Emotive Speech

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:36 pm By Peter Leithart

Ogden and Richards, whose triangle of signification (word, concept, reference) has had a significant impact in evangelical hermeneutics, begin their book on the “meaning of meaning” by acknowledging that words have other functions than referential, “which may be grouped together as emotive. These can best be examined when the framework of the problem of strict statement and intellectual communication has been set up.” They note that the reverse order would be appropriate if they were focusing on “popular or primitive... Read more

Unending lawsuit

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:50 pm By Peter Leithart

In his book, Liturgies and Trials , Richard Fenn writes, “The individual is perpetually facing judgment by abstract and impersonal criteria that are only partially revealed while always calling into question the individual’s own sense of worthiness . . . the theme of the ‘last judgment’ loses its theological framework, and the process of adjudication becomes as endless as it is inescapable.” Without “religious guarantees to secular speech,” the “trial never ends.” This is a burden too much to bear:... Read more

Justification and modern man

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:45 pm By Peter Leithart

In Arthur Miller’s After the Fall , a character says, “When you’re young, you prove how brave you are, or smart; when what a good lover; then a good father; finally how wise or powerful or what-the-hell-ever. But underlying it all, I see now, there was a presumption. That I was moving on an upward path toward some elevation where – God knows what – I would be justified, or even condemned – a verdict anyway. I think now that... Read more

Higher criticism

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:43 pm By Peter Leithart

I like J. Louis Martyn. His commentary on Galatians is a masterpiece, and the other essays I’ve read are all very stimulating. I begin with a disclaimer because what has been called Martyn’s “seminal proposal” concerning the gospel of John is remarkable mainly for the absence of evidence and argument. Martyn begins with the common critical assumption that the gospels tell us as much or more about the communities that produced them than about Jesus. On this assumption, he finds... Read more

Civilization of Word

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:49 pm By Peter Leithart

In the introduction to his Elements of Semiology (1964), Roland Barthes argues that for all the icons and images that surround us, we remain a civilization of the word: “Semiology has so far concerned itself with codes of no more than slight interest, such as the Highway Code; the moment we go on to systems where the sociological significance is more than superficial, we are once more confronted with language. it is true that objects, images and patterns of behaviour... Read more

Purity of heart

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:03 am By Peter Leithart

A pure heart is one that is not contaminated by base motives. It is a undivided heart. 50,000 of the sons of Zebulun were in David’s army, and they “could draw up in battle formation with all kinds of weapons of war and helped David with an undivided heart” (1 Chronicles 12:22). Purity of heart is a military virtue. Read more

Technical terms

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:56 pm By Peter Leithart

Samuel Johnson says that “all appropriated terms of art should be sunk in general expressions, because poetry is to speak a general language.” Barfield disagrees: “Johnson was hopelessly wrong.” (more…) Read more

Poetry v. science

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:04 am By Peter Leithart

Barfield thinks it’s disastrous to oppose poetry and science “as two fundamentally opposite modes of experiencing Life.” Among other things, it spoils art: “For it leads straight to that Crocean conception of art as meaningless emotion – as personal emotion symbolized – which is so poisonous in its charter to all kinds of posturing and conceited egotism.” Read more

Definition as Achievement

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:53 pm By Peter Leithart

Barfield responds to critics who charge that his attention to individual words “is a precious and dilettante kind of criticism.” He says “the reverse is the truth” and further argues that “Words whose meanings are relatively fixed and established, words which can be defined – words, that is, which are used with precisely the same connotation by different speakers – are results , they are things become . The arrangement and rearrangement of such univocal terms in a series of... Read more

Soul of words

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Guy de Maupassant says, “Les mots ont une ame . . . . Il faut trouver cette ame qui apparait au contact d’autres mots” (Words have a soul . . . . It is necessary to find this soul which appears at contact with other words). Owen Barfield, who quotes this passage, comments: “this ‘contact’ with other words is the precise point at which the potential new meaning originally enters language.” Which means that new meaning is always potentially entering... Read more