The 'Literal Sense' of Prawns - in Context

We Bible-believers often want to appeal to something like the ‘plain’, ‘natural’ or ‘literal’ meaning of the text of Scripture, but without making naive or simplistic claims to some kind of neutral presuppositionless reading.

There seem to be lots of helpful things in Tim Ward’s sometimes hard to understand book, Word and Supplement: Speech Acts, Biblical Texts, and the Sufficiency of Scripture (OUP, 2002).

He’s careful on this point. A (Warfieldian) orthodox Protestant confession of the sufficiency of Scripture with Christ as the centre of the canon:

is not intended as an argument for a ‘flattening’ literalistic interpretation of Scripture, particularly of those parts of the Old Testament which, in the course of progressive revelation, do not have a ‘literal’ authority over believers today. ‘Literal’, though, is here in scarce-quotes because… the Old Testament itself refers to what for it is an [partly?] unnamed coming reality. For Christian believers, obedience to the ‘literal’ sense of e.g. Old Testament food laws in the context of the canon would therefore mean adherence to Christ’s warning that it is not what goes into us that makes us unclean but what comes out of us (Mark 7:15). Literal sense, which is always contextually defined, is therefore to be distinguished from literalistic sense, which is not. See Vanhoozer’s comment that ‘the literal sense – the sense of the literary act – may, at times, be indeterminate or open-ended’ (Is There A Meaning In This Text? p313). Nor is it to deny the necessity of recognizing tropes in Scripture; as has long been acknowledged, the ‘literal sense’ of a text can be metaphorical, if that is its intended meaning. (p292)

I guess too that all this would be part of a scholarly defence of interpretative maximalism?

The term “scarce-quotes” is new to me, by the way, and I think I might make more use of them. Along with lots of carefully chosen “m-” and “n-” “dashes”- which Miss Bell informs us was originally a printing term - based on “m” being twice the width of an “n”.