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Back to Greek



     First, I'd really like to see us all get back to Greek topics.
That is why I subscribe to this forum, not really to read
appends in which one world view bumps up against another and that's
as far as it goes.  Second, and with the hope of promoting my
first point, I'd like to observe an irony myself.
Dr. Sennett writes:
>Another irony is that Fundamentalism (and, to a great extent, many
>branches of contemporary Evangelicalism) adopted the positivistic view of
>language that insisted on core meanings for terms and syntactical
>structures, leading to a wide variety of exegetical and hermeneutical
>mistakes that fuel much of the division in the church today.  This view
>of language, overthrown since at least the late Wittgenstein, nonetheless
>persists in conservative seminaries and pulpits, and leads to many

I find it ironic that many scholars (I won't bandy about some
caricature label like "Fundamentalism", used in a way wholly out
of sync with its original significance) complain that Fundamentalists
(whatever that means) and Evangelicals are guilty of holding a particular
form of worldview dogmatically, without admitting that they too are doing
the exact same thing:  using a particular view of reality as the grid
for understanding everything else, and these scholars can be just as
ferocious in defending their worldview as the "Fundamentalists" they
condemn.  What it comes down to is not whether a given person has
a world view; that's a given, though I would suggest that many scholars
do not wish to acknowledge the significance of that fact.
What the argument is really about is "who's worldview is right?".
So let's stop this nonesense about "Fundamentalists" holding a given
worldview as though those who assert this do not, or that somehow,
whatever the view held by "Fundamentalists", it must be wrong,
just because they are "Fundies".  In addition, beyond the fact that
sentences are the real basis of communication, rather than single
words, I'm not aware that the entire population of the planet has
overthrown the view that what we say are only language games.
It's one thing to assert that in the faculty lounge;  it's quite
another to assert that it is universally true.  A certain view
of language may have been changed in some higher education
institutions, but I don't think that constitutes something
being overthrown.  Besides that, anyone can proppound a theory
of language.  What is required is that that theory works in
the real world, and I don't think I'd be willing to grant that
all that Wittgenstein, early or late, said about language would
meet that criterion.  Finally, I want to address what is being
implied in some appends, namely, that religious truth is somehow
different from other kinds of truth and need not be rooted in
events.  One writer granted that the resurrection may have been
an event but that does not matter now.  What matters now is
what someone believes.  This modernist period tendency to
divide truth up into separate compartments like soup cans
is indefensible from a logical point of view.  Truth is truth.
Facts are facts.  Period.  There is no difference between
asserting that Jesus rose from the dead and asserting that
that there is a law of gravity.  In either case, it is either
true or it is not true.  If truth is relative, I challenge anyone
to right now disavow the existence of gravity, go outside the
building you are in and jump up to the top of it.  Belief in
something is irrelevant to its facticity.  Furthermore, the
unproved assertion that events have no significance but
are only given when they are interpreted does not stand
up to logic IMHO.  If you go out tomorrow and your car is
hit in the middle of an intersection, that event has meaning
or significance whether it is interpreted or not.  Otherwise,
your insurance company would not be sooooo interested in the
facts of what happened.  They are not interested in your
interpretation that the other driver is stupid.  They are
interested in the significance of the fact that you or
the other driver ran a red light.  While determining the
precise significance of the death, burial and resurrection
of Jesus, if you grant for the sake of argument that they
occured, is harder to obtain just by rational process,
that does not for one moment change what that significance
is, and it retains the same significance whether I believe
in someone's interpretation of the event or whether I reject
entirely that the event occured, if we grant that it did occur
for the sake of argument.  All these arguments being
bandied about against the views of "Fundamentalists" are just
the old fallacies that derive from a Cartesian world view, which
should have died with the Law of Spontaneous Generation of Matter,
but still hang on in theological schools.  So, now, can we please
get back to Biblical Greek?  Sorry for the long append but
this is ridiculous.