McKnight on Metaphor

Metaphor is more than ornamental decoration on a more fundamental propositional reality, more than a homey story in a sermon or a cleaver picture to illustrate a point.  Metaphors need not be stripped of their literary beauty to discover under them their propositional reality. Au contraire: metaphor is not a linguistic stage rehearsal but the performance itself. Anthony Thiselton claims in New Horizons in Hermeneutics: "Metaphor produces new possibilities of imagination and vision; narrative creates new configurations which structure individual or corporate experience."  Again, Thiselton: "If metaphor, therefore, present possibility rather than actuality it is arguable that metaphoric discourse can open up new understanding more readily than purely descriptive or scientific statement." The effect of seeing metaphor as possibility is that metaphors are not in need of decoding or unpacking but of indwelling. Said another way, by receiving the metaphor into the soul, the soul learns the reality. THus, we not only indwell the metaphor, the metaphor indwells us. The charitable, loving approach to a metaphor is to let it have its way with us, and only by surrendering to it does it yield its truth.

Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 37.

Deconstructionism

Five criticisms of deconstructionism from Thiselton:
1) If textual meaning is a community product, texts can never transform readers “from outside"
2) prophetic address has lost its power and in fact achieves the opposite, for its message is constructed by the very community it purports to address
3) notions like grace or revelation are illusions, since there are no givens
4) the “message of the cross” becomes no more than the “linguistic construct of a tradition”
5) nothing can ever be counted as error in the development of doctrine, for it is all little more than a social construct.

In Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 482.