Exegetical Fallacies Quotes

“More than two decades ago, Frank Stagg wrote an article about “The Abused Aorist.”[3] The problem as he saw it was that competent scholars were deducing from the presence of an aorist verb that the action in question was “once for all” or “completed.” The problem arises in part because the aorist is often described as the punctiliar tense. Careful grammarians, of course, operating within the traditional categories, understood and explained that this does not mean the aorist could be used only for point actions. The aorist, after all, is well-named: it is aorist, without a place, undefined. It simply refers to the action itself without specifying whether the action is unique, repeated, ingressive, instantaneous, past, or accomplished.”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“La filología es el ojo de la aguja a través del cual debe pasar todo camello teológico para entrar en el cielo de la teología”2.”
― Donald A. Carson, Falacias exegéticas: Interpretación eficaz hoy

“Si cometemos un error al interpretar una de las obras de Shakespeare, o no medimos bien un verso de Spencer, es poco probable que esto acarree consecuencias eternas; pero no podemos aceptar una negligencia semejante en la interpretación de las Escrituras. Estamos hablando de los pensamientos de Dios: estamos obligados a hacer todo lo posible para entenderlos bien y explicarlos con claridad.”
― Donald A. Carson, Falacias exegéticas: Interpretación eficaz hoy

“los que están convencidos de la importancia de la buena hermenéutica muchas veces no la practican bien.”
― Donald A. Carson, Falacias exegéticas: Interpretación eficaz hoy

“debemos interpretar la Biblia de acuerdo a los principios reconocidos de la lengua y el habla.”
― Donald A. Carson, Falacias exegéticas: Interpretación eficaz hoy

“A little self-doubt will do no harm and may do a great deal of good: we will be more open to learn and correct our mistakes. But too much will shackle and stifle us with deep insecurities and make us so much aware of methods that we may overlook truth itself.”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“This does not mean real knowledge is impossible. Rather, it means that real knowledge is close to impossible if we fail to recognize our own assumptions, questions, interests, and biases; but if we recognize them and, in dialogue with the text, seek to make allowances for them, we will be better able to avoid confusing our own world-views with those of the biblical writers.”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“But the heart of the issue is that semantics, meaning, is more than the meaning of words.”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“False assumptions about technical meaning In this fallacy, an interpreter falsely assumes that a word always or nearly always has a certain technical meaning—a meaning usually derived either from a subset of the evidence or from the interpreter’s personal systematic theology.”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“But one should be suspicious of all statements about the nature of “the Hebrew mind” or “the Greek mind” if those statements are based on observations about the semantic limitations of words of the language in question.”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“we should be a trifle suspicious when any piece of exegesis tries to establish the meaning of a word by appealing first of all to its usage in classical Greek rather than to its usage in Hellenistic Greek.”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“In short, words change their meaning over time.”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“my point is that we cannot responsibly assume that etymology is related to meaning. We can only test the point by discovering the meaning of a word inductively.”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“I am simply saying that the meaning of a word cannot be reliably determined by etymology, or that a root, once discovered, always projects a certain semantic load onto any word that incorporates that root.”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“I state that exegesis is concerned with actually interpreting the text, whereas hermeneutics is concerned with the nature of the interpretative process.”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“The fundamental danger with all critical study of the Bible lies in what hermeneutical experts call distanciation. Distanciation is a necessary component of critical work; but it is difficult and sometimes costly.”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“but one that demands that we learn to move toward unanimity in the crucial business of thinking God’s thoughts after him. This, surely, is part of the discipline of loving God with our minds.”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“the remaining debates among those who hold a high view of Scripture will be exegetical and hermeneutical, nothing else.”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“The essence of all critical thought, in the best sense of that abused expression, is the justification of opinions. A critical interpretation of Scripture is one that has adequate justification—lexical, grammatical, cultural, theological, historical, geographical, or other justification.”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“We are dealing with God’s thoughts: we are obligated to take the greatest pains to understand them truly and to explain them clearly.”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“Many local Bible teachers and preachers have never been forced to confront alternative interpretations at full strength; and because they would lose a certain psychological security if they permitted their own questions, aroused by their own reading of Scripture, to come into full play, they are unlikely to throw over received traditions. But”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“It is all too easy to read the traditional interpretations we have received from others into the text of Scripture. Then we may unwittingly transfer the authority of Scripture to our traditional interpretations and invest them with a false, even an idolatrous, degree of certainty. Because”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies

“But tragic is the situation when the preacher or teacher is perpetually unaware of the blatant nonsense he utters, and of the consequent damage he inflicts on the church of God. Nor”
― D.A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies