Search Results for: literal

As I was walking to work this morning, it occurred to me to conjecture that “liberal” theologies err to the extent that they neglect their symbiotic relationship with ordinary, historic, “orthodox” (by which I don’t necessarily mean “what contemporary soi-disant orthodox Anglicans mean, but something more like “broadly-agreed-upon”) theology. I’d say “liberal” theology is parasitic on historic orthodoxy, but there’s no way to do that without giving the impression that I mean it pejoratively, which I don’t.
 
That is, I conjecture that “liberal” theology flourishes to the extent that it provides an alternative articulation of theological points alongside what non-“liberal” theologies assert. When “liberal” theology begins to elbow aside or suppress non-“liberal” theology — when it asserts a sort of Whiggish triumphalism over the allegedly obsolete, irrelevant formulations of hidebound blah blah blah — it cuts off the vitality of the partner without whose continuing strength, the “liberal” alternative loses its coherence. Thus, if I’m on the right track, it’s positively in the interests of “liberal” theologians to support strong education in the basics of historic theology; that’s the juniper that supports their mistletoe, or the anemone that shelters their clownfish.
 
On this account, “conservative” theologies likewise depend symbiotically on historic orthodoxy. And by the same token, the more narrowly one defines the “one true and eternal faith” of a “conservative” theology, the less wholesome that theology becomes; dry rot sets in, and (once again) the tree collapses under the weight of its symbiont. The leading difference in these two cases derives from the rationale given for choking off the host: in the case of the “conservative” symbiont, the main trunk has become too tolerant, has deviated fatally from the correct doctrinal formulae.
 
When I propose this, I do not mean to refer to a particular present case, e.g. sexuality. All the specifics of cases would require argument relative to their specifics, and although I disagree with many “conservative” arguments regarding sexuality, I don’t posit that they err simply by drawing a line and not “tolerating” disagreement on this topic. Rather, the more precise way to conduct the “conservative” argument (according to me, to whom no one is obliged to listen) would be to begin by allowing that breadth and diversity and flexion characterize the church through history, and that theological positions such as that which I advocate nonetheless fall outside the bounds of what the church can permit. Now, some theologians do couch their arguments that way (generally), and I respect the care that reflects. I still disagree, but it’s an argument within which we’re really disagreeing about a real thing. A considerable number of theologians, on the other hand, espouse a perspective on the church’s teaching that unduly throttles the circulation of nourishing theological ideas — let us say, by making one particular doctrine of the atonement an essential hallmark of sound theology — such that the church’s growth and strength suffer. “We only need Vitamin D! All those other vitamins are a snare and a delusion!” One need not adopt an absolutism of one source of nourishment in order to dispel claims that other diets are unbalanced (if indeed they are).
 
It’s harder to explain to “liberal” theologians that I disagree with them, because often (as in the case of sexuality) we seem to be agreeing. Still, where a modernised church proclaims its triumph over its own past’s ignorance, I politely step out of lockstep and return to converse with less up-to-date colleagues. The fact that the church’s mind changes in various ways over time (how could it not?) doesn’t mean that its former outlook is benighted, foolish, uncritical, anachronistic, or “fundamentalist” (a word that tends to function overwhelmingly as a term of abuse, not as a clearly-defined explanation of a basis for disagreeing). Most “liberals” take some things literally and they ignore or rationalize other things; most “conservatives” likewise take some things literally and soft-pedal or rationalize others. Most “liberals” and “conservatives” both construe certain theological premises as “fundamental.” Almost all of those definitions obscure the possibility that the definer in question might, possibly, be wrong — might indeed need fellowship with, communion with, a broader range of alternatives than she or he is willing for his/her definition to permit. (Again, there will be boundaries — the problem arises not from drawing boundaries, but from refusing to draw boundaries humbly, charitably, and subject to change or correction.)
 
The strength of good theology draws on more than simply partisan teaching. If any version of “liberal” or “conservative” theology is sound, it will be able to draw strength from the historic breadth and variety and consistent emphases of the church’s teaching. At the very least, the distinct “l”/“c” theology will benefit from its adherents and exponents being able clearly and specifically to explain the pattern of continuities and exclusions that they propose. And new believers will be very much better served by learning sympathetically the church’s historic basics first, before they learn ways that their contemporaries have characterized topics more narrowly.

NPR’s Monitor Mix blog has posted a great interview between Frannie Kelley (the interviewer) and Eliot Van Buskirk and Jay Sweet. Just a few of the bulls-eye, dead-on quotations:

FK: Right, so why are labels still making CDs at all?…
EVB: Partially, it’s because they bought out their distributors in the ’80s. They literally own trucks.
JS: Exactly. And also because they need to have some payable against the bands, and they own the manufacturing, the distribution, the marketing etc.
 
FK: Does the money the average consumer spends on extras (like exclusive tracks) and novelty items, like the AC/DC amp, ever make it to the musicians?…
JS: In many ways artists would be better off getting a straight loan from a bank.
 
EVB: Right, which it sort of is. As a wise man once said, if you want to see the best on-demand free music service in the world, go to YouTube and close your eyes.
 
EVB: The anger towards the major labels is well-deserved. They are the only industry I can think of that openly scorns, disrespects and tries to fleece their audience at every turn.
 
JS: If both the artist and the fan feel ripped off . . . that’s a harbinger of doom if I ever saw one.
EVB: I spoke with an RIAA executive around the time of the original Napster lawsuit, and his tone was very much “these goddamn meddling kids” and not “how can we treat our consumers better so they don’t backstab us?”
JS: The fans as the enemy is really a fight you can never win. Ever.
JS: Imagine any other industry where the brand sues its customer base on a regular basis.
JS: Pretty soon you go for a different brand.
 
JS: Smart bands have great management. Great managers have even better accountants.
 
EVB: Labels have essentially become banks. Radiohead’s genius with In Rainbows’ was, in part, to use a bank instead of a label. Banks have better terms, assuming you’re an established act like they are.
JS: Exactly what I said earlier.
JS: Bands would be better off taking out small loans than using a label.
JS: At least they would be in charge of their own accounting.

Nick Lowe was on the right track. But it’s well worth reading the whole interview. Well done, NPR!

Really nothing that associates there with one another, but they’re in my tab bar, waiting for me to link to them.
 
The Boston Globe notes the illuminating studies of metaphorical usage that some of us have known about for more than twenty years (and that acute readers of Dinosaurs Comics read about back in March).
 
Elegant futurist flatware design, from 1957 (by way of 2001).
 
David talked about his use of Shannon’s signal/noise distinction at Ars Electronica last September. As I thought about it, I realized that there’s no intrinsic difference between signal and noise, that “noise” to a radio operator may be “signal” to someone who’s investigating sunspots.
 
Leafy greens, eggs, potatoes, cheese, sprouts, berries. Even ice cream sometimes. What’s the preventive value of being a vegetarian?
 
Now I’m going to download the new Mountain Goats album from eMusic. Excuse me.
 

It seems impossible that I’ve been in Glasgow less than a week. If old age speeds time up, perhaps we can counteract that effect by moving from familiar surroundings to strange new cities, every week or two. On the other hand, it’s so exhausting that the perceived protraction of time is squandered by naps and lassitude.
 
I flew from Durham last Sunday afternoon. The flight experience was unremarkable, save that I only got bout ninety minutes’ sleep on the overnight to Glasgow, and the elderly 757 had only a few screens, showing all the same programming (and the one nearest me was dimmer than optimal, so the darker scenes in A Night At The Museum: Smithsonian escaped me.
 
I arrived at Glasgow on schedule, and was permitted through immigration after a thorough (but agreeable) questioning. There were no customs inspectors in sight (literally; one could have smuggled any sort of contraband into Scotland). Since I arrived at the crack of dawn, though, and had no keys to my flat, I hauled my baggage up to the upper-level dining area to pass an hour or so drinking coffee and trying to think through the fact that I now live in Scotland.
 
I then took a cab into downtown Glasgow (at rush hour) to obtain my keys from the landlord’s solicitor. After an hour or so, the lease was ready, I signed, received the keys, and took a cab out to my new neighborhood. I opened the flat, unpacked my clothes into the closet, and hiked from the flat to the Department of Theology and Religious Studies to show them that I actually exist. They showed me my new office — third (= US “fourth”) floor walk-up — and greet some of my new colleagues. Then, suddenly, I was overwhelmed with weariness and staggered home.
 
This is where the story gets weird. When I arrived at my flat, barely conscious, I couldn’t manage to open the doorknob lock. I turned and twisted and pushed and pulled for ten minutes or so, but nothing worked. I asked my friendly downstairs neighbor to give it a go; he tried for another fifteen minutes. Since I didn’t have a mobile phone, I asked whether I might use his phone to call my landlord’s solicitor. I called her, she called my landlord, my landlord called my neighbor, and eventually soeone in the chain arranged for a team of joiners (yes, “joiners,” just as in Midsummer’s Night Dream) to come pry open the door and replace the knob. As it turns out, they had to break the doorknow off the door altogether, and they wouldn’t have a replacement knob-lock assembly till the next day. By now, it was about 5:00 Monday afternoon, and I still hadn’t slept more than 90 minutes since Saturday night. I collapsed, slept and waked in alternating shifts till morning, when I woke up and prepared to greet the joiners.
 
(More after church)

I’m feeling better about this round of visa application. Although Margaret will quickly point out that I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, I have at least a tenuous basis for my confidence this time. When I first applied, the Embassy rejected me right away — literally the next day after they opened my file — because they spotted a defect in my application. This time, they opened my file almost a week ago and I haven’t heard a peep from them, suggesting to me that they haven’t seen any prima facie reason to turn me down.
 
And since I already have a job lined up, and since I’m such an innocuous sort of person (I have all my inoculations up to date), and since it’ll be such a pain in the neck for Glasgow if I’m not permitted into the country, and since I’ve very obviously learned my lesson about submissive compliance to immigration authorities, I do venture to think that this application will bear fruit. They’re probably just double-checking my bona fides, maybe taking my passport photo down to the Kinko’s around the corner to make me a laminated visa (is a visa even a separate card, or something? I’ve never seen one), or trying to get past the leopard in the disused lavatory in the cellar to open the locked file cabinet and obtain the triplicate copies of my application.
 

According to Alex Hayes, “Thinking was literally distributed across the caves of Lascaux, for example. Was it distributed without translation or mutation? Of course not, but it was distributed nonetheless” (link courtesy of Stephen Downes).
 
Just out of curiosity, in what sense does the knowledge that the paintings entail exist in a state sufficiently distinct from the paintings, and sufficiently clearly delimited, that it makes sense to submit that the paintings constitute a translation or mutation of the (untranslated, un-mutated) knowledge? I’m not arguing that there’s no such thing as knowledge or any comparably overblown claim — but I’m wondering what stake we have in reserving a sphere of “knowledge” that’s not inflected by its representations. If we grant (as I insist) that action is a mode of meaning and interpretation, do our enacted interpretive gestures also “mutate” knowledge? If so, what do we know about un-mutated, pure knowledge — and how can we know it apart from the mutagenic effects of words, actions, and other interpretive representations? (And how does the verb “know” work in the previous sentence?)

On one hand, people want to interpret the Bible literally, as opposed to figurative or abstracted readings; the literal sense provides a bulwark against caprice and an assurance to humble readers. On the other hand, people want to distance themselves from literalists, who read the Bible too literally. As a result, interpreters devise elaborate defenses of what counts as “literal” (in a good sense) that’s nonetheless different from what’s literal (in a bad sense); they ascribe figurative force to the literal sense (“at this point, the literal sense is a metaphor”) and locate the determinative qualities of this literality in the text, even though the literalist is making the same appeal to “the text itself.”
 
It needs to be this way, because such readers insist that it can’t be that the Bible’s meaning is underdetermined, that the communicative gestures represented in a Bible might plausibly be apprehended differently by different readers who weight the different aspects of the representation (and indeed, “different representations”) differently.

I’m working on what I want to say about the function of “literal” in interpretive/theological discourse; as part of that think I recalled that most people come to hermeneutics as they do to politics and religion and design, with partially-formed intuitions about what must be and what ought to be. I was wondering how to get at the relation of those under-theorized premises, when it occurred to me that the SongMeanings website provides some helpful illustrations.
 
If I teach a hermeneutics course again, I may direct students to a song each, with the assignment to examine the kinds of claim that commenters make about what the song “means,” and the sort of evidence they adduce for their claims. It may be easier to recognize some exaggerated errors in this open website than to catch them in play when arguing out a theological issue.

I have a short essay half-formed in my mind, developing my argument from “La Misère du Littéral” to make the point that the whole discourse of what counts as “literal” interpretation or “biblical literalism” has gone off its rails. The same may be said of “fundamentalism,” as shown by the Revealer’s recent post about “Britain’s cleverest fundamentalist.” The article in the New Statesman to which they link doesn’t go that far; the closest its author comes is to suggest that he’s writing about someone whose “views come across as hardline, explicit and specific, verging on the fundamentalist… because of the gulf between his straightforward expression of belief and the kindly muddle of the old liberals who dominated for so long.”
 
The theologian in question is Tom Wright. Now, I disagree with Tom about plenty of topics, within our field of mutual specialization and in a broader theological sphere. For all I know, he supports Manchester United and the Yankees. But the Revealer’s characterization of Tom as a “fundamentalist” shows a disregard for the ethics of journalistic precision that reflects very poorly on the site and its contributors. The only rationale I can think of for labeling Tom a “fundamentalist” is that he takes positions on Christian doctrine and ethics that depart from the Manhattanite liberalism that regards any clear dogmatic claim as ludicrous (unless, perhaps, it’s made by a Tibetan Buddhist). Tom is a resolutely critical reader of the Bible, a throughly modern intellectual, and is miles away from the kinds of ecclesiology and theology that “The Fundamentalism Project” analyzed with scholarly precision.
 
But why let accuracy preclude name-calling? Tom doubts that gay and lesbian Christians can reconcile the exercise of their sexual inclinations with the theology he is entrusted to protect and promulgate. He thinks, risibly enough, that the phrase “of the body” in the millennia-old articulation of Christian faith in the “resurrection of the body“ should actually be understood to refer to bodies. No one sophisticated enough to work at the Revealer could be suspected of so callow a blunder!
 
I tell you, the more I hear from the prominent voices of Christian progressivism, the more determined they seem to fulfill all their adversaries’ worst opinions of them. If Tom is a fundamentalist, so am I. If Tom is a fundamentalist, all the term can mean is that the accuser thinks he or she is smarter than Tom. Guess what: you’re wrong both about Tom and about yourself.

I just handed in my paper for next week’s colloquium, and as I was roughing out the last bits it occurred to me that among the difficulties that beset biblical interpretation, few may be as toxic as the the disciplinary proclivity toward esotericism. I don’t mean that all biblical scholars shop in the sort of bookstore that gives Chris apoplectic paroxysms; I mean that biblical studies tends to focus its disciplinary energies on that which cannot be detected by a casual reader. The same inclination affects other, perhaps all, interpretive fields, too. It is especially pronounced, however, in biblical studies, and that inclination militates against biblical scholars reading well the text that they study. Worse still (and some of you knew I would get to this), by adopting a practice that endorses the premise that “the real meaning” involves something other than what was said, the esoteric impulse in biblical scholarship tends obliquely to support such intellectual miasmas as The da Vinci Code.
 
I do not endorse a facile literalism (still less, the King James variety). On the other hand, sometimes authors express themselves exoterically: they mean what they say. At such points the expositor’s job is not to seek out further obscurities, but to say, “Yup, that’s pretty much what it means. You didn’t need a biblical scholar to tell you that, did you?”
 

I gave the presentation on Magritte and Krazy Kat at the Society of Anglican and Lutheran Theologians meeting yesterday, and it was a shade of a letdown; the group was attentive and very responsive to the presentation itself, but the preponderance of those who spoke up were pretty firmly committed to the hermeneutical status quo — especially after my presentation, when a panel discussed Lutheran approaches to the use of Scripture in discussions concerning sexuality. Though I didn’t by any means expect that everyone would fall all over themselves to accommodate my points in the talk, many of the pivotal issues in the panelists’ talks fell squarely into the area that I had just devoted ninety minutes to calling into question. Anyway, I’ll post the gist of the lecture in the extended version of this post — in case you’re interested. Continue reading “SALT and Savour”