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Originally Posted by Barnpreacher  Please forgive me if this comes across the wrong way. My wife and I are going to the hospital at 5:30 in the morning for the birth of our second child, so I am a little edgy.
The man is dead and cannot get on here and defend his position. If he was still alive and could get on here and defend his position I doubt that anyone would fare any better against him now than they did before.
To say his exegesis on Matthew 5 was shoddy is just a little out of line for my taste.  |
Sir: with all due respect and sympathy, you're not coming across in the wrong way or edgy; you are just illustrating a common experience found among those who knew Bahnsen. Like yourself, many who knew him have a hard time getting their minds around the possibility that he was anything less than unanswerable in exegetical debate.
That's somewhat understandable since he seems to have been just about unanswerable in apologetic debate. But...
Exegesis and apologetics are not the same thing. And since I supplied sufficient evidence to show Bahnsen's exegetical work on Matt 5:17 in TICE (whatever else is true of his exegesis of other passages in TICE or elsewhere) is simply not up to the same standard as his apologetic work, I don't think we can presume that he would emerge unscathed from a debate with someone who has thoroughly reviewed his exegesis of these verses. AFAIK, he never encountered such a critique in his lifetime written from a Reformed perspective: the one full review that I know about was written by a dispie four years before Bahnsen's death as a Master's thesis, and I don't know whether or not Bahnsen ever saw it. (Fowler really only dealt with a couple of the key words in v. 17 and v. 18 not all of them, as did Long. Poythress only partially dealth with one verb in v. 17.)
Granted Bahnsen is dead and unable to reply. But so are Luther, Edwards, and every thologian born before 1900. On this board, when somebody finds past theologians in error, they are criticized, sometimes as strongly as I have done. Why should you believe that only Bahnsen could not possibly be wrong? The proof of the pudding is in the eating, not what somebody thinks is possible, and the proof of "shoddy" and "appalling" exegetical malpractice is the presence of methodological errors that render the exegete's thesis either impossible or at best unproven. And what is certain, - not just claimed - but certain, is that such errors are present and vitate Bahnsen's work on this passage.
Please reread what I wrote above "shoddy" in my original post. Bahnsen misrepresented a dissenting commentator as being in agreement with him, drew a conclusion that does not always follow from the meaning of alla and attempted to support his premise with a Scripture in which that conclusion clearly is not present, something he himself would later admit. Finally he clearly overlooks relevant meanings of a key word in the passage; an exegetical no-no if ever there was one. If these errors taken cumulatively do not demonstrate "shoddy" or "appalling" lapses in exegetical judgement, what would?