Music as text (or vice versa)

A while ago I considered music as preaching (or vice versa). Peter Leithart has a clear, succinct post considering written or spoken text musically: Hermeneutics: Melody of the Text.

Each word must die for the sentence to live, yet each word must live in memory for the sake of the whole. For a melody, each note must die for the melody to live, yet each remain in memory for a melodic line to form. And so with a whole text, or book: hear the text, and don't miss out the bass drone, repeated rythms, or recurring motifs! 
But read it here in Dr Leithart's own words.

Symphonic Theology

Poythress' Symphonic Theology is a good little book - short chapters making an easy introduction to using various perspectives when reading the Bible: the validity, value and exemplification of the same. (That I enjoy reading Poythress is not entirely surprising, as he's a Presbyterian mathematician-theologian with an interest in linguistics and translation, and writes well.) I didn't so much find the book's ideas novel, as clarifying my thoughts. But I keep finding that if I think I've had a good idea, Poythress has already written a (much) better book on it. Next one I'm eager to get hold of is his new 'In the beginning was the Word: Language - A God-centred approach' from Crossway.

Christ the key and cornerstone

I've been pondering lately a couple of key critiques, which are actually one. A friend in church said of a children's talk of late, that a Muslim would've been happy with it. My Mum would sometimes critique a service, that a (non-Messianic) Jew would've been happy with it. It may sound extreme rhetoric, but passing over whether or not these critiques were true in those instances, it is the key critique. What does our service, what does the talk, what does our church life, make of Christ? If the good news of Jesus Christ weren't true, would the talk still hold? It shouldn't! The hymn below is a new one to me, and I know I shall enjoy singing it with church this morning!

All praise to Christ, our Lord and King divine,
Yielding His glory in His love’s design,
That in our darkened hearts His grace might shine: Alleluia! Alleluia!

Christ came to us in lowliness of thought;
By Him the outcast and the poor were sought,
And by His death was our redemption bought: Alleluia! Alleluia!

The mind of Christ is as our mind should be –
He was a servant, that we might be free,
Humbling Himself to death on Calvary: Alleluia! Alleluia!

And so we see in God’s great purpose how
Christ has been raised above all creatures now,
And at His name shall every nation bow: Alleluia! Alleluia!

Let every tongue confess with one accord,
in heaven and earth, that Jesus Christ is Lord,
and God the Father be by all adored: Alleluia! Alleluia!

(by F. Bland Tucker, 1938, alt. ©The Church Pension Fund)

The hand that draws the bow that fires the arrow that flies

As I've studied Mark's gospel over the past 2 months (I think ch.1.1-10 is at the top of the frequency league table, with 8 times studied / spoken on / prepared / taught), I've been very struck by just how much it relies on the Scriptures (or 'Old Testament'). I've known that all the Scriptures are about Christ, so you would expect (if you believe Jesus' word) that Mark relies on the Scriptures. But to quite what extent I'd never seen before.

The OT Scriptures frequently work to create tension like a bow being draw back and back still further, as the string gets increasingly taut. It is not always that X in the OT Scriptures is Y at the coming of Christ. Sometimes that is the case - Christ is the Emmanuel, the tabernacle, the dwelling of God with man while he also is the life-blood sacrifice of atonement which means God may dwell with man without us being eternally consumed by the fire of his holiness. But often it is not simply X is Y, but in the OT a tension is built up, a bow carved out of the wood of God's revealed truth, which as time goes on in the OT, is pulled further and further back. An arrow is formed on the string: a hint, a promise as to how it may be resolved. But it is still tense, taut, ready to fly. And when the time is fulfilled, the string sings as the arrow is released and flies with all the energy God has built up over 2000 years of covenant revelation history - flies true and straight, and where we saw only tension and a shadowy arrow, now we see it land [THUCK] in the target - the target revealed as Christ. And so it is in the very first 2 verses Mark records (after his 'title').

As it is written in Isaiah the prophet,
“Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way,
the voice of one crying in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’”

Now Mark hasn't just found a couple of phrases in the Scriptures which could fit the words he's about to introduce, like a bad word study. Not having chapter and verse numbers, he quotes these verses yes because they fit with what he's about to introduce, but also because the weight of the surrounding passages fits with what he's about to introduce.

He quotes Malachi first:

“Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? [And the prophecy ends with:] Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”

The messenger who will prepare the way, Elijah-like: and, Mark writes, voilà John, wearing the right gear, calling for repentence! Who do we expect to come following the messenger? "Me." YHWH. And "The Lord whom you seek - the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight." Who is this but the Messiah? But who is 'Me,' speaking, but YHWH Himself? And this reinforced with the effect he is to produce - who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?

Then Mark quotes Isaiah (40), as promised:

Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her
that her warfare is ended,
that her iniquity is pardoned,
that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins.

A voice cries:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

A voice says, “Cry!”
And I said, “What shall I cry?”
All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is
like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades when the
breath of the Lord blows on it;
surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand forever.

Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news;
lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good news;
lift it up, fear not; say to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!”
Behold, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him;
behold, his reward is with him, and his recompense before him.

Again, we have the messenger Mark has spotted promised (X is Y): a voice crying in the wilderness prepare a highway... and again - who is coming? For whom is John preparing a way? "For our God"! God is coming. Say to the cities of Judah, "Behold your God!" And yet Isaiah declares it as good news - the 'gospel'.

Yet how great is the tension between those two prophecies Mark has so swiftly glued together! Malachi announces,
God's messenger is coming - and then God is coming - bad news: repent!
Isaiah announces,
God's messenger is coming - and then God is coming - good news: believe!

How can this be? A hint is given in Isaiah - the people's sin has been dealt with. But that was then, and the sin of the time: it doesn't explain how now God may come among his people and it is good news. Yet that is just what Mark has claimed too, in his headline: so as he expounds on these 2 prophecies in the rest of the chapter (and the book), we want to know - the bow has been drawn back, Mark - you claim the arrow has flown to its target, you claim the target is this man Jesus: we want you to show us, Mark, so we see the quiver of the arrow in the target, so we hear its [THUNK] as it hits home.

And so he starts in - God's messenger comes: John. He warns the people to repent. We expect God to come on scene. Jesus comes. Eh? How does that fit?! We expected YHWH, not a Man! And the voice speaks from heaven: "This is my beloved Son." And the Spirit descends on him like a dove. The Man Jesus is declared to be God, and he announces good news to believe. The arrow has flown from the string drawn taut by Malachi and Isaiah, and it flies to the Man Jesus, declared to be the Son of God.

When it comes to OT fulfilment in Jesus, so often we just squint at the arrow - a verse - and think, "Ok, so you've plucked out a verse which has a few matching words," and we fail to notice the weight of the passage, the book, the whole OT behind this arrow as a strong bow drawn back, strong and taut, projecting this arrow swift and true to Jesus. And it is when we take the time to familiarise ourselves with the OT bow, that we most clearly see that it is designed, drawn and fired by God, and the answer, indeed, is always Jesus. Beautiful!

You search the Scriptures

What is newsworthy? The press decides. I'm often struck that the subjects of items which appear in my email front page feed, from yahoo's francophone press, cannot be found on the BBC 'news' website. Today, it is the news that the Pope will preside over a synod to discuss the topic of Bible interpretation. On "The Word of God in the life and mission of the church," the general assembly will bring together 250 Roman bishops, to address - according to the yahoo article - both fundamentalism and secularisation with regard to interpretation. The Pope has circulated a paper in advance of the synod, and it is from this that the article draws. This in itself is interesting, but more so, that they have invited a Rabbi to address the synod on the subject of Hebrew interpretation of Scriptures. Now it would be interesting to hear a Rabbi speak on that. But disturbing are the words by the Vatican spokesperson: Le grand rabbin de Haïfa (Israël) Shear Yashyv Cohen exposera lundi soir

"la manière dont le peuple hébreu lit et interprète l'Ecriture sainte (...)
qu'il partage en grande partie avec les chrétiens."

While the contents of the synod place Christ and the church at the centre of the Word of God, you've got to wonder what kind of 'centre' that is, if the Scriptures Jesus claimed all pointed to him as Messiah are "for the most part" read and interpreted by Christians in the same manner as Jewish people who do not recognise Jesus as Messiah. The spokesperson for the Vatican is somewhat correct, but it's not something of which to boast. Then again, with the press determining the news, the ellipsis in the quotation above may well change the meaning entirely (I couldn't source the full quotation on the Vatican website). Interpretation, eh?

The Sunday School Answer

I know what the answer is, but I'm not quite sure of the question. Seriously. The answer's 'Jesus'. (Surprise!) The broadest question might be, "Who fulfils this psalm?" Answer: Jesus. "Whom does this psalm foreshadow?" works too - answer, Jesus. Then, 'About whom was this psalm written?' I think I'd have to say 'The King / the Righteous man / Israel (etc.) in the first instance, with an awareness that there was a greater ideal, that the King / The Righteous / true Israel wasn't actually fulfilling those things, so with a trust in God that he would one day provide so as to fulfil the psalm.' Dave posted some (very good) talks from Mike Reeves on psalms 1 & 15 and a debate kicked off about interpretation (again), because I said foreshadow rather than predict. Although I'm still thinking through this so I don't think I'd phrase some of this how I did then, here's what I meant, from some notes I wrote for small group leaders when we studied the psalms in the West Midlands CUs last year:

Promise-fulfilment
Psalms are not so much direct predictions of the future, but they contain promises which are not entirely fulfilled in the present so look forward to the future. (Sometimes these are refered to as types, and the fulfilments as antitypes.) The OT type promises more than the present, and the NT antitype fulfills the divine purpose implicit in the earlier event. Often Jesus is taken as being the antitype of descriptions in the psalms. That is, he fulfils the description of a psalm even though it was a personal testimony, not a ‘Thus says the Lord: in the latter days…’ prophecy. [The most obvious one is Ps.22.] So Jesus is the perfect man linking Eden to Hebrews in Psalm 8, he’s the perfect priest linking Genesis 14 to Hebrews (5 & 6) in Psalm 110, he’s the perfect King beyond David’s experience, the perfect Worshipper beyond the faithful Israelite and the perfect Object of worship, etc. This isn’t usually a straight ‘fit the peg in the hole’ fulfilment: the antitype is usually greater than the type. Jesus more than fulfils the psalms in every way. E.g. He suffers for righteousness’ sake, as the king over God’s people, like David, but he has no need for confession, unlike David: David is a shadow of the King to come. So we’re not looking just for sentences-which-only-Jesus-fulfils sprinkled randomly through the psalms. We’ll be thinking, What did this mean at the time – in what way was it the psalmist’s experience / hope / lament / prayer / praise? And how does Jesus fulfil this even more?

You are not the hero
The hero of the psalm, the more-than-fulfilment, the antitype, is Jesus – not us! Now, once the NT applies it to Jesus, then because we are in Him, and co-heirs of his righteousness, then some of it applies to us too (E.g. Ps.2, Rev.12, Rev.2.26-27). But it doesn’t apply directly to us without going through Jesus – in fact, it didn’t even apply to the psalmist without going through Jesus, the Messiah, but they didn’t say that so explicitly. (There are some hints of awareness e.g. in Ps.40.)

I'm not entirely happy with how I phrased everything then, and I'm still thinking through links between Christology and the doctrine of revelation as it applies to the psalms. Comments on that specifically very welcome.

But I sometimes think that we're so caught up with what the question is that we forget we're all agreeing on the beautiful answer that every child in Sunday School can give us: Jesus!

One touch from the King

I recently posted about several books, including One Touch From the King by Mark Stibbe. I said it takes a position on miraculous healing which is more balanced and pastorally helpful than most charismatics I've read. Pondering this more, I thought I'd have another flick through it and point out more pros & cons - comparing him relative to others I've read isn't a very helpful indicator! So here are some points, in no particular order:

Stibbe differentiates between gifts of healing (which he describes as gradual and/or partial) and miraculous healing (instananeous, total). He claims this distinction is implied from the fact these are listed separately, and the book is written about miracles, not gifts of healing. I'm not sure how much this is merited, but it makes the book's focus more clear.

The author's aim was to encourage us to seek God in faith. The book does this, and avoids the pitfall of making people feel guilty for lack of faith if they don't see healing, by emphasising that God is King - King of kings & Lord of lords - and is therefore sovereign over whether or not someone is healed, and over the timing. He has a chapter encouraging perseverence and patience with hope, which is helpful pastorally. This whole emphasis is often lacking in books which seek to encourage faith in God to heal - as if mentioning God's sovereignty or the need for endurance will decrease faith.

Another potential pitfall is that we can get so caught up in pursuit of the blatantly miraculous that we miss the more 'mundane' - and difficult! - ministry with which God calls us to serve the sick and hurting: ministries of mercy and compassion. Mark Stibbe has a chapter encouraging us to reach out to the sick in their pain and minister with compassion: commendable. My Mother visits the many elderly ladies of my parent's church in a nursing home (and hospitals) several times every week, checks their houses are ok, does their laundry, and sits chatting or in silence with them. I must say that I believe that the evidence of the power of the Spirit at work in his people is far clearer in this, with the community of God's people caring for one another, than in most healing meetings I've heard of or been in. So, commendable to encourage serving one another in compassion, in the long haul, and not only seeking miraculous 'fixes'.

Stibbe also notes that it is not always right to pray for healing: better sometimes to pray that God will enable his people to die well. This certainly rings true as I think of friends whose only desire was to depart and be with Christ. This present world had become too much for their bodies. So the author points out that Jesus left plenty of people dead, as well as raising the son of the widow from Nain. He also notes that miracles don't bring a pleasant life: that if we seek to see the Spirit's power, we may also expect to "experience a new appreciation of the Cross - both the message of the Cross and the marks of the Cross".

Having said that, I think some of his use of Scripture isn't good. He misunderstands the double healing in Mark 8, and takes it as a case of perseverence needed. Our Lord did not have God refuse his prayer! No, the context in which Luke places it show us that Jesus used this miracle to illustrate to his disciples (and Peter particularly) their need to see fully, as they grasp that he is Messiah, yet refuse him on what kind of Messiah he must be.

He rather abuses Elisha, by suggesting that unlike our Lord, Elisha didn't take the risk to have physical contact in compassion for Naaman, the gentile leper. It doesn't seem to occur to him that Elisha might have had good reason to humble Naaman before the Lord rather than meeting his expectations in the manner of healing! The record does not encourage us to criticise Elisha for a lack of compassion, but to rejoice in Naaman being humbled before God, and healed by His mercy.

There's at best a large hole in his use of Acts 4 & 5 - the church meet to pray for the Lord (vv.29-30):

"And now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus."

And Stibbe says this was answered in ch.5: "Now many signs and wonders were regularly done among the people by the hands of the apostles." But what do we see inbetween? Immediately after they pray, we're told,

"And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness."

Is this not the answer? And if we're looking for miracles, then the answer in ch.5 doesn't actually give Stibbe what he claims: the miracles in ch.5 are done by the apostles - not by all the church who'd been praying. This is not a large point, but Mark generalises to encourage us all to seek miracles, like the NT church: yet if the answer to the NT church was found in the miracles of the apostles, then the answers we expect may be different from what Stibbe describes.

That leads into my next query. Stibbe doesn't show that the "signs of the apostles" are to apply to the whole church today. Now, I can't see any indication in the NT that certain signs are expected to cease at any time before the parousia. But it does seem that there were signs of the apostles - given to confirm their word as God's word - e.g. 2 Cor 12.12, Heb 2.1-4 - which are referred to in the past tense in Hebrews. It seems that these gifts focussed round the ministry of the apostles to bear witness to apostolic preaching. This is not to say that God does not chose to do these things otherwise: merely that this seems to be the focus. So when Stibbe encourages us to an 'apostolic Christianity', I think he needs to do more work to show why we should expect to each be like an apostle! Perhaps he attempts this in his book Healing Today.

Stibbe says of his summary aim, at the beginning:

God can radically transform your situation with just one royal touch. A
moment of divine contact can bring an invasion of heaven into your world.

Of course I am aware that there are many who are still waiting and we will not evade the tough questions on the way, questions like, 'What happens when the King's touch is not experienced?' 'What happens when people are not healed and transformed instantly?' But my overriding desire is to encourage you to a new level of faith in the King's life-changing touch. My aim is to help raise your level of faith in the ability of the King of kings to touch your life.

In this aim, he succeeds to a certain extent. He would do better if he addressed those concerns I raised above. But if I were to pick on one thing to summarise, that would improve this book on healing and miracles, it is an explanation of the incoming of the Kingdom in the now, while pointing to the hope of the not yet. It is Romans 8. It would answer the question left begging by Stibbe's book: If God is sovereign, and can intervene so powerfully to transform the lives of his children, to bring 'an invasion of heaven into your world', then why does he not always do so? The answer of Romans 8 would seem to be that the indwelling presence and work of the Holy Spirit does indeed bring an invasion of heaven into us, and in us, into the world. This is experienced partially now, and completely later - the King would have us not only seeking his 'touch' now, but moreover, longing for his return. Now we see in a dark reflection, and we groan in these mortal bodies; then we will be like him, for we shall see him face to face, receive the final redemption of our bodies and be clothed in immortality. We witness to the world of the King and his Kingdom now by the Spirit who dwells in us, transforming us to be like Him, but all the more we long for his appearing. Come, Lord Jesus!

I much appreciated Sam Storm's succinct statement:

I believe healing is in the atonement in the same way I believe all spiritual and physical blessings are in the atonement. Were it not for the death and resurrection of Christ we would have nothing but the eternal damnation that we deserve. But not all such blessings are experienced in their fullness until the consummation of all things in the New Heaven and New Earth. This would certainly be true of the healing of the body.

Quote of the day: literally

Quote of the day today goes to my late Grandfather, on reading prophecy / apocalyptic "literally", and the sitting capacity of women. What he writes is true and (towards the end) made me chuckle out loud on the train back from Wolverhampton:

Revelation... is by and large a book of symbols. There is indeed what one may call didactic writing in it. For example, there are plain statements about the second advent. But the attempts to carry through a literal interpretation founder on the rock of the patently symbolic character of much of it. It is written in sign language for the most part. The bulk of it was communicated by visions. John was (literally 'became') in the Spirit on the Lord's day and the unseen world was opened to him and, as in a great drama, successive visions passed before his view.

Think of Peter's vision in Acts 10. Being in a trance, Peter saw a great sheet let down by the four corners, wherein were all manner of four-footed beasts and creeping things and birds. Peter, though slow at first, came to see that this vision was full of significance - preparing him to recognise that God was no respecter of persons and that He would freely receive Gentiles who believed, as well as believing Jews. So it is with the visions seen by John. If we take them literally, we are in grave danger of getting only the husk, while missing the kernel - the true meaning.

There are those who insist on taking a grossly literal view. The book bears on the very face of it a warning against such treatment. It speaks, for example, of "a woman sitting on seven mountains", but no female ever had such sitting capacity!

- W J Grier, The Momentous Event

Understanding dispensationalists

For a while I've been reading Poythress' Understanding Dispensationalists, because I didn't understand how an evangelical could have a dispensationalist hermeneutic given the gospel insistance on the eternal unity of Jews and Gentiles achieved in Christ outlined in Paul's letters. So, I thought, if I don't understand how a Christian can be dispensational, I clearly don't understand dispensationalism well enough. And Poythress' book is marvellous.

Clear and gracious, Poythress helped me understand dispensationalists (does what it says on the tin and all that). He thinks dispies and covenant theologians aren't as far off now as we think, and picks out a few key issues which challenge dispensational theology or call for more study.

At the risk of giving the impression that Poythress' study is as narrow as the following, I was then interested to be reminded of Stephen Sizer's IVP book Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon? by a friend who's going to be in the church Sizer pastors. I think I have it somewhere, but haven't read it yet. But I found he's got a few lectures of the same title summarising it here. Interesting stuff. I'm becoming increasingly convicted of the importance of historic theology, or studying theology in its chronological context, or knowing some of the history of the development of doctrine, hermeneutics, epistomology and so on. Sin so easily blinds us not only to certain areas in which we are currently wrong, or certain ways in which we each tend to sin according to a sinful personality, but also certain areas chronologically in which we are prone to error or sin different from those before and after us. We do well to read dead Christians and know the history of church & doctrine so to be corrected.

Which leads me nicely into what I'll study next, having dispensed with dispensationalism: Athanasius. I'm very excited.

Somewhat akin to eating cheese?

Don't read a review of NTWright before you go to bed. Not if your main task the next day is to study a Pauline epistle anyway.

I had set myself to Colossians. Sometime after I'd noted/marked themes and repeated ideas, Tchaikovsky's 1812 thundered to a conclusion from my (borrowed, ancient) laptop, leaving the sound of silence to fill the room. Dangerous. First of all I got distracted pondering why Paul calls Jesus 'Christ' almost every time throughout Colossians whereas in other letters he uses 'Jesus Christ/Christ Jesus' and in others a fairly good mixture of combinations of the words of Lord, Jesus and Christ. Having concluded from flicking through that there was no logical division I could see immediately to be made between those contexts in which one and another were used, I turned back to Colossians. I managed to further note some of the main arguments (the enthralling Spot the Conjunctions game) and applications being made (Spot the therefore/so + imperative) before, having noticed the argument to do with dying, being raised and living in Christ, my mind went off on one, and these scribblings appeared at the bottom of the page where I was making notes on Colossians:

Living in a metanarrative: covenantal (relational - God-centred; consequential)
Escatological, social, moral, cosmic (implications, hopes)
All realised focally in the Christ event: revealed as the interpretative lens: in Christ
We live this metanarrative in Christ
That is the interpretative framework because it is the realised framework: Christ's death and resurrection, according to the Scriptures, for our sins. That is the gospel. Not just his death but his death and resurrection, not just a philosophy of life but bound up in historical events; according to the Scriptures: not an invented interpretation of the death and resurrection, they come in context as the focal point / realisational point of the metanarrative; for our sins: without the substitution the death and resurrection do no good 'for us': we must be in Christ to live in his story, in him, in his death and resurrection, as he took our death...

I blame NT.

And back to Colossians.

Manuscript BS and pomo hermeneutic

The GBU last year used the Manuscript Bible Study method. We've moved this year to the (Observation, Interpretation, Application - same in French!) prepared questions method. Now, I had never really thought of MBS as bad - it just takes ages. In fact, I thought that I was using it in part in my Clifton SLOBS last year. That said, I don't think I've ever done a full MBS study. (With Clifton we used it with a suggested range of questions to consider until we arrived at a main teaching point and aim, and then went to suggested questions to use for the groups, because of time.) So I'd never considered what it actually is. My IFES team leaders here pointed out that what ends up being discussed is the points of the passage which most members find interesting. This may not be the emphasis of the passage. If the leader has prepared well, then it shouldn't be bad interpretation, but ultimately the group is in charge.

It struck me (acknowledging that I've been enjoying reading Vanhoozer's "Is there meaning in this text?") that this is essentially a postmodern hermeneutic: it dethrones the author (whether real or implied) and puts the reader in charge of meaning. Does the text itself have an intended meaning? Does it have an intended response?? These are rhetorical questions - responses would involve a dissertation the size of Vanhoozer's tome... but clearly the answer that MBS implies (even if it is used for better purposes) is that the reader is in charge of the text, its meaning, and the response. The author doesn't call for a response; rather, the reader responds to what the reader has decided of the text. Thus the reader conditions the text, rather than the text conditioning the reader.

As Christians, we have a resposability to be more careful readers than MBS allows/proscribes. We are made and redeemed to be in God's image: personal, communicating, responsable beings who act in covenant relationships with each other. We must be careful readers of each other's communication, and supremely careful readers of God's communication.

Of course, OIA questions don't guarantee this, but would seem to more carefully consider that there is an author with intended meaning and intended response.

(Vanhoozer's thesis is that text is coventantal communicative action. He has a lot more to say about it, and further logs may follow: I'm loving it! There's a lot more to consider about how much the response produced is part of the meaning too, and to what extent the author is responsable for responses - I hope he'll say more in what I haven't yet read. That also has implications for the proposed UK law on incitement to religious hatred: none of us act as if deconstruction is true, but as if we are creatures of real communicative action!)