Hunches and Concerns

Clwinbery at aol.com Clwinbery at aol.com
Tue Jul 2 12:36:13 EDT 2002



In a message dated 7/2/02 9:55:17 AM, emory2oo2 at hotmail.com writes:

>
>Here is where I disagree. Bultmann, for example, presented a view
>of first century Judaism that was being corrected/challenged by
>many scholars as he wrote, but after all was said and done,
>people simply accepted Bultmann's view without ever going to the
>original sources. It took E.P. Sanders, years later, to come along and
>demonstrate Bultmann's portrayal of Judaism as almost wholesale
>without support. Once a certain person says it, that settles
>it for the masses.
>
>Ask any GNT Greek student to explain the M/P paradigm, and you
>tell me if he gets within a hundred miles of Carl's presentation.
>Uncritically, I suspect that most students' default understanding
>of most M/P forms are Passive. It would not even occur to a student
>of the GNT to give serious consideration to KATHRTISMENA in Romans
>9:22 as a Middle.... that's a pretty serious passage on understanding
>the Integrity of God.
>
>Read Wallace on this verse GGBB... he claims the other occurrences of
>KATHRTISMENA are almost all Passive... and yet I would say the
>polar opposite. Now granted, Wallace is driven by a theological
>bias as I am, but again, it is naive to assume that the implications
>of this M/P paradigm and issue of voice are not extremely important.
>
>Doing away with the Once-for-all Aorist was critical if you ask
>me, because most Greek Students, I suspect, simply bought into
>the idea. John MacArthur still preaches this from his pulpit today!!!
>
>Doing away with the Divine Passive is no small matter.
>
>And I am saying that the reason Carl's presentation of the M/P
>is important is because what was once thought to settle a theological
>issue based on OBJECTIVE evidence.... grammar.... has now been
>done away with. Done away with if you buy into the implications
>of the M/P Voice issues. Or, done away with at the scholarly level.
>(This is why I think it critical not to downplay "doctrine."
>Paul considered all things loss in exchange for what?! I guess
>the next step is to quibble over what doctrine means.)
>
I hope that you do not think that we personally are saying to "downplay" 
doctrine. We all have our doctrinal positions. What we on b-greek are asking 
is that we hold doctrine out of the discussion of the phenomena of the Greek 
texts we are considering. Certainly Carl's concept of the mid./pass 
morphological forms will make a difference in the way we translate certain 
verbs in any texts we read. What we ask is that we talk about the phenomena 
of the texts on this list. We are free to take what we do here and move to 
any other of a number of lists to discuss the theological implications. This 
philosophy so far has given us a list that is focused and helpful to a very 
diverse group of Greek students. To continue that we must, IMHO, continue to 
allow each who studies the texts to be free from theological restraints. Some 
of those theological restraints would be the results of other factors other 
than the phenomena of the texts we are reading.  When someone who is 
considered a "Greek expert" (we are all at different points on the 
idealogical mountain) makes a theological declaration, it may be given more 
weight than the Greek itself indicates. I am sure that many of my basic 
beliefs servive from my upbringing rather than from a pure consideration of 
Greek texts. I can't remember the exact source now, but there is an old Latin 
phrase that can be translated something like this. "This is the book in which 
we find our own ideas, we gather them up and set them forth." Years of 
reading Church History as an avocation convinces me that this is true.

Carlton Winbery
Louisiana College



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