Matthew Burgess and Jim West have continued the argument I noted yesterday about amateurs and professionals (or dilettantes and scholars as Jim tends to put it). In the course of this Jim makes the most moderate comment I’ve seen him make on the topic.
i’m happy to agree with you for the most part here matt. i have no problem with amateur’s dabbling. but when it comes right down to it, i don’t trust their exegesis any more than i would trust the diagnosis of a ’self trained’ physician. as far as i’m concerned, and i don’t mind being essentially alone on this, the bible is too important to leave in the hands of the untrained.
I don’t think anyone’s talking about “leaving the Bible in the hands of the untrained” but trying to train the untrained to use it better.
Like Jim (I think) I sometimes find myself regretting the democratisation of knowledge and opinion that the internet has accelerated. Ironically, I suspect that one can trace the history of this back to the Reformers’ insistence on private judgement, and through (especially) American revivalist populism, to its modern forms, secular and religious. I do, therefore, find it wryly amusing that an American Baptist like Jim who’s so keen on the magisterial Reformers gets quite so riled about it.
One further point. I find the idea of “trusting an exegesis” a bit odd. I will trust an experienced and expert exegete, particularly those whose past work I have found enlightening. By “trusting them”, I mean that I will start exploring what they say from the point of view that they know what they’re talking about, and that I have something to learn. I assume that, if they say something I disagree with, I should think very hard that I might be wrong and them right. But I do not asume they are bound to be right, and I will still subject their exegesis to critical questioning, and reserve the right to disagree with them. I examine their exegesis, rather than trust it. Where I find it sound, it gives me further reason to trust subsequent work; where I find it unsound it may predispose me to being a little less trusting of them the next time round.
That’s probably not far off what Jim means, and I suspect there’s more agreement going on than appears on the surface. Like it or not, however, we live in a culture where “expertise” is often something distrusted, and “experts” will only win it back by showing they do indeed know their subject and their arguments better than Ms Dilly Tantty down the road.
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no doug you’re right in your penultimate paragraph. of course i would only add that the dilettantes don’t have the tools with which to test the difference between right and wrong.
and my one gripe with the reformers is their ridiculous notion that just any old donkey farmer could understand the bible. in this point they were wrong and the catholics were right.
I’m beginning to worry. I think that”s three times recently we’ve agreed on something
I think we’d all be a lot better off if we started off on the ground floor being humble about the fact that there’s a lot that we don’t–and never will–know.
Even the donkey farmer can get the big picture and most of the important trajectories. It’s once we get beyond that that we all get into trouble. Even with all the data the experts do claim to have, there’s a good chance they might be missing that key interpretive context or cultural clue that changes the “meaning” of a passage.
Have you been to a Sunday School class? The exegesis being perpetrated is frightening and yet it is taking place in thousands of churches every Sunday.
Alright, gentlemen; solutions? Better training? Enforced humility? controlled access to Scripture? Resignation? Full time complaining on blogs? Do the masses even want to be educated out of their comfortable assumptions?
(Pardon my dilettante punctuation)
the masses dont give a flip. which is why we must.
@Ben apophatics ‘r’ us on this blog.
@Scott stop going to Sunday school classes. They’re clearly bad for you.
Seems that Mr. C.S. Lewis dressed up as Ms. Dilly Tantty from time to time. For example, here’s the way he presumes to start his Christian Reflections on the Psalms, which he dares as a mere novice to say are Jewish:
This is not a work of scholarship. I am no Hebraist, no higher critic, no ancient historian, no archaeologist. I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself. If an excuse is needed (and perhaps it is) for writing such a book, my excuse would be something like this. It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can. When you took the problem to a master, as we all remember, he was very likely to explain what you understood already, to add a great deal of information which you didn’t want, and say nothing at all about the thing that was puzzling you. I have watched this from both sides of the net; for when, as a teacher myself, I have tried to answer questions brought me by pupils, I have sometimes, after a minute, seen that expression settle down on their faces which assured me that they were suffering exactly the same frustration which I had suffered from my own teachers. The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago that he has forgotten. He sees the whole subject, by now, in such a different light that he cannot conceive what is really troubling the pupil; he sees a dozen other difficulties which ought to be troubling him but aren’t.
In this book, then, I write as one amateur to another, talking about difficulties I have met, or lights I have gained, when reading the Psalms, with the hope that this might at any rate interest, and sometimes even help, other inexpert readers. I am ‘comparing notes’, not presuming to instruct. . . .
but didn’t a scholar just recently recommend Lewis… confusing!
from the Ancient Hebrew Poetry blog:
“…C.S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms remains an indispensable introduction to that corpus.”
http://ancienthebrewpoetry.typepad.com/ancient_hebrew_poetry/2009/05/reading-the-psalms-with-c-s-lewis.html
i wouldn’t worry too much with john’s recommendations…
at least lewis had the good sense to realize who he was.
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