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eBook details

• Title: Meaning and Law (Critical Notes)
• Author : Journal of Biblical Literature
• Release Date : January 22, 1998
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 167 KB

Description

When Paul uses the word [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] in, say, Rom 3:27 [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] or 7:23c ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]), what does he mean by it? This is a notorious problem. Virtually everyone agrees that in a passage like Rom 7:14 ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]), [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] means the Mosaic law, or perhaps all of scripture, and most accept the same sense in at least the great majority of the places where Paul uses the term. The consensus breaks down on Rom 3:27 and 7:23c, however, as on other passages where Paul uses [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] with an accompanying noun in the genitive case; Rom 7:21 ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]) and 7:23a ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]) are also problems. Some hold the link with Mosaic law to be so thoroughly established in Paul's general usage that it governs these passages also; thus Paul Achtemeier writes that [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] is "the torah understood as having as its chief characteristic that of trust," and James Dunn that [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] is "the law [as] used by sin to bring about death, as already explained in [Rom 7:]11-13." (1) But others disagree: Ernst Kasemann, for instance, takes [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] to be "the rule, order, or norm of faith," and [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] to be "the power of sin." (2) Perhaps progress can be made here by attending to some concepts drawn from the study of semantics. To begin with, there is the question of what we mean by "meaning"; in fact, we mean different things by it, and some of the confusion over Paul's meaning can be traced to confusion over "meaning" itself. In his standard treatise on semantics, John Lyons distinguishes three concepts: reference, sense, and denotation. (3) For our purposes the most important distinction (often neglected in discussions of Paul's use of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]) is that which separates reference from both sense and denotation. Sense and denotation are functions of a term's lexical meaning--what one would expect to find in its dictionary entry--and are independent of any particular context in which the term is used. Reference, however, exists only in context. Reference is the link between words and what a particular writer (or speaker) is talking about on a particular occasion. If I say, "The man in the corner took my hat," then "the man in the corner" refers to the man in the corner--one particular man, who, in the context in which I speak, is presumably identifiable. I might have said "that man," or "the man," or even "he," all referring to the same man; something in the context (the previous sentence, or a gesture) would have to clarify who that is. I could also have said "that kleptomaniac in the blue shirt": different words, different sense and denotation, same reference.

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