Book Review : Exegetical Falacies

I've nearly completed reading an exceptionally well written text by D. A. Carson entitled "Exegetical Fallacies". It is a brief compendium (about 140 pages of narrative) of the most common logical and rhetorical errors made by preachers through the ages. As a part-time pulpiteer I understand the ease with which false arguments can be made and incoherent appeals constructed and was hence drawn to the text hoping to avoid such mistakes in the future.

This text catalogs and explains fallacies involving word studies (overgeneralizing and equating semantics with etymology for example), logical errors, improper presuppositions and a wide array of others. While Carson is himself a conservative scholar, he includes examples of errors made by a representative sampling of scholars from fundamentalists to moderates to liberals.

My interest was drawn particularly to the longest chapter; that on 'word study fallacies'. The author speaks at length and with great attention to detail on issues of grammar, syntax, etymology and literary genre. Of particular personal interest was his discussion of how often the notions of synonym and equivalence are conflated. If two words are equivalent, for example, they can be legitimately interchanged in any context without the smallest nuanced change of semantics or connotation or external referent. A confusion between similarity and equivalence can lead to a host of errors which are carefully described throughout the central portion of the text.

It is rare to find a book that is simulatneously modern, rigorous and linguistically rich. This is must reading for anyone who aspires to "rightly divide the word of truth". It gives clear instruction on how to identify likely sources of error and gives, by way of example, a vision of the well trained and renewed mind; an example that in today's postmodern academic environ, is all but extinct.