Exegetical Fallacies - DA Carson

 The final reason why this study has become important is the change in theological climate in the Western world during the past thirty or forty years. At the risk of oversimplification, one could argue that the generation of conservative Christians before the present one faced opponents who argued in effect that the Bible is not trustworthy, and only the ignorant and the blind could claim it is. In the present generation, there are of course many voices that say the same thing; but there are new voices that loudly insist our real problem is hermeneutical and exegetical. Conservatives, we are told, have not properly understood the Bible. They have imposed on the sacred text an artificial notion of authority and a forced exegesis of passage after passage. One of the emphases of the acerbic attack on “fundamentalism” by James Barr is that conservatives do not really understand the Bible, that they use critical tools inconsistently and even dishonestly. At another level, one of the explicit claims of the recent commentary on Matthew by Robert H. Gundry is that his approach to the text is more faithful to Scripture than that of traditional conservative commentators. Similar phenomena are legion.