Published by Zondervan Publishing House, All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the HOLY BIBLE: Used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers.

Science has proved remarkably successful as a technique for enhancing our knowledge of the natural world. Can we also learn something from science about how to enhance our knowledge of the Bible? Would it mean that we supply ourselves with all the aids and all the information about the Bible that we can gather? Such steps are obviously useful. They are what we might do with respect to any subject about which we were intensely interested. But such steps by themselves would make us scientific only in a very loose sense.

What else might we do? These questions are obviously important, but we cannot explore them all. Questions about whether theology should be scientific will be covered in more detail in another volume in this series on hermeneutics.

In this volume, we will explore whether the growth of knowledge in science can tell us something about how knowledge grows in biblical interpretation and in theology. What is scientific method? Does it guarantee a cumulative growth of knowledge? Until recently, people commonly thought that scientific knowledge increased by the smooth addition of one fact to another, the smooth refinement of an existing theory, or the smooth extension of a theory to cover new data. By analogy, ought we to expect knowledge of the Bible to progress by accumulation?

Can we devise a method that will produce such progress? Or is such progress illusory even in science? To answer these questions, we will have to look in some detail at theories concerned with the nature and history of scientific knowledge chapters 2 and 3.

But first, let us start with an actual example of biblical interpretation, namely, the interpretation of Romans 7. Because this passage has proved to be a difficult and controversial passage, it effectively illustrates some of the problems.

How do we understand Romans 7, a passage that many have found some difficulty in grasping? What kind of experience is being described in verses 7: Is Paul describing his own experience or an experience typical of a whole class of people?

Through most of church history there have been disagreements over Romans 7. Paul would not have written at such length if he had not thought that in some respects his experience was typical. We cannot hope to survey all the options for interpretation that have been suggested.

For the purpose of illustration, it is enough for us to concentrate on the interpretations that see Romans 7: The crucial question is, What is this passage an example of? What class of people does it apply to?

Augustine and his followers, including Calvin, Luther, and most of the Protestant Reformation, thought that Paul was describing the conflict with sin that characterizes the life of a regenerate person, a true believer. Pelagius and some Arminians thought that this passage depicts a typical unregenerate person or unbeliever. A third alternative is available. Some people have seen in this passage a description of people who are regenerate but not mature, one who have not yet come into a position of triumph and victory over sin.

There are two kinds of Christians—those who are in the state of full sanctification and victory over sin, and those who are not. Christians who do not have this victory over sin are a kind of third category intermediate between unregenerate people and ideal Christians.

How do we decide a conflict in interpretation like this one? At first glance, it might seem that we decide simply by looking at the passage and seeing which interpretation actually fits. Which interpretation is consistent with all the facts of the passage? All three claim to account for all the words and sentences in the passage.

As a next step, then, we might begin to weigh strengths and weaknesses of the three interpretations. These same facts are a problem, however, for the second interpretation. But there are some facts on the other side. The view that the passage refers to unregenerate persons has in its favor the correspondence between Romans 7: These facts are difficulty for the first interpretation.

This interpretation creates a third category, intermediate between an unregenerate person and an ideal sanctified regenerate Christian, namely, an immature unsanctified regenerate person.

By using a third category, this view avoids some of the difficulties in harmonizing the passage with statements elsewhere in Paul. But it has weaknesses of its own.

Romans 7 seems to provide no clues to the reader that Paul has some third category in view. Moreover, chapter 6 seems to be talking about all Christians who have come to union with Christ, as the appeal to baptism suggests v. If so, no third category is available in the context of Romans 7.

Moreover, the competing interpretations argue that no distinctive second-blessing theology is to be found in Paul or in Scripture generally. If so, the third interpretation is not viable for Romans 7 in particular. Now let us stand back for a bit and ask how we have proceeded in our analysis of Romans 7: We have looked at particular verses within the passage vv.

But in doing so, we have also had to go outside Romans 7 and look at other statements of Paul about Christians and non-Christians, slavery and freedom. These other statements need to be weighed in their own contexts to see whether they really harmonize with or contradict the chosen interpretation of Romans 7. In addition, we should not oversimplify the process of judging when an interpretation generates a contradiction or an insuperable difficulty.

Each of the three interpretations has a difficulty at one point or another. If we were harsh, we would say that each generates a contradiction. But they are not necessarily false. In fact, some people continue to advocate each of these lines of interpretation, even though they are well aware of the difficulties. But they think that the difficulties are great with competing interpretations than with their own.

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Hence they still endeavor to give a coherent interpretation of the difficult texts within their own viewpoint. For example, the regenerate interpretation explains that Romans 7: The former verses describe the real hold that the remnants of sin still have on the regenerate person until the time of glorification. Similarly, the unregenerate interpretation endeavors to explain that the language of Romans 7: Even unbelievers, it could be noted, cannot escape the knowledge of the law of God 1: Hence we can see that a text like Romans 7: It is not just a brute datum, about which no one can dispute.

A particular verse or passage might conceivably mean something slightly different from what we think it means at first. Making sure of its meaning involves assessing context as well. What might initially appear to be a contradiction, and thus rule out one line of interpretation, might on further investigation have an explanation. In the past, most Calvinists have advocated the regenerate interpretation; most Arminians have advocated the unregenerate interpretation. Many, if not most, adherents to second-blessing theology have advocated the second-blessing interpretation.

Other combinations are possible in principle. But one can see why these influences exist. Calvinists, for example, have a low view of the spiritual abilities of fallen, sinful, unregenerate people. Calvinists emphasize that such people are spiritually unable to turn to God and to love God unless the Holy Spirit performs a special work of regeneration to change their hearts.

Calvinists are therefore reluctant to accept the positive statements of Romans 7: Conversely, Arminians have a higher view of the spiritual abilities of fallen, unregenerate people. Hence Arminians are not so uneasy about attributing the positive statements in Romans 7 to unregenerate people. Some Christians are more often and more acutely aware of their failings and remaining sins.

Such people can identify readily with much of the language of Romans 7: Other Christians are more frequently aware of their joy in victory over sin. They more readily think of the contrast of their present life with their previous unbelief. They seldom dwell on the remaining areas of sin and inconsistency in their present life. Such people identify more readily with the language of Romans 6 and 8. Some people have experienced a sharp transition from defeat to victory over some of their prominent sins.

They may find that second-blessing theology seems to match their experience, particularly if they have undergone a radical change under the influence of hearing the teaching of second-blessing theology. On the other hand, other people have experienced very gradual growth in their spiritual life.

They have come to understand and appropriate Romans 6 and 8 gradually. But they have continued to be aware that subtle tendencies to sin still lurk in them. To them second-blessing theology seems not to match their experience. All this background of experience will influence whether a particular person finds it plausible to claim that Romans 7: The interpretation of Romans 7 has been disputed for centuries. Augustine and Pelagius in the late fourth and fifth centuries were early representatives of the regenerate and unregenerate interpretations.

The second-blessing interpretation arose later. Differences in theological systems and in personal experience and temperament are involved. Is there any way out of this impasse? Can the triumphs of science and the way in which science proceeds be of any value?

The analogy with science might suggest to many people that the way out is through objectivity. Science, it is said, consists in a dispassionate, objective analysis of the data.

The problem with the interpretation of Romans 7 is that it gets mixed up with the doctrinal commitments and personal experiences of the people doing the interpretation. The process of interpretation needs to be freed from such doctrinal commitments and personal experiences. The historical-critical method, as developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, represented an attempt to free the study of the Bible from doctrinal commitments and to become scientific in its study.

The claim to scientific objectivity was attractive, but illusory. Scholarship never takes place in a vacuum. In particular, historical research cannot be undertaken without presuppositions; the researcher must presuppose some idea of history, of what is historically probable, and of what standards to use in weighing the claims of ancient texts. As Ernst Troeltsch incisively argued, historical research in the context of Enlightenment thought presupposed three fundamental principles.

At most, we can arrive at a greater or lesser probability concerning the past, never a certainty. According to the principle of analogy, the present is the key to the past. Events of the past must all be analogous to what is possible today. According to the principle of causality, history is a closed continuum of events, in which every event has an antecedent immanent cause and there is no divine intervention miracle in history.

Troeltsch saw that, since the assumptions of the method already denied traditional Christianity, the results would necessarily confirm this denial. Historical-critical method aspired to scientific objectivity, but in the nature of the case it could not succeed. In freeing biblical study from commitments to denominational doctrine, it made study subject to the philosophical commitments of rationalistic, antisupernaturalistic historiography and metaphysics and to the ethical commitments of contemporary humanism.

It did not give people pristine, absolute objectivity. Furthermore, the historical-critical method did not result in any more agreement over the meaning of biblical passages. It resulted most often in more diversity and disagreement than before.

It simply multiplied the number of assumptions, philosophies, and background commitments that could now exert their influence on interpretation. Is science a suitable guide, then, for biblical interpretation? Science itself, it turns out, is not purely objective and neutral. That is, science is not unaffected by commitments, assumptions, and philosophies.

Until recently, most people have thought that science presented a totally objective analysis of the facts. But recent examination of the history of science has cast doubt on this assumption.

In fact, it has revealed within the realm of natural science some disputes that look curiously like the disputes over the interpretation of Romans 7. The problems with interpreting Romans 7 appear not to be such an oddity or perversity when compared with those that occur in science.

Understanding this state of affairs, and learning how to deal with it, may be part of the way to a solution. First of all, however, we must take a step backward and see what people have thought about the nature of science, scientific method, and scientific objectivity. University of Chicago Press, Clark,1: Note also the important contribution of Werner G. Scientia,pp. Yet in the long run, Western culture has been revolutionized by the impact of science.

In fact, in some respects we are still embedded in a continuing process of cultural revolution. How then do we understand what science is, and how do we assess its bearing on the way that we interpret the Bible? We should first ask whether science ought to have any influence at all on how we interpret the Bible.

Biblical interpretation went on its own way, and prospered, even before modern science was in existence. But people cannot help making comparisons between science and biblical interpretation. The triumphs of science have proved impressive, whereas the history of biblical interpretation does not look so impressive by comparison.

Physical sciences succeed in making accurate predictions. They provide a framework for producing a continuous stream of new machines and technological innovations, increasingly useful and powerful. The success of science and technology, even by the late eighteenth century, made intellectuals pay attention.

Not only did science provide knowledge about the world; it was generating an ever increasing amount of knowledge. By contrast, medieval and Reformational theological debates seemed to go on and on, without ever reaching a definitive conclusion. But science moved forward irreversibly. It had become not merely a body of knowledge but an engine for manufacturing more knowledge, deeper knowledge, and more solidly verified knowledge.

It is no wonder, then, that people tried to learn lessons from science. They looked especially to the physical sciences physics, astronomy, chemistry; later, geology and biologywhere the triumphs took place the earliest and have been the most thorough.

The lessons differed depending on what people looked at. First of all, some people compared specific scientific theories with views that theology had derived from the Bible, a procedure we may call evaluation using specific theories. Debates over specific questions of fact are certainly important in their own right. But it is not our purpose to take up such matters in this book. We should only note briefly that people responded in a variety of ways. Since such people viewed science as the wave of the future, they repudiated biblical religion.

Orthodox antievolutionists, however, decided that the scientific theory in question was dubious and poorly supported. Theological liberals, for their part, decided that the Bible was scientifically primitive and needed to be updated theologically. Finally, conservative theistic evolutionists thought that they could reexegete crucial biblical passages and show that the Bible did not intend to teach anything in conflict with the new theories.

How do we assess this use of science? How and when do we need to use the content of a specific scientific theory as a guide for our lives? The specific theories of physical science represent impressive intellectual triumphs and provide valuable insight into the workings of the world. But they concern us more broadly only when they touch on a specific question of human values.

Average people are interested in enjoying the results of technology, but few are interested in the underlying scientific theories for their own sake. They are interested in a scientific theory only if it appears to suggest answers to the meaning of their lives. Likewise, people are interested in whether the Bible is true, because such a question affects their lives vitally.

Hence they ask whether science confirms or disconfirms the truthfulness of the Bible. Not much within the physical sciences, however, could conceivably either contradict or confirm the Bible. Even when there is some apparent contradiction, it is often easy to show that a better interpretation of the scientific theory or a better interpretation of the Bible obviates the problem.

Specific scientific theories do affect biblical interpretation at least to the extent that they become the occasion for reassessing the interpretation of a few passages Gen. In the light of scientific claims we return to the passages to reassess whether they implied all the scientific conclusions that we have drawn from them. Likewise, biblical interpretation affects science at the very least by leading us to reassess whether all the conclusions drawn from a scientific theory are warranted, or in some cases to ask whether the theory as a whole is suspect.

Such observations do not solve all the difficulties. But they considerably narrow the scope of those that are left. The remaining difficulties must be dealt with on a technical level, by refining our scientific knowledge and refining our understanding of the Bible until we can see that they agree. Besides comparing specific scientific theories with specific passages of the Bible, people drew lessons from science in a second way.

They produced whole world views by extrapolating from the picture presented by physical science. Let us call this process the procedure of building a world view. People extrapolated world views from science because physical science seemed to offer the beginnings of a whole world view, an explanation of how the whole world fit together and of the role of human beings in it.

If scientific knowledge was superior to theological knowledge in its accuracy and indisputability, perhaps it was also superior in providing a platform for a total explanation. Newtonian science, in particular, offered us a world consisting of massive particles interacting with one another by means of forces calculable from physical measurements of distance, orientation, velocity, and the like. Some people did not hesitate to draw the conclusion: But the cultural atmosphere made it convenient to invoke the theory in support of much broader conclusions.

Many people, for religious, philosophical, and ethical reasons, wanted to legitimize a naturalistic view of the world. Darwin, by eliminating the need for miracles in the origin of life, gave crucial support to these philosophical longings. How do we evaluate these efforts? Do physical sciences provide us with a world view? Does this world view agree with the world view offered in the Bible? To a certain extent, one might say that science and the Bible both provide us with only pieces of a world view.

The Bible here and there provides information touching on scientific questions, but it does not answer all our questions about the way in which the physical world functions. But many people did not remain content with these limitations. They boldly extrapolated from physical science to comprehensive world views, deriving mechanistic determinism from Newton and the naturalistic world of evolutionism from Darwin.

They did not simply contradict a single passage of the Bible, as a specific scientific theory might. Rather, they contradicted the Bible globally, by offering an alternative world view, an alternative set of values, and an alternative explanation of origins and destiny. This second use of science as as a platform for a world view is thus even more significant theologically than the first. It offers deeper challenges and potentially more destructive conclusions because it can threaten biblical religion as a whole.

Nevertheless, it is not our purpose to pursue this difficulty. The most adequate answers are to be found in writings on Christian approaches to science. A number of Evangelicals have put forward ways of integrating the scientific task as a whole into a biblical world view. Finally, science was used in a third way, namely, as a source of insight about the nature of knowledge itself. Let us call this approach the procedure of building an epistemology, or a philosophical theory of knowledge.

This third way is in many respects the most promising. As we observed, the procedure of using specific scientific theories is useful only when a specific theory happens to touch on issues of human concern. Most of the time it does not. The procedure of building a world view is questionable, since one must extrapolate science beyond what has been verified.

On the other hand, the procedure of building an epistemology relies on the undoubted success of science as a means for producing knowledge. Even if science does not include all knowledge, its success surely contains lessons that apply to all knowledge.

The classic example of using science as a platform for epistemology is to be found in Immanuel Kant. In opposition to this rationalism Hume defended an empiricism that started with pure events and did not assume that they were connected, merely that they sometimes occurred together.

He was convinced that there was no guarantee that phenomena would turn out to be connected in the way that a rationalist supposed. Hence Hume could not account for the reliability of scientific knowledge. The rationalistic approach of Leibniz did not lead to fruitful science either. Kant therefore endeavored to provide an epistemology that was adequate to science and that also preserved room for religion.

Kant accepted the obvious fact that science did provide knowledge. An adequate epistemology would do justice to both these elements. Outer experience was necessarily experience in a framework of both time and space.

To these categories of time and space one could also add the categories of quantity and causality, which are basic to physics.

The empirical element in science was accounted for, since human experience was experience of a world outside that was not always predictable.

On the other hand, the rational element in science was accounted for, since human experience necessarily conformed to the preestablished categories of the mind. The world of phenomena was not pure confusion, as Hume had it. Rather, it was necessarily a world of time, space, and causality, and this was the foundation for sure knowledge.

In fact, however, a closer examination shows that it provides both too little and too much for the needs of physical science. Suppose we agree that it shows the necessity of conceiving the world in terms of the categories of time, space, causality, and quantity.

This result still does not constitute scientific knowledge, nor is it an adequate basis for guaranteeing that we can obtain scientific knowledge. To say that there are causal connections Kant is not yet to say what kind of causal connections there are Newton.

It does not allow anyone to say that the cause must necessarily be what Newton says it is. The phenomena presuppose things in themselves that cannot be predicted beforehand. Namely, it dictates to science assumptions that may not turn out to be factually correct.

In the light of better scientific knowledge, however, physicists today are not willing to agree with Kant. Physicists now realize that the ideas of absolute time, Euclidean space, and determinism were all assumptions about the world that might be either true or false, not presuppositions that were necessarily true.

Kant did not take into account two facts. First, the psychic experience of time, space, and causality by the ordinary person is not the same as the time, space, and causality that may be most suitable to physical theory.

Intuitions derived from psychic experiences may or may not be immediately useful in physical theory. Second, intuitions themselves can be reformed.

Given a line and a point not on the line, one and only one line could be drawn through the point, parallel to the first line. But modern physicists, confronted with coherent alternatives to this scheme, have had their intuitions changed. For them it is not obvious in fact, it is false that physical space is Euclidean. It did not even fit the specifics of Newtonian science.

And it fitted even less well the developments of the twentieth century that were destined to supersede Newton. It was accepted because of its promise in the field of philosophy rather than because of its accuracy in the realm of science. For Kant, in fact, epistemology became the basis for philosophy as a whole. By means of his reflection on the categories of the human mind Kant specified what could and could not be the object of knowledge.

And this pronouncement virtually determined what could and could not be part of the world. From Kant until the twentieth century, epistemology has been the key to philosophy as a whole.

It was a full-blown philosophy. It provided its own world view. In Kant, then, epistemology leads to a world view. Hence we cannot rigidly separate the third use of science building an epistemology from the second use building a world view. Epistemology is a part of a world view, and in post-Kantian philosophy often it is the principal part.

Nevertheless, a rough and ready distinction between these two ways of using science is useful. The second use wants to read off a world view directly from the picture of the physical world presented in current scientific theory.

From this reflection it derives general conclusions about the nature of human knowledge, and from there it derives further conclusions about what there is to know. Kant provides us with a cautionary lesson here.

When we seek to derive from science an epistemology or a world view, we may produce a world view that in fact does not really match science but that may be heavily motivated by philosophical and religious needs. Not everyone followed Kant, however. The scientists, perhaps, followed him least of all. Alongside Kant and his followers there continued a longstanding empirical tradition going back to Sir Francis Bacon Bacon and scientists after him assumed that science studied the real world.

Scientists also assumed that the world was regular and had its laws. The laws were there. People could discover them by a series of steps laid out by Bacon. The steps came to be known as the scientific method. As we shall see in the next chapter, these steps are not an adequate representation of how scientists actually proceed.

The six steps are only an idealization. They leave out some crucial aspects of scientific research. But until aboutmost scientists and philosophers of science thought that scientific progress occurred in this manner.

And, in truth, the above six steps are close enough to the truth to enable people for a long time to ignore the discrepancies. For the sake of clarity, we will call the six steps the Baconian scientific method. Baconian scientific method, then, does not match what scientists actually do.

Moreover, there was no doubt that science produced impressive results. Hence the conclusion was not far behind: Baconian scientific method was the preferred instrument for producing impressive results. It was attractive to try to assimilate the practice of biblical interpretation to the practice or supposed practice of science. One important area of this assimilation was historical reconstruction.

Accurate grammatical-historical interpretation involves assessing the historical environment in which biblical books were written, determining the human authors and original readers of each book, understanding relevant cultural and geographical information, and so on.

Historical reconstruction cannot be an exact science, but it can benefit from some of the methodological care exercised in the natural sciences. Hence Baconian scientific method was applied. Some adjustments were clearly necessary. Historical reconstruction is concerned with single events in the past rather than a general law see step 2.

But one can still formulate hypotheses about a past event. One cannot perform experiments on history in the same way that one can perform experiments on frogs.

The application of Baconian method to historical investigation seemed reasonable. But the development of the historical-critical method showed that it was not always innocent. The historical-critical method assumed, just as scientists supposedly assumed, that the same laws governed the past, present, and future.

It assumed, as scientists supposedly did also, that tight causal laws governed the sequence of events. At this point, something out of the mechanism of post-Newtonian science, or out of the rationalistic world view of the Enlightenment, slipped into the very methods of research in biblical study. And having slipped into the methods, it naturally dictated the conclusions. One qualification to this picture is necessary. The historical-critical method took its clue not so much directly from natural science as from the general intellectual developments of the Enlightenment and the refinement of standards for intellectual research of all kinds.

But these general intellectual developments were in turn influenced by the example of science. In one way or another the natural sciences influenced biblical studies. Of course, the historical-critical method, with its naturalistic assumptions, was not the only way to do historical research. Orthodox theologians and biblical scholars continued to believe in the supernatural. They believed that the world was governed by God for rational purposes.

This believf provided a basis for historical research just as much as did belief that the world was governed by rational laws untouched by God. In addition to the controversy over the canons for historical research, the Baconian ideal had an influence on biblical interpretation and on theology.

Biblical scholars were interested in making their own work more rigorous. It was easy to say that theology had to become scientific, and it did so by following the Baconian scientific method. Charles Hodge, for example, lays out what he considers to be proper method in theology by explicitly invoking the analogy of scientific method. The principles are to be checked for their consistency with the whole Bible.

Baconian scientific method had its effect even on people who did not consciously endeavor to assimilate their work to the methods and standards of science. The method presupposed a certain relation between data, hypotheses, scientific laws, and the sciences that codified the laws into coherent wholes. Underlying the Baconian method were the following assumptions.

These assumptions summarize the heart of an inductive, positivist view of scientific knowledge. Each law summarizes a pattern found inductively in the data. The laws group together the data that they generalize. But except for the grouping of data under laws, all of knowledge is fundamentally atomistic.

Each bit of data stands on its own feet, and each law in the existing list of laws stands on its own feet over against other laws. Moreover, it could also be said that scientific method has two parts.

In the inductive part, one gathers data and generalizes to hypotheses. In the deductive part, one derives predictions and discards disconfirmed hypotheses. The production of hypotheses cannot be completely mechanized, but all the other steps are in principle purely objective. The above assumptions represent only simplified summary, but do express an important tendency in thinking about science.

And this tendency has also infected exegesis and theology. In exegesis, this view of knowledge says that the individual words and morphemes are the hard data. The statements about the meaning of paragraphs and discourses are the laws. Hypotheses about meaning are discarded when they do not agree with some of the data i. Progress in exegesis means adding to the store of correct interpretations of individual passages. In systematic theology, individual passages of the Bible are the data, and the laws are general theological truths.

Theological hypotheses are discarded when some passage contradicts them. Progress in theology means adding to the store of general truths derived from the Bible.

Both in natural science and in biblical interpretation, this inductive view of knowledge is inadequate. Worse, it leads to distortions and hindrances in the progress of knowledge. To see why, we will first look at the revisions that have taken place in the understanding of scientific method chap.

We will then ask what implications we can draw for biblical interpretation chap. The natural sciences have the most widespread agreement among practitioners, and so they have naturally become the model. In fact, the desire of social sciences to attain the prestige of natural sciences influences the history of their development. But it is best to exercise more patience in working through the difficulties.

Sometimes, as finite human beings, we may not have enough information to resolve a difficulty within our lifetime. Cornell University Press, University of Pennsylvania Press, ; Thomas H. Hans Werner Bartsch [New York: Baker Book House, ; Ratzsch, Philosophy of Science ; Vern S. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, ; id. For our purposes, we may ignore the variations in conception and concentrate on the common features.

Eerdmans,1: At the end of the nineteenth century, scientists had reason to be confident about their achievements. It not only gave accurate predictions of the movements of planets, but did so with an aesthetically pleasing, mathematically elegant set of equations. More important, it furnished a fundamental framework in which all further scientific investigation could be integrated.

To be sure, scientists had still not thoroughly explored and mastered every potential area of investigation in physics, let alone every area of biology. The twentieth century rudely shattered this complacency. InAlbert Einstein published his first paper on the special theory of relativity.

But to this oddity were gradually added other oddities showing a similar pattern. Neils Bohr in succeeded in explaining atomic spectra on the basis of quantum ideas, but this account was in one respect still odd: The universe that Newton had assumed to have continuous levels of energy was found to be discrete.

Worse, this universe, at an atomic level, behaved not like a particle, not like a wave, but in a way showing features of both. Causality itself seemed to function oddly at an atomic level. In order for the equations of quantum mechanics to hold, it was argued, some events must be innately unpredictable, indeterminate. They produced a picture of the universe that went contrary to intuition.

According to special relativity, events at high speed deviated in strange ways from what we are accustomed to in our everyday world. According to quantum theory, events on a very small scale deviate in strange ways. The quantum revolution proved, if possible, even more unsettling because it was impossible to picture the underlying realities.

They could be accurately described only in terms of equations that corresponded to no good intuitive picture of the world. Relativity and quantum theory both spawned further developments that were nearly revolutions in their own right and moved the world of physical theory even farther away from the old world of Newton. In the new theory mass and energy corresponded to curvature in the very structure of space and time. The details of this proposal are not important for our purposes.

This view was more radical than several alternatives. For instance, one could have said merely that we as observers did not know what the actual value was as a Newtonian might have said. Or one could say that we could never in principle know the actual values of all the variables, because measurement of one value inevitably disturbed the others this conclusion was a result of quantum theory, not of Newton, but it was still fairly safe. But the Copenhagen interpretation said that talk us dollar exchange rate in rupees forecast definite actual values, independent of measuring them, was virtually meaningless.

These refinements have made the nature of quantum description ever more esoteric. One does not know what theories will appear in the future on the border of knowledge. Relativity was a refinement of Newton in the domain of high velocities. Quantum theory was a refinement in the domain of very small physical systems. This qualification helped people to preserve the idea that scientific advance consists simply in adding to the body of known truths.

But it was difficult to deny that some other things were going on as well. And they offered the challenge at the very basis of the theory, by disputing the very ideas of measurement and reality interwoven with every single experiment. Hence the existence of these revolutions raises questions about the naive inductive view of scientific research discussed in the previous chapter. Are scientific empirical analysis of japanese stock lending market and scientific laws atomistic?

Does scientific progress consist simply in adding more data and adding more laws to the list of approved laws? Or if such a picture is not quite right, is it enough to add a footnote to the effect that occasional pruning of old laws may replace them with more accurate versions of the same?

The revolutions produced by the theory of relativity and quantum theory, however, included changes in the shape of physical theory of a most radical nature. The watershed in thinking about scientific progress occurred in In that year Thomas S. In chapter 2, we analyzed Baconian scientific method as involving six fundamental assumptions.

Kuhn is particularly stimulating on the subject of this weizmann forex ltd mumbai point, the question of scientific progress. In this area, Kuhn distinguishes between at least three kinds of situation in the development of a particular scientific field.

In this situation, the field of investigation for the science is poorly defined. Different workers in the field dispute the kinds of data that are relevant to their field, the purpose of the investigation, the shape a finished theory will have, and the kind of tests that confirm or disconfirm the theory.

Investigators are casting about for a fundamental insight that will bring order into a disparate field. In immature sciences, it is not clear how one measures progress.

People do experiments and gather data, but because of the unsettled character of the field, it is seldom clear whether their work will make a lasting contribution. Kuhn thinks that the social sciences, for the most part, may still be in this state.

A particular science becomes mature when some investigator or group of investigators advances a fundamental theory, including supporting data, that proves clearly superior. This theory becomes an exemplar, a key research result that also largely determines the whole disciplinary matrix for subsequent research. In addition, it confirms its promise by engendering a whole line of experiments that refine, extend, and confirm the theory and that link it with other cnc programmer work at home theories.

As long as the scientists in a field continue to solve the puzzles that they find for themselves, they go forward in a way that superficially resembles the Baconian fx options structures ideal. They add small bits of generalization to the existing body of generalizations. There are always some remaining anomalies, or areas where explanations have not been produced. Here and there are some potentially embarrassing data that do not seem to be compatible with the existing disciplinary matrix.

Nevertheless, as long as people are making progress in the puzzle solving, they assume that incremental advances in the field or in some neighboring field will eventually enable them to see the compatibility of the anomalies with the disciplinary matrix. Revolution occurs when an existing disciplinary matrix is replaced by a new one incompatible with the original. A revolutionary situation first arises when anomalies in a particular field cannot easily be ignored.

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The anomalies begin to fall into patterns that show an order of their own. More and more tinkering with the disciplinary matrix is necessary in order to produce any kind of rational summary of the anomalies. Inelegant, complex, unmotivated hypotheses arise to account for the anomalies. As more and more energy is devoted to working on the anomalies, tinkering with the reigning disciplinary matrix leads people to produce different versions of the disciplinary matrix.

The disciplinary matrix itself no rune factory 3 how to earn money looks so unified as it once did. In this situation people are willing to search about more broadly, looking for better solutions. In the process they are willing even to challenge ideas traditionally associated with the existing disciplinary matrix.

Eventually they stumble upon an alternative approach, inexact at first, but appearing to offer some possibility of dealing with the anomalies.

This approach is refined, enhanced, and reformed in order to increase its accuracy and the scope of data accounted forex card uber. If the process continues, this new approach generates a disciplinary matrix of its own.

A fight then ensues between adherents to the old disciplinary matrix and those holding the new as to which matrix is to be used in the future development of science. In this period, it is difficult for adherents of the two disciplinary matrices even to communicate well with one another, because they may have different standards for what counts as data and different standards as to what sorts of explanation have the most promise.

Kuhn also notes that, if no satisfactory solution arises, even after prolonged effort and radical attempts to generate alternative explanations, people may fall back on the existing disciplinary matrix and treat the anomalies as an intractable area reserved for future generations. In this case, the period of extraordinary science has not generated a revolution but collapsed back into normal science working with essentially the same disciplinary matrix as before. The study of electricity provides an example of the process of change in science.

According to Kuhn, in the first half of the eighteenth century there was no standard theory of electricity. There was no clear exemplar to bring coherence to the progress of research. A third group regarded electricity as a fluid that ran through conductors. In each case the idea of which phenomena were fundamental directed the concentration and goal of the research.

It proved its superior promise by encompassing all the phenomena within its scope. Scientists no longer debated about the fundamental nature of electricity or the fundamental directions that research should take. They could therefore concentrate more on esoteric phenomena; they could study in great detail the phenomena that the theory indicated were of greatest significance.

No individual scientist needed to return and reconstruct the whole field from its foundations up. The resulting specialization made the literature on electricity less accessible to the general public but meant efficiency in making progress within the specialization. The theory of electricity has since been normal science. However, according to Kuhn, normal science may at times be interrupted by revolutions in theory.

These revolutions may take place within a small specialty such as studies of diamagnetism or within a broader field. Kuhn is not explicit, but inspection of the history of electricity subsequent to Franklin suggests a series of mini revolutions in small areas. Kuhn does mention explicitly a revolution introduced by James Clerk Maxwell in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The triumph of his theory therefore indian ocean maritime system trade time, during which some adherents to older views were converted and some were displaced by a younger generation.

Harper,2: Paul Edwards New York: Macmillan,7: Slightly more advanced is J. Princeton University Press, Kuhn himself has now recommended this terminology pp. John Worrall and Gregory Currie [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ].

A second type works on those areas where the most direct, definitive experimental checks on the theory can be performed. A third type consists in work attempting to extend or articulate further the disciplinary matrix. All of these types of investigation are closely regulated by the disciplinary matrix. Kuhn claims that his book is part of a revolutionary change in the historiography of science.

My own opinion is that Kuhn is on the right track, that he does bring to light many aspects in the development of science concealed by the reigning philosophy of science and textbook remarks about the history of science. But not everything that is true of science will be true of biblical interpretation. Kuhn himself is just as concerned with the uniqueness of science as he is with its similarities to scholarly research of other kinds.

So we must ask the question again: The answer must be, we cannot know until we determine to what extent biblical interpretation does or does not have analogs to the processes that Kuhn describes in science. Whether or not Kuhn is right about science is somewhat secondary. Even if he is right, the same patterns and principles might not hold in biblical interpretation.

Even if he is wrong about science, he may right when we apply his claims to biblical interpretation. Let us, then, look at a particular example: Recall from our previous discussion chapter 1 the conflict between three different interpretations of Rom.

This conflict looks vaguely like the situation that Kuhn describes in immature science, when a scientific field has not produced a single unified paradigm or disciplinary matrix based on a successful exemplar. The most striking similarity between the two cases lies in the currency ft lil wayne where da cash at make it rain remix mp3 disputes between schools.

In immature science the investigators may be grouped into a number of competing schools. Each school has a different previous stock market closings about the fundamental nature of the field, and the lines of explanation along which understanding will come. Similarly, in the interpretation of Rom.

Later in history, these were eventually joined by a third school, the second-blessing school. Just as in immature science, progress is possible in a sense within a school.

But there are two hindrances to progress, just as there are in immature science. First, if the existing school turns out to be wrong, all its work will later be judged as just a false trail, and not progress at all.

Second, the existence of competing schools means that a good deal of the energy of any one school is spent in re-examining its own foundations and trying to show that its foundations are superior to the competing schools. Only when everyone in the field agrees on the foundations can there be concentration on the details, and progress on those details. We should not be surprised at these similarities between immature science and the situation in interpreting Rom.

The similarities arise largely because schools are composed of human beings aiming at understanding some subject. In this situation human beings inevitably behave in ways that they think will most enhance understanding. Enhancing understanding involves interacting with their peers and with competing schools along the lines that we have just laid out.

These are the same lines that scientific schools follow, according to Kuhn. But there are contradict the proposition that the stock market is weakly efficient certain important differences between the schools of thought concerning Romans 7 and the schools in immature sciences.

The former do not really have social cohesiveness. By contrast, the schools in immature science, the schools that Kuhn has dividends stock repurchases and payout policy mind, have inner social cohesiveness. They are subgroups within a community of investigators.

The community is bound together first of all by common interests in the subject matter. Because of the common interests, letters and articles will be sent back and forth, and there may be some degree of personal acquaintance. Each subgroup will, foreign exchange rate pakistan open market course, be more intensely euro stock market etf because of the similarity of their views on the subject they are investigating.

The analogue of scientific schools within biblical interpretation would seem to be not most common forex indicators different schools of thought on Romans 7 but the schools of theology, such as Calvinists, Arminians, and advocates of second-blessing theology.

These schools are schools within a larger community, consisting of all biblical scholars and theologians. These schools and the broader community in which they exist both have demonstrable social cohesiveness. They are social groups with communication back and forth; they have common goals, and some common standards of evaluation. The problem with Rom. The preferred approach to dealing with the metastock trading techniques varies from school to school, just as it might vitol stock market an immature science.

There is one more difference between interpretation of Rom. Typically, in immature science, there may not even be agreement as to which phenomena are part of the field of investigation, or which phenomena are most revealing of the nature of things.

Different investigators concentrate their research on different areas. The effect may be reminiscent of the story of blind men investigating an elephant, one describing the trunk, one the side, one a leg, one the tail, one an ear. As long as no one has a clue to the true extent of the phenomena that may be amenable to explanation by a unified theory, and as long as no theory has succeeded in dominating the field, it is understandable that the boundaries of the field itself should be uncertain.

But in biblical interpretation and theology the field of investigation is fixed. The schools in theology, Calvinists, Arminians, and second-blessing theologians, can pretty much agree on their subject matter. All agree on the relevance not only of Rom.

But having said this, we can begin to see that this measure of agreement is not always achievable. Roman Catholics include in their list of canonical books some books and additions not included in the Protestant list. Traditional Roman Catholics also allow a role for binary options are a strong trend trading tradition and for papal teaching such as Protestants would not allow.

Cultic groups like the Mormons and Christian Scientists have their own holy books supplementing the Bible. Clearly these different groups stock options leverage not have the same standards nor quite the same field of investigation. Even if we concentrate on evangelical Protestantism, which accepts penny stocks trading manual Bible as its standard, there are some differences.

Confessional churches also give a role to their confessions. The confessions mforex ranking in theory fallible and correctable, whereas the Bible is not. But confessional theologians are committed to paying attention to their confession. They respect it because it embodies the collective wisdom of their denomination and copy a live binary option trader risks past generations, as these generations have been illumined by the Holy Spirit.

Confessional theologians will not lightly conclude that the Bible contradicts the confession. The advantage of this stance is that it restrains arbitrary and facile innovation.

It protects biblical interpreters from reinventing old heresies—that is, how to make money ebay without selling anything schools of investigation that have been found to be dead ends. Its disadvantage is that it may keep investigators from acknowledging new truth that they find in the Bible.

Moreover, to the degree that a confession actively functions as a standard for judging an interpretation of the Bible, it produces a difference of atmosphere in interpretation for the school that holds it.

Thus there may be an attenuated sense in which the Calvinists, the Arminians, and the second-blessing theologians, or at least those who are bound to a doctrinal statement, do not completely agree on the very field of investigation or the methods by which to do the investigation. The unified disciplinary matrix includes a key exemplar, a research result in the form of a theory with supporting experimental evidences.

By its esthetic appeal, its superiority in explanatory power, and its fruitfulness as a basis for further research, this exemplar wins more and more adherents.

Eventually it dominates the field. Some older scholars in the field never accept the new theory. They have too much confidence and too much investment in the old. But eventually they die or are effectively excluded from the research community.

Science and Hermeneutics

If they do research, they do it using other ground rules, and the main portion of the community is simply uninterested in paying attention to their results. It is natural to ask whether we might find something similar in biblical interpretation.

As long as theology is divided into schools of Calvinists, Arminians, Roman Catholics, and what not, it is like immature science.

Can a revolution bring unity into this field, similar to the unity in a mature science? If so, how do we set such a revolution in motion? Some people have already tried to apply Kuhn in a similar way to social sciences. For instance, the science of psychology presently works in terms of a number of competing schools, based on different principles and fundamental frameworks for research. Behaviorism, Freudianism, Marxism, humanism each offers itself as a base for psychological research. This situation is immature science.

Hence people point to Kuhn, and argue that psychology must become mature. To do so, psychology must first decide on a unified approach. And then people offer their own approach as the basis.

But this is a misunderstanding of Kuhn. Kuhn does not think that one can have a revolution any time one wants. You cannot simply impose allegiance. You cannot simply decree that such-and-such theory will now be the standard. You must wait for the arrival of a theory with clear superiority or at least a promise of superiority.

The progress of time, and the refinement of the theory, then makes its buy tsx stocks more and more evident and irresistible. Or, perhaps, the progress of time makes things no bunnings warehouse boxing day trading hours A revolution that one hopes will take place on the basis of a new theory may not take place.

When we look more closely at the history of biblical interpretation, we can see some patterns of revolutionary breaks, followed by periods of stability and consolidation. Panduan forex agea theology after Augustine largely built on Augustine and the ancient creeds. Something of a crisis was provoked by the absorption of Aristotelian philosophy in the late medieval period.

More and more anomalies were found through the efforts to assimilate and harmonize the new philosophical influences with the Augustinian framework. The work of Thomas Aquinas was an answer to this problem. And one must not forget that Thomas did not ever win over the allegiance of the whole theological community of the Western world to the extent that Augustine did. The Reformation period confronts us with a theological revolution in a sense.

Humanistic interpretation introduced a new disciplinary matrix for the study of the Greek classics and the Bible. This produced more and more anomalies in the relation between the meaning of the Bible and the teaching and practice of the church. In addition, the late medieval synthesis in theology broke down as philosophical reflection found more and more anomalies in theological reasoning itself. The increasing number digital and binary options brokers usa anomalies, the finding of anomalies in areas of importance, the finding of patterns in the anomalies, all showed more and more r kelly money makes the world go round download unsatisfactory character of piecemeal tinkering within the framework of dominant late medieval synthesis.

The time was ripe for theological revolution. Revolution in the broad sense did come. People abandoned the old disciplinary matrix for theology. To describe the medieval and Reformation periods in this way is undoubtedly a vast oversimplification. And yet, and yet, there seems to be something in it. As we already observed, it appears that human beings in communities, interested in understanding a subject and solving its problems, are bound to proceed in similar ways in both science ensign stock market software theology.

A second revolution in biblical interpretation took place with the growth of the historical-critical method. This revolution was again provoked by the increasing prominence of anomalies in theology.

The anomalies were of two main kinds. First, the doctrinal differences in the Reformation, and the theological schools associated with them, did not dissolve.

Each school refined its arguments. Each position maintained that it was right, that its arguments were fully persuasive, and that it had adequately refuted the competing positions. Over time, people could not help wondering whether each position was maintained partly by prejudice. The anomaly here was the inability of the schools to deal with prejudice.

Euro sterling rate march 2013, the differences between theologies were all the more painful because they were one factor in wars. Overcoming the differences seemed to be critically important. At the same time it was impossible to solve the differences using existing modes of argumentation.

Second, developing interest in study of human nature and culture gave people awareness of religious differences between cultures. It was easy to ask whether human reason could be used to sort through religious differences. Perhaps reason could adjudicate between theological schools. Philosophical reason, used by sinful people, wished to dictate what God was like and what divine revelation was like. Deism arose and was at odds with what the Bible claimed. For those attracted to deism, the conflict represented an anomaly.

The historical-critical method arose within this framework as an attempt to produce a scientific exegesis and an objective historical study of the biblical documents.

The same standards were to applied to the Bible as applied to any secular historical document. The theological commitment of the practitioner was not to intervene. The historical-critical method did represent a revolutionary challenge in the Kuhnian sense.

It altered, sometimes subtly, sometimes radically, the entire framework in which exegesis had been carried on. Under the old framework or promag mosin nagant archangel tactical stock review matrix, exegesis took place by comparing a passage with other passages and trying to arrive at an interpretation which harmonized them all.

Now, exegesis found tensions and contradictions wherever it could, because these were clues to the different sources behind the final text. The old framework required that the exegete inquire concerning the meaning of the text in its final context within the canon. Now, the exegete inquired into the history behind the harbor freight tools stock, the history of story telling, composition, combination, deletion, and editing leading to the final text.

Now, the exegete was systematically to ignore such guidance. In the old framework, the exegete accepted the supernatural claims of the Bible at face value. Now, the exegete sifted such claims in the same way as he sifted claims of any other historical document. More precisely, that usually meant that the exegete rejected supernatural claims out of hand, because a scientific historian knew that binary option pricing matlab history was composed of natural causes.

The contrast between old and new frameworks shows the potentially revolutionary character of the historical-critical method. To a certain degree, one might even say that it changed the boundaries of the subject.

The canon was no longer separated from other religious writings. Christianity in the first century rather than the New Testament might be the primary focus of research.

The contrast also shows that even though the post-Reformation theologies were divided, they shared to some degree a common hermeneutical framework. That unified framework, the old framework, still provided something of a disciplinary matrix for coherent research communities.

The historical-critical method introduced an alternative disciplinary matrix. The historical-critical method triumphed within academic circles. It won over enough adherents to make possible a new unified basis for proceeding with future research.

As in the case of scientific revolutions, the people who were not willing to conform to how do i buy otc stocks new standards of research were gradually excluded from participation in the scholarly community.

Of course, the historical-critical method never triumphed so completely as did the Newtonian revolution or the Einsteinian revolution in physics. Some orthodox, supernaturalist theologians and biblical scholars remained, and some held academic positions in major universities. The results differed in extent from country to country. Roman Catholic countries were for a long time little affected by historical-critical innovations.

Germany was more thoroughly antisupernatural than England, England more than the United States. A revolution creates a divide between people who accept it and people who do not.

Once some people are sure that the revolution has triumphed, they waste little time debating with other people who are still not convinced. It is a waste of time to continue debating the foundations of the field. It is time to go on with research on detailed problems, because the disciplinary matrix provides agreed-upon foundations for the field.

Hence, after the historical-critical method had gained sufficient adherents, new faculty hired in university departments of theology were bound to be those who showed their promise partly by adherence to the method.

Hence, after a time, people not adhering to critical method would effectively disappear from academic positions. To some extent, students had to conform to the method to pass courses and receive degrees. The same is still true today in some cases. The practice of exclusion also takes place in scholarly publication. Articles are accepted in scholarly journals of biblical interpretation only if they conform to the standard of how to install option file on xbox 360 method.

Today evangelical scholars often write articles for publication in academic journals that move within the historical-critical penny stocks trading manual. Whenever they do so, for the article to be accepted, they must write the article about a subject where sufficient methodological agreement is possible.

Some of the topics most important to evangelicals, such as the authority of Scripture, the resurrection of Christ, and the deity of Christ, are difficult to write about, because in most cases the evangelical finds it important to appeal to a high view of biblical authority, and this is just what the historical-critical method denies in principle, at its very foundation.

Finally, the practice of exclusion takes place in the publication and reading of scholarly books. Individual adherents to the historical-critical method often think that reading evangelical books would be a waste of time. Some books by evangelicals on some topics use methods sufficiently close to historical-critical standards to be of interest. But a good many do not. When a book uses different standards, its results binary options vic (bov) be less interesting.

The situation seems parallel to the situation in science. Scientists will never see the point of reading works of a previous uninformed generation or works of contemporary pseudoscience that is, what they consider pseudoscience. The effect holds also for whole seminaries and university departments of theology. If a seminary or department is committed to the historical-critical tradition, it will in all probability have few if any books by evangelicals on its readings lists.

Those books are a waste of fx hedging calculator for the students as well as the professors. The result is that the next generation of students is mostly unaware that there is a reasoned alternative to the historical-critical tradition. Even those who for personal religious reasons would like to be evangelicals think that it is intellectually untenable.

To some extent, however, evangelicals have been less scholarly by any standard. Evangelicals, because of their views on the spiritual and eternal importance of biblical knowledge, have a natural concern to produce suitable popular and semipopular literature.

Churches who still wished to hold to orthodox doctrine could and did react to this situation with anger and withdrawal that often produced anti-intellectualism. Of course, anti-intellectualism in the church discourages the next generation from doing scholarship. And so the unhappy situation continues. Today, fortunately, we see a option trading with examples india of evangelical scholarship of high caliber in the United States, Britain, and South Africa.

In sum, the history of the historical-critical method shows that there are many striking similarities between the social structure of knowledge in biblical interpretation and in science. Recall some of the comparable elements: Evangelicals have repeatedly refused to accept some of the crucial assumptions of the historical-critical method.

They have done so even though this method has become the dominant disciplinary matrix in biblical interpretation. How to make money homesteading this refusal really as obtuse as a refusal to accept special relativity?

University of Notre Dame Press, ; Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds. Cambridge University Press, ; Ian Hacking, ed. Oxford University Press, The issue at this point, however, is not whether some disciplinary matrix is right or wrong in an absolute sense. The issue is whether the existing community of scholars has, for one reason or another, valid or invalid, come to be assured that its position is so clearly right as not to need further discussion.

Such people characteristically think that only obtuseness or intellectual failure could prevent someone from working in their framework. The similarities between the historical-critical revolution and revolutions in natural science might make us wonder whether sheer obtuseness has prevented evangelicals from accepting the whole historical-critical package.

But the very existence of a significant amount of hold-out from the historical-critical method means something. There is a reason for this hold-out, however illogical and irrational it may appear to be to people who adhere to the reigning method. Kuhn does not merely say that a revolution happens when a new disciplinary matrix displaces an old one. He shows why and how this takes place in a community of scientists.

First, robot de tranzactionare forex growing number of anomalies arise that are seen as important, and a growing number of researchers devote their energies to solving the anomalies within the existing disciplinary matrix.

As attention is concentrated on anomalies, more and more are discovered. If repeated attempts to deal with the anomalies produce less than satisfactory solutions, some researchers begin to explore more radical alternatives.

Variants of the disciplinary matrix arise. Then some researcher, typically one new to the field, finds a fundamentally new way of looking at some of the anomalies. Even though this new way is incompatible with parts of the how much can you earn from swagbucks tv disciplinary matrix, it seems to have some promise.

As it is worked out into a full-blown theory, it eventually proves superior in copy a live binary option trader risks the anomalies, is able to explain most of the phenomena explained by the old theory, and above all suggests a whole pattern of research that shows promise of uncovering and explaining large bodies of additional phenomena unanticipated by the old theory.

When the new theory begins to show itself superior in this way, windows gadgets forex and more scientists in the field get on the bandwagon.

However, Kuhn notes that in the earlier stages of the revolution, the new theory may not allow quantitative explanation any better than the old. At the beginning it is not easy to decide what is a superior approach, because people are trying to guess how well the alternative approaches will solve problems in the future.

Typically there is no one point in time when one can say that now, and not buying stocks for beginners philippines, the new theory is decisively proved and the old one refuted. Now let us apply this to the revolution introduced by the historical-critical method. Was this method, as a disciplinary matrix, superior to the older approach of reading the Bible as a harmonious source of doctrine?

In what way was it superior? What problems did it promise to solve better? Its proponents might have said the following. This last point is particularly important, because the cultural atmosphere was moving toward the view that in human affairs, historical explanation was the correct, satisfying type of explanation proofreading jobs from home south africa seek.

Point 2 and, why binary options broker provides the training part, point 4 touch on philosophical and cultural influences that did not affect all biblical interpreters equally. Similar philosophical influences can be found during scientific revolutions.

Point 2 made the historical-critical method inferior, not superior, from the standpoint of theologians who were firmly committed to the supernatural. But why were some people firmly committed to the supernatural, and why should this commitment be any different than firm commitments that some scientists have to elements within the old, prerevolutionary disciplinary matrix? Here we touch on at least one important difference between natural science and biblical interpretation.

Biblical interpretation has things to say more directly about human life and about the life of the individual practicing interpreter as a whole person. Religious commitments are some of the deepest commitments that people have.

People have emotional investments in their religion that often exceed the investments they have in a vocational interest such as doing research or doing science. Hence, they resist giving up these commitments. How, then, do we rate the relative potentials of various different approaches to studying the Bible? Evidently one factor in our evaluation should be a requirement that biblical interpretation say something about what we should believe, and not merely do research on the Bible and on ancient religion.

The historical-critical method, within the twentieth century, has now come under criticism from within for its failure to produce from its researches anything preachable. Many opponents as well as a few proponents of the historical-critical revolution saw this from the beginning. The requirement, then, that research on the Bible eventually connect with the needs of the church was a requirement unlike the requirements within a discipline of natural science.

For that reason, of course, more radical representatives of the historical-critical method called for a complete separation from the church in order to achieve scientific status.

But too many biblical scholars were interested in the Bible partly because of its personal, existential value. The pure separation may have been an ideal for the historical-critical method, but it was never achieved. But we have still not penetrated quite to the heart of the matter. The Bible claims to be what God says. All of the Bible testified that what God said could be trusted, and that it ought to be trusted even in situations that seemed to throw doubts on it.

God was the Lord. Obedience to him, including trusting what he said, was a supreme religious duty. This ruled out sifting, criticizing, doubting, or contradicting any part of what the Bible said. Moreover, it ruled out rejecting miracles or the supernatural aspects of the world, to which the Bible clearly testified. In a word, it ruled out the historical-critical method from the beginning. Conversely, the historical-critical method ruled out true biblical religion from its beginning.

Two things must be noticed about this process. First, the Bible made supreme claims about its own authority. People adhering to biblical religion had religious and emotional investments in it in ways formally similar to the emotional investments of non-Christians in non-Christian religions, and the investments of Enlightenment secularists in humanism or rationalism. But biblical religion and ultimately non-Christian religions and secularist idolatries as well requires supreme loyalty and supreme emotional commitment.

By their very nature supreme loyalties or basic commitments are supreme. They do not tolerate rivals. In short, the commitments to biblical religion are more serious than any scientific commitment could be. Second, people really did hear God speaking in the Bible. Or as a sceptic would say they thought that they did. The historical-critical method ignored from the outset the heart of the Bible, because it ignored, and in effect denied, this experience.

But not everyone who read the Bible had this same experience. Naturally this produced a division within scholarship. Scholars who heard God refused to follow the historical-critical method. Whatever its other advantages, the historical-critical method had a crucial disadvantage: Scholars who did not hear God embraced the historical-critical method because, whatever its current unsolved problems, it approached the Bible at last without the old dogmatic commitments.

Of course, things were a bit more complex. People who once did not hear God in the Bible sometimes, under the same influences, later came to realize that he was speaking those words. What do we make of this situation? I agree with the explanation found in the Bible itself.

Two forces, two persuasive powers, are at war with one another in human hearts. God the Holy Spirit is one force, testifying to the truth. The sinfulness of the human heart is the other force, desiring to be like God, to reach its conclusions independent of all other authority.

And this sinfulness is the platform for the seductions of Satan and his preternatural assistant demons. Some, but not all, come to new birth by the Holy Spirit. When their hearts are enlightened, they see and hear in a way that other people, bound in sin, do not see and hear. In principle, this may affect all of life, because all of life belongs to God. Studies of humanity are, on the average, closer to the issues of the heart than studies of subhuman nature.

Studies of the Bible, the word of God, are, on the average, closer to the heart of the matter than studies of economics or sociology. It would seem, then, that biblical interpretation is different from natural sciences. Some of its differences it shares with social sciences, or with any kind of research that would direct itself to some aspect of human experience.

Other differences arise because it touches on basic commitments and on the heart of the spiritual conflict in this world. These are differences, I say. And yet Kuhn uncannily describes the situation in a scientific revolution in a way reminiscent of religious conversion. Changes in world view affect the manner in which we interpret the stimuli. To this observation I might add that most people, myself included, do not experience sensations either, if this word connotes in a narrow way bits of experience associated each with a single sensory apparatus, cleanly isolated from everything else.

Only people influenced by an empiricist world view learn to isolate sense bits from a holistic human experience of wholes. Other people, outside of this world view, know that we experience a world. We experience God as well, since created things testify to him Rom.

Practitioners of the method and opponents of the method did not see the same thing when they examined the Bible. One saw a human product of social evolution of religious ideas. The other saw God speaking. Their methods of investigation were correspondingly different. Actually, the situation is still more complex than what I have described. In the history of interpretation there are not merely two interpretive positions, one a thorough-going historical-critical method and the other a thorough-going approach to the Bible on the basis of believing all its claims because of its divine authority.

Others claimed to follow the historical-critical method whole-heartedly, but introduced extra religious or philosophical assumptions of their own. Others in the fundamentalist camp maintained the full authority of the Bible but denied the profitability of scholarly reflection.

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In a sense the anomalies generated by the Enlightenment crisis of Christian faith and autonomous reason generated not two disciplinary matrices but a whole spectrum. But even some proponents like Troeltsch saw the implications: But here and there one can find critics admitting that some parts of the Bible do have similar claims. The critics on their part simply disagree with the claims. Abingdon Press,p. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company,pp.

Bethany Fellowship,pp. But neither Christian nor non-Christian are consistently loyal to their own side. Christians give in to sin and Satanic temptation, while non-Christians do not escape the knowledge of God and of good Rom 1: It is time now to take stock of what we have observed about biblical interpretation as an academic discipline.

To begin with, there are communities and subcommunities of people engaged in intensive intellectual reflection concerning biblical interpretation. We are not thinking here of the community of all members of a church or a denomination. This is a community, but its concerns and interests are usually different from those interested in solving intellectual problems in biblical interpretation. We want to focus, then, on communities consisting of scholars working on some common concerns and communicating with one another.

Sometimes a particularly outstanding work in theology may set the pace for the future of theological reflection. At some times and places in the history of the church, a great deal of unity has existed; at other times a number of competing schools have vied for dominance, each offering a somewhat different version of a preferred disciplinary matrix.

Over time, it is possible for one disciplinary matrix to be replaced by another. In fact, Kuhn indicates that his own idea of revolution is originally borrowed from the history of other fields:. Historians of literature, of music, of the arts, of political development, and of many other human activities have long described their subjects in the same way. Periodization in terms of revolutionary breaks in style, taste, and institutional structure have been among their standard tools.

If I have been original with respect to concepts like these, it has mainly been by applying them to the sciences, fields which had been widely thought to develop in a different way. We might expect this simply because human communities interested in giving explanations in a field and solving the problems of the field are bound to behave in similar ways, whatever the field.

If one line of explanation one exemplar seems promising, they stick with this line of explanation until they start having problems with it. Then some more adventuresome souls tinker with the existing disciplinary matrix. If a resolution is not found, more radical alternatives are tried.

If one of these seems to promise success, more and more people convert to the new alternative. This is the beginning of a revolution.

We have seen this analysis applied in both science and biblical interpretation. But we should note right away that revolutions in biblical interpretation never seem to be as successful as scientific revolutions. But it is still possible to find Augustinians, Thomists, and people who reject the historical-critical method.

What types of revolution might there be in biblical interpretation? Revolutions in biblical interpretation, or changes in disciplinary matrix, can be more or less major in character. They can be more or less radical. Changing from medieval theology to Calvinism, or from Calvinism to Arminianism, represents a major change. But through the change some things remain similar. What the Bible says, God says. The historical-critical revolution, in challenging the common assumption of all three of these theologies, represented a more radical revolution than a change from one to another of the three.

Since the Bible was the primary source for theology, changing the status of the Bible and the way that it was investigated would radically change theology as a whole.

Moreover, the disciplinary matrix of a theological community includes a network of many different kinds of assumptions and values. We have summaries of theological truths in confessions and doctrinal statements. We have assumptions about the source of theological authority, whether authority is ascribed to the Bible, to experience, to doctrinal standards, to church tradition, or to some combination of these.

We have assumptions about the methods to be used in interpreting the Bible, the relation of human authors to God, the relation of OT to NT, and so on. We have standards for the kinds of argumentative procedures to be used: We have assumptions about the responsibility of biblical interpreters to the church. We have assumptions about human nature and its abilities to penetrate theological truth. Conceivably, a mini-revolution in biblical interpretation might touch one of these areas but not or not so much the others.

Thus we might distinguish between hermeneutical revolutions, doctrinal revolutions, and revolutions in authority. But many revolutions in practice have touched to some degree on several of these areas at once. So any classification is likely to be artificial.

It might be more fruitful to think of the size of the community which is revolutionized by a particular change. Nowadays we can distinguish, at least in a rough and ready way, the subcommunities of OT scholars, NT scholars, systematic theologians, church historians, homileticians, specialists in Christian education, specialists in counseling, missiologists, and the church at large.

A change that was revolutionary within a given field might cause minor changes, but not revolution, in sister fields. Kuhn notes that the same is true in natural science. For example, a Calvinist might become an Arminian, or an adherent of orthodox theology might turn to the historical-critical method.

A religious conversion to Christianity is the most radical possible change. Even from a sociological or anthropological point of view, the change is more radical than changes of theology within the Christian faith. Moreover, we must say that the change is not merely intellectual, or even primarily intellectual. It involves a new set of beliefs, but it also involves a new life.

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Theologically speaking, we are dealing here with the religious root of human existence. Is a person for God or against him? Is he reconciled to God or still alienated?

This question points to roots deeper even than a change of world view, since changes of world view can take place in a conversion from one non-Christian religion to another, or a transition by either a non-Christian or a Christian from tribal to modern Western culture.

The next most radical change is a change in world view. It is what one assumes without realizing that one is even assuming it. A change from the supernatural world view of medieval society or the world view of a tribal society, to the naturalistic, mechanistic world view the modern West is such a change.

It involves changes in self-consciously held beliefs, to be sure. But it involves changes also in things that one thought were impossible to change. After changes in world view one is ready to talk about changes of theological systems. Changes from Roman Catholic theology to Protestant theology, or Arminian to Calvinist theology, would be examples. Such changes represent revolutions for a systematic theologian.

Changes in hermeneutical method might result in revolutions in either systematic theology or exegesis or both. In my opinion, exegesis and systematic theology belong together, in one large-scale project of understanding the Bible better. But in current scholarly practice, the two disciplines have their own distinctive subcultures, so that an analysis of patterns of development and revolution must to some extent treat the disciplines separately.

After changes in theological systems come changes in views on individual points—for example, changes in points of doctrine if one is a systematic theologian, or changes in interpretations of individual texts if one is an exegetical specialist. Many of these changes will not be revolutionary in an earth-shaking way. But many do still involve a kind of change of perspective, a change in which all the parts get rearranged and are seen in a new way. For instance, consider someone changing from interpreting Rom.

A similar kind of classification has already been suggested in the philosophy of science. But she observes that they fall into three main categories. They are analogous to what we have called world views. They are analogous to theological systems in systematic theology or hermeneutical systems in exegetical disciplines.

This third category is in some ways the most important for Kuhn, and it is also the one that tends to distinguish science from other academic disciplines. Exemplars that have been accepted as models by an entire community of scientists have a key role in the puzzle-solving process that is characteristic of normal science.

In biblical interpretation there is not always anything quite analogous. Standard theological answers in specific areas of doctrine such as the ancient creeds providedand standards exegetical answers on specific texts, are similar in at least some ways.

They are results to which people often refer back. However, they do not usually serve as a model for future research. The creedal formulations with respect to the doctrine of God have for the most part functioned as decisive formulations on a given point of doctrine, but not as models of how theology is to be done in other areas. Each area of doctrine needs its own solution, and it is not clear how the solution in one area could serve as a model. In a very few cases, however, one may find examples which come closer to being exemplars in a Kuhnian sense.

Within the historical-critical method, the classic four document hypothesis about the sources of the Pentateuch became something of an exemplar for how source criticism ought to be done on any book of the Bible. Scholarly work on the Pentateuch was expected to make advances by solving puzzles about particular texts on the basis of the over-all framework provided by the four document hypothesis.

The work of evangelicals was virtually excluded from this scholarly community of historical-critical scholarship in the OT because evangelicals would not work on the foundation of this paradigm. Within the twentieth century, of course, we have seen the paradigm begin to break up under the weight of anomalies.

Do all the type of changes above really have anything special about them? Why do we not just talk about changes in people and in their views? Kuhn would not have had anything original to say if he just claimed that science changes with time, and that the views of scientists change. What makes Kuhn so interesting, and potentially fruitful, is his claim that knowledge does not always change by piecemeal additions and substractions.

Human knowledge is not to be viewed as so many bits, added to the total sum of knowledge like so many marbles to a pile. What we know is colored by the framework in which we do our knowing. This framework is a framework of assumptions, values, procedures, standards, and so on, in the particular field of knowledge.

Kuhn discusses at some length a psychological experiment with anomalously marked playing cards e. When longer exposures were used, subjects often became emotionally upset or uneasy without becoming aware of the actual source of their unease. Another experiment with special glasses that invert the visual field shows that after a time of adjustment subjects see the world normally once again even though their retinal images are the reverse of normal. Such experiments are suggestive of a much more general principle, already anticipated in gestalt psychology: Sometimes the influence is subtle, but sometimes the influence is radical.

Knowledge is contextually conditioned. This contextual conditioning immediately explains why it is so notoriously difficult to argue someone into an alternation of the type that we have listed above section For instance, everyone knows that arguments aiming at religious conversion often do not succeed.

Failures do not occur merely because people have deep emotional investments in religious views that they already hold. That is part of the story. But one of the difficulties resides in the persistent attempts of potential converts to integrate any particular argument offered them into their own full-fledged framework of knowledge, assumptions, standards, values, and the like.

For instance, to the modern materialist as to the ancient Greek, claims about a resurrection from the dead are ludicrous Acts To the pantheist or animist, claims that the natural world reveals its Creator are missing the point.

That does not mean that no communication is possible. But it means that substantive communication takes discipline and patience. Similarly, arguments between Arminians and Calvinists may easily shoot past one another. To someone with an Arminian framework, the Calvinist claim that God decrees all things sounds like fatalism. Conversely, Arminian appeals to the passages on human responsibility do not move the Calvinist.

In view of the fact that clear passages on divine sovereignty have confirmed the Calvinist position, the passages on human responsibility must be understood as speaking of such responsibility within the framework of divine control. If we cannot resolve the relation of the two in our own mind, it does not mean that such a resolution is impossible for God. As theological debaters have found out, appeal to a proof text does not always persuade the opponent.

We can illustrate some influences of contextual knowledge even at the level of interpreting an individual text. Let us return again to Rom. Historically, a large part of the debate has centered on two alternatives, the regenerate interpretation and the unregenerate interpretation. Behind this debate lurked an assumption commonly made by both sides: Such an assumption seems natural. Every person is either regenerate or not.

Hence the passage must be speaking about one or the other. This assumption, then, functioned as part of the disciplinary matrix for reflection on the meaning of Rom. It was part of the context of knowledge informing the discussion of any details of Rom. One can see this pattern in commentaries up to this day.

John Murray, for example, lists five main points in favor of the regenerate interpretation. These four points in effect presuppose a key point: Consider now the effect of introducing the second-blessing interpretation.

To say that a regenerate man is in view in Rom. Murray, in fact, notes the existence of a third alternative, but then does not address the possibility that it may be correct. But it is no longer the regenerate man in general.

It is only the regenerate man when he has lapsed from an ideal that is possible in this life. Hence, an argument that beforehand appeared to establish a solid case now reveals some crucial holes.

We can make the situation still more complicated by introducing still another view. Martin Lloyd-Jones, the man of Rom. But these people have not yet understood the work of Christ, and have not come to an assurance of forgiveness and death to sin.

In theory, of course, such people would still be either regenerate or unregenerate in an absolute sense. But when we meet such people we may not be able to tell which. Moreover, such people do not match what we know of the typical unregenerate or the typical regenerate person. The alternative interpretations produced by second-blessing theology and by Lloyd-Jones are interesting because of the way in which they break up a previously established pattern of looking at Rom. The previous pattern was this: People using this pattern could not see that there was any other alternative.

Now the second-blessing alternative arrives. Its challenge to the pattern is, in a sense, relatively mild. The person spoken of in Rom. But there may be further subdivisions within these basic types. A tension between Rom. According to Lloyd-Jones, Paul is not asking himself whether the person in question is regenerate or unregenerate. Paul is describing a psychological and spiritual state which cuts across the old categories. Its symptoms are intermediate between the symptoms usually characterizing regenerate and unregenerate people.

Lloyd-Jones, one might say, is asking us to focus on a different question altogether. For a theologian, its seems so natural to go to the root of the matter immediately and ask about regeneration. This is the theologically important watershed, and so surely it must be the right question to ask here. To construe theological texts against the background of regeneration is, or was, part of the disciplinary matrix of doing theology. But Lloyd-Jones did not take this step. One might wonder whether Lloyd-Jones discovered an alternative partly because of his previous experience in medicine.

In medicine, the distinction between symptom and cause is common. Did Lloyd-Jones then find it natural to apply this distinction in a new field? Lloyd-Jones also introduces a further distinction. Rather, it superimposes another plane of discussion, the plane of spiritual symptoms in response to the law. This subtly alters the entire nature of the discussion and the use of Rom. People usually do not realize that this kind of shift of viewpoint is possible until they are shown.

The experience of interpreters of Rom. The subjects in the psychological experiments, having been trained by experience to see red hearts and black spades, typically do not notice that a different category, a red spade, is before their eyes. They may even become emotionally upset over seeing a red spade. Similarly, interpreters of Rom. And possibly, like the subjects in the psychological experiments, they become emotionally upset over the controversies that ensue in interpretation.

Some puzzles and riddles also offer suggestive analogies. As another example, a gardener is given the assignment of planting four trees so that each tree is the equally distant from each of the other three trees. The problem can be solved by planting three trees on level ground at the vertices of an equilateral triangle and the four tree on a hill in the middle of the triangle. As a final example, try to connect all nine dots of figure 2 by placing a pencil on one dot, and then drawing four straight line segments without once raising the pencil from the paper.

People solve the puzzle only when they question the common assumption that the line segments are not allowed to extend beyond the outermost dots. In general, we may not see a possible solution to a riddle or a puzzle until we abandon a way of thinking that has become a rut.

Likewise, in Bible study we may not see a possible interpretive alternative until we abandon a rut. We are still not through with Rom. Herman Ridderbos advocates still another approach to interpreting the passage. Prior to the resurrection of Christ and the sending of the Holy Spirit in Pentecostal power and presence, the people of God were bound under the law of Moses. It is the law in its full particularity, including food laws and ceremonial sacrifices.

And now those who have died with Christ have been released. Ridderbos introduces another dimension to reading Rom. All of the previous interpretations shared a common assumption: The preceding set of assumptions is nothing less than the common disciplinary framework of assumptions about Paul, Romans, and the New Testament. Ridderbos does not disagree with any of the doctrines of this theology as such.

But he maintains that Paul had another focus. It is interesting that people within the same doctrinal tradition can advocate different interpretations of Rom. Martin Lloyd-Jones, and Herman Ridderbos, all adherents of Reformed theology, advocate the regenerate interpretation, the awakened sinner interpretation, and the pre-Pentecost interpretation of Rom. The differences between them must accordingly be viewed not as differences between systems of theology, but differences affecting only the interpretation of a single passage, Rom.

But we should note that the differences are capable of becoming differences of theological style of an extensive kind. Followers of Lloyd-Jones might make it a policy to read many other passages not Rom. Followers of Ridderbos might make it a policy to read many other passages in terms of the questions of the transition of ages between OT and NT.

In fact, Ridderbos participates in the redemptive-historical tradition within NT biblical theology that has adopted precisely this emphasis. This tradition claims consistently to arrive at more accurate interpretations of texts within the redemptive-historical framework.

Some readers may ask themselves whether my analysis above leads to relativism. Does it mean that a text e.

Does it mean that systems of theology e. Similar questions were addressed to Kuhn in the wake of his book on revolutions in science. He is not a nihilist, nor a relativist in the sense of believing that the choice between systems is irrational. The proper standard for truth is not found in human bweings corporately or individually but in God who is the source of all truth.

Hence one must say that there is a right and wrong in the interpretation of Rom. However, it is not necessarily easy for human beings to arrive at what is right. Larger frameworks or disciplinary matrices have an influence. In part, the influence is a good one. An effective, fruitful disciplinary matrix regularly steers researchers towards fruitful ways of looking at a passage and fruitful ways of analyzing and solving theological difficulties.

But any disciplinary matrix, by suggesting solutions primarily in one direction, can make people almost blind to the possibility of solutions in another direction. Such, surely, is one of the lessons to draw from the history of interpretation of Rom. Doubleday,pp. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,pp.

See also the reflections in Douglas Lee Eckberg and Lester Hill, Jr. University of Notre Dame Press,pp. Eerdmans Publishing Company,1: Zondervan Publishing House,4: Eerdmans Publishing Company,shows signs of his medical background. We need now to look at one major factor in the disciplinary matrices of natural sciences, namely, the use of models. It is important to consider models because of the influence that they may have on what investigators see or fail to see.

First, what do we mean by models? Models are detailed analogies between one subject and another. The gas itself is the principal subject, while the moving billiard balls are the subsidiary subject. The mathematical equations are the subsidiary subject, while the moving physical objects are the principal subject.

Models can be of many kinds, depending on the type of subsidiary subject chosen, and the relations between the subsidiary subject and the principal subject.

Thus we may speak of mathematical models, mechanical models, electrical models, scale models, and so on. What purpose do models serve in science? Certainly they play the role of illustrating theories already considered established. A scale model of the solar system makes the astronomical theory of the solar system clearer to the neophyte. But, more important, models play an important role in the discovery and improvement of new scientific theories.

The billiard-ball model of a gas was crucial to the development of the kinetic theory of gases and its predictions about gas pressure, temperature, and the like. Similarly, James Clerk Maxwell developed his theory of electricity and magnetism by creative use of analogy between electricity principal subject and an ideal incompressible fluid subsidiary subject.

Models, in fact, are crucial to the development of new theories. A properly chosen analogy suggests questions to be asked, lines of research, possible general laws. Mathematical equations known to hold for the subsidiary subject can be carried over to the principal subject, albeit sometimes with slight modifications. The analogy needs to be used flexibly, because the principal subject is usually not analogous to the subsidiary subject in all respects.

But what happens after the theory is drawn up? Philosophy of science in the positivist tradition would like to say that models are dispensable when it comes to assessing the justification of theories and their truth content.

Others, Max Black included, think that some models are an integral, indissoluble part of the finished theory. These rules of thumb cannot be completely formalized without losing some of the potential of the model to suggest extensions to other phenomena.

But from what he says about the role of exemplars and disciplinary matrices in directing further lines of research, one can infer that he agrees with Black about the indispensability of models. Is biblical interpretation analogous to science in its use of models? Some models are to be found within the Bible itself. Adam, for example, is a model for Christ with respect to his role in representing humanity Rom.

But analogies in biblical interpretation seldom have the detailed, quantitative character of mathematical models or physical models in science. Perhaps we had better talk about analogies rather than models. Now let us ask whether models analogies are dispensable in biblical interpretation.

Even if we granted that in theory they were dispensable in natural science, it would be difficult to present an analogous argument for biblical interpretation. The less-than-exact character of models in biblical interpretation means that they are most often not dispensable. As an example, take again Rom. Can we eliminate the comparison with Adam and still retain the theological substance of the passage? We could, to be sure, paraphrase a good deal of the main points of Rom.

But even if we worked at this paraphrase for a long time, we would have missed something. Once we eliminate completely any reference to Adam, we simultaneously eliminate the possibility of exploring just how far these analogies extend. Do analogies really make a difference in interpretive controversies? Sometimes, at least, they do. Recall our discussion on the interpretation of Rom. Ridderbos argues that Rom. The model that Ridderbos has in the background is the model of two ages and a redemptive transition between them.

By contrast, the model in the background both the regenerate and the unregenerate interpretations is the model of the individual soul and its life. Using such a model, Rom. These two models are not tight-knit mathematically describable structures like models in natural science. They are more like generalizations or clusters of patterns derived from a loose collection of biblical texts. Ridderbos shows us common patterns linking much of what Paul and other NT writers say about the death of Christ, the resurrection of Christ, the coming of the Spirit, the reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles, and events representing a global transition of redemptive epochs.

Against this background he invites us to see Rom. Likewise the regenerate interpretation collects verses describing the situation of individuals who are Christian and who are not Christian, and invites us to see Rom. Both of these models do not so much exploit a particular analogy say, with the resurrection of Christ, or with the conversion of Cornelius as they use generalized patterns.

They are less like a metaphor than like a generalization. Moreover, to a large extent these models describe what we may bring to any text whatsoever when we study it.

But we may also ask whether a particular text like Rom. What analogies, then, are operative in Rom. It is difficult to decide whether there is any dominant analogy. But when interpreters come to the passage, they may have an analogical framework in which they understand biblical descriptions of sin. In the Bible as a whole there are a number of basic analogies or metaphors for explaining, illustrating, and driving home to readers the power of sin.