Recently, an article came to my attention that seeks to challenge one of the arguments in my favorite book on hermeneutics “Deep Exegesis.”  The author did a good job of taking Peter Leithart to task on some important hermeneutical points.  However, I believe that he ignored Leithart’s context.  First, he ignored the immediate context of what he was actually citing.  Further, he did not demonstrate awareness of the perspective through which Leithart was writing.  Ultimately, the author over-estimated the category mistakes that Leithart had supposedly made.  In this way, his points did not actually land.

There are two primary points that Don Collett makes: Leithart does not make a distinction between historical events and cognitive acts.  Further, Leithart loses the providence of God by arguing that historical acts become prophetic acts.

  • Cognitive Acts vs. Historical Acts

Collett’s first point is actually the poorer.  In his book, Leithart argued that events change over time.  An event happens such as a shooting.  That evening the victim of the shooting dies and the event becomes an assassination.  Collett argues that Leithart has not drawn a careful distinction between a cognitive event and a historical event.  The historical event is what happened.  The cognitive event is how it was conceived.  The historical event cannot be changed, while the cognitive event can be changed. He argues that logically Leithart would have to hold that a shooting could become a healing if the victim of a shooting were healed.

However, Leithart does make a distinction.  It is not Collet’s distinction.  My guess is that Leithart would not hold to Collet’s distinction because historical events are inevitably cognitive.  Leithart likely conceives of history as an art rather than a bare recitation of facts.  Leithart makes a distinction between skeletal events and thick events (Deep Exegesis, 219, note 12).

There is something real about the skeletal event, One man pulled a trigger on a gun, a bullet came out, and entered another man’s body.  The skeletal event is fixed.  In fact, Leithart later tells us “texts are fixed” (Deep Exegesis, 44).  Since his chapter is titled texts are events, we can easily see that Leithart conceives the “skeletal events” as fixed well. Events more regularly conceived of are not fixed.  As soon as you call that “skeletal event” a shooting, it has become cognitive.  You are interpreting the skeletal event and giving it meaning.  The skeletal event itself does not have inherent meaning until it finds its place as an event in a story.  Behind Leithart’s thought, there seems to be a distinction between fact and event. Facts are external.  Events are inherently cognitive.

I would argue that Collet is better off arguing that his distinction is better than Leithart’s rather than arguing that Leithart is not careful in distinguishing things.  There may, for example, be more clarity to Collet’s distinction.

  • A prophetic Old Testament?

Collett goes on to target Leithart’s understanding of the relation of the Old Testament to the New Testament.  He argues that Leithart’s understanding that events are changed per se or ontologically by future events, undermines an understanding of the Old Testament as prophecy. Originally the Old Testament was not prophecy (at least the parts that are not explicitly prophetic) and later, in Christ, the works and words of the Old Testament characters became prophetic.

Here Collett makes a category mistake of his own.  He doesn’t distinguish between the time-bound and the timeless.  God, of course, ordered the events of the Old Testament so that they prophesied of Christ.  God, who knows all things and decrees all things, caused them to be written in Holy Scripture as a witness to Christ.

In time things become.  In a certain sense, my two-year-old self was a prophecy of my twenty-nine-year-old self.  I also became my 29-year old self.  This is because I experience becoming, whereas God has access to all parts of my life.  He can see and ordain the order so that the pattern of my life makes logical sense. I can only see (or realistically my parents can only see) what was prophetic in my two-year-old self now that I am 29.  Through time God taught his people to see his entire word as prophetic so that when Christ did come, they would see that it had already been foretold.

Collett does not recognize the perspective through which Leithart is working.  He is not seeking to resolve the question of whether there is a spiritual sense in Old Testament scriptures in this chapter.   Leithart is working to understanding history, times, events, and texts. He is trying to understand how mankind interacts with these things; how meaning works.  Ultimately, he is working out a theory of how all events and texts work, not just biblical texts; then he applies it to scripture.   Leithart is doing sociology. Collett is applying a debate to Leithart’s work that Leithart was not writing for. Leithart is not seeking to answer Collett’s set of questions.

Of course from God’s perspective, the Old Testament always was a prophecy of Christ.  It takes time to become so in history.  Through the scriptures that were given, Jews did figure out that there was something more coming. The time of Christ was a time of expectation. They knew a Messiah was coming.  But the disciples didn’t know that scripture spoke of Christ specifically until the saw the specific works of Christ. They understood that the Old Testament was prophetic.  It didn’t become prophecy of Christ until Christ had done on the cross; even though it was already prophetic of that specific moment because of God’s decree.

God’s knowledge is full and whatever he says, he knows the full meaning long before that is realized.  Our knowledge is partial.  Leithart is focussing on our conception of meaning in time.  He doesn’t imagine that he has access to God’s conception of events, except as far as God has revealed it in his word.

Ultimately, I don’t know if represented Collett or Leithart perfectly in this little blog piece.  I have tried to be fair.  However, as I have mulled over Collett’s piece, I do believe he misses the mark.  He is working with a different framework than Leithart.  Once he recognizes that, he will strengthen his interactions with Leithart’s work.  As I mentioned at the beginning, I find Leithart’s account very compelling and so far I find very little to complain about it.