There is an argument going on (which I’ve tasted but not kept up with) over whether one would derive the doctrine of the resurrection from Exodus 3.6 if Jesus hadn’t told us to. One of the questions involved is whether or not “grammatical-historical exegesis” gives us reliable results.

The problem with this is that there is no reason to assume that Jesus made all his premisses explicit in his argument. There only had to be one unstated premise in his argument that was acceptable to some onlookers (not necessarily the Saducees; their refusal to accept the premise may have been their public condemnation) for the argument to work perfectly.

I don’t know what this means for G-HE in general as a grand statement of principle, but as I often encounter it in practice, I think it demonstrates it to be more or less useless. What I find in professors often trying to train semi-Biblically-literate students who are going to seminary is a desire to “reign them in” and give them a careful method that will give them assured results in their interpreting a passage. This involves a demand to focus on the details of an argument and passage. But this is entirely arbitrary. Anyone reading this blog knows that most writers expect their readers to already know something. To expect the intended meaning of a text to depend on only the details within that text is to expect something untrue of all human communication.

Reigning in imaginations may stop certain kinds of errors, but it will simply encourage others.