Tuesday 12 March 2013

The absolute necessity of anachronistic reading in personal narrative

In a movie, when we look at people carrying out various actions, saying various things, and we come up with our own interpretations about who they are, what they are like.

Yet later on in the plot, something key is revealed about them... And then we go... "Oh... I know what he meant know", or we begin to reinterpret what they said or did previously by what we now know.

This of course does not imply that the character has changed, but that our understanding of the character has changed.

This does not imply that those things were not already there in the text, but rather we did not see those things, until someone made it clear to us (it may have been clear to someone else)

So then the fault is with what we understand, not what is written

Accusations of "you're reading too much into it" could just as well be confessions of ignorance or a lack of depth of relationship with Christ

No?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Totally agree! In fact to put it really bluntly: the current hermeneutical reductionism of most evangelicals today is reading back into the text their own ignorance. THEY are the eisegetes.

It's dangerous to study the Bible in depth without having read through it often enough.

yemsee said...

thanks - anonymous person

Unknown said...

Can you retell this post with two examples - a concrete cinema example and then a Bible one. Specific examples can help to win this argument.

Eisegeting contemporary ignorance is a fascinating way to put things.

yemsee said...

I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to think of... but I'm not trying to win any arguments =)