hOUTWS Jn3.16 "In this way"

Mike Sangrey mike at sojurn.lns.pa.us
Sat Apr 1 17:53:36 EST 2000



Joseph A. Weaks <jweaks at delta.is.tcu.edu> said:
>  My emphasis (not so much an  "insistence") is not merely academic.
> The majority of church members  ONLY hear John 3:16 taken out of
> context.  I'd say that 90% of the  folks in the 4 churches I've served
> have ONLY understood the hWSTE as  a Result Clause of the intensive
> extent of hOUTWS (ie. God sending  God's son is a result of how much
> God loved us).  The context of the  analogy with Moses does make clear
> that there is at least some  emphasis on a correlative "in this way"
> (even if only 60%/40%).  So,  as an interpreter, and as their pastor,
> it is my vocation to give  voice to this forgotten aspect.

I am reading "Linguistics and New Testament Interpretation: Essays on 
Discourse Analysis"  edited by David A. Black.  To illustrate "Reading a text 
as discourse", J. P. Louw uses John 3:1-21.  He says verses 16-18 "(...marked 
by three syntactic units...) contains in itself a comment on the hINA clause 
in the [previous syntactic unit], each [of the three] taking the argument a 
step further" (page 24).

However, in the graphic he presents, which captures his discourse analysis of 
the text, he boxes verses 14-15 as a single syntactic unit.  What struck me 
when looking at the graphic was that maybe 'hOUTWS--the first word in the next 
box--was referring back to this syntactic unit.  That is, the analogy between 
Moses and the Son of Man.  In other words, God's love of the world is 'in the 
same way as' this analogy.  'hOUTWS' is not forward looking, but backward 
looking; it looks back to 'the lifting up'.

Is this (no pun intended) grammatically allowable?
-- 
Mike Sangrey
mike at sojurn.lns.pa.us
Landisburg, Pa.
       There is no 'do' in faith, everywhere present within it is 'done'.





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