[E. Albright]

Originally posted by Krsqk:
First, to effectively communicate to a wide variety of people, it should be able to be taken at face value, unless it clearly indicates otherwise. Second, I think in some cases (definitely not all), the issue is not one of interpretation, but application. "I know what this says, but what does it mean in my life?" Third, the majority of conflicts are between the literal and allegorical camps. Disagreements on interpretation between literalists are usually limited to points of detail, not doctrine.

I need to shut up. Really. So this shall be my parting word. Besides, I don't think there's really any reason to continue this line of discussion, as we appear to have hit a semantic brick wall. I think we're using the word "interpretation" differently. I say this for two reasons.

First, you continue to return to phrases such as "face value", which outright eliminates the possibility of textual interpretation as I'm using the word. Yes, words can have a "face value", but it's subjective. Comprehension of text (or any communication) is not a matter of objective comprehension, but of subjective interpretation ("To me word X means concept Y, word A means concept B, word Q means concept R, and thus phrase ABC means concept N", to brutally oversimplify).

Second off, you speak of application v. interpretation. I'm inclined to take this as suggesting that you mean interpretation as "God said XYZ; what does he want us to do?", rather than "God said XYZ; what does he want to communicate by saying XYZ?". This returns us to the fallacy of intentionality; i.e., the notion that one can necessarily extract a communicator's intended "message" from a communication. I have a feeling the root of our problem is actually a touch more esoteric than what has thus far been discussed; I'm wanting to accuse you of subscribing to the existence of universals. If this is the case, our discussion would need to move to a higher level to achieve any meaningful resolution, and I doubt you'd want to go there (not that I'm sure that I, cut off from English-language reference material of the non-Internet-y variety, would want to either, mind you).

Oh, and regarding whether literalists disagree over detail or doctrine, well... I present Exhibit A as a non-mainstream (but certainly not without a following) literal doctrine...

The Bible definitely includes the perspective of the men who wrote it. That's why books which mostly parallel each other can present totally different sides of a story (i.e., 1/2 Kings and 1/2 Chronicles). If you really believe that this passage rules out literal interpretation, then smack yourself in the head next time you say "sunrise" or "sunset."

...or I suppose that this might be the root of our semantic problem. Literal interpretation means more than just taking something non-allegorically; it means reading the text as the author intended it to be read. Unless you're the author, you can't do so. And if you've got other people writing the text for you, you stand no chance of communicating anything outside of "the perspective of [ those ] who wrote it"... By admitting the preceeding, mind you, you've interposed at least one more layer of subjective interpretation between the reader and the Reavealed Truth. And in any and all fairness, you need to include a layer for the translator(s), too; even if you think one can write something that can be read with an "objective interpretation", I dearly hope that you don't think that objective translation is possible (Douglas Hofstadter's marvelous Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language raises some interesting points in this regard).

Okay, I'm done. Really. Tongue-biting (finger-biting?) shall now commence.

E. Albright

[ Edit: UBB code cleaning ]

[ December 18, 2002, 11:41: Message edited by: E. Albright ]