I can understand why Duane Smith wishes to treat Scripture both as needing to be put in scare quotes and as any other literary corpus. And in fact he has a serious and oft-unnoticed point when he decries the false dichotomy between confessional readings and a relativist free-for-all.
I am intrigued that David Ker wants to get rid of the Bible as well. For despite what he says, that surely is the force of his argument.
Our appropriation of Old Testament texts for modern application is bizarre if you think about it. Let me offer some analogies. What if we determined French fiscal policies by appealing to the practices of Louis XIV? Or immigration policies in England by appealing to the policies of Edward I? But a proper analogy would be much stranger than that. It would be like Mozambique establishing a republic by looking at the governance methods of the pre-Columbian Americas. The reason all these analogies seem so strange is that in every case a revolution had taken place in the course of history. Economics, immigration, and government would never be the same. Preaching from the Old Testament is like that. The rules have changed. The revolution has torn down the gates of the Bastille. Genghis Khan has little to teach us about how China should navigate the 21st century
The problem is, why on earth should he confine that to the Old Testament? To all intents and purposes, the difference in time between us and the New Testament is surely as great as between us and the Old. The distance between us and Jesus is considerably greater than between Sarkozy and Louis XIV, Elizabeth II and Edward I, or Hu Jintao and Genghis Khan. Adding a few more centuries to take us into the pages of the Old Testament makes little difference to the revolution in human society.
Either David’s argument doesn’t work for the Old Testament, or it works for the whole of whichever canonical collection we mean by Scripture.
{ 15 comments }
Hmmm, you’ve got a point there…
Exactly! The New Testament should be for modern progressive Christians what the Jewish scriptures were for the earliest Christians. A key part of our heritage, a key dialogue partner, but the beginning rather than the end of the conversation…
I think I’m trying to underline the coming of Christ as a new paradigm. The cultural/temporal distance is unquestionably distant in both cases, but as 21st century Christians we are operating in the same kingdom as that established by Jesus, whereas B.C. is a different game with different rules.
@David. I don’t think that quite works. Exactly the same strictures you use about the temporal binding of the OT apply to the NT. Conversely, everything you say about operating in the same kingdom as that established by Jesus could be argued equally well as worshipping the same God who revealed himself to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Oh, and just to complicate things, for one or two generations the kingdom established by Jesus only read the OT as scripture.
@James. I’m not convinced that does justice to what might be called the “sacramentality” of Scripture, the sense that it provides a meeting place for a conversation with God.
Well, I think Scripture can be a perfectly good meeting place. Indeed, we’ve been meeting there and having very interesting conversations. But sometimes we’ll find that meeting place has windows that encourage those of us who inhabit it to also venture beyond it. How’s that for a metaphor?
Hmm. I think the question is whether we come back to the house for a conversation about some of the interesting things we’ve seen. But we probably reached the limits of that metaphor before I finished that response
As always, thanks for making me think. I’m going to go hum for a while.
David,
Some of us like the tune you’re humming. It’s refreshingly humble. Despite the ostensible contradictions, you’ve confessed yourself an outsider to scripture (you’re not a Jew, after all) – and the Christian perspective is the one letting you read (like the good linguists say, “etically”). And you haven’t, despite your confessed humility, ever forgone thinking.
“The distance between us and Jesus is considerably greater…”
And yet wasn’t the distance between the loose Samaritan woman and Jesus and the distance between the Greek Syrian Phoenician woman and Jesus and the distance between the Canaanite woman just as considerably great? If you must reduce to your either / or binary, then of course such a method (i.e., the women’s method appropriated? by Jesus) “works for the whole of whichever canonical collection we mean by Scripture.” But, really, is the choice you make here the only one, Clayboy?
“wasn’t the distance between the loose Samaritan woman and Jesus and the distance between the Greek Syrian Phoenician woman and Jesus and the distance between the Canaanite woman just as considerably great?”
Nope. Nowhere near. Suggesting that the distance between any one premodern society and its equally pre-modern neighbour is comparable to that between a late (or post-) modern society and the various pre-modern ones strikes me as complete bollocks.
I’m very rarely that blunt, but … perhaps John Hobbins has been stirring me up to speak my mind (or what passes for my mind)
Well, please don’t mind being blunt even if you have to credit John for it.
I’m not really comparing “distances” of time. The point I’m driving at is how the gospel writers (John, Mark, and Matthew) startle their (male) readers with how Jesus encounters the divides of sex, race, culture, and class. The women recorded appropriate what is not theirs, and Jesus not only allows this but he seems to celebrate both what they do and how they do it. I’m suggesting that this is what David (with Jesus) is doing as well.
(The studies that Lydia He Liu does of Chinese appropriations of Western modernism get at similar methodology. She calls it “translingual practice,” but by whatever name, such a method of appropriating someone else’s place or canon is what David seems to be exploring.)
Do the gospel writers really “startle their (male) readers with how Jesus encounters the divides of sex, race, culture, and class.” It took, largely, until the late twentieth century for people to read the gospels as anti-sexist, anti-racist etc. That may suggest our contemporary readings, with which I am largely sympathetic, are not as friendly to our concerns as you suggest. I’m also intrigued that you leave arguably the most woman and oppressed friendly gospel (Luke) out of your listing.
“’m also intrigued that you leave arguably the most woman and oppressed friendly gospel (Luke) out of your listing.”
I suppose I could talk about Luke.
Until I do… That “[i]t took, largely, until the late twentieth century for people to read the gospels as anti-sexist, anti-racist etc.” cannot possibly mean that those who had access to them much earlier didn’t read them so. (The history of “rhetoric” has been largely only male until the last three decades or so, when feminist rhetoricians started looking much more closely at it. The basis for re-writing such history is not just some late-20th and early-21st new view; rather, the material with which rhetoric history is being re-viewed is also the re-covery of various feminist rhetorics, some discovered having existed long before Plato ever coined the word “rhetoric.” By analogy, re-readings of the gospels that are more-or-less novel by your standards don’t preclude the likely possibility that women (and others oppressed by the male versions) have existed when the gospels were first written.
Now, you’ve got me thinking I should go re-read Barbara E. Reid’s Choosing the Better Part?: Women in the Gospel of Luke.
Surely the difference is not between OT and NT but between the political and spiritual realms.
Unlike some evangelicals I reject any direct application of Old Testament, or for that New Testament, teaching to “Economics, immigration, and government”. We should not attempt to model modern nations after ancient Israel, still less after the Roman Empire. At most we can take from Scripture general principles for government, such as the importance of justice and the value of each human life.
However, things are quite different in the spiritual realm, which does not change like the political one. In this realm the teachings of the New Testament are much more directly applicable, I would argue.
And because the church as an institution has one foot in the spiritual and another in the secular, there is a difficult balance to be maintained between directly and not so directly applying biblical teaching.
Didn’t some cheeky git say something about the grass dieing but the Word enduring forever…wonder what he meant by that.
Comments on this entry are closed.
{ 1 trackback }