arapahoepark
Puritan Board Post-Graduate
One of the recent threads discussed the ideas of multiple authors, redaction and OT Allis and that piqued my interest. I ended up coming across this article and was curious as to your thoughts, especially @iainduguid and @greenbaggins
In sum, he seems to argue that OT Allis wasn't consistent in his methodology by applying notions of later redactors to the Pentateuch but not to Isaiah. It is also argued that Allis is actually missing the nature of prophecy that the higher critical scholars were attempting to correct.
This certainly impacts the New Testament use of OT. Is there where the two readings and christotelic view comes from, where the NT authors are alleged to smatter proof texts irrespective of context? What of 'multiple fulfillments'?
Additionally, I have been reading a book that exegetes Genesis 2 that constantly refers to it as the second creation and to the author as the Yahwist, yet supposedly holds the Bible as still authoritative. If such redactors and authors are contradictory in their alleged beliefs and writings, doesn't the view of inspiration and authority break down into absurdity when pressed logically?
Thoughts in general on the article?
In sum, he seems to argue that OT Allis wasn't consistent in his methodology by applying notions of later redactors to the Pentateuch but not to Isaiah. It is also argued that Allis is actually missing the nature of prophecy that the higher critical scholars were attempting to correct.
H. H. Rowley criticized Allis in a 1951 review: “The author completely ignores the nature of the argument for Deutero-Isaiah, which is that here we do not have a prophet’s announcement to an eighth century [sic] audience of things that should be in the distant future, but that we have a prophet’s assumption that he and his hearers are in a sixth century [sic] background.”44 Many of the critics were not concerned with the question of whether the prophets could predict the future by divine inspiration, but rather whether the prophets would predict the future, especially in a manner that seemed to disregard their contemporary situation
Ridderbos is then quoted right after:Since only God could know the future in such detail, to demur that the prophet offered such a view of the future obscured and therefore denied the supernatural element. Allis failed to ask what it means that “Isaiah was intended for a particular readership (Israel) but that its message had non-Israelite implications (for ‘the nations’).”46 It seems necessary on Allis’s view to say that prediction held little significance for the prophet’s own generation, particularly since the present generation would never be able to apply the prophetic test of Deut 18:21: “When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken presumptuously.” Ironically, this tends to sever the significance of the prophet’s words for his own generation from the significance for later generations—exactly what Allis accused the critics of doing. Finally, Allis’s assumptions are also partly grounded in what we might call a “mechanistic view” of prophecy in general and of prediction in particular. Allis assumed that prediction must have an “obvious sense”: objective,non-metaphorical, and well-defined.47 This may be a consequence of the realist-empirical atmosphere at Princeton, which also tended to view historical writing as an objective collection of facts. The critical question was also partially a genre question, which Allis neglected to address because of this assumption.
So it seems that the question revolves around the nature of prophecy. Surely, we all agree that context is king yet, isn't the idea that the prophets are only forthtelling for their generation, as opposed to foretelling, basically a denial latter, especially in the NT?The function of prophecy is consequently not that of a detailed projection of the future, but is the urgent insistence on the certainty of the things to come. . . . Just as the time of the future is ultimately contracted to one point, so the worldspace is to him [the prophet] a totality and not an accurately differentiated magnitude. We see that the prophets paint the future with the palette of their own experience and project the picture within their own geographical horizon
This certainly impacts the New Testament use of OT. Is there where the two readings and christotelic view comes from, where the NT authors are alleged to smatter proof texts irrespective of context? What of 'multiple fulfillments'?
Additionally, I have been reading a book that exegetes Genesis 2 that constantly refers to it as the second creation and to the author as the Yahwist, yet supposedly holds the Bible as still authoritative. If such redactors and authors are contradictory in their alleged beliefs and writings, doesn't the view of inspiration and authority break down into absurdity when pressed logically?
Thoughts in general on the article?
Last edited: