Thanks Jeremy,
Indeed a very long article, but very informative. Hadn't seen it articulated this way before but it seems obvious enough even to us average Joe's.
InigoMontoya, you probably stopped just short of where the author was going as it relates to judging, something sorely missing these days.
A related item; Been siting on this for a few days, hoping it would come up on Christianity Today's site, not as of yet, will link back to it if it does, but here is an excerpt:
From 'Truth' on Two Hills Bob Wenz
([i]He starts out discussing two primary issues, one, the stalemate over presidential nominations and secondly, the recent upholding of a practicing homosexual as a bishop in the Episcopal Church[/i])
"...the two stories are closely linked- and much more so than appears on the surface.
The key to understanding the connection is found in the appendix of a new book on preaching. Dr. Walter Kaiser, president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, writes: "In my judgment, the most dramatic moment in the entire 20th century came in 1946 when W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published their article 'The International Fallacy' in [i]"The Sewanee Review"[/i] ([i]Preaching and Teaching from the Old Testament,[/i] Baker 2003).
Wimsatt and Beardsley, according to Kaiser's summary, taught that "whatever an author may have meant or intended to say by his or her written words is now irrelevant to the meanings we have come to assign as the meaning we see in the author's text. On this basis, the reader is the one who sets the meaning for the text." Also called "formalist criticism," this school argued, in short, that paying attention to the author's intentions is a fallacy.
I first encountered the idea 30 years ago - not in a philosophy class but in a graduate class on literary interpretation. This idea came through a professor who had been "infected" by her doctoral committee chairperson, who in turn had been influenced by literary critic Kenneth Burke. Twenty - five years after it was first presented, formalist criticism's hostility toward an author's intention had spread to many of the colleges that would educate the baby-boomer generation.
Now, a half-century since it first was proclaimed, the Wimsatt-Beardsley doctrine, along with its children, is so widely accepted that it has tainted nearly all major social institutions- even the church.
...The professor who introduced me to this odious doctrine gave us a midterm examination. In order to express my disdain for the concept, I simply wrote an answer to a totally different question than she had asked. I got a zero on the question, of course, and used a follow-up visit to her office to challenge her doctrine of intentional fallacy. She told me I had not answered the question she wrote. I responded that once she had written the question, I had no need to determine what she -the author- originally intended. I had interpreted the question as I had wanted. Trying to determine what she had intended by the question, I argued, was a fallacy."
(From the latest issue of CT July 2004) __________________________________
He goes on to spell out all the ramifications of this reasoning in both the world and the church. All of this looks as we are fast approaching a time of being 'Left Behind', those of us that will cling to the Word of God that is. In fact we are already considered 'dinasours'...
_________________ Mike Balog
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