Catholics on the question of justifi cation. I was pleased that one of the fi rst
persons I met at the Society for Pentecostal Studies meeting was an ecu-
menical representative from a Mennonite denomination as part of an
ongoing conversation.
- Gadamer, Truth and Method , 296, “ Daher ist Verstehen kein nur reproduc-
tives, sondern stets auch ein productives Verhalten .”
- Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences , ed. and trans. John
B. Thompson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 201.
- Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology , trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158.
- See my “Kierkegaard and the Anxiety of Authorship,” in The Death and
Resurrection of the Author? , ed. William Irwin (Westport, CT: Greenwood,
2002), 23–43.
- Examples of his anxiety about a supposed “anything goes” relativism from
his Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1967) are given in Whose Community? Which Interpretation? 48–49.
- Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation , 249.
- Ricoeur also writes, “If it is true that there is always more than one way of
construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal ... The text
is a limited fi eld of possible constructions,” Hermeneutics and the Human
Sciences , 213. “Mary had a little lamb” might mean “Mary owned a little
lamb,” or “Mary’s parents owned a little lamb that she made into her pet,”
or “Mary, in an incident that belongs in a horror movie, gave birth to a
lamb,” or “Mary was a grifter who pulled a con on a child who was entirely
‘had’ by it.” But it couldn’t mean that the Cubs would fi nally win the
World Series.
- I love the collect for the fi fth Sunday in Lent in the Book of Common Prayer ,
which says, “Grant your people grace to love what you command and
desire what you promise; that among the swift and varied changes of the
world, our hearts may surely there be fi xed where true joys are to be
found.”
- Wolterstorff is critical of Ricoeur and Derrida in ways I fi nd unnecessary.
- Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Refl ections on the
Claim That God Speaks (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
- April may be the cruelest month, but for children at least, December is by
far the longest.
- Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse , 55.
- New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014.
- N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
2013), 569.
- On the notion of apostolic authority, see Kierkegaard’s essay, “The
Difference between a Genius and an Apostle,” in Without Authority , trans.
SPIRIT AND PREJUDICE: THE DIALECTIC OF INTERPRETATION 31
