Conservative Bible Translation. It is practically admitting it’s eisegesis right up front. I’m speechless. This is the very definition of irresponsible scholarship.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised with my Hebrew Bible discussion group. I first posted about our initial discussions about truth. Since we’ve gotten through the source criticism of the Pentateuch one of the reflection questions, and rightly so since most of the department is MDiv, is how does this material change how you approach the Hebrew Bible? After warming up to the topic it seems that no one has shied away from it. That makes me happy. Everyday I get more and more faith and hope for this generation it seems.
I shared a very small bit that these are all things I had to ask and grapple with. And that is why I’m enrolled. Because the questions I had – particularly the answers I was given – were not satisfactory. They did not do justice to the evidence. I’d rather look at the historical figures for my faith, they were the ones that lived what got written down. Why worship the mediator?
Get behind the text. The text itself is not the object. The text merely stands as a the mediator to the referent at which it points. That is where the real work gets done.
In my estimation this is the best thing Jim West has ever written
Theology as a practice allows for creativity, and imagination. However, I am always amazed when people seem to forget that this is also a discipline which must deal with evidence – especially when we claim to be part of a tradition.
All these good theological posts are making me doubt if NT is where I want to be. Ok, not really. But they are where the rubber meets the road, and are all points where the NT will inform our faith. That is why I want to study the NT. And this new atheism “movement”, if it should be called anything more than a stumbling forward powered by vitriol, continues to make press.
This is the second atheist philosopher I’ve now seen go public with a rather extensive critique of the Four Horsemen. On to the juicy tidbits, all the emphasis is mine.
NS: You’re a literary scholar, and you’re talking about religion. Is religion literature? Are you proposing that religion become a resource for politics to draw from in the same way as any other literary canon might be?
TE: No, not at all. I think the whole movement to see religion as literature is a way of diffusing its radical content. It’s actually a way of evading certain rather unpleasant realities that it insists on confronting us with. One of the things that happened in the 19th century was that culture—literary and other kinds of culture—tried to stand in for religion, and there was a lot of talk about religion as poetry and religion as myth. That was an attempt to shy away from some of the more uncomfortable challenges of religion when taken rather more seriously.
NS: Though of course the Christianity you present doesn’t sound like a lot of the Christianity one hears in the public sphere, especially in the United States.
TE: I think partly that’s because a lot the authentic meanings of the New Testament have become ideologized or mythologized away. Religion has become a very comfortable ideology for a dollar-worshipping culture. The scandal of the New Testament—the fact that it backs what America calls the losers, that it thinks the dispossessed will inherit the kingdom of God before the respectable bourgeois—all of that has been replaced, particularly in the States, by an idolatrous version.
NS: You say he emphasizes a “propositional” account of religious faith above a “performative” one. But how far can one go believing in God performatively, through political acts, before it becomes a proposition?
TE: All performatives imply propositions. There’s no point in my operating a performative like, say, promising, or cursing, unless I have certain beliefs about the nature of reality: that there is indeed such an institution as promising, that I am able to perform it, and so on. The performative and the propositional work into each other. But it is a typically positivist kind of mistake to begin with the propositional, just as it would be for someone trying to analyze a literary text, which is basically a performance. Somebody who didn’t grasp that would be making a root-and-branch mistake about the kind of thing being confronted. These new atheists, and, indeed, the great majority of believers, have been conned rather falsely into a positivist or dogmatic theology, into believing that religion consists in signing on for a set of propositions.
I think these three strands speak towards a single truth about what has happened. Religious literacy is at an all-time low. Very few are in a position to understand just what they are reading. It is not their fault. Things have changed. Largely the Church was ill-equipped to deal with fostering a religious literacy. And universities have long since been places where that occurred as well. To study the literary qualities of the religious texts can certainly cause one to gloss over their potential impact. You end up looking for something else. Platitudes get substituted in. You can’t eat a whole meal of platitudes however. They are the sugary bon-bons, the mint on your pillow, after you’ve eaten a full meal at the table. It is therefore easy to call on propositions as the markers. Especially in an increasingly scientific age where modernism has run its course.
Both the civil religion, I would suggest the “dollar-worshipping culture” above, and a great deal of evangelicals and fundamentalists have all grabbed onto the proposition arguments offered by modernism. And, at least in my view, the modernist agenda has fallen flat. It is all but canned on the philosophical front. That would certainly create a vicious circle in which religious literacy becomes worse and worse. Only a “performative” view, to use Eagleton’s term, such as Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, among others, seem to be able to “get” what they are reading. Perhaps their sacramental liturgy has kept this literacy, this performance, alive. Though to be sure, not all of them are on the same page, which makes their examples hard to follow. I know for myself I am looking for a high liturgy tradition that values this emphasis on performance. Hopefully those who are religiously literate are able to move in these directions to open people’s eyes.
And just to close with one stinger.
NS: When you talk about it being beyond choice—I’ve been interested to see how Richard Dawkins calls himself a “post-Christian atheist” and talks about celebrating Christmas.
TE: I think, actually, he’s a pre-Christian atheist, because he never understood what Christianity is about in the first place!
[HT: Inhabitio Dei]
Over at April’s blog about labeling, and method.
Continued by Michael with a good comment stream that seems to ellucidate the issue quite well.
Over at Science and the Sacred. If I was into the Hebrew Bible, I’d consider studying under this guy. Much to learn.
“Equality!” in the language of floaters, is not the plea that the dignity of all individuals be affirmed in concrete ways, but rather the demand that no criterion be allowed to stand that requires substantive commitment to a particular community and its way of life, for such criteria encumber the individual in its quest for Self.
Covenant Communion
The new alliance between the biblioblogers and the SBL is certainly the topic of heated discussion (a nice and neat breakdown can be found here). Jim, ever active, having founded this alliance states it’s goals:
- Purpose – camaraderie, sharing of best practices, reserving meeting space. These are the first reasons for affiliation that come to my mind.
- Affiliation – Anyone who cares to come to the session. Being on the steering committee is another matter. This is just how all other sessions at SBL work. We take care selecting our steering committee but anyone is welcome to submit papers and attend.
- Areas covered – this is where I think we need to focus our attention. Presumably papers would not be able, e.g., considering whether Gen. 1 contains the concept of creatio ex nihilo. There are at least three other sessions where that would be more appropriate. Ditto Jesus, Prophets, Paul, etc. So what would we discuss? I might begin with such suggestions as: value of online resources (e.g., Wiki v. NTGateway); maintaining an online presence as contributing (or not) to promotion and tenure; the value of online social networks (including blogs) for developing one’s research, and so on.
As a just-turned-student of theology (long-time-book-hoarder) I find it ironic that the digital medium, which my professional life thus far is entangled, is quickly becoming a discussion topic.
One of the topics that the academy has to handle (and I think Suzanne does a fine job) is the phenomenon of link rot (Being a technologist I need not be worried about using wikipedia for technology related topics. Authorial attribution is not necessary as a technologist. Bits are on or off, right or wrong – we have no gray areas – or so we think).
In the link-rot debate many people contend that pages will disappear and links will fail – and that this is a “Good Thing”. The digital world is not a library, and there is no centralization by design (which I’ll come back to later). Rather the digital world is organic, not a true representation of all that ever was. Content “dying” will cause new content to take up its place. That new content will have its own unique contribution to the digital world. In our theological disciplines there are authorities, and experts, and libraries to hold all that they write. It is fastidiously centralized so that nothing is lost. You need someone, generally a teacher, to guide you through the sources. They give you the lay of the land, the big authors that one must contend with in a certain field of study. In the digital world, you’ll be very lucky to find a guide. And there are no indications of authoritative and expert – such as the willingness of a publisher to publish the book. The very fact that it is free, both gratis and libre, decentralized, and anonymous, creates a situation in which erecting the current status quo is nigh impossible.
That is why people get scared. The game has changed. As Kuhn would say: the paradigm has changed.
The attempt to reify the “pay wall by publishers will not go well. The end-around is already happening with Google Books program and Google Scholar search engine. Centralization will not happen. I fully understand that Journals need to be monetarily supported. And I fully understand that the scholars need to be paid for what they write. I don’t think this out of any ulterior motives, or knowing the answers ahead of time. However, I think social media can teach us how to change our model whereby we can give something away which is interesting, important, and informed – while being able to make money. It seems the academy’s authority and expert status would be perfect for owning the “conversation”.
I hope some of you find this helpful. It is exciting to get to bring my tech world insights some where else. I look forward to learning much about history and theology from all of you. Let me know if you have any tech projects going on – I do freelance work!
Do not ask your clients what they want. Tell them, and sell them, what they want. If you know your clients and your market – they will buy it. To ask them what they want is to refuse to do your job as a product manager. You are asking your customers to do your job for them. And they are not going to spend forty hours a week at it. That is all I have to say about clients.
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