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Tom
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353

Posted 11/5/2002 12:20 AM (GMT -6)

Hi-

In his Divine Discourse, Nicholas Wolterstofff advocates contemporary “speech-action” theory as his basic approach to language. This theory was pioneered by a J. L. Austin at Oxford. What is “speech-action” theory?

Tom

"Kind of like donut holes--no one's ever eaten a donut hole because they don't exist." Starkman

PotOnWheel
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890

Posted 11/5/2002 2:09 AM (GMT -6)

A start:
www.ats.edu/leader/grants/luce/proposal/wolterst.htm

PotOnWheel
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890

Posted 11/5/2002 7:03 AM (GMT -6)

quote:
@EYEBROW:Reformed Perspective
@SUBA:Article 1 of 4
@AUTHOR:by Nicholas Wolterstorff
Dr. Nicholas Wolterstorff is Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

@TITLE:The God Who Speaks

@BODYTEXT:In his autobiography, which he called Confessions, the great church father Augustine describes the exact means and moment of his conversion from paganism to Christianity. In extreme spiritual distress he walks out of the villa in which he has been talking with some friends and into the garden. There he hears a child on the other side of the garden wall mysteriously chanting, “Take and read, take and read.”

Augustine first wonders whether these are perhaps the words from some child’s game, but quickly he concludes that they don’t belong to any game he knows about. Then the conviction wells up within him that “this could only be a divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the first passage on which my eyes should fall.”

So Augustine goes back to where he has lain his copy of Paul’s letters, opens it at random, and reads, “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites.” Immediately, he writes, it was “as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.” He became a Christian.

Twice in that brief moment Augustine heard God speaking to him: first by way of the child’s sing-song, then by way of being presented with a passage from Paul’s letters.

From that time forward, Augustine became a devoted student of Scripture. And what he read there, many times over, were reports of God’s speaking to some human being. Let me, at random, pick just two examples: In Isaiah 7:10 we read, “Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz. . . .” And in Isaiah 8:1 we read, “Then the Lord said to me [Isaiah]. . . .”

In short, the God of the Bible is very much a speaking God. There’s much more that we learn about God from Scripture, but this is prominent: the God of Scripture is a God who speaks. If one’s God is a God who does not speak, or worse yet, a God who cannot speak, then one’s God is not the God of Scripture.

@SUBA:God Speaks

@BODYTEXT(-INDENT):When we put Scripture together with Augustine’s story of his conversion, what we get is this: God spoke to men and women of antiquity as reported in Scripture; God spoke to Augustine by way of a child’s sing-song; and third, God spoke to Augustine by way of Scripture itself. To this must of course be added that God spoke, above all, in and through Jesus Christ. The God of Scripture and the God of Christian experience is a God who speaks in diverse ways and on many occasions to human beings.

@BODYTEXT:In this article and three succeeding ones, I want to reflect on this claim that God is one who speaks--a claim which, so I would guess, has remained more alive in the Reformed tradition than in any of the other great traditions of Christianity.

It seems a matter of course to the Reformed person to speak of the Bible as “the Word of God.” In this present article I want to get us going by offering some preliminary considerations. In a second article, I will make some suggestions for understanding how it can be that God speaks. And then in a third, I will reflect on how to go about interpreting Scripture if one believes that God speaks by way of Scripture. [FOURTH?]

Some theologians will find controversial what I am going to say; nonetheless, I think it’s true. That God speaks—really speaks--has not been a prominent theme in the history of Christian theology, including Reformed theology, and this despite the fact that Scripture prominently presents God as speaking. The theme may appear to be prominent in theology, but I don’t think it really is.

In the first place, there’s a long tradition in theology that argues that talk about God speaking has to be regarded as metaphorical. How could God literally speak? it’s asked. Speaking requires vocal chords. Or if we include writing under speaking, speaking requires either vocal chords or a body with which one can manipulate some writing instrument. But God has no body, so how could God literally speak? It has to be a metaphor.

In my next article I will challenge the assumption that speaking requires having a body. I’m going to argue that, literally speaking, God speaks—not metaphorically but literally. So let me drop the point for now, to take it up in the next article.

My main reason for holding that in the history of Christian theology there is much less recognition than there might appear to be of God as one who speaks is that God’s speaking has been assimilated on the one side to inspiration and on the other side to revelation. In fact, so I contend, it is neither.

There has been a great deal of discussion of divine inspiration, especially inspiration of Scripture; likewise there has been a great deal of discussion of divine revelation. But neither inspiration nor revelation is the same as speaking. Let me try to show this.

@SUBA:Not Inspiration

@BODYTEXT(-INDENT):First, inspiration. Every now and then it happens in human affairs that one person says or writes something under the inspiration of another; in fact it happens rather often in the relationship of teachers and students. A professor, Matthew, let us call him, has profoundly influenced the thought of his student, Michael, on a certain topic, and now Michael, under that influence, gives a speech or writes an article on the topic. Here’s the question: Who, in that situation, is the speaker or the writer? Who is the one that makes whatever claims are made in the speech or the article?

@BODYTEXT:To me it seems obvious that it’s Michael who makes the claims, not Matthew. Michael is the one who, in that sense, speaks. Granted, his professor might well be willing to make most of the same claims. Granted, his professor profoundly shaped his thought on the matter—“inspired” him, we sometimes say. Nonetheless, Michael is the speaker.

So far as I can see, the same has to be said about the relation of God to, say, the biblical writers. Let us not question that God inspired them on certain occasions and topics to say and write what they did say and write. But if that’s all that happened, we don’t yet have God speaking. What we have instead is God inspiring the biblical writers to speak and write as they did speak and write. What we have is God inspiring and them speaking. What we have is human speech inspired by God, not divine speech.

I should highlight an assumption I am making. I am assuming that often we can illuminate the relationship between God and human beings by reflecting on analogues in human affairs: by looking at the relation between inspiration and speech in human affairs, we can illuminate the relation between inspiration and speech in the case of God. The fact that we can indeed reflect along these lines—with all due caution—seems to me an implication of the fact that we are made in the image of God.

@SUBA:Not Revelation

@BODYTEXT(-INDENT):That was my reason for holding that divine speech is not to be identified with divine inspiration. Now for my reason for holding that divine speech is also not to be identified with divine revelation.

@BODYTEXT:Let it be said that when we speak or write, we invariably reveal all sorts of things about ourselves. By writing this article, I reveal to you, my readers, that I know English grammar, that I care very much about properly understanding God, and so forth. But the point is that most of what I reveal I don’t say. Until the sentence before last, I didn’t say that I knew English grammar; I just revealed it. And I didn’t say that I care very much about properly understanding God; I just revealed it.

OK, some will say, it’s true that we reveal all sorts of things that we don’t say. But isn’t it nonetheless the case that among all the things we reveal are the things we say? Isn’t saying something the same as revealing it?

Now and then, yes, but not in general. Suppose I ask you to close the door. Did I then reveal what I said? That makes no sense. What I asked is that you close the door. But I didn’t reveal that you close the door.

Did I maybe reveal that I want you to close the door? Perhaps so—if I actually want you to close the door. It’s possible to ask you to close the door without really wanting you to do so; maybe I’m just putting you through an obedience test and wanting you to fail. But in any case, asking that you close the door is different from asserting that I want you to close the door. The latter is an assertion about my desires; the former is no assertion at all. Asking is not asserting, requesting is not declaring.

The point is especially important when it comes to God. If we interpret all claims about God speaking as claims to the effect that God reveals something about himself, we lose the note of God commanding us, enjoining us, asking us, replacing those with God’s telling us various things about himself. God does tell us about himself. But just as prominent in Scripture, if not more so, is God’s commanding, enjoining, asking, and so forth. God’s commanding us to do something is not the same as God’s telling us something about himself.

Of course, God can reveal that he has commanded something of us, but then the commanding has to have happened already, and independently, or it could not be revealed.

@SUBA:Speech Is Speech

@BODYTEXT(-INDENT):For these reasons I conclude that divine speech is no more to be identified with divine revelation than with divine inspiration. The two, speech and revelation, are intimately connected, as are speech and inspiration; let me be clear on that. But they are not to be identified.

@BODYTEXT:I said that the theme of God speaking has been much less prominent in Christian theology than it is in Scripture and in reports of Christian experience—adding that a good many theologians will find that claim controversial. But I trust I have succeeded in explaining why I hold that view.

Theologians have said a lot about divine revelation and divine inspiration, assuming that in speaking of revelation and inspiration they were in fact speaking of divine speech. But when we think carefully about the matter, we can see that that assumption is not true.

God is one who speaks. God is also one who inspires and reveals, but those are different from being one who speaks. In the next article in this series of four, I want to discuss directly on the God who speaks. What we will especially want to try to understand is how it can be that God speaks, literally so, even though God has no body.

@EXCERPT:That God speaks--really speaks--has not been a prominent theme in the history of Christian theology

Divine speech is no more to be identified with divine revelation than with divine inspiration.

quote:
ID:Dr. Nicholas Wolterstorff is Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale University, New Haven, Conn. [Church membership?]
@EYEBROW:Reformed Perspective
@SUBA:Article 2 of 4
@AUTHOR:by Nicholas Wolterstorff

@TITLE:How Can God Speak?

T/C LINE:If God has no body, how can we say that God literally speaks? And how can fallible biblical writers speak the infallible Word of God? A renowned Reformed thinker finds answers in ordinary human affairs. Part two of a four-part series.

@BODYTEXT(-INDENT):Deep in Christianity, as in Judaism, is the claim that God speaks. The Bible reports multiple examples of God speaking and says of Jesus Christ that he is the Word of God. The Bible itself is regularly said to be the Word of God. And many Christians have had the experience of God speaking to them personally.

@BODYTEXT:In my previous article I argued that, in spite of this prominence in Christian Scripture, liturgy, and experience of the theme of God speaking, Christian theologians across the centuries have not paid a great deal of attention to it. The reason, I suggested, is that theologians have assumed that in speaking about divine revelation and divine inspiration they were speaking about divine speech. But not so, I argued; speaking is different from revealing something and is likewise different from inspiring someone.

In this article I want to offer some suggestions as to how to understand the claim that God speaks. As I mentioned in my first article, I’ll assume that we can gain some degree of understanding by looking at analogues in human affairs.

There’s a long tradition within both Jewish and Christian theology that says that talk about God speaking has to be understood metaphorically. It is said that since God has no body, God cannot literally speak. Speaking requires vocal chords with which one can make sounds--or, if we include writing under speaking, it requires that one be able to move parts of one’s body in such a way as to make marks of some kind on surfaces. I don’t think this objection is correct. What I will try to show is that even though God has no body, God can nonetheless literally speak.

@SUBA:Locutionary vs. Illocutionary Acts

@BODYTEXT(-INDENT):There’s been a development in philosophy over the past 50 years or so that I think helps enormously in understanding how God can speak. The development I have in mind is called “speech act theory.” It was begun by a philosopher at Oxford, J.L. Austin, and the philosopher who has perhaps more than anyone else developed it is John Searle, who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.

@BODYTEXT:Those who developed speech act theory most certainly did not have their mind on God’s speech; but there is, in particular, one distinction they made that proves enormously helpful to those of us who are interested in the theology of the speaking God.

Let’s work with a humble example. Suppose I ask you to close the door by saying, “Would you close the door, please?” Speech act theorists would argue that I have then done two distinct things. Though this sounds, on first hearing, like philosophers inventing a distinction where there’s none to be found, I think they are right. One thing I have done is to utter the English sentence “Would you close the door, please.” And the other thing I have done is ask you to close the door.

Why would anyone hold that those are two distinct things? Well, because it’s possible for me to do one of them without doing the other: I can utter that sentence without asking you to close the door, and I can ask you to close the door without uttering that sentence. That’s enough to establish that they really are two distinct actions on my part. If uttering those words and making that request were identical, then of course it would be impossible to perform the one without performing the other. There wouldn’t be any other. 

So consider: I can utter that sentence in the course of giving an English lesson to some foreigner who wants to learn the language, as an example of one way of expressing a request in English. I wouldn’t then be making the request to close the door; I would just be uttering the sentence as an example. On the other hand, I could ask you to close the door by using, say, a Dutch sentence.

Of course the two actions, though distinct, are nonetheless closely connected. I made the request by uttering the sentence; my uttering the sentence counts as my making the request.

It will be helpful to have names for these two different sorts of actions. The names J.L. Austin gave are as good as any. He called the action of uttering a sentence a locutionary action. You can see why he called it that; it’s the action of producing a locution. The action of making a request he called an illocutionary action; it’s an action one performs by way of performing a locutionary action. Other examples of illocutionary actions would be making assertions, asking questions, and issuing commands.

There’s a lot more to speech act theory than that, but for our purposes we need only the simple distinction between locutionary acts and illocutionary acts.

@SUBA:Ambassadors and Prophets

@BODYTEXT(-INDENT):I think the reader can already see that the old argument that God cannot literally speak because God has no body loses its persuasiveness when we think along the lines of speech act theory. When we say that God speaks, surely what we really want to say is that God asserts things, commands things, promises things--in short, that God performs illocutionary acts. And such acts are different from uttering sentences with one’s voice and writing them down with one’s appendages. The latter are locutionary acts.
@BODYTEXT:From this point on, let me narrow the focus a bit so that we don’t get lost in all the varieties of divine speech. The Bible reports God as speaking to Israel by way of events in Israel’s communal life: national calamities, national victories, marvelous deliverances, and so forth. Let me focus on God speaking by way of some human being speaking--God speaking by way of Paul speaking, God speaking by way of Amos speaking, and so forth.

Notice that what we have in such cases is two agents: Paul or Amos, on the one hand, and God on the other. When I ask you to open the door by uttering the English sentence, “Would you open the door, please?” there’s just one agent--me. When God speaks by way of some human being, we have double agency. 

Do we have examples in ordinary human affairs of double-agency discourse, or is it unique to God’s speech? Yes, we do have examples--a lot more of them than one might at first think.
Sometimes one person authorizes or deputizes another to speak on his or her behalf, in his or her name. This used to happen commonly in the relation of an ambassador to his or her head of state: the head of state would authorize the ambassador to say certain things in the name of the head of state to the leader of some other government. The ambassador did the talking, but it was the head of state who performed the illocutionary act of issuing the warning or the promise.
As I say, that’s how it use to be; nowadays, with telephones, e-mail, and faxes, the practice has almost entirely disappeared. Heads of state can now speak directly to each other without going through the intermediary of an ambassador.

I submit that the former practice is how the Bible understands the role of the prophet, namely, as one who is deputized to speak on behalf of God--in other words, as one who is commissioned to speak in the name of God. By way of the prophet speaking, God speaks. Let me quote from Deuteronomy 18, where Moses assures Israel that when he is gone, God will raise up new prophets from among them:
@BLOCK:And the Lord replied to me: “They are right in what they have said. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command. Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet speaks in my name, I myself will hold accountable. But any prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, or who presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak—that prophet shall die. (NRSV)
@BODYTEXT:The prophet speaks “in the name of” God just as an ambassador speaks in the name of the head of state, just as an attorney speaks in the name of a client, or just as a proxy speaks in the name of the person for whom he or she is the proxy. As I mentioned, there are many more examples of deputized speech in human affairs than one first thinks.

@SUBA:Beyond Prophetic Speech

@BODYTEXT(-INDENT):There’s more to the Bible than a record of prophetic speech, however. Maybe it’s OK to stretch the notion of prophet a bit so that it covers the New Testament apostle; then the Gospels and the New Testaments letters become prophetic speech.
@BODYTEXT:But it’s implausible to think of the Psalms, addressed as they are to God, as prophetic speech--or, indeed, the Wisdom literature as a whole. This implies that if the Bible as a whole is God’s Word to us, we need an additional way of understanding how God can speak by way of a human being speaking. Is there an additional way? Do we have, in ordinary human affairs, a second example of double-agency discourse?

Yes, I think we do. Consider the case in which one person seconds the parliamentary motion made by another person. In that case, the person who seconds the motion appropriates for himself or herself what the first person said. The person who seconds the motion typically doesn’t deputize, commission, or authorize the person who makes the motion to speak on his or her behalf; the person who makes the motion just says what he or she thinks. But the person who seconds the motion appropriates for his or her own speech what the first person said. Something similar happens when we quote somebody else approvingly: “As John Calvin so correctly remarked. . . .” In such a case, I say what Calvin said, and I do so by way of appropriating for myself what Calvin said.

Here then is a way to understand how even the parts of the Bible that are not plausibly viewed as prophetic speech are nonetheless part of the totality of God’s speech to us by way of the Bible: God appropriates for God’s own speech what the psalmist has said.

Let me close by calling attention to an important feature of both deputized speech and appropriated speech. The head of state may not agree with absolutely everything that the ambassador says when the ambassador delivers a warning or promise from the head of state, and the person who approvingly quotes something may not agree with absolutely everything in the passage quoted.

Of course the head of state will agree with the main point of what the ambassador says, and the person who quotes approvingly a passage from another writer will agree with the main point of the passage. But that leaves room for disagreement over some of the details.

Does this perhaps offer a way forward in understanding how the biblical writers can reflect their own, often fallible, understanding of various things, while nonetheless speaking the infallible Word of God?

@EXCERPT:Even though God has no body, God can nonetheless literally speak.

The prophet speaks “in the name of” God just as an ambassador speaks in the name of the head of state.

quote:
@SUBA:Article 3 of 4
@EYEBROW:Reformed Perspective
@AUTHOR:by Nicholas Wolterstorff
ID: USE PREVIOUS (INCLDNG CHURCH MEMBERSHIP)

@TITLE:Interpreting God’s Speech

@BODYTEXT:Suppose you believe that Scripture in its totality is God’s book. How would you go about interpreting some passage of Scripture so as to find out what God said thereby? That’s our present topic in this third article of our four-part series on God speaking.
Before we set out, let’s remind ourselves of what was said in our two preceding articles. My main point in the first article was that though God’s speaking has often been identified with God’s inspiring and with God’s revealing, in fact it’s distinct from both of those.
In the second article I considered how God could speak. I observed that it’s often been said by theologians and philosophers that God cannot literally speak, since God has no body with which to make sounds or produce marks on pages. I find the argument unpersuasive; I think that God literally speaks.

To see how that can be, I suggested that we follow a recent development in philosophy called “speech act theory.” When someone speaks, that theory distinguishes between the person’s action of uttering words and her actions of asserting, asking, commanding, and so forth, which she performs by way of uttering words. I proposed that we follow the philosophers and call the former locutionary actions and the latter illocutionary actions.
When we consider whether God speaks, surely our interest lies in whether God performs illocutionary actions. Does God assert things to us, issue commands to us, make promises to us?

After making the distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts, I drew attention to the fact that rather often in human affairs one person speaks (performs some illocutionary act) by way of some other person saying something. I called this double agency discourse and noted two types of this communication: sometimes one person deputizes another to speak on her behalf (deputized discourse), and sometimes one person appropriates what another says for her own speech, as when a person seconds a parliamentary motion or quotes approvingly what someone else said (appropriated discourse).

I went on to suggest that these fairly common human phenomena of deputized and appropriated discourse provide us with illuminating models for understanding how God can speak (perform illocutionary actions) by way of human beings saying or writing things.

Let’s concentrate on Scripture. The prophetic and apostolic components of Scripture are to be thought of as deputized discourse; God deputized the prophets and apostles to speak in God’s name. The rest of what we have in Scripture can be thought of as appropriated discourse. God appropriated what some human being said as a way of saying what he, God, wanted to say.

@SUBA:Two Steps Toward Understanding

@BODYTEXT(-INDENT):That brings us to our present topic: suppose we understand the Bible as a blend of human speech deputized by God and human speech appropriated by God. How then do we interpret what God said by way of what those human beings said? How do we interpret divine discourse?

@BODYTEXT:Details have to be left aside on this occasion. The core of my suggestion is that such interpretation, in its overarching pattern, will have two distinct phases. It will be what I have sometimes called a double hermeneutic. (Some readers might not have come across the word hermeneutic before. It’s less frightening than it sounds; it just means principle or theory of interpretation.)

The first phase of interpreting what God has said is this: we interpret what Scripture’s human writers have said.

Why is that? Well, suppose I am an ambassador deputized to speak on behalf of my head of state. To find out what my head of state is saying by way of my speech, you must first understand my speech. Or suppose I say something by way of approvingly quoting somebody else. To find out what I said, you first have to interpret the passage I quoted.

So too for scriptural interpretation: to find out what God said by way of deputizing or appropriating some passage of Scripture, we must first interpret what the human author of that passage said. We must do that as carefully and responsibly as we can, employing whatever scholarly aids prove helpful.

Some readers will be inclined to say at this point, “And doesn’t that automatically give us what God said?” If I approvingly quote somebody else, doesn’t your interpretation of the passage I quoted automatically tell you what I was saying by quoting it? And if I speak on behalf of my head of state, doesn’t your interpretation of what I said automatically give you what my head of state said by way of my speaking?

So isn’t a single hermaneutic sufficient? Take, for example, the biblical Song of Songs. Doesn’t God just say what the author said? If I know what the author said, don’t I know what God said by way of appropriating that book?

What is true, I think, is that we are to take God as saying what the human author said unless we have good reason, in a given case, for concluding otherwise; if we couldn’t assume that, we would really be adrift. But there are good reasons, in specific cases, for concluding otherwise; hence the need for a double hermeneutic in which we first interpret what the human author or editor said, and then the distinct thing God said thereby.

@SUBA:Three Reasons for Two Steps

@BODYTEXT(-INDENT):Let me give my reasons--some of them--for thinking that God doesn’t always say, and doesn’t always only say, what the human author or editor said.

@BODYTEXT:In the first place, when interpreting Scripture for what God said thereby, we have to treat the Bible as one single book, God’s book. That is, we must interpret it not as God’s collected works but as God’s one work. The whole in terms of which we interpret a part is not just the whole of that one of those 66 or so books within which that passage is found; rather, the whole consists of the totality of Scripture, the totality of the canon.

Why is that? Well, suppose somebody writes and asks me for my philosophy. (People do in fact sometimes do that!) One thing I could do, obviously, is send them a philosophical essay I have written. But another thing I could do is put together a number of things other people have written--a poem, perhaps, a short story, a biblical passage, or a fragment of philosophy--and send this totality to my inquirer with the instruction that to grasp my philosophy he or she must read all those items together and interpret each in the light of the others.

So too for the Bible. What we call “the books” of the Bible were written by different authors and assembled by different editors. In the first hermeneutic we interpret them more or less separately. But God has appropriated this totality for his speech to us, by inspiring the church to select this totality as its canon, and that implies that when interpreting Scripture for God’s speech we must treat the totality as one book.

The church has long recognized that when we do this we will rather often conclude that what God says by way of some passage is different from, or goes beyond, what the human writer says. For example, when we interpret what God says in the Song of Songs as part of the totality of the Christian canon, we discern that what God says by way of some passages diverges from, or goes beyond, what the ancient writer said. When distinct writings are put together into a larger literary unit, new things happen!

That’s one reason for holding that we need a double hermeneutic when interpreting Scripture for what God said. Here’s a second reason: When we interpret, say, a psalm for what the human writer said, we obviously interpret it as an address to God; that’s what the Psalms are. But when we interpret that psalm for what God says by way of appropriating it for inclusion in the canon, then we obviously must switch from asking what the human writer is saying in addressing God to asking what God is saying to us. 

I have a third reason. The human writers of the biblical books reflect in various ways their own limited, fallible, and even sinful selves. Theologians in their discussions of biblical inspiration (remember our topic here is God’s speech, not God’s inspiration) have long recognized this by saying that inspiration is “organic.”
But when we interpret for what God says by way of some biblical passage, we obviously don’t attribute to God the limited, fallible, and sinful things that we find in the human speech. Rather, as Augustine already observed, we allow our interpretation of Scripture for what God is saying to be guided by the principle that God never speaks unlovingly or falsely. It is, after all, divine infallibility that we confess, not human infallibility.

It may be helpful to have before us an example of what this comes to. Consider the opening verse of Psalm 93:

@BLOCK:The Lord is king, he is robed in majesty;
the Lord is robed, he is girded with strength.
He has established the world; it shall never be moved;
your throne is established from of old;
you are from everlasting.

@BODYTEXT:I think it’s clear that the writer is here giving expression to that ancient cosmology which held that the earth is kept from moving about on the waters under the earth by pillars that hold it fast.

You and I now know that ancient cosmology was mistaken. Accordingly, when we interpret this passage for what God says, we don’t conclude that God says what the ancient writer said--but neither, let me say emphatically, do we simply dismiss or ignore the passage. We ask what God was saying by way of what the writer said. What’s needed is a double hermeneutic.

I’m well aware that some people think it’s important to preserve that human being who was the psalmist from all error (while nonetheless speaking of “organic” inspiration!). To achieve this, they hold that the psalmist wasn’t really expressing his belief in the ancient cosmology; he was just mining it for metaphors. If we adopt a double hermeneutic, and interpret for God’s speech by using the Augustinian principle that God does not speak unlovingly or falsely, then we don’t have to resort to this implausible expedient.
But how is it possible for God to speak infallibly by way of human beings who speak fallibly? Recall our analogy. I may appropriate some other person’s speech for my own without agreeing with absolutely everything that other person said; likewise an ambassador may speak on behalf of his head of state without the head of state agreeing with absolutely everything the ambassador says.

It’s for these reasons that we need a double hermeneutic when interpreting Scripture for what God said thereby.

@SUBA:Three Key Principles

@BODYTEXT(-INDENT):I have already mentioned two fundamental principles that we use in the second hermeneutic: we interpret God as saying what the human author said unless we have good reason in a given case to conclude otherwise; and in interpreting for what God said we operate with the principle that God speaks infallibly.

@BODYTEXT:Here’s a third fundamental principle: if we have good reason to think that God said something different from, or in addition to, what the human author said, we consider what it is that God is most likely to have wanted to say with these words. That, of course, presupposes knowledge of God; only he and she who have some knowledge of God can interpret for what God said.

Much could be said about these three principles; but I have run out of space. Just one last point: when we who are Christians interpret the biblical text for what God said by way of this text, we do so in the light of what we know of, and from, him who is no text but rather God himself dwelling among us and sharing our nature--namely, Jesus Christ. That is to say, we interpret God’s word to us by way of Scripture in the light of him who is himself God’s Word.

@EXCERPT:God doesn’t always say, and doesn’t always only say, what the Bible’s human authors said.

How is it possible for God to speak infallibly by way of human beings who speak fallibly?

quote:
@SUBA:Article 4 of 4
@EYEBROW:Reformed Perspective
@AUTHOR:by Nicholas Wolterstorff

@TITLEA:Knowing God and Interpreting God’s Word

@BODYTEXT:In this fourth article of our series on God speaking, I want to say a bit more about a matter that I mentioned ever so briefly near the end of the last article.

Let’s review where we are in our discussion. After explaining in my first article that my topic is neither inspiration nor revelation but God speaking, I suggested in my second article a way to understand how it can be that God says things by way of Scripture.

I observed that in human affairs it sometimes happens that one person claims, asks, promises, proposes, commands, and so forth, by way of a deputy of that person speaking on his or her behalf, such as an attorney for a client. And sometimes one person claims, asks, and so forth, by appropriating what someone else has said, such as in seconding a parliamentary motion or approvingly quoting the words of another.

In my third article I reflected on how we are to go about interpreting Scripture for what God said if we think of Scripture as either deputized or appropriated by God for God’s own speech. I said that such interpretation would require two stages. First we must interpret for what the human writer said, and second for what God said by way of what the human writer said.

There are lots of things to be said about how the transition is made from understanding what some human author of Scripture said to discerning what God said by way of what the human author said. In the course of saying a few things about that transition, I remarked that only those “who have some knowledge of God can interpret for what God said.” The transition, I said, “presupposes knowledge of God.”

It’s that comment that I want to develop a bit in this article.

@SUBA:Knowing Before Interpreting?

@BODYTEXT(-INDENT):My guess is that there will be some readers who, if they fully understand what I just said, will be somewhat alarmed by it. Here’s why: I suggested that we must already know something about God if we are to interpret Scripture for God’s Word.

@BODYTEXT:Obviously it’s also true that in the course of interpreting for God’s Word, we learn new things about God; but my point is that if your head is completely empty of all convictions about God, you can’t even get started on the project of interpreting for God’s speech.

Yet some people are of the view that Scripture is, or ought to be, our sole source of knowledge about God. They are of the view that we ought to approach Scripture with heads completely empty of any convictions about God, and that our views about God ought to be gotten exclusively from Scripture.

Let me explain why I don’t think that view can be right. Once again, it will prove helpful to start with a few observations about ordinary human speech.

As we all know, many of our words have several distinct meanings; but even given a particular meaning of a word, we can use that word to speak not only strictly and literally but also loosely and figuratively. So when I hear you uttering a certain sentence, how do I figure out what meanings of the words you had in mind, and how do I figure out whether you’re using them strictly or loosely, literally or figuratively? In short, starting from the words you used, how do I figure out what you claimed, asked, commanded, and so forth?

As you would expect, there are disagreements among those who think and write about such matters. But I think that such interpretation always involves the knowledge we have about the speaker. In the light of what we know about the speaker, we figure out what he or she is likely to have wanted to say with those words in that situation.
For example, suppose two people both utter the sentence “The crows are after me,” when no crows are in sight. If you believe one of those persons to be sane, you will interpret her as speaking figuratively; perhaps she has just given a talk that stirred up a nest of controversy. By contrast, if you believe the other person to be psychotic, you’ll most likely interpret her as speaking literally; claiming that actual crows are attacking her is one sign of her disturbance.

It’s the same way with God’s speech. To know when to interpret God’s speech by way of Scripture literally and when to interpret it figuratively, we must know something about God. Scripture, for example, sometimes presents God as having wings; it’s because we know something of God that we don’t interpret God as telling us by way of such passages that he has wings, literally speaking.

Those who are of the view that we should have empty heads about God when interpreting Scripture would probably reply that we interpret metaphorically the representation of God as having wings because God tells us that he is a Spirit--and a spirit doesn’t have wings.
The respondent thus takes literally the statement that God is Spirit. But if all we’re going by is mere words, why not run the interpretation in the opposite direction: why not interpret literally the representation of God as having wings and metaphorically the statement that God is a Spirit? The mere words give us no guidance as to which way to go.

The point I’m making was made already by the great church father Augustine. In a section of his little book On Christian Doctrine, Augustine reflected on how to decide when to interpret a passage of Scripture literally and when to interpret it figuratively:

@BLOCK:“We must show the way to find out whether a phrase is literal or figurative. And the way is certainly as follows: Whatever there is in the word of God that cannot, when taken literally, be referred either to purity of life or soundness of doctrine, you may set down as figurative. Purity of life has reference to the love of God and one’s neighbor; soundness of doctrine to the knowledge of God and one’s neighbor” (III,10,14).

@BODYTEXT:I agree with Augustine. I don’t think there’s any way around the conclusion that, when interpreting Scripture for God’s Word, we interpret in the light of convictions we already have about God. In the course of our interpretation we then learn new things about God--and we find that some of the things we already believed don’t work out in the process of interpretation.

With these new and corrected beliefs in mind, we then go on to interpret other, perhaps more difficult passages. Thereby we learn more things and again get some of the convictions we already had corrected. And so it goes. It’s more like a spiral than a straight line.

@SUBA:Acquiring Knowledge

@BODYTEXT(-INDENT):And now for the question that’s on the lips of all of us: from where do we get these beliefs about God in the light of which we interpret Scripture for God’s speech?

@BODYTEXT:Augustine's reference to doctrine is a clue. You and I have been taught things about God by the church, by our parents, by our teachers; it’s in the light of the “doctrine” we’ve learned from them that we interpret Scripture for God’s speech.

Every reader will respond with a Yes, but . . .. Yes it’s true that we interpret Scripture for God’s speech in the light of what we’ve been taught about God. But where in turn did that teaching come from? And in any case, that teaching might be mistaken.

So what Augustine says is no more than a beginning. Once again, how do we gain the knowledge of God that’s required for interpreting Scripture for God’s speech? And, when they are mistaken, how do we correct the convictions about God that we bring to our interpretation of Scripture? Let me make some suggestions.

There’s a form of knowledge of God that one acquires by living faithfully with God in a life of piety and commitment; it’s important that that sort of knowledge be brought to bear on interpreting Scripture for God’s Word.

Those who treat interpretation of Scripture as a mere exercise will toss up all sorts of ingenious interpretations, but the person who has the knowledge of God that comes from living faithfully with God will feel about many of those that “That’s not the God I know.”
That implies, of course, that interpretation of Scripture for the Word of God must be conducted as part of a life of piety and commitment. Perhaps it implies even more. Perhaps it implies that such interpretation should be conducted only in overtly devotional contexts--contexts in which one prayerfully invokes the presence of the Spirit--not in purely academic contexts.

Second, there’s a knowledge of God that’s acquired by faithful theological and philosophical reflection. As Christian theologians and philosophers mull over the implications of each alternative way of interpreting some passage of Scripture, they bring the implications of an interpretation of one passage into play with the implications of interpretations of other passages. They also bring into the picture things that we know as human beings, including things that we have learned from science. In this way they slowly come to the conclusion that God is not like this but instead like that.

That was how the theologians and philosophers of the church slowly and painfully came to some understanding of how God is related to Jesus, how they came to the conclusion that God is triune.
The theologians and philosophers of the church make mistakes, as we all know, but their reflections are not all mistakes. I didn’t mention it above, but we also make mistakes in what we understand ourselves to have learned about God from living faithfully with God.
My reference to the church in the paragraph above leads me to mention yet another way in which we come to a knowledge of God. I would contend that even those Christians who think they are interpreting Scripture with empty heads are in fact, without realizing it, employing in their interpretation things they have learned about God from the church.

Not only is that how it is; that’s how it should be. For if the church is God’s precious possession--as we confess it is--then we cannot just put out of mind those things that the church has taught with near unanimity over the ages.

Obviously here too we are not dealing with infallibility. But if we hold that the church, whatever its error and waywardness, nonetheless remains Christ’s body on earth, then we will begin our interpretation of Scripture for God’s Word from within the church, not from outside it.

And if we want to avail ourselves of the knowledge of God borne by the church and necessary for interpreting Scripture for God’s Word, I think it is important that we do our best to listen not only to our own little corner of the present-day church but to the church of all ages and of all places.

Nothing has been so effective in helping me discriminate between what’s true and important and mistaken and parochial in my late-20th-century Americanized Dutch-Reformed heritage--or in enabling me to enrich what that heritage has taught me--as reading what members of the church from other times have said about God, and reading what members who live today in other places and segments of society are saying.

@SUBA:A Continuing Process

@BODYTEXT(-INDENT):In summary we acquire convictions about God by living faithfully with God, by reflecting on the work of faithful theologians and philosophers, and by listening to the reflections of the church of all times and all places.

@BODYTEXT:Without trying to empty our head of those convictions, instead bearing them in mind, we read Scripture, seeking to discern God’s Word therein. In the course of doing so we find ourselves learning new things about God and having some of the things we already believed corrected. We then use these new and corrected beliefs in our further interpretation.

So it goes, in a sort of spiral motion. And all the while we conduct our interpretation and live our lives in the confidence that our salvation does not depend on getting everything right.

Moreover, we don’t interpret Scripture all by ourselves. Rather, we interpret Scripture for God’s Word as members of that community which is the church.

@EXCERPT:We interpret Scripture in the light of convictions we already have about God.

Interpreting Scripture for the Word of God must be conducted as part of a life of piety and commitment.

****************************************************

That's the church-pew presentation, from our denominational magazine, in four monthly editions.

Al

Edited by - Al2Si2H4O9 on 11/05/2002 12:15:58 PM

PotOnWheel
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890

Posted 11/5/2002 7:06 AM (GMT -6)

CT review, by a grad. student who was 'feeling his oats.'

quote:
He Is Not Silent
But Nicholas Wolterstorff wants to know how we know when God is speaking.-
by Andrew Chignell

Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks
By Nicholas Wolterstorff
Cambridge University Press
326 pp.; $59.99, hardcover; $18.95, paper

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard relates the Hasidic legend of Rebbe Shmelke from Nickolsburg. Shmelke, it is told, never heard his teacher, the Maggid of Mezritch, complete a teaching, because as soon as the Maggid would say "and the Lord spoke," Rebbe Shmelke would start shouting in wonderment, "The Lord spoke! The Lord spoke!" and continue in this vein until he had to be carried from the room.

Shocking as it sometimes seems, many theists--especially those in Jewish and Christian circles--believe that the Lord of the universe speaks. More surprising still: many of these believers claim that God speaks to them. Saint Augustine is famous for confessing that he was led to Christianity when he heard God speaking to him through a young child's voice in a garden. Contemporary evangelicals are (in)famous for saying things like "I felt God speaking to me through that passage" or "I really heard from the Lord on that issue." In Divine Discourse, Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff reflects on these kinds of claims and concludes that they may be philosophically defensible.

Leaving God speechless
Can Divinity discourse? After all, "God is Spirit," says the apostle John; and spirit-beings don't have vocal chords and they do not use pens, paper, or word processors (though stone tablets and palace walls have been utilized on special occasions). This does not deter Wolterstorff: We know of many cases, he says, "in which one person says something with words which he himself hasn't uttered or inscribed. Cases of double agency, we might call them." An ambassador, for example, is authorized to speak in lieu of the head of state, while many a CEO has "composed" a letter by the hand of a secretary.

These are the kinds of creative comparisons Wolterstorff makes as he tries to bring questions about the nature of language (which have dominated philosophical inquiry in this century) to bear on questions about God's way of speaking (which have not). He also makes a relatively subtle but crucial distinction: that between speech and revelation. The idea that God reveals himself in the twin books of nature and Scripture is hardly revolutionary (though there is still debate over what that revelation consists in and how it is apprehended). But speaking, according to Wolterstorff, is something altogether different.

In short, to speak is "to take up a normative stance in the public domain." Candidates delivering political speeches, for example, may promise things in such a way that they do not, in the main, reveal anything about themselves. Rather, they utter sentences that sound like promises, and we listeners (and voters) ascribe to them the rights and obligations that are conventionally given to one who has promised. It is possible (and perhaps all too common) that, in taking up this "promiser" stance, the candidate may not be revealing his true intentions at all.

Wolterstorff thinks that other speech acts--like commanding or asking or even asserting--work in much the same way. It may seem natural to assume that when someone issues a command, he is revealing his will to us. But, says Wolterstorff, this just won't do: God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, after all, but God was not thereby revealing his will that Isaac be sacrificed (since he didn't will that at all).

These are knotty issues, and Wolterstorff unties them with characteristic grace. Many of his points assume Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin's speech-act theory of language, in which all "speeches" are evaluated as sorts of public actions. Even more fundamental to Wolterstorff's work here, however, is a certain understanding of God--an understanding that, as we shall see, is more often found in pulpits and prayer closets than in systematic theologies.

The God of Divine Discourse is not the unresponsive, impassible monad depicted in some traditional theologies; in other words, he is not a God whose "participation" in history consists in the unfolding of a sovereign will that was in place at Creation. Rather, Wolterstorff pictures God as a free communicator who is involved in a dynamic dialogue with his speaking creatures. Wolterstorff implicitly aligns himself here with people like Clark Pinnock and William Hasker who argue for what they call the "openness of God." In a rather controversial book by that title (InterVarsity Press, 1994), Pinnock and company claim that the view of God that is most consistent with the Bible is one that allows God to interact with, suffer with, and even dispute with his creatures without compromising his transcendence and other omni-properties. On this view, God and human beings are "cocreators" of the future: God's will interacts with ours and changes in response to the decisions we make. In a class at Yale entitled "The Other God," Wolterstorff reveals his sympathies for this sort of theology; in Divine Discourse, he publishes them.

Those concerned with mystical or charismatic understandings of the way this open/other God speaks, however, will be disappointed with the book. Wolterstorff is not interested here in speaking about (or in) ecstatic utterances or audible voices; most of his work deals with the "speech" that is recorded in the biblical text. But this takes him from the frying pan to the fire, so to speak, for the climate of contemporary hermeneutical philosophy is very hot indeed for one who would search a text for what the author was saying (or intending to say) when he or she authored it.

Can God be an author?
Wolterstorff isn't daunted. Having shown that God can speak, he goes on to try to show that God can speak as an author. In doing so, however, Wolterstorff is not willing to countenance an inerrancy theory of inspiration, nor does he want to say that all the biblical writers were prophets directly deputized to deliver "the word of the Lord." On the contrary, most of them were just people writing in order to say something--in a letter, in a poem--and it so happens that God decided to "appropriate" their speech as his own. "All that is necessary," says Wolterstorff, "for the whole [Bible] to be God's book is that all the human discourse it contains have been appropriated by God, as one single book, for God's discourse." And how do we know that God has "authored" a text in this way? Well, says Wolterstorff, "the event which counts as God's appropriating this totality . . . is presumably that drawn out event consisting of the Church's settling on the totality as its canon."

So God has "authored" by appropriating human texts and having them canonized. Our job is simply to figure out what the human author was intending to say, and then go on to interpret what God was "saying" when he chose to appropriate that human discourse. Wolterstorff calls this practice "authorial-discourse interpretation" and claims that it is the one used in most homiletical and devotional settings anyway.

References to the "intentions" of authors or "authorial discourse" fly directly in the face of the reader-based hermeneutical theories that originated in European thought and have become popular here over the last 20 years. But Wolterstorff doesn't mind doing some "in-your face" philosophizing on occasion, and, though he has been taken to task on this issue by many a mainstream hermeneut, he continues to claim that these other theories must give "in the face of the facts." At the Wheaton College Hermeneutics Conference in 1994, I had the pleasure of watching him square off over this issue with Merold Westphal of Fordham University, who favors the near-canonized Continental approach to interpretation. Debate between the two has continued at later conferences (most recently at the American Philosophical Association's Eastern Divisional Meeting in December 1996) with Westphal always contending that nothing about the author's intentions is relevant to the interpretive enterprise. In Divine Discourse, Wolterstorff takes aim at Westphal's concerns by addressing two of their original French formulators: Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida.

Ricoeur enjoins readers to survey the "sense" that the text itself presents to them, without regard to its author's intent. Derrida claims (and here I tread gingerly) that the discrepancies between the words of a text and the variety of meanings they may refer to indicate that there is really no set meaning at all, and that readers should learn to enjoy the "free play" of indeterminate interpretations that this affords. Wolterstorff cheerfully notes that such reader-oriented theories are interesting and even appropriate in certain contexts, but he still wonders what we should do if we are interested in what the author was actually saying. These theorists don't think we can know this, or don't think we should; Wolterstorff disagrees.

Interpreting celestial speech
The only way we can begin to infer what an author was saying, or trying to say, Wolterstorff insists, is by knowing something about her. The charitable interpreter must discern "what would be natural for the person speaking to say in the context" in which she is speaking. With respect to the human authors of the Bible, then, the historical and literary studies of the canonical texts that have proliferated in this century can be revealing. If we are able to piece together an understanding of what it was to assert, command, or promise in Saint Peter's world, then we will begin to see (or hear) what he was trying to say by using the words that he did. Likewise, if we know something about God--that he is loving and that he does not lie, for instance--we can begin to eliminate certain interpretations of the divine discourse and get closer to what God was saying when he "authored" the text.

But herein lies a problem: The human author may not have been aware of what he was saying--or of what he would be taken as saying- when he used certain words. God, on the other hand, is usually aware of such things. Thus Wolterstorff concludes that we may have to distinguish between the human and the divine speech on occasion. The psalmist talked about the earth "not being moved" in Psalm 93, and this was taken to mean certain things in ancient Palestine (and in seventeenth-century Italy). When God appropriated this human discourse, however, he could anticipate what this speech would mean when it was approached as part of a canonical whole by readers in other times and places. Wolterstorff warns that we should not take God to be saying anything different from what the human author intended unless we have "good reason" to do so. But with something like the geocentric reference in Psalm 93, Copernican Christians have very good reason indeed!

This move puts Wolterstorff at odds both with inerrantists and with Hans Frei and the other narrative theologians who preceded him at Yale. Wolterstorff is claiming that we always employ outside knowledge--about God, about reality, and about morality--in order to interpret. We know that the solar system is heliocentric, and so we interpret the divine discourse in Psalm 93 metaphorically. We know that Jesus does not lie and was not crazy, and so we take his claim to being "the door" in a nonliteral fashion.

But as Frei and the fundamentalists saw, this can cut both ways: so-called liberal theologians may "know" that miracles don't occur, and they will gloss the miracle stories accordingly. So despite his ongoing focus on the author as the source of meaning, Wolterstorff is eventually forced to confess that Scripture always bends a bit in the grip of different readerships. For this reason, he says, the responsible hermeneut will (1) do her best to make what she brings to the text as truth-conducive as possible; that is, she will get to know God and the world better; and (2) be willing to admit that any readings that diverge from the literal sense or the traditional interpretation of the church are, one might say, guilty until proven innocent.

Wolterstorff is a relative newcomer to hermeneutical philosophy, and his approach bears the marks of creativity and innovation that are often evident when an expert in one field turns his attention to another. Nevertheless, I suspect that few of the seasoned purveyors of the hermeneutical theories that are now near-orthodoxies will be won over by the criticisms advanced in Divine Discourse. Wolterstorff's treatment of these orthodoxies is insightful and incisive, but it is not involved enough to be conclusive. His criticisms of Ricouer and Derrida, for instance, constitute two of the shorter chapters in the book. He is forced to move fast, and to brush past points that could be better won in a lengthier discussion. Also, Wolterstorff simply ignores Hans-Georg Gadamer and Mikhail Bakhtin--two widely respected theorists on interpretation who are very sympathetic to Christian concerns, and whose works are the product of a lifetime of reflection on these issues.

Other interesting questions arise regarding the procedure for authorial-discourse interpretation. For instance, we might ask where we get the preliminary information about God that we take to his text (e.g., that he is loving and honest) if not from the tradition that has built up around that text in the first place. And if we do get it from there, are we moving in what Martin Heidegger calls a happy hermeneutic circle, or in a slightly more vicious one?

What Wolterstorff has done in Divine Discourse is what all good philosophers hope to do, if they are honest. By applying rigorous and innovative analysis to a relatively fresh topic, he has cracked the door to a new room in the mansion of philosophy--a room that his ongoing work may help to furbish and fill with other conversationalists. More significantly, Wolterstorff has done in Divine Discourse what all good Christian philosophers do: he has allowed believers both in and outside the academy to think more precisely about a topic of unspeakable existential importance--namely, what we possibly can mean when we say, with the Maggid of Mezritch, "this is the word of the Lord."

Andrew Chignell is a graduate student in religious studies at Yale University.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 32

Alan Rhoda
Registered Member

Date Joined May 2002
Total Posts : 680

Posted 11/5/2002 10:59 AM (GMT -6)

Tom,

I'm no expert on speech-act theory, but I have read a couple of J. L. Austin's books: (1) "Sense and Sensibilia" (a play on the title of Jane Austen's novel) and (2) "How to Do Things with Words". The latter book develops Austin's speech-act theory. Note the title: How to DO things with words. A speech-act is an action (something that we do) performed simply by speaking. Austin focuses on a class of statements called "performatives". They are called this because the very utterance of the statement PERFORMS some act. Perhaps the clearest example is the case of sentences of the form "I promise X". By uttering the sentence one MAKES A PROMISE to carry out X. Another statement that perform an action is "I resign".

Hope that helps,
Alan

Terry_Baxter
Registered Member

Date Joined Jan 2002
Total Posts : 187

Posted 11/5/2002 5:04 PM (GMT -6)

Hey TGB, can you fill out some of the context for us?

Here's some Speech Act stuff that might apply or help make sense of Wolterstoff (whom I've never read. would you recommended him?)

There's a dichotomy between utterances that describe states of affairs (constatives) and those that perform actions (they ARE acts) which are called performatives.

Performatives don't have a truth value, they are felicitous or "happy".

There are social rules that make promises work (intention to carry it out, belief from the promisee, etc.). When both speaker and audience agree that the rules have been met, that performative is "happy". Thus, the otherwise impotent words of a promise are made in to an act.

Austin and Searle elaborated on the theory to divide speech acts in to locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. <insert yawn here>. The upshot of this is that illocutionary acts are most reliant on social status (a demand, a bet, etc.) while perlocutionary acts affect the audience with fear, belief, etc.

I can't imagine the social status stuff being too applicable for Godly communication. That seems to be an odd categorization of status (God > everything)

The perlocutionary acts stuff (speech "creates" something in another person) makes very good sense of some Jesus' words about 'faith coming by hearing'. It might also 'explain' his healing miracles that used a spoken component to 'create' faith in the sick.

So.... 'splain! How might this apply to Divine Discourse?

Terry
Giddyup

PotOnWheel
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890

Posted 11/6/2002 12:28 AM (GMT -6)

Terry: "make sense of Wolterstoff (whom I've never read. would you recommended him?)"

Al: Look above at the third post. Its all an article from a church denominational mag.

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