The Sermon on the Mount is the primary prooftext for Christian pacifists. In my reading, a neglected consideration is the fact that hyperbole is a fixture of Christ's pedagogy. You find that throughout the Gospels as well as the Sermon on the Mount in particular. This doesn't mean we can impute hyperbole willy-nilly to whatever Jesus said. But it's something we must make allowance for. In some cases, hyperbolic is overt, but in other cases it's just understood. Take Christ's blanket statements about prayer promises. So we can't automatically take everything Jesus says at face value. There's no presumption in the abstract that the statements of Jesus on any particular occasions are or are not hyperbolic. But in some cases we may not be able to settle the question.
No comments:
Post a Comment