"Come,
come," said the landlord, who felt that paying people for
their absence
was a principle dangerous to society; "a joke's a joke. We're
all good
friends here, I hope. We must give and take. You're both right
and you're both
wrong, as I say. I agree wi' Mr. Macey here, as there's two
opinions; and if
mine was asked, I should say they're both right. Tookey's
right and Winthrop's
right, and they've only got to split the difference and make
themselves even."
When Mary Ann Evans
wasn’t
translating David Strauss’ Life of Jesus from German to English,
she was
writing novels under the pseudonym George Eliot, including Silas
Marner, from
which this passage is taken. The landlord is the man who owns a
tavern, and he
doesn’t want his customers arguing with each other, so to
prevent fights, he
always tries to agree with everybody, even when they disagree
with each other.
This is a common strategy for writing papers, and it doesn’t
always work very
well.
Consider this
conclusion:
There is no
need to see the old and new
perspectives on Paul as contrasting with each other. At a
certain point they
complement each other to explain the original meaning of the
word “faith” to
this early Christian. Lutheran base of salvation earned by faith
is
complemented, in my opinion, with some ideas of E. P. Sanders
from the new
perspective on Paul.
Let
me now quote what E. P. Sanders has
to say about Luther:
But Luther’s problems are
not Paul’s, and we
misunderstand him if we read him through Luther’s eyes. (E. P.
Sanders, Paul,
Oxford University Press, 1991, p.49)
Clearly,
Sanders thinks that his
interpretation of Paul is incompatible with Luther’s. His
argument is that
Luther misunderstood Paul. If Luther’s interpretation of Paul is
compatible
with Sanders’, then Sanders must at least have misinterpreted
Luther. But in
that case, I want to know how and why Sanders got Luther wrong.
Of
course, the case is complicated.
Perhaps Luther was right about some points, and Sanders was
right about others.
But who was right about which point? It is all very well to say
they complement
each other “at a certain point”, but unless you tell me which
point exactly
that is, you haven’t told me anything.
It
always sounds wise, when there is a
debate, to split the difference and accept that there is
something to be said
for each side. But unless you give exact information, you don’t
sound wise, you
just sound like someone who is trying to sound wise, like the
landlord. You
also might want to consider Tycho-Brahe’s geo-heliocentric
theory, which was
intended to be a wise compromise between Ptolemy and Copernicus.
Ptolemy
thought that everything revolves around the Earth, Copernicus
thought that
Earth and all other planets orbit around the Sun. Tycho Brahe
argued that the
Sun moves round the Earth, but some planets orbit the Sun as it
orbits the
Earth. So, Copernicus and Ptolemy complement each other. They
are both right
and they are both wrong. That is a compromise, but is it really
such a clever
position?
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