The year in question, there was a president for that year. The president changes every year. The president for that year was Phyllis Trible, a very famous scholar who especially works with Old Testament tax, and is very interested in hermeneutics, that the study of interpretation. If she's also very interested in literary theory and kind of what's new, so she gave what would be called a pro-structuralist or a deconstructionist reading. Of the Elijah and Jezebel narratives. You know the story. Elijah the prophet and Jezebel, this horrible queen who is suppressing God's people, and is especially trying to do away with the worship of Yahweh, because instead she thinks everybody should worship Bail. Elijah is one of the few people to stand up. In fact, he is so, he feels alone, and at one point God has to encourage him, that there's a lot of people around. So Elijah is this great prophet who stands up to it. You remember that Elijah prays, and there is no rain, and then he prays again, and there is rain, and the rain comes down, and whereas the prophets of Bail were not able to do that, Elijah is able to pray to his God, and then accomplish. You know the story. She did a deconstructionist reading of this to say that there are, for instance, gaps in the text. Things that the text doesn't really talk about. She would acknowledge, for instance, that it's trying to get you to side with Elijah. But what if we wanted to side with Jezebel just hypothetically? And we start saying to ourselves, you know, are there not gaps in the text? For instance, you know, what does Elijah do right after the rain starts coming down, and the prophets of Bail have been shown to be false prophets? He kills him, doesn't he? And he has him slaughtered. This mass slaughtering of priests, not their human beings. Is that the right thing to do, she might ask? And by the way, you know, what is it that we have against Jezebel? And she's killing the prophets of Yahweh. Well, Elijah just did the opposite. What was Elijah doing? Well, Elijah was serving his God Yahweh. Well, what was Jezebel doing? Well, she was serving her God, Bail. And so you can ask what's going on in the text there. Well, clearly there is a bias in the text towards Yahweh, but there's also a bias that's just admitted. There's a guy, Jezebel's a lady. And in 21st century, in that time it was still 20th century America, we recognize that there has been a patriarchal nature to literature throughout the ages, and so part of what's really going on here is you've got this patriarchal author signing with a guy with this one deity, and in the process, Jezebel and her deity get marginalized. And that was the presidential address in front of 2,000 people, after which there was a standing ovation. Now, does that shock you? That's what's going on in universities today. And that's this whole thing. Does the text cohere? We're not talking about the author. The text. Are there gaps in the text that you could fill in in different ways to understand the text differently? That would actually undermine the text. What do you think? She hijacked the story. You think she hijacked the story? Why is it not legal to do that? She didn't write the story. So she's messing with what the author is trying to do with the story. Yeah, she's hijacking the story. The response, by the way, and a lot of the post-structuralism deconstructionist readings come from Marxist or very strong feminist or from gay and lesbian readings right now. Because they're trying to say that we got to hijack these narratives. Because these narratives have been suppressing us for years. So we got to hijack them. So she would admit to that. What you're calling a question is whether that's fair or not. Can you hijack an narrative like that? That's a question. Yeah. I guess just a question behind the words. So you're saying we do have to fill in these gaps. Yeah. The question is do we have to fill them in a certain way? That's the question I want to ask. Yeah. Yes. I want to deal with this in a very academic way, just kind of intellectually. But the point you bring out that this may be related to our son nature. Yeah. I said that there was a standing ovation for a mis-trouble, but Dr. Trouble there. My friend and I, we were such eager young bucks, that we had gotten seats towards the very front. We were like four rows in front, and there were, you know, easily 30 rows behind us. And this huge gigantic banquet room, right? And we had these seats right up front. And throughout David and I, we're not communicating because we're trying to be good academicians here. So we're not saying anything. We're not like, oh my goodness, what is she saying? We're just kind of staring and disbelief. And what do you do at the end when everybody else is standing up? What was going through my head was I can see academically how this was fun in games. Now, I really could see what she was trying to do academically. But what went also through my mind was this is heresy. I mean, she has just equated ball with Yahweh. She's just created the God of the universe with a demonic petty non-deity. And that's horrible, so son nature is there. So David and I, it was so funny because neither of us were communicating about this, but as soon as it came time for applause, we both had our bags right at our feet. And we reached down, kind of like fiddling down to try and find out what's down there. Because I mean, I didn't, it wasn't the place to walk out. But at the same time, I couldn't applaud that. So, you know, we're sitting there fiddling with the bags and these people are, yay! You know, it's hard in an academic setting to wear both hats there. Yeah. That's a very good point. The point, in case you didn't hear it, is something along the lines of the text does cohere. It coheres within its own historical context and within the relationship between the author and the audience. So the audience already assumed certain things that allowed them to fill in the text. For instance, you gave an example of the audience would know that Jezebel was widely understood as a very evil woman. And so they weren't expecting her to be otherwise. So they're not expecting her to be good, whereas Elijah is a bad guy or anything like that. Is that fair at restatement? Yeah. That's a very good point. So, let me, you know, put up with regard to that in terms of cohere. I mean, there's a sense in which the deconstructionist is right. The way we fill in the gaps is via social convention. The issue is they don't like those social conventions. And so the way they want to critique them is by throwing them out. But if you acknowledge that there are social conventions that allow us to fill in the gaps, then historical context comes up again and the relationship between the author and his or her audience allows you to fill in those gaps. That's good. I saw a couple other hands, yes, in the back. Right. So what you're saying is there's something to be said for this. There might be another viewpoint from here. So there might be another viewpoint, another way to see it. Jezebel probably did view this differently than Elijah did. The question then, fundamentally, and you rise this, but because you say as a Christian, you want to say the Bible is true. The question really has to do with, do you agree with the Bible representing this is God? This is really God. Yahweh is God. Vales not. So therefore this is the right viewpoint. And so there's a more fundamental spiritual issue going on here. I think Beth mentioned this earlier in some respects too. Our disposition to the text is going to affect how we receive it. That's true. I would also, though, however qualify this and say that, there is still, I think, a basic issue of fairness here. If we came across another document that was written from Jezebel's point of view, and it really, I mean, it hammered home how great Jezebel wasn't, how awful Elijah was. We might very much disagree with that. But if we're going to be fair to that document, we don't make the document itself say something other than it does, which is what the deconstructionist is just trying to do. The deconstructionist is saying that the whole thing can unravel, the document itself can unravel. I want to say maybe on a purely academic basis, okay, let's hypothetically consider Jezebel's position, but first, let's understand the way this was written and what this is trying to say, and you can disagree with it. But you don't disagree with it by making it say something other than what it says. You understand what it says first, and then disagree with it later. Does that make sense? Yeah. And that's where I think there might be some serious problems here. Again, for a sake of, oh, there's somebody... Okay, so you're wanting to say that the Bible is in a different category here than other works. Yeah, and we would acknowledge that, because it is wrong to try and subvert it. And completely go the other direction or something like that. Right, well, and it is, and so we want to follow that. But I want to say, actually, I want to go further than that. I want to say it is unfair to the director of a movie, to go to the director of the movie and say, you know, what I got out of it was something completely different than what you were intending. You know? I want to say it's unfair to Melville to try and say that, you know, that I completely disagree with you. I want to say that it's unfair to Shakespeare to say that what Shakespeare was really trying to say in Romeo and Juliet, is, you know, we should fight with one another. I mean, that's fundamentally what we need to really have good battles, it's good when people die and commit suicide. That's unfair to Shakespeare. That might be your position, but it's unfair to Shakespeare to do that to him. And in the same way, it's just not fair to the Bible to make it say something other than it says. I'm going to move on. Just mention a few things in terms of does the text go here. Here's some points. One, if one wishes to participate in a communicative act, that is, they want to hear what is being said, then almost ethically, you need to give the speaker the benefit of the doubt. I mean, it's just proper. It's what you do in an active communication. In what sense do we give the speaker the benefit of the doubt? First, we assume that the speaker is trying to communicate in a coherent fashion. We don't immediately go in and think, I bet this person is just going to battle with me. So we assume a coherency to what they're trying to communicate. So in effect, we have to assume, rightly, that the text coheres. Next, we accept the social conventions within which he is communicating, even if we don't agree with them. If we really want to understand what the author is trying to communicate, we have to work within the social conventions in which that author is working, even if you don't agree with them. So that's how you go about understanding something. Another way that we give the author the benefit of the doubt is we think the best of him or her and assume, unless we have significant evidence to the contrary, that he or she is attempting to make rational sense. We assume rationality on the point of the other person. Now, if we recognize that those are the assumptions we should have in coming to a communicative act, then it allows the text to cohere. If we disagree with that, then yeah, the text unravels. But is that a problem with the author? Is it a problem with us? Ethically. Next, while we may disagree with the philosophy of the text, it is still possible to understand the text on its own terms. And only after understanding it, do we argue against it? I did try here to adequately represent what Phyllis Trouble was trying to do, even though I radically disagreed with it. She has a point of view and we need to understand that point of view before we critique it. I didn't try and make her point of view into battle itself. I tried to understand it first and then critique it. And the deconstructionists are often not actually saying anything new when they deconstruct the text. Phyllis Trouble is not the first person to say, well, might there not be a different perspective on this? What they are saying that is new is they are incorporating their disagreement into their reading of the text itself. In other words, instead of interpreting it first and then disagreeing, they undermine the whole interpretation of the text itself by making it say something other than what it intended to say. And it's just not fair. That's how I view it. Thus, it is not the text inability to communicate which is really being critiqued, but the assumption of which of the text itself is being derided. So finally, contrary to many popular arguments, do not exist as entities by themselves. One of the reasons that the deconstructionists can do this is because they've already predicated their philosophy on the intentional fallacy. In other words, they've already written off the author. We just tried to reestablish that the author has something to say here, you know, 20 minutes ago. But if you take the author out of the picture, then really all you have is a text in a reader. And that allows the text to be messed with a little bit more. But if you say there is an author involved here, and there is a real line, and the text comes from an author, then suddenly you're back to this ethical system of, I need to be fair to the author before I critique them. So the very fact that texts are authored means that texts have meaning that we can seek to understand.
Good. Okay, last point. The question is in a post-modern context, where you can get movies that are just like almost like random images, or they have so many different themes that compete with one another, that it's hard to say what is the one theme? What is the author really trying to convey? And you're saying, even in that context, do you approach it with the same thing? It would actually, in a very non-post-modern sense, yet affirming the diversity of post-modernism say yes. In this sense, that if I'm really trying to understand what the director is doing with a picture that's so random in that way, that to understand what the author is doing there is that they are trying to create a random product, and trying to create something that challenges our understanding by making it all random. And so ironically, I'm kind of coming back to them and saying, I want to understand you. And I want to assume that you are able to communicate, even though you're communicating randomly. And the very randomness of your communication can be understood as that's your intent. And so I'm approaching them with the same hermeneutic, and I feel like it's fair to them, if that makes sense. Even though they're trying to play games with the whole system. Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay. Last question. The question was, do the deconstruction see their view as less subjective? No, actually, they see it as complete pure subjectivity. They're arguing that the subject constrains the interpretation of the text. And therefore, when I look at that movie, it's all on my shoulders. I can make it mean whatever I want, because that's my privilege as the subject. So it's not just subjectivity, it's subjectivity on steroids. It's like, let's just immerse ourselves in our subjectivity. And I want to step outside of that and say, hold on, that is just not fair. There is still an object out there. And if we're going to be fair to that object, we need to let that critique our understanding of it. And I think that's only fair in any act of communication. All right. Next. Should we not just privilege the reader? Even if we see the text as a coherent product of an author, people can still say, okay, I recognize all of this. But still, I have this sense that I want to be able to get something from the text. And the way I'm going to do that is I'm just going to read the text and see what hits me like. You know, what warms my heart, or what makes me angry? And isn't that right? So shouldn't it just be my response to the text that I'm really interested in? So shouldn't we just privilege the reader? What do you think? So this seems lazy and selfish to you. Yeah, that could be that. I mean, there can be some people who are very sharp and intelligent and are not being lazy in the process. And often it's more of a default. Yes. It's not honest because you're not seeking to learn to be challenged in a sense because you're letting yourself challenge yourself instead of let somebody else challenge you. Is that a fair way of saying it? No, that's good. Other things? Purpose of Scripture. Reprove, correct, instruct. If you're not letting Scripture do that, then you are not doing engaging the purpose of Scripture. And coming back to something Charlie said earlier, I mean, I've been trying to do this in a very academic kind of basis just talking about literature broadly, but if we really see the Bible as something that comes from God, then we are under manning God in the process. We're saying it's okay for me to live in my own private world. I don't really have to let you tread maybe in a very uncomfortable way in my life. You know what I mean? But you're the Almighty God of the universe, so we need to do that. Yeah. So there's two things that I hear there, actually. You say you're sitting above the text rather than sitting under the text. And so there's, again, it comes back to a kind of a selfishness, or really, I mean, that's a pride issue, isn't it? But then the second thing that she said is that it wreaks havoc in the church. I know they work together, but I see that almost as a different point. I mean, the practical ramifications of this is, you know, you have individuals being able to believe whatever they want to believe and suddenly that the whole church disintegrates. Yeah. So you find this unsettling because it gives you no room for absolute truth. And I agree. It is very unsettling, and there is no room for absolute truth here. There's still another question we need to ask, and we'll ask it in a minute, because I think postmodernism has a point for us. We don't want to just be complete modernists in this regard. We'll get to that in a second. Yeah. Let's comment. Yeah, yeah. So your point effectively is, there can still be application after we understand the intended meaning of the text. Would it be fair to say that one of the things that's happening here with the reader just simply getting out of it? And that's not bad. You want to read scripture. You want to have it impact your life. But you have to understand it in its intent first before you apply it. I think that's along the lines of kind of what you were conveying. And so what they're doing here is they're short circuiting. I mean, it really comes back to kind of that laziness point in some ways. This is easier. It's faster. It's quicker. If I just go to the text, read it my devotional life, and I come out warmed and happy. Instead of actually sitting down and doing the hard work of understanding what in Matthew mean by the be attitudes? What did Jesus intend to say? And how is that fit in the whole context of what Matthew is trying to convey that Jesus said? Before I then kind of apply it to my life. And when we do that, it actually can be unsettling because I think, for instance, going back to the be attitude thing, I mean, it disconserts me that one of the things he's most blessing is people who are persecuted because I don't want to be persecuted. But when you see that that's in the text, then you go with an application that's in maybe a slightly different way than I would have just kind of said, well, good, I'm blessed. And that's great. And that's something like that. Okay. Thank you all. There's one last question that I want to interact with, and we just have a few minutes left. Is it possible for a reader to objectively understand a text? You know, I'm going to just give you my answer because we're running shy on time here. My short answer is it possible for a reader to objectively understand a text is no but. Okay. In other words, can I be absolutely confident that I have completely, fully understood, objectively in such a way that I have in my mind the exact mind of what's in the author and the exact mind of what God intended in Scripture in every instance. Now. And we need to recognize that there is, that I am still approaching the text as a subject. And then I do have presuppositions and I do have a pre-understanding it does get in the way. And so I have to acknowledge that. And I would also acknowledge, for instance, that an example of that is the number of denominations we have today. If we all objectively understood the text and we're willing to ascend to it and about our need to it and follow it, there would be no need for a whole bunch of denominations that disagree with one another. But to the extent that people have misconstrued the text over time, we have different denominations. And we should not think that our denomination has everything right. That would just be unwise. Okay. Nor should we think that individually we have everything right. So we approach the text as a subject. But the text is still there and it still critiques my subjectivity. Let me draw one more diagram for you. I'm going to try a different pan and see if it works better. Is that better? I'm going to erase this. I have a certain pre-understanding and here I approach a text. And some people say that the whole thing is circular. This is known as the hermeneutical circle. I have a certain set of pre-concept of what the text means. So when I read Romans, I already think it's about justification by faith. And I come back and it just confirms what I thought before. And the question I want you guys to think about is, is this a vicious circle? What do you think? Do I just kind of confirm my own pre-understanding when I approach the text? What do you think? Yes. Okay. Good. We've seen it happen. We've seen ourselves change. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting that part of this observation comes from kind of a phenomenological awareness that people do seem to read the Bible like they want it to be read. And so there's some truth. There's got to be some truth to this. But your point is another phenomenological point is we've actually seen change in our viewpoint. So that can't be the whole truth. We're good. Yeah. Other points. Yes. Uh-huh. Okay. I hear two things there. One is if you are seeking truth in the text. So part of it has to do with our disposition. Okay. Are we seeking truth? In other words, are we willing to be critiqued by the text? And then if we are, then the text is out there. It remains an object. It doesn't change. The words on the page, I can't move the, well, I can, but it'd be horrible to move around the words on the page. You know, the words are still there. And so there's still an object out there that critiques us. And the more that we've seen that happen, the more we can practice the letting the text change us. Is that good? Yeah. Great. Other points? Yes, sir. Okay. So, um, church tradition because other people in the church have read the text that can help critique us. Can I say two things about that? One is, I've read a lot of the early church fathers. Okay. I mean, this is, this is before there was, you know, Catholic, non-Catholic, or anything like that. We're talking, you know, Augustine and before. It's your Imanias and Anseych. Um, what, what you have there is people who were closer to the time period and often have great insights into the text. And also, they make great mistakes, exegetically. So I look at Iranias and I look at Justin Martyr and I look at others and I say, uh, they have, I need to listen to them. But they're also, they make a lot of mistakes. And we have the privilege over 2,000 years of interpretation of seeing a lot of different attempts at interpretation, some of which can argue their case better than others. And so when I look at church tradition, I'm not just thinking early church, I'm thinking up until, you know, five minutes ago. So if we look at the whole of the churches, exegesis of the text, then we're in a community of learners and that forces us to consider other possible meetings of the text. And that's a good point. Okay. We had the lights go out and that meant that the camera went out at the last few minutes of class. So I finished here and, uh, let the people go and now we're just going to review what I had just said to the people. So that's why there's nobody in these front rows. Okay. Um, right as the lights went out, Charlie up front here was making the point that in interpretation, it's not just us and the text, that the Holy Spirit is involved in the process too. And that I would wholly affirm. That as we look down through all of these things, we recognize that there is something special in the interpretation of scripture and God has a vested interest in how we come out in this. And so his Holy Spirit illuminates our understanding of scripture. At the same time, we cannot presume on that because in point of fact the church throughout the ages has claimed to be the Holy Spirit and yet they have disagreed with one another. So what we need to recognize is that we humbly acknowledge that our pre-understanding can be wrong. We ask for the guidance of the Holy Spirit and that gives us extra confidence that as we approach the text which is an object that can critique our pre-understanding here. As we read it in a community of readers with the rest of the church and see other viewpoints in the church and allow those to also critique our pre-understanding. As we have a disposition of seeking the truth of scripture that that disposition, the humility that's involved in that allows us to come to the text and have some hope of critiquing our under pre-understanding. And so as I will mention next time, I would prefer to see this as a kind of spiral where yes we approach the text with our pre-understanding but in humility, seeking truth, allowing the texture to critique us and when we do so we spiral into a better and more appropriate understanding of the text. And that's what I would leave us with in this class session.