rst, from Prof. Gracia's arguments it is not clear how he would address cases of recent ornew religious organizations, specifically when there is no established theological tradition. I have an example inmind. There is an "organization" of people who call themselves "readers of the Urantia Book." This group isbased on, they claim, the revealed teachings of many deities to two individuals between 1911 and 1934. Thebook itself, published in 1955, is the largest published text claiming to be divinely revealed; it easily exceeds twothousand pages of "information." What's interesting about the Urantia Readers for our purpose is that there is anextensive revealed text with no established theological tradition to adjudicate interpretation and, remarkablyenough given its only been in existence for 50 years or so, there is a long history of schisms and interpretiveconflict. So I would wonder how such cases where the theological tradition has not yet developed would behandled in Gracia's model.My more general query is this. As the scope of the argument is limited to propositional meaning, and as Prof.Gracia wants to not constrain himself to omnipotent, omniscient deities, I suspect that his arguments for thenecessity of relational interpretations goes beyond the limits of revealed texts. As it turns out, I believe there isonly one place where the fact the text is divinely revealed turns out to be absolutely crucial for his argument, andthat is in the argument for theological interpretations. I would expect many of his arguments to apply to theimportance of philosophical interpretations of philosophical texts. A number of his arguments againstintentionalism-for example that the text is supposed to be presenting results true beyond their culturalcontext-apply to philosophical texts, as do his arguments against literary and sociological interpretations. So mysuspicion is that although the project was established to see how revealed texts should be i...
