I really wanted to like this book! This book was handed to me by a true prayer warrior, a woman in one of my churches that really spends serious time in prayer. I had great hopes for this book because of this.
However, I am really disappointed with this book. I found Sheets' style to be inauthentic and "preachy." It didn't feel real or vulnerable to me. Nearly every anecdote that is shared about prayer is miraculous and incredible in some way. Never is there a serious wrestling with unanswered prayer. Overall, if your prayers go unanswered it feels that Sheets' answer for you is that you are doing it wrong.
Sheets' also demonstrates an overall ignorance of biblical Greek and Hebrew. The only scholarly works cited are lexicons and concordances and not a single biblical commentary is mentioned for any passage he discusses. Sheets' does know his way around a Greek or Hebrew lexicon and Webster's Dictionary. Unfortunately this leads him down the path of many Exegetical Fallacies.
The most common fallacy of Sheets' is defined by D.A. Carson as "unwarranted adoption of an expanded semantic field." The following is what Carson means:
The fallacy in this instance lies in the supposition that the meaning of a word in a specific context is much broader than the context itself allows and may bring with it the word's entire semantic range. Exegetical Fallacies, p. 60.Sheets' regularly brings to bear the word's entire semantic range even if the context does not allow this.
Another fallacy Sheets' falls into is "semantic anachronism".
This fallacy occurs when a late use of a word is read back into earlier literature. At the simplest level, it occurs within the same language, as when the Greek early church fathers use a word in a manner not demonstrably envisaged by the New Testament writers...But the problem has a second face when we also add a change of language. Our word dynamite is etymologically derived from dynamis (power, or even miracle). I do not know how many times I have heard preachers offer some such rendering of Romans 1:16 as this: "I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the dynamite of God unto salvation for everyone who believes" -- often with a knowing tilt of the head, as if something profound or even esoteric has been uttered. This is not just the old root fallacy revisited. It is worse: it is an appeal to a kind of reverse etymology, the root fallacy compounded by anachronism. Did Paul think of dynamite when he penned this word? Exegetical Fallacies, pp. 33-34
He probably didn't, seeing that dynamite had not yet been invented!
But here is another pastor committing this same fallacy! Sheets on pages 169-170 says,
On the other hand, we have weapons that are "divinely powerful" to pull down strongholds, if we would only realize it...The word "powerful" is dunatos and is actually one of the New Testament words for a miracle...And, of course, this is the Greek word from which we get the word dynamite. This stuff is explosive!
This dynamite is explosive for the "destruction of fortresses"...
Sadly and obviously these are not the word pictures the New Testament writers had in mind as they had no experience or understanding of dynamite.
I'll let Carson have the last word, as I believe many popular level books consumed by Christians are full of these "word-study fallacies":
But as important as word studies are, it is very doubtful if profound understanding of any text or of any theme is really possible by word studies alone.
Perhaps the principal reason why word studies constitute a particularly rich source for exegetical fallacies is that many preachers and Bible teachers know Greek only well enough to use concordances, or perhaps a little more. There is little feel for Greek as a language; and so there is a temptation to display what has been learned in study, which as often as not is a great deal of lexical information without the restraining influence of context. The solution, of course, is to learn more Greek, not less, and to gain at least a rudimentary knowledge of linguistics. Exegetical Fallacies, p. 64
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