SBCOutpost

SBC Outpost regularly requests that Guest Authors provide articles for publication. Dr. Boyd Luter is writing in just such a capacity. Dr. Luter is Pastor of Comal Country Church (SBTC), Canyon Lake, TX and Adjunct Professor of New Testament and Theology at Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, Liberty University. He is a graduate of Mississippi State University and holds the Th.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Dallas Theological Seminary.

Dr. Luter has over 16 years of pastoral ministry experience in Colorado, Texas, California and Ohio. In addition, he has taught Bible and theology full-time for 15 years — most recently at the Criswell College, Dallas, TX, from 1999 to 2003 — and has also taught adjunctively for both Golden Gate and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminaries.

Luter has published eight books and 20 journal and periodical articles, in addition to his contributing chapters, entries and segments to a number of edited essay collections, biblical, theological and apologetics dictionaries, study Bibles and Bible translations and paraphrases. He has edited three commentaries for Christian Focus Publications’ Mentor series and has written a weekly religion column in a local newspaper for nearly seven years.

Way back toward the end of the last century — you remember: the decade or so leading up to Y2K — there was an intriguing issue about how to interpret the Bible that bled over into evangelical (including Southern Baptist) circles from the liberal sector. It was a debate between “authorial intent” and “reader response criticism” for the right to say “This is the proper anchoring point of interpretation.”For those not familiar with the terms, “authorial intent” is the view that a text means what the author intended for it to mean. By contrast, “reader response” holds that meaning is in the eye of the beholder, so to speak. In other words, a text can mean whatever the words can be stretched to mean.

Perhaps this sounds at least vaguely familiar, given that much the same battle had already been fought — and lost — in the realm of legal interpretation some half a century earlier. Instead of the “strict constructionist” view, which attempted to anchor interpretation of the U.S. Constitution in the intention of “the framers,” the Supreme Court became populated with those who chose to find “rights” in the broadest possible contemporary understanding of its words. The results of such a “reader response before reader response” approach to jurisprudence have been catastrophic (e.g., abortion on demand). Read the rest of this entry »