Tuesday 1 November 2016

Preterism and Audience-Relevance

Full-preterism seems to rely on always taking audience-relevance literally.
But in the Olivet discourse, Jesus was addressing only three of His disciples privately, not the entire AD70 generation directly...
He addressed these three disciples in the first person plural: "when ye see all these things come to pass"...
And yet He was speaking of things which neither of them lived to see, as far as we know.
(James was martyred early; according to tradition, Peter was martyred before AD70; and John, I don't know about for sure.)
So we seem to have a precedent here of Jesus addressing a specific audience and yet having a different, broader, future group of people in mind instead, or as well.

So as much as 'audience relevance' can be a valid hermeneutic, it's also a valid hermeneutic to concede that a statement's grammar alone isn't the only determiner of whether audience relevance was intended to be taken strictly literally or otherwise. There are other determiners.

Another determiner besides grammar could be 'the obvious'. For example, when Jesus said "when ye see", the meaning could be limited literally to His immediate audience, grammatically - but the obvious is that James was martyred soon afterwards and didn't live to see it. That's obvious! So the obvious helps qualify the intended meaning of the grammar. And visa versa.

I'm just saying full-preterism can be more narrow in its literalism than was intended. 

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