Tense and testable assertions

Jonathan Robie jonathan.robie at datadirect-technologies.com
Sun Oct 27 14:59:40 EST 2002


At 07:36 PM 10/27/2002 +0000, dconklin at tcq.net wrote:
>David Conklin here
>
> > John 13:31 hOTE OUN EXHLQEN, LEGEI IHSOUS: ***NUN *** EDOXASQH hO UIOS
> > TOU ANQRWPOU KAI hO QEOS EDOXASQH EN AUTW:
> >
> > Using Mari's interpretation, "now is the son of man glorified, and God
> > is glorified in him." The glorification does not refer to the past -
> > Jesus has not yet been crucified - it refers to the "now" in the
> > sentence. Exactly when is a matter of interpretation (the time of
> > Christ's crucifiction? the time of his ascending into heaven? the time
> > of his resurrection?), but it clearly isn't in the past.
>
>In this case, could He be glorified in the present but not in the sense
>that one is thinking of glorification?  Isn't one's theology intruding?

I mentioned above that "exactly when is a matter of interpretation", and 
stated several possibilities. You ask if it is possible that He is 
glorified in the present - this seems to agree to my statement that "it 
refers to the 'now' in the sentence". In my interpretation, I was assuming 
that "now" refers to the near future. You say that it might mean quite 
literally the "now" of the time of speaking.

The point of this example is that despite the Aorist EDOXASQH, the 
glorification seems not to have occurred in the past. I think that we agree 
about this, but I'm not quite sure.

It is quite possible, of course, that my interpretation is simply wrong for 
any given passage - the trick is to find a consistent interpretation that 
seems to fit all of the examples well, not to decide how to interpret one 
example and then force that interpretation on all the other passages no 
matter how plausible the results look.

Regardless, the interpretation of a language's constructs can never be 
separated from the range of plausible interpretations we can give to 
examples of those constructs.

Jonathan




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