As I slog through my dissertation, which is basically a word study on "righteousness," I sometimes feel the tedium of word studies. But the following quote cheered me up.
In his Firth Lectures of 1962, Bishop Stephen Neill, has just been discussing James Barr's influential 1961 book, The Semantics of Biblical Language, a book that has greatly influenced me and my interest in biblical lexicography, and thus directly contributed to my decision to pick "the righteousness of God" as my dissertation topic. "In the year 1961," writes Neill, "a large stone was thrown with great violence into the calm pool of Biblical studies" by the publication of this book. Barr had exposed some of the faulty linguistic assumptions behind one of the pillars of biblical scholarship, Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament.
After summarizing Barr's critique of Kittel, Neill writes:
"It may seem that this chapter has come down with a sudden bump from the hills to the plains. We were considering the highest flights of New Testament understanding and now we have come back to words -- to the details of linguistic theory, of grammar, and of syntax -- subjects that many readers will feel glad to have left behind in their schooldays. But is that really a come-down? Is it not simply a frank recognition of the nature of the revelation which is there in the Bible? 'We have this treasure in earthen vessels', says St. Paul of his own ministry; by analogy the same phrase can be used of the Scriptures. If revelation comes to us as the Word of God, it can come only through words; every word has its history, it is related to other words, it stands somewhere in a complex linguistic structure. Words, as we said, are not solid objects like marbles; they are flexible, always changing their meanings and their connotations, difficult to seize in their integrity, always a little recalcitrant in the hands of the one who uses them. Try as we will we cannot get away from the words, in themselves, and in those subtle grammatical structures that build up sentences and paragraphs and books. In theology no one renders us more valuable service than the scholar who helps us to understand the words better, who guides us through the subtleties of idiom, who heads us off from the blind alleys of false etymology or false interpretation of usage. For him the work may be tedious -- for those who profit by his labours the results may be illuminating in the extreme."
[Stephen Neill, The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861--1961: The Firth Lectures, 1962 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 334-35. Yes, I know there is a Second Edition published in 1988, in which N. T. Wright provided an update of NT scholarship up to 1986. But I prefer the original edition; that way I can enjoy the older Bishop's writing unalloyed by the "newer perspectives" of the younger Bishop.]
Anyway, I enjoyed that quote. There does seem to be a general sense that word studies are just not that important or helpful. It is often said that word studies, philology, and grammatical exegesis can't resolve this or that debate, that we have to engage in broader historical, philosophical, and theological analyses. But I think Neill is right: "Try as we will we cannot get away from the words, in themselves." The work may be tedious, but ultimately there is no other route to grasping the meaning of God's word.
Some additional links on Stephen Neill:
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