Part Two The Angel and the Beast We are now in a position to look at the angel of the bottomless pit. Here is the principal (some say only) verse referring to him: And they had as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, but in Greek he has the name Apollyon. – Rev. 9:11 The first thing to notice is that in contrast to the fairly detailed descriptions of the demonic locusts in verses …
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Part One 4. The smoke from the pit darkens an already darkened sun. When I say “an already darkened sun” I do so because of Revelation 8:12: Then the fourth angel sounded: And a third of the sun was struck, a third of the moon, and a third of the stars, so that a third of them were darkened. A third of the day did not shine, and likewise the night. Here the sun is already greatly affected when the …
There are some Bible passages that pose peculiar challenges to interpreters. These passages confront us with revelations of weirdness. We are faced with accepting and exploring this weird side of Scripture, or else with smoothing it over, perhaps by not actually dealing with it, but instead just pretending it is obscure, and on that basis, moving on. Episodes that qualify to be on the list of weird passages would include Genesis 6:1-4 and Joshua 10:11-14, but many could be added. …
Part Three Speech-Act Theory and Biblical Interpretation On a more positive note overall is the matter of whether language is merely descriptive or whether it can be said to actually do something. This gets us into the subject of language as “speech-acts.” This view has been defined as follows: Speech-act theory is a set of pragmatically based principles that were developed at the edge of philosophy and linguistics. The major assumption is that language is not so much concerned with saying …
Part Two Ricoeur Alongside Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur (d. 2005) stands as the most important philosopher of hermeneutics in the last hundred years. His work is often to be found discussed in evangelical circles today, and for that reason we shall devote a little more space to his work. Ricoeur is concerned with how language is used not with how it is structured.[53] As human existence is communicated through language, the study of the use of language is, therefore, the study …
I made a bit of a hash of the initial post on this because I was in a rush. Here is an extended and revised version (which is what I should have posted). It questions the third essential of Ryrie’s proposed sine qua non. The picture of history that is constructed comes from the base of consistently applied principles of grammatico-historical (G-H) hermeneutics.[i] The Bible is to read as one would read any other book. The presupposition here is not …
Part One Footnotes follow on from last time. The Hermeneutical Landscape The philosopher of religion Gregory Clark admits that, “[some] sources regularly describe the variety of hermeneutical approaches practiced today as ‘dizzying’.”[22] In closing his article Clark writes: “Hermeneutics as a discipline is as wild and woolly as it has ever been, and its future shape and even its existence are impossible to predict.”[23] Reading the “movers and shakers” in evangelical hermeneutics today is a little foreboding. It might be …
The Olivet Discourse has been a battleground for interpreters from the various schools of eschatology for aeons. Even futurist premillennial writers offer different opinions on the passage. Nothing is going to be solved for everyone here, but I do want to call attention to the way that Jesus introduces two themes and later comes back to them again. If we allow that the Lord is referring to these themes by recapitulating them in His discourse then we have a helpful …
I am convinced that the Book of Revelation ought to be interpreted as a prophecy and that its numbers and symbols have identifiable referents either close by or in other Books of the Bible. I have therefore given a list of works espousing the Dispensational point of view. Not that non-Dispensational writers aren’t useful, but accuracy of interpretation must come first. I have made note also of some non-dispensational works. Robert Thomas (2 Vols) – This is Thomas’s most …
A review of If I Had Lunch with C. S. Lewis: Explaining the Ideas of C. S. Lewis on the Meaning of Life, by Alister McGrath, Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2014, 241 pages, hdbk. C. S. Lewis is an endlessly fascinating person. He was an Oxford Don with few equals as an intellectual. Anyone who is familiar with the three volumes of Letters is well aware that they are reading the correspondence of a man who had read (and …
