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Originally posted by Wannabee
Thank you for putting me in my place Dr. You've accused me of dishonesty and naivete.
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Not both, just the latter.
I think you're honestly wrong.
Many dispensationalists (especially of the earlier forms of it) have/had a view of hermeneutics that held it is sort of mechanical thing, put the passage in the grinder, turn the handle and there it is.
Most evangelical (and other) scholars today would say that no interpretation of any text works this way.
Take your interpretation of my criticism. You think I'm accusing you of dishonesty. Why? Because, I guess, in your world the only "honest" view is the correct view and if I think you're wrong, then I must be accusing you of dishonesty. I don't think the world works this way.
I myself have sometimes been guilty of speaking this way.
I honestly do think that you are sincere in your views, but that you are sincerely wrong. There's a difference. I don't think that being wrong entails dishonesty. You come to my comments in a context, with a background, that causes you to read them as you do. That's my broader point about hermeneutics.
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Furthermore, you addressed my comment out of context. The dating of CT is generous, but still is "new" in the scheme of things (as I stated)
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I read you to say that CT and Disp. are roughly contemporaraneous in origin. This was a widely-held view in American disp. circles. It relied on now discredited scholarship on the history of covenant theology.
See this essay for a popular update:
http://www.wscal.edu/clark/briefhistorycovtheol.php
I don't mean to say that that there was a fully-formed covenant theology in 1523 -- I've read the original text, done my own translation of untranslated texts; it's what I do for a living -- see this
work for example.
Covenant theology developed gradually through the 16th century and into the 17th. Most of the older scholarship held that it more or less arose de novo in the 17th century with Cocceius. This is false as Van Asselt, Bierma, and I and others have shown.
I'm not aware of anything like the Scofield system (or its predecessors) in the 16th century. In many ways, dispensationalism in not a Protestant hermeneutic (defined by the Reformation reading of texts).
Yes, there were, as I've said, historic pre-mil folk in the early 17th century - there is good work being done on Alsted and Meade and Piscator and others. They weren't dispensationalists however.
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I don't see a trace of what became dispensationalism in the Fathers"¦
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Yes, you can quote someone quoting the Fathers, but as Luther might say, I read the Fathers for myself and I teach patristics. Though not a Patrologist by trade, I read some patristic scholarship.
Yes, as I already said, there were pre-millennial fathers, but they didn't make national Israel the baseline for understanding redemptive history -- precisely because they were in an argument with Jewish critics. They argued that Christianity was the spiritual Israel, that the national covenant was temporary and illustrative of the new covenant. Irenaeus argued this at great length.
As I say, please read C E Hill, (1st edn Oxford Univ Press; 2nd edn is Eerdmans). It is the definitive work on early Christian eschatology.
The modern discussion on hermeneutics is well beyond Milton Terry et co. Even the points I wrote (in the context of the creation debate) are somewhat naive and dated. I would write them differently today. In that context I was trying to explain to frightened fundamentalists in my own circle the same point I'm making here, that two people can use the same set of hermeneutic principles and emerge with different readings of the same text.
I'm not trying to bully you. I'm sorry you feel that way.
I do tend to be blunt and I don't think disagreement is bullying, though I understand that in our culture the two are often mistaken.
rsc