Category: Weblog

  • Canonical Development*

    In the second and third centuries, the church worked under several different hermeneutical constraints, including: canonical development, community boundary definition (vis-à-vis Judaism, Paganism, and heretical, “Christian” sects), and hermeneutical method. Although this period of biblical interpretation has long been closed, being aware of the natures of these respective constraints can help us understand the early…

  • Messages in Communication

    Texts are artifacts insofar as they are products of constructive processes and are ontologically distinct from their authors (Barton 159). Thus, respecting how readers encounter texts, Derrida correctly says that “there is nothing outside the text” (Caputo 80; cf. Barton 220). That is, readers only directly encounter the text, not its “meaning,” the author’s “intention,”…