Redeem the Time

Since I posted yesterday, I’ve been flooded with semi-intuitions that the problems I care most about (theological, hermeneutical, ethical, and all) find a common determinant in the character of time. I hesitate to blog any one of the notions that’s crossed my mind — they aren’t that well-developed yet — but if I were a character in an Edwardian novel, I would set out for a cottage in a remote location (say, France, or the Cotswolds, or even Scotland) and spend a year or two working out the connections. As it is, I’ll mull them over in the gaps of my days, and if anything noteworthy comes to fruition, I’ll let you know.

In the meantime, in ecclesiastical news, it turns out that Barbara Brown Taylor is not an “ex-priest,” but has stepped down from parish ministry. Sadly, the noteworthy story here is not that the USA Today got its facts wrong in a headline, but that she feels comfortable claiming that “Jesus knew the Hebrew Scriptures, and he departed from them. He was not faithful to the Scripture of that time. . . .” When celebrities such as she advance foolishness like this, the job of teaching wisdom to the church just gets harder and harder.

And since I noticed all this through Kendall Harmon’s site, I ought to complete a bizarre convergence of parties by noting that here I repudiate Brown Taylor’s claims, and endorse Al Kimel’s resistance to Paul Zahl’s unnerving theological hybrid of Luther and Zwingli.

But that “time” stuff — so much to think about, from Augustine to Heidegger. . . .

2 thoughts on “Redeem the Time

  1. AKMA, this time thing is interesting. I am anxious to hear more. I just completed my PhD, writing about the “meaning” of Scripture with reference to your good buddies, Vanhoozer and Fowl. One thing that I argued for, with help from McClendon’s and Smith’s reading of speech-acts and Peirce’s notion of signs, was that the meaning of Scripture is something that is neither found in or behind the text nor created in front of the text, but rather emerges from the community’s reading of its sacred texts OVER TIME.

  2. “And since I noticed all this through Kendall Harmon’s site, I ought to complete a bizarre convergence of parties by noting that here I repudiate Brown Taylor’s claims, and endorse Al Kimel’s resistance to Paul Zahl’s unnerving theological hybrid of Luther and Zwingli”

    Word.

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