Bruce Alderman

2,347 reputation

722

bio	website	brucealderman.info
	location	Kansas
	age	44
visits	member for	1 year, 7 months
	seen	yesterday
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I've been a Christian since 1985, and a member of East Heights United Methodist Church in Wichita since 1994. My theology is Wesleyan/Arminian, but I don't think all Christians must share this view.

I believe that the Bible is inspired but not inerrant, that it was written to teach us about God and not the physical universe.

I believe faith is not an intellectual pursuit but a transformation of our entire being.

	2,347 reputation	bio	website	brucealderman.info	visits	member for	1 year, 7 months
722 badges		location	Kansas		seen	yesterday

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Oct 27	revised	Is there a scriptural warrant for the literal-historical approach? clarified that I am not setting interpretive principle against each other
Oct 27	comment	Is there a scriptural warrant for the literal-historical approach? Sorry, I didn't mean to come across as advocating excluding literal methods. I'm only trying to exclude the view that each scripture passage can have at most one meaning, and that it cannot mean anything other than the surface-level meaning of the words unless the passage itself explicitly says otherwise. I'll try to edit my answer to clarify.
Oct 26	asked	What are higher and lower criticism?
Oct 26	comment	Redaction criticism and grammatical-historical hermeneutics For example, Isaiah 45, which mentions Cyrus the Great as God's "anointed" who would free Israel from captivity, is believed by most critical scholars to have been written during that captivity.
Oct 26	awarded	Commentator
Oct 26	comment	Redaction criticism and grammatical-historical hermeneutics And I don't think this statement is accurate: "If a prophesy is fulfilled, critics date the text as a whole to after the fulfillment." Most historical critics (as far as I've seen--I'm not an expert) tend to assume any prophecy will be fulfilled within a short time after being written, because historical criticism seeks the meaning of the text for the first readers.
Oct 26	comment	Redaction criticism and grammatical-historical hermeneutics Could you give some examples of how historical-grammatical "converges" where historical criticism "diverges"?
Oct 26	answered	Is there a scriptural warrant for the literal-historical approach?
Oct 26	comment	How does “Sensus Plenior” differ from Allegory, Gnosticism, Kaballah, and Midrash? I would just note that Christians have used allegory since before the church included Greeks. See, for example, Paul's allegorizing of the Sarah and Hagar in Galatians 4.
Oct 26	comment	Is there a scriptural warrant for the literal-historical approach? @Bob: Are you referring to Biblical literalism, as defined in the Wikipedia link? "Biblical literalists believe that, unless a passage is clearly intended as allegory, poetry, or some other genre, the Bible should be interpreted as literal statements by the author."
Oct 25	comment	Is there a scriptural warrant for the literal-historical approach? Meta discussion here: meta.hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/135/…
Oct 25	comment	Is there a scriptural warrant for the literal-historical approach? I'm going to start a discussion on meta about terminology, because as I understand it, these are all examples of allegorical interpretation.
Oct 25	awarded	Student
Oct 25	asked	What is the difference between historical-grammatical and historical criticism?
Oct 14	answered	Who is being “taken” in Matthew 24:40-41?
Oct 11	answered	The Eye of the Needle
Oct 6	awarded	Teacher
Oct 6	comment	Which 'modern' English translation of the Bible is considered the 'closest' or most accurate translation? There is a difference between "literal" and "accurate". If the literal order of the Greek or Hebrew words doesn't yield a sensible sentence in English, or if the original language contains an idiomatic expression, a direct word-for-word translation is less accurate than a translation that captures the meaning but loses the structure of the original.
Oct 6	answered	What is the “fourfold sense of Scripture”?
Oct 6	comment	Where does the “slippery slope” of allegorical interpretations start? It seems to me that you are making an unwarranted assumption that there is only one right meaning. Often a single passage has multiple meanings that can apply to different people in different times.