On People Who Wish Not to Be Bothered with the Facts (or, Don’t Mess with Moisés Silva)

Mike Aubrey reports that, much to his horror (and mine), someone found his blog through these vile search terms:

“moises silva liberal”

I know well, my gentle snowflakes, that no words can possibly express the tremendous horror produced by such ghastly (and indeed, hellish) lucubrations, produced as they are by sick and perverted minds. It is to Mr Aubrey’s credit, then, that he made some excellent (if brief) remarks concerning the wholly reprehensible practice of labeling scholars as “liberal” as a way to conveniently dismiss their work. To them I should only like to add a quote from the infallible Moisés Silva himself (depicted to the right in an artist’s rendering), taken from his Interpreting Galatians: Explorations in Exegetical Method, 2nd. ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001):

“Nothing could be more wrong-headed than letting our conceptual framework blind us to the evidence or to new ways of looking at the evidence. It is all too easy for us to prejudge specific interpretations simply because they have been advanced by unbelieving scholars or simply because they appear, at first blush, to conflict with our prior commitments. But the Christian faith does not ask us to ignore or reject the facts. Quite the contrary, it provides the only means of properly evaluating them—all of them” (page 151).

(This chapter of Interpreting Galatians appeared originally as “Systematic Theology and the Apostle to the Gentiles” in Trinity Journal 15:1 [Spring 1994]: 3-26. A link to the full text of this article, and to that of several other articles by Our Infallible Hero, may be found at the end of what is perhaps the most important post I have written on this blog.)