Writing about ‘hyperbaton’, the phenomenon of putting words in an odd order, Mark Forsyth observes:
[A]djectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.[1]
If you are an English speaker, you almost certainly know this rule on some level, yet probably did not know that you knew it until Forsyth told you. Contrary to Forsyth’s suggestion that it is an ironclad and universal rule, you can almost certainly come up with a few exceptions. However, whether an absolute law or not, it is interesting that, unlike some of the more artificial grammar rules much beloved of linguistic prescriptivists, this is an organic law of our spoken language that was discovered in the wild and that, even in the case of the exceptions to it, there seems to be some consistent yet mysterious logic by which we all stack adjectives.
On the other hand, there are examples of more artificial rules that get imposed upon our language, often designed to conform—or perhaps contort—it to some questionable ideal. Certain grammarians’ idealization of Latin grammar, for instance, has excited their disapproval of the practice of ending a sentence with a preposition, something perfectly natural in English sentence structure. In a story that is almost certainly apocryphal, Winston Churchill once upbraided an overzealous inferior who sought to enforce this stricture with the marginal note, ‘This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.’
These two rules arise from quite different approaches to language, the first more descriptivist and the second more prescriptivist. The first arises from close observation of how we actually use our language and the second from older grammarians’ demands about how it ought to be used. Of course, there can be slippage. Forsyth articulates the observed general rule of adjectival order as if it were a universal prescriptivist rule belonging in a textbook. Observed general patterns can easily be inappropriately universalized and imposed back upon speech as artificial and unnatural constraints. Here, in the words of Captain Hector Barbossa: “The code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.”
The differences between these two approaches also arise from different relationships with language. The first arises from the organic speaking of our mother tongue; the second more from the acquisition and study of a dead and highly formalized language for scholarly or ecclesiastical ends, from a world populated by tables of conjugations and declensions.
There are, of course, other ways of relating to the learning of a language. Many people learn second languages as adults, coming to a new language as mature speakers of their mother tongues. For such people, the process of language acquisition can be different and probably will involve a lot of time spent studying handbooks of speech with various rules, in addition to learning through conversation. Speaking a new language as an adult will likely involve not only the acquisition of an extensive body of new vocabulary and grammatical principles, but also the frequent correction of linguistic habits taken from one’s mother tongue.
Dr Leithart compares the process of our learning of Scripture to that of learning our mother tongue, which we learn with models, mentors, and few established linguistic habits to act as obstacles. However, I am not sure that this analogy is an apt one. The process is rather more akin to a collective acquisition of a foreign tongue in the absence of true native speakers. This process is superintended by the work of the Spirit and looks to the example of Christ, but when we are speaking Scripture as Christians, we are speaking a language that, in many ways, still retains a measure of foreignness and strangeness to all of us, even with a sanctified language instinct. Even our models and mentors are not native speakers, but people who have gained a limited proficiency in Scripture, the tongue of our adoption.
For such people, rules will necessarily play a more prominent role, even though they will need to be handled with great care. Inductive rules, for instance, offer a limited way of knowing things that native speakers know more by instinct, much as Forsyth’s observed rule might help one to explain to a non-native English speaker why ‘green great dragons’ do not exist. When we articulate our exegetical principles in such rules we formalize and articulate our instincts, in ways that expose them to other people’s scrutiny, correction, and adoption and which enable us to hold them more self-consciously.
Of course, many of the rules offered by more ‘scientific’ exegetical approaches have, like the requirement that we not end sentences with a preposition, inappropriately imposed alien expectations upon the text. While often well-intentioned, these have muffled the voice of Scripture, which is full of inconvenient breaches of its rules. Typology, for instance, is ruled out of court, even though the Scriptures themselves routinely engage in it.
As readers and speakers, we all operate with rules of some kind. For many of us, it was not until we learned a second language that we began to realize the immense body of tacit rule knowledge that we have of our mother tongue. As we make these implicit rules explicit, we can gain greater knowledge and proficiency in our language and also become better equipped to teach others. One does not best speak a language by fixating on rules, technique, and method. However, in our collective task of trying to master the language of Scripture—recognizing its foreignness to us as people of fallen, Babelic tongues—we will routinely need to express the guiding rules that led us to our readings of the text.
In the Church led by the Spirit, there remains little agreement on how a great many parts of Scripture are to be read. The perspicuity of Scripture is a quality of the text, not of its readers. Nor is the perspicuity of Scripture typically understood to be a universal feature of the text, but rather relates more narrowly to ‘those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation’ (Westminster Confession of Faith I.vii). In such a situation, we will often need to approach the interpretation of Scripture haltingly, like foreigners.
While we will develop guidelines over time, these guidelines should be provisional and limited, open to inspection and susceptible to revision. An overconfident reader of Scripture can easily impose universal systems and structures upon the text, which have the effect of blinding them and others to its complexities and irregularities. Exalting rules that they have arrived at over all others, they can end up closing themselves off to the corrective examination of other readers and elevating their systems or methods over the text itself. Good rules must always be open to revision from the text and increase our attentiveness to it.
On the other hand, mere dependence upon a supposed sanctified hermeneutical instinct, apart from the routine careful articulation, exposure, and defence of the (likely implicit) principles by which its readings have been arrived at, makes the Church dependent on the private illumination of certain gifted parties, rather than public truth. One of the tasks of gifted people, if they are to communicate their gifts and not just things that they have produced with their gifts, is formalizing, codifying, and otherwise rendering explicit things that are second nature to them. For gifted readers of Scripture, explaining how they arrived at certain readings will always be a central part of their calling.
In the absence of articulated rules and principles, the authority of Scripture can easily become displaced, increasingly being eclipsed by the supposedly illuminated reader who acts as its appointed intermediary, having arrived at their spiritual readings by some mysterious alchemy of mind. Here I want to give a cautious two cheers for grammatical historical exegesis, whose demand for rigorously articulated exegetical principles was designed in part to curb fanciful exegesis which, while affirming the authority of the text, could treat it as if a blank cheque written out to certain imaginative readers (producing or reinforcing unhealthy authority dynamics that the Reformers and their successors often needed to address). The interpretative minimalism of much grammatical historical exegesis is a serious fault, but not an integral one.
Learning to use rules in our reading of Scripture can be, I submit, a curbing of excessive confidence in our approach to Scripture. They can be a way in which we submit ourselves to the examination of others and by which we grow in our own attentiveness and self-consciousness in our reading. They enable us more readily to communicate our gifts of reading to others. And, perhaps most importantly, articulating and communicating the rules and principles by which we read Scripture is one of the chief means by which we communicate the authority of Scripture itself.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast. He is also the contributing editor of the Politics of Scripture series on the Political Theology Today blog. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
[1] Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase (Icon Books, 2013),
Writing about ‘hyperbaton’, the phenomenon of putting words in an odd order, Mark Forsyth observes:
[A]djectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.[1]
If you are an English speaker, you almost certainly know this rule on some level, yet probably did not know that you knew it until Forsyth told you. Contrary to Forsyth’s suggestion that it is an ironclad and universal rule, you can almost certainly come up with a few exceptions. However, whether an absolute law or not, it is interesting that, unlike some of the more artificial grammar rules much beloved of linguistic prescriptivists, this is an organic law of our spoken language that was discovered in the wild and that, even in the case of the exceptions to it, there seems to be some consistent yet mysterious logic by which we all stack adjectives.
On the other hand, there are examples of more artificial rules that get imposed upon our language, often designed to conform—or perhaps contort—it to some questionable ideal. Certain grammarians’ idealization of Latin grammar, for instance, has excited their disapproval of the practice of ending a sentence with a preposition, something perfectly natural in English sentence structure. In a story that is almost certainly apocryphal, Winston Churchill once upbraided an overzealous inferior who sought to enforce this stricture with the marginal note, ‘This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.’
These two rules arise from quite different approaches to language, the first more descriptivist and the second more prescriptivist. The first arises from close observation of how we actually use our language and the second from older grammarians’ demands about how it ought to be used. Of course, there can be slippage. Forsyth articulates the observed general rule of adjectival order as if it were a universal prescriptivist rule belonging in a textbook. Observed general patterns can easily be inappropriately universalized and imposed back upon speech as artificial and unnatural constraints. Here, in the words of Captain Hector Barbossa: “The code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.”
The differences between these two approaches also arise from different relationships with language. The first arises from the organic speaking of our mother tongue; the second more from the acquisition and study of a dead and highly formalized language for scholarly or ecclesiastical ends, from a world populated by tables of conjugations and declensions.
There are, of course, other ways of relating to the learning of a language. Many people learn second languages as adults, coming to a new language as mature speakers of their mother tongues. For such people, the process of language acquisition can be different and probably will involve a lot of time spent studying handbooks of speech with various rules, in addition to learning through conversation. Speaking a new language as an adult will likely involve not only the acquisition of an extensive body of new vocabulary and grammatical principles, but also the frequent correction of linguistic habits taken from one’s mother tongue.
Dr Leithart compares the process of our learning of Scripture to that of learning our mother tongue, which we learn with models, mentors, and few established linguistic habits to act as obstacles. However, I am not sure that this analogy is an apt one. The process is rather more akin to a collective acquisition of a foreign tongue in the absence of true native speakers. This process is superintended by the work of the Spirit and looks to the example of Christ, but when we are speaking Scripture as Christians, we are speaking a language that, in many ways, still retains a measure of foreignness and strangeness to all of us, even with a sanctified language instinct. Even our models and mentors are not native speakers, but people who have gained a limited proficiency in Scripture, the tongue of our adoption.
For such people, rules will necessarily play a more prominent role, even though they will need to be handled with great care. Inductive rules, for instance, offer a limited way of knowing things that native speakers know more by instinct, much as Forsyth’s observed rule might help one to explain to a non-native English speaker why ‘green great dragons’ do not exist. When we articulate our exegetical principles in such rules we formalize and articulate our instincts, in ways that expose them to other people’s scrutiny, correction, and adoption and which enable us to hold them more self-consciously.
Of course, many of the rules offered by more ‘scientific’ exegetical approaches have, like the requirement that we not end sentences with a preposition, inappropriately imposed alien expectations upon the text. While often well-intentioned, these have muffled the voice of Scripture, which is full of inconvenient breaches of its rules. Typology, for instance, is ruled out of court, even though the Scriptures themselves routinely engage in it.
As readers and speakers, we all operate with rules of some kind. For many of us, it was not until we learned a second language that we began to realize the immense body of tacit rule knowledge that we have of our mother tongue. As we make these implicit rules explicit, we can gain greater knowledge and proficiency in our language and also become better equipped to teach others. One does not best speak a language by fixating on rules, technique, and method. However, in our collective task of trying to master the language of Scripture—recognizing its foreignness to us as people of fallen, Babelic tongues—we will routinely need to express the guiding rules that led us to our readings of the text.
In the Church led by the Spirit, there remains little agreement on how a great many parts of Scripture are to be read. The perspicuity of Scripture is a quality of the text, not of its readers. Nor is the perspicuity of Scripture typically understood to be a universal feature of the text, but rather relates more narrowly to ‘those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation’ (Westminster Confession of Faith I.vii). In such a situation, we will often need to approach the interpretation of Scripture haltingly, like foreigners.
While we will develop guidelines over time, these guidelines should be provisional and limited, open to inspection and susceptible to revision. An overconfident reader of Scripture can easily impose universal systems and structures upon the text, which have the effect of blinding them and others to its complexities and irregularities. Exalting rules that they have arrived at over all others, they can end up closing themselves off to the corrective examination of other readers and elevating their systems or methods over the text itself. Good rules must always be open to revision from the text and increase our attentiveness to it.
On the other hand, mere dependence upon a supposed sanctified hermeneutical instinct, apart from the routine careful articulation, exposure, and defence of the (likely implicit) principles by which its readings have been arrived at, makes the Church dependent on the private illumination of certain gifted parties, rather than public truth. One of the tasks of gifted people, if they are to communicate their gifts and not just things that they have produced with their gifts, is formalizing, codifying, and otherwise rendering explicit things that are second nature to them. For gifted readers of Scripture, explaining how they arrived at certain readings will always be a central part of their calling.
In the absence of articulated rules and principles, the authority of Scripture can easily become displaced, increasingly being eclipsed by the supposedly illuminated reader who acts as its appointed intermediary, having arrived at their spiritual readings by some mysterious alchemy of mind. Here I want to give a cautious two cheers for grammatical historical exegesis, whose demand for rigorously articulated exegetical principles was designed in part to curb fanciful exegesis which, while affirming the authority of the text, could treat it as if a blank cheque written out to certain imaginative readers (producing or reinforcing unhealthy authority dynamics that the Reformers and their successors often needed to address). The interpretative minimalism of much grammatical historical exegesis is a serious fault, but not an integral one.
Learning to use rules in our reading of Scripture can be, I submit, a curbing of excessive confidence in our approach to Scripture. They can be a way in which we submit ourselves to the examination of others and by which we grow in our own attentiveness and self-consciousness in our reading. They enable us more readily to communicate our gifts of reading to others. And, perhaps most importantly, articulating and communicating the rules and principles by which we read Scripture is one of the chief means by which we communicate the authority of Scripture itself.
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast. He is also the contributing editor of the Politics of Scripture series on the Political Theology Today blog. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
[1] Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase (Icon Books, 2013),
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