Exegetical Fallacies - D. A. Carson

only unnecessary, but also self-contradictory; for the authors of such views expect us to understand the
meaning of their articles!
More sophisticated writers understand that the hermeneutical circle is not vicious: ideally, it is more
of a hermeneutical spiral. The interpreter can get closer and closer to the meaning of the text (as the writer
of that text intended it), until he or she really has grasped it truly, even if not exhaustively. Such writers
deny that a text is cut free from its author as soon as it is written or published: it is always right and valid
to ask what the author of the text intended as judged by the indications in the text itself.
In some kinds of literature, of course, there may be a kind of polysemy that reflects authorial intent:
for example, an aphorism may be designed by its creator to convey truth at several different levels. But
such examples do not cut the text off from the author.
Whatever the problems raised by the new hermeneutic, we have learned much from these
developments. In particular, we have been forced to recognize that distanciation is an important part of
coming to grips with any text: the interpreter must "distance" his or her own horizon of understanding from
that of the text. When the differences are more clearly perceived, then it becomes possible to approach the
text with greater sensitivity than would otherwise be the case. F. F. Bruce recounts an amusing story of a
Christian who did not know anything of distanciation. Apparently this brother, a fisherman, once gave an
explanation of why the disciples caught nothing after fishing all night (John 21:3). "They should have
known better than to expect anything. We are told that they had with them the two sons of Zebedee. These
were the men whom Jesus called the 'sons of thunder,' and it is a fact well known to all fishermen that
when there is any thunder in the atmosphere, the fish bury their heads in the sea-bed, and it is impossible
to catch any." 3
In one sense, I have already raised such problems in another guise. In chapter 3, fallacy 5 was
labeled "world-view confusion." My focus there was on the logical difficulties involved in reading into
the text one's own experiences and concepts; but the same illustrations could be recast to point out these
larger problems of presupposition. There are other entries in this chapter that overlap somewhat with
entries in the preceding chapter, but I shall try to draw attention to somewhat different phenomena.
If it is true that the new hermeneutic can teach us to be careful and self-conscious about our
limitations and prejudices when we approach the Word of God, we will profit greatly; but it will harm us
if it serves as a ground for the relativizing of all opinion about what Scripture is saying. I do not know
what biblical authority means, nor even what submission to the lordship of Jesus Christ means, if we are
unprepared to bend our opinions, values, and mental structures to what the Bible says, to what Jesus
teaches. There may be differences of opinion about what the Bible is in fact saying, differences that can
sometimes be resolved with humble interaction and much time; but among Christians there should be little
excuse for ignoring or avoiding what the Bible has to say, on the false grounds that knowledge of
objective truth is impossible.
More recently, the "new hermeneutic" has been displaced in many circles by "radical hermeneutics."
With complex roots in linguistics and structuralism, radical hermeneutics has fostered an array of
interpretive approaches (the best known of which is deconstruction) that are grounded in postmodern
epistemology. Rejecting "modern" epistemology with its insistence on foundations and proper method,
postmodernists, sometimes on highly sophisticated grounds, argue that there are no secure foundations,