their grammatical construction. Thinking and promising and anticipating are going on
here. One attends to discourse meaning through grammar and through words. But one
misses the point if one attends solely to the grammar and the individual words.
less "meaning-focused." In natural languages "grammar" primarily denotes an apparently
finite, intellectually analyzable system of rules about constructing words and sentences
from simpler components. Grammar is limited--but meaning is not. We use the limited
resources of grammar. But on the level of meaning we talk about everything under the sun.
Meaning is so rich and complex as to be virtually intractable in comparison with grammar.
The label "grammatical" may be used synecdochally to stand for the whole. But I fear that,
as a label, it can also support the illusion that meaning can be "scientifically" mastered in
the same way that grammar apparently can.
a field that would be more rigorously tractable. Benefits and insights have resulted. But
in the process it is easy to lose sight of the fact that understanding human communication
includes understanding references in the world. Reference is usually excluded from
internal professional linguistic analysis, for the obvious reason that it is scientifically
intractable. And reference is not the only intractable problem. The functions of language
in the larger world are richer than what we capture in dictionaries or grammars or
discussions of reference.
what God all along had referred to in Genesis 3:15.
incalculabilities about what human writers may think and imagine. By contrast with the
writers, human readers are neither inspired nor infallible. But the Holy Spirit works
understanding in them, in what theologians call illumination. When we are reading the
Bible, do we control our own thoughts perfectly? No, because blasphemous thoughts may
peak out at us, in spite of our general conscious intention. Where do creative ideas come
from? What happens when a passage virtually leaps off the page and seems to address a
modern reader vigorously, directly, overwhelmingly? What happens, for example, when a
layman reads Genesis 3:15 and sees as if by immediate intuition that Christ is the seed of
the woman, who crushed Satan by his crucifixion and resurrection? Is this the meaning of
the text?
hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit when we are hearing the voice of our own desires, or
even a demonic voice (1 Tim 4:1-2). But then are we to go to the opposite extreme, and
maintain that the Spirit is present only when we are most rationally aware of the sources of