Wars and Rumors of Wars

Those who regard the pragmatics of political effects more highly than the admonitions of religious traditions may take a moment to contemplate exactly how the experience of military subjugation engenders sentiments of reconciliation and cooperation. Some observers propose that fierce hostile actions actually tend to stimulate animosity and an inclination toward violence.

No one should be subject to the fear of sudden violent death; no one should be subject to the fear that tanks will flatten his or her home. And so far as I can tell, no one advances the cause of peace by killing more people. Killing more people advances the causes of hatred (suppressed or overt) and vengeance, and killing more people will only cost a steadily increasing number of lives. I pray that we not let our own feelings of loss and anger blind us to the price our actions will exact--and not only on our enemies, but soon enough indeed upon our loved ones.
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      ( 3:58 PM )  

Deep Natural

**Attention, RIAA: A. K. M. Adam, avowed copyright dissenter, bought a copy of Michelle Shocked's CD at full price because he wanted her to get the money.**

This is a terrific piece of work--not as "purely" gospel-sounding as the earlier semi-bootleg of some of the same material, but in contrast it's a wonderful example of an artist's capacity to go beyond genre restrictions while at the same time drawing on the richness that the genre makes available. Here Shocked reaches deeply into the sensibilities of gospel, reggae, funk, and jazz, and puts together what she finds in unique ways, with powerful insight. In a certain way, it reminds me of hearing the first Dire Straits record and thinking, "No one has played like this before--why not?" It's not "Christian music" any more than Bach is "Christian music"--the theological convictions permeate these cuts, but they don't batter the listener with callow "I love Jesus" refrains. The CD ought to do well with careful listeners across market niches; when it doesn't get a lot of attention in "Christian rock" circles, though, it'll show how thoroughly that category depends for its cogency on marketing imperatives rather than audience or artistic affiliations. Permalink -Main Page-
      ( 3:24 PM )  

Inconclusive Postmodern Response

First, though, I want to comment on the affective dimension of their responses and of postmodern theory. I'm truly moved by the spirit of generosity in which the topic--often a cardinal example of flamebait--has been handled. David, definitely, and most everyone in with academic experience in the 80's and 90's, has stories to tell about Bad Postmodernists. You know the type--they hang around street corners, cussing and wearing black clothes to make the kids think they're cool, offering them filterless cigarettes, and intervening in every conversation with unanswerable deconstructive conundrums, congratulating themselves for their high sophistication. Wow, aren't they smart! But David's frustration in the Heidegger Circle, or Tom's irritation at the "tedious ephebes" of Benjamin, Derrida, De Man, and their posse, rings familiar to enough many people that any discussion--much less, any appreciation--of postmodern thought evokes only snarky dismissal. While I was teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary, its president Thomas Gillespie hardly missed any public opportunity to decry the dreadful influence of those truth-hating, faith-undermining, too-clever-by-half postmodernists. This sort of affective response to postmodern thought draws on deep aquifers of mistrust and resentment, some of it well-merited--which makes the patience and charity that my friends display in their contributions all the more welcome.

I would say, "on to more substantive matters," but my postmodern side would want both to undermine the assumption that affective reasoning matters less than cognitive reasoning, and to problematize the association of "substance" metaphors with "serious," "important," "respectable" topics. So instead I'll just change the subject by authorial force.

One of the concerns that David voices involves the extent to which postmodern theory seems on one hand to undermine the possibility of a transcendent perspective, so that no interpretive claim has any more basis than any other (so all interpretive claims are equal)--and on the other hand, that people will continue to make interpretive claims, among which we need to discern better from worse, illuminating from confusing, right from wrong. My response to David at this point entails admitting that I claim there's no point from which to form absolute judgments of "just plain flat-out right" from "utterly, undeniably wrong." That doesn't mean that we can't make any such judgments, or that the judgments by which we distinguish better from worse amount to nothing more than "my opinion." When I assess a given interpretation as "good" or "bad," I weigh the interpretation against my understandings of relevant historical circumstances, of the semantics of the phrases in question, of the relation of that interpretation to the churcch's teachings, of the effects of the interpretation in the complicated shared life that makes up the church, and of my taste (an non-arbitrary criterion developed and refined through years of study, argument, and listening to rock'n'roll records). None of these criteria admits of the claim that all interpretations are equal.

David and Steve went over this terrain well in the aftermath of David's initial review/response. Steve indicated that when discussing representations of the polar bear "I am choosing to start my questioning here, and these are the results of that beginning… these may not, however, be the results I would get if I started my questioning there, which is just as valid a launch-point as here." David questioned Steve's choice of the word "choose," pointing to the extent to which our starting-points are much more given than chosen (he might have alluded to our "thrownness"/Geworfenheit, right?); Steve hasn't yet responded to this generation of Weinbergerian responses, but we have reason to hope that he'll be back with more.

Tom protests against the "Neener! Neener!" school of postmodern evasiveness, but goes on (if I read him appropriately) to remind us that the quest for the correct interpretation of this or that constitutes in itself part of the problem. I'm not sure exactly the ground from which Tom would stage his resistance, but one might take the narratological premise that "excess" information, information over and above what is needed to convey the message, provides the "literary" dimension of our communication. From that perspective, David and I would be ignoring exactly the literariness of literary communication in our eagerness to discuss how one gets messages right.To this, David answers that he's thinking of all life as an interpretive project, not just of interpretation as an elaborate decoding process for transmitting message A in different words (but with the same meaning). Tom alludes to "translation" and praises Walter Benjamin (who's well-known for, among other things, a challenging essay on "The Task of the Translator"), so that I've been construing part of his intervention as a defense of the connotative density of the "original" over against attenuated translations, interpretations, and so on. (If I'm not catching Tom's concern, I trust him to help me.)

My response would draw on both David and Steve (again), by stressing that yes, a book about interpreting the BIble will perforce have a lot to to with translation and interpretation-of-a-text; that's the way I tricked the press into publishing the book. But the book's written so as to lead toward David's more general project of interpretation. I'd argue (again, along lines that David invokes) that "interpretation" isn't a special activity that involves transmutations of texts from one language (or terminology) to another, but that humans are interpreting, meaning-making organisms. Everything we do interprets, ascribes significance great or small.

So when we re-present anything (Steve usefully cites the example of a symphony, but it applies just as much to a poem or a verse of the Bible), whether by changing the language that constitutes it, by enacting it onstage, by repeating it verbatim, by trying to embody it in our everyday lives, we change the text about which we're talking. "On the Task of the Translator" isn't the same as "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers." We can lament that difference as loss, as Tom suggests ("What gets lost in translation of poetry is, in other words, the poetry"), or we can marvel at a world suffused with meaning, within which we take a place even in our most tediously quotidian activities. I constantly nag my classes to remember that the most important work of biblical interpretation they do comes on the streets and in the homes of their parishes; when a pan-handler asks for change, you interpret Jesus' instruction not to withhold what is asked of you (and indeed to give more). So far am I from wanting to diminish the richness of our world of meaning that I press ardently for my students to amplify and revel in their meaning-making interpretation of the Bible, the world, their relationships, and everything. And in return for Tom's quotation from St. Augustine a couple of days ago, I cite my favorite line from de Doctrina Christiana (3, 28): "For what could God have more generously and abundantly provided in the divine writings than that the same words might be understood in various ways. . . ?"

That's all for now, more than enough, till someone pushes us further.

(For the record, on a topic David introduces but no one else follows up, my book intends to introduce readers to various sorts of postmodern biblical interpretations--so that by citing particular "interesting" or "provocative" interpretations I aim not to endorse those interpretations, but to suggest that these interpretations represent sophisticated instantiations of postmodern critical thinking.)
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      ( 11:48 AM )  

Bonus Guest blog

Overdue Thoughts

Constant readers--well, okay, "both of you"--may remember that I supported the "plagiarist priest" in suburban Detroit, at least so far as he was accused of preaching sermons that others had written (he was also accused of using others' writings under his byline in the church newsletter, for which I have no sympathy). About a week ago, I promised to talk about a very different attitude I bring to "sermon illustrations" the heart-warming (or "cautionary" or "comic" or "dramatic") narrative nuggets that circulate in oral tradition, in published compendia, in cherished scrapbooks or notebooks or stacks of file cards, and now (of course) on the Web. Victor Echo Zulu noticed, and has been reminding me that I should speak my piece.

Here's something I wrote a year or two go:

Those endearing little stories that seem to add such vivid color to your otherwise pedestrian sermon raise many important questions about who's preaching what to whom. Does the illustration really fit the point you're making so perfectly? Illustration-mongers have to prepare their wares to suit a variety of possible homiletical points; if the anecdote in question would do just as well for three or four other sermon ideas, in what sense does it strengthen your sermon and in what sense does it simply decorate your prose? (And bear in mind that your congregation may well have heard the same illustration used before--quite possibly, they've heard it used better.) If a congregation appreciates their preacher's selection of sermon illustrations, are they learning from the preacher or from their preacher's favorite journal of preaching helps? How often, how fully can you preach with utter conviction from stories that you plucked out of a compilation of homiletical hors-d'oeuvres? This may all be sour grapes on my part; I remember that I was always envious of my preaching professor who seemed to have lived through a superabundant array of instructive experiences. At the same time, I think that I have a basis for arguing that too heavy a reliance on "sermon illustrations" can lure the preacher into regarding her task as dressing up a point (we may hope that it's a biblical point, but often enough it's a point drawn from sociology or pop psychology or a recent movie) in an attractive set of illustrative stories. That differs pretty significantly from "biblical preaching," as far as I can tell. It relocates authority for the sermon from the preacher to the illustration-producer, and it risks resting too much persuasive power with the decorations rather than with the subject of the sermon.

To summarize my take on sermon illustrations: those who are best able to use them, don't usually need them; and those who are most eager to grab onto them probably ought not be using them. Permalink -Main Page-
      ( 8:02 AM )  

Spring Cleaning

By the way, one of the under-rated blessings of the web is its capacity to keep you humble. When wood s lot blogged the postmodernism conversation, he found profound, thoughtful nuggets from Tom, David, and Steve, and quoted me as saying, "Hey, the book is cheap." Oh, well. Permalink -Main Page-