Thursday, January 08, 2009

Locating Inspiration...

Where does divine inspiration lie in relation to the biblical text?  Was the author inspired tying it to authorial intent?  Are the words inspired tying it to the text?  Is the interpreter inspired tying it to reading strategy?  More importantly, how does the idea of inspiration and the location of inspiration relate to hermeneutics?  Do questions of inspirational location even matter if the hermeneutical considerations overshadow the problem?  For instance, if inspiration is tied to authorial intent but authorial intent is hermeneutically impossible to recover apart from the text itself, is it at all meaningful to call the individual authors inspired?  Or, if the text is inspired but texts are only interpreted (and perhaps even constructed) by readers, then is it at all meaningful to call the text inspired?  Or, if the reader is inspired then how does that inspiration proceed and of what purpose is the text at all?

These are the questions that are currently consuming my days as I attempt to write a paper about the relationship between biblical scholarship and Christian Theology.

4 comments:

Jon Coutts said...

AWESOME. you have posed the hermeneutical dilemma succinctly and well with that paragraph of questions.

good luck answering them!

Colin Toffelmire said...

Ha, thanks a lot! Wanna give me a push?

D+ said...

Hey,

You gotta check out John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch. It is my favorite book on the doctrine of Scripture... it is "just a sketch," but it provides piles of food for thought. I found the book infuriating because he subverts the importance of the entire hermeneutical problem as I have understood it. You know he is on to something when he irks so many people :)

Colin Toffelmire said...

Thanks man, I'll give it a try.