Search Results for: literal

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”

I was going to comment retrospectively on Tom’s post about the Bible and “proper” understanding, but Paul and Tom and Phil far outdid anything I’d be able to cobble together.

So instead, I’ll summarize the article about technology and religion that I sent in to my editor.

In the opening paragraphs, I try to sketch the extent to which technology permeates contemporary culture. While one can imagine a hermit who eschews all fabricated advantages, or a bleeding-edge early adopter who embraces all technologies without hesitation, the vast preponderance of religious adherents fall into a middle area that accepts some technologies and rejects others, very often without careful analysis.

I then begin by proposing a very rough characterization of religious faith that repudiates the material world in favor of the spirit, and religious faith that endorses the material world as an expression of the human spirit. Such a convenient taxonomy might shed some light on religious attitudes toward technology, but it occludes mediating positions or religious perspectives that construe technology in itself as indifferent, but concentrate on its effects on believers.

I call attention to technology’s propensity to foreground its advantages and to suppress its costs. The capacity to drive across town to obtain a take-out pizza constitutes a delicious benefit of automotive transportation, but that benefit occludes the chain of dependency, pollution, and exploitation that produce and sustain the car. While advocates of technology can concentrate on the vast advantages that technological devices bestow, religious thinkers will want to keep a steadfast eye on all the labor, spoliation, waste, and pollution on which technologies depend.

Moreover, technologies insinuate themselves into their users’ lives so as to constitute aspects of their own identity. A musician senses the familiar instrument to be an extension of her or his own self; a driver does not simply operate a car, but feels with it (and responds to its traumas and triumphs as though they involved the driver’s own self. Indeed, sometimes technological devices become appendages of their users (glasses, for an external example, or a pacemaker for a life-sustaining internal device).

As technology shades into personal identity, though, we encounter the perplexing zone where organic identity and technological identity become difficult to parse. A copious literature explores the zone where “robots” and humans interact in ways that call into question the artificiality of the android and the humanity of the biological person.

(Here I note in passing a point I owe to Chris Locke — that especially in the field of “artificial intelligence,” technology comes with the hereditary influence of its progenitors in the military-industrial complex, and the apple rarely falls far from the tree.)

The conundrum of technological humanity, the cyborg, often evokes the suspicion that the technological aspect of something (or someone) is not real. I’ve been asked more than once if certain of my friends are “real friends” or “online friends.” But no matter how you slice it, online interactions involve reality in some way or another; they are actual interactions, not hallucinations or fantasies.

We need to take seriously the religious significance of technology (and the technological dimensions of religious life) in part because the two have always been intertwined — from Stonehenge to temples. St Paul relied on the virtual presence made possible by letters to communicate with far-flung congregations; the buildings and appliances that serve religious purposes may involve digital technology as well as mechanical technology.

If machines can approximate humanness, and digital reality remains nonetheless real, though, what shall we say about technological spirituality? I take several paragraphs to explore the meaning of “religious behavior” in a digital online environment. Can toons pray? Can toons participate effectually in religious ritual? What criteria apply to the legitimacy of spiritual interactions online? Can one really be married in an online ceremony? (Are the toons involved married, but not their users?)

In a section that sends long roots back to my earliest arguments with David Weinberger, I insist that the internet doesn’t constitute a place — but (showing, I hope, a respectful appreciation of what he’s taught me since then) I underscore that the two-dimensional non-spatial nexus is not like any other two-dimensional entity with which we’re acquainted. Our near-instant access to the limitless extent of the expanding Web, and the fact that the Web interacts with time very differently from the ways that conventional spaces do, enrich the online environment with (non-literal) depth that three-dimensional spaces lack. The difference of the digital world approaches constituting the “sufficiently advanced” condition that Arthur C Clarke equates with “magic”; and since comparativists have long submitted that magic and religion are formally indistinguishable, we may fairly suggest that the Web offers users a magical, religious environment.

So to sum up, it is with good reason that people say both “God is in the details” and “the Devil is in the details.” Either way, it’s the details of technology that pertain to religious evaluation (and the details of religious particularity that will determine the status of technologies). As religions have struggled with whether to permit musical instruments, electrical lights, or other technological affordances, they will gradually come to terms with digital technology, in ways that vary according to the technology and the religion involved.

(Here’s a full PDF of the essay draft as submitted.)

Margaret and I have been wincing and groaning and rolling our eyes so much over the past few weeks that someone’s liable to lock us up — honestly, though, it concerns not our psychological stability, but the many and various invidious ways that people deploy the term “literal.”

(Not “literally,” this time anyway.)

Margaret’s working on the theology of hope, which involves attention to eschatology. When writers expatiate on the future, however, they demonstrate a terrible tendency to lay claim to authoritative use of “literal.” Fred Clark has pointed to the problem with “literal” in The Worst Books Ever Written (with extra credit for invoking the Muggletonians, a favorite digression in my lectures on Revelation or on the Montanists). Margaret notices that opponents of TWBEW frequently assert contrary “literal” readings that likewise depart markedly from what “literal” ordinarily denotes. And my engagements with hermeneutics and Anglican miasma constantly encounter people who claim that the literal or plain sense of words justify their side of an argument — as though their adversaries were arguing that “pizza” should be construed as “happily” and “bless” as “second-hand tennis shoes.”

The “literal” sense, or the “plain sense,” or whatever one might call it, just doesn’t do an honest day’s work when invoked in controversy. That’s as true now as it was in 1628:

That therefore in these both curious and unhappy differences, which have for so many hundred years, in different times and places, exercised the Church of Christ, we will, that all further curious search be laid aside, and these disputes shut up in God’s promises, as they be generally set forth to us in the Holy Scriptures, and the general meaning of the Articles of the Church of England according to them. And that no man hereafter shall either print, or preach, to draw the Article aside any way, but shall submit to it in the plain and full meaning thereof: and shall not put his own sense or comment to be the meaning of the Article, but shall take it in the literal and grammatical sense.

(I know I’ve quoted that before, from The King’s Declaration Prefixed to the Articles of Religion of November 1628, but it remains as true now as it did then and when I’ve quoted it before.) “Literal” doesn’t function to disprove what an interlocutor proposes; it doesn’t provide a bulwark against misinterpretation; it doesn’t unveil (apokaluptô, “reveal”) the supposed real meaning of words or phrases. There’s no there there. “Literal” always operates only within groups that already share the premise that such-and-such is a literal sense, or that have not already set down stakes for a contrary position.

Where the refernce of a word or phrased has been dispute, loud assertions about what it “literally” means have no pertinence; the meaning is what’s in question. Most claims about what something or other “literally” means should be recast as arguments that readers ought to construe such-and-such literally as X, or that a reading that proposes X as the literal sense of the text provides the best, soundest, most illuminating reading of the text. By the same token, readers who ascribe figurative, allegorical, or metaphorical sense to particular expressions have not taken flight from reality; they assert that the best, most fitting, most illuminating, most persuasive reading of the text emphasizes aspects of the text that extend beyond the literal.

The “literal” sense of these texts is hardly ever what people care about — they usually care about the tropological (ethical implications) or anagogical (implications about the shape of the future) or allegorical (doctrinal implications), which for various reasons they conflate with the literal. Alas, the literal sense isn’t equipped to fulfill their aspirations — so they whip the poor, bare, lexical-grammatical unit like Balaam’s ass, trying to force it to do what it can not. And like Balaam, they’re wrong.

We use “literal” or “plain sense” most soundly when it is trivial, when it’s not in dispute; we used it almost as soundly when we use it in grammatical or syntactical argument, where clear warrants and conventions provide a shared framework within which to work toward assent; we use the terms foolishly and ineffectually when — as is most common — we use tham as rhetorical arm-twisting (or cheer-leading) to assert that we’re uniquely correct in contexts where “literal” or “plain meaning” is precisely what’s disputed.

Margaret has compelled me to catch up on The Office and LOST this summer (thanks to DVDs and iTunes), both of which I’ve enjoyed a great deal — but (semi-spoiler alert) I’m struck, and disappointed, by the mortality/disappearance rate of black characters in LOST. (We’re part-way into Season Three, so readers who know the series can judge to what we’re referring.) The first season gave writers a lot to work with, and a richly integrated cast; at this point, the color spectrum has shifted vigorously away from the darkest skin tones.

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Which reminds me that someone suggested that my owning a television is like Les Carpenter owning a biretta — a waste of a glorious resource upon someone who doesn’t adequately appreciate it. And to make it worse, the Center’s townhouses come equipped with cable subscriptions. After the novelty of flicking through a hundred or so channels (it looked as though there were five or six “Christian” channels, to my surprise), we haven’t turned it back on.

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Back to LOST for a second — I was intrigued to read Edward Cook’s entry about watching LOST with Hebrew subtitles; evidently the subtitling industry regards Hurley’s “Dude!” as equivalent to Hebrew ben-adam (literally “son of humanity,” “son of a human,” or traditionally “Son of Man”). The soteriological implications of a “Dude” theology, especially when we make the connection to The Dude of The Big Lebowsky (finally making sense of that bowling-with-angels sequence, and enhancing the Old-and-New Judaeo-Christian partnership of Walt and the Dude), set the imagination reeling.

The Dude abides.

I’ve linked to Fred Clark’s scathing analysis of what he plausibly identifies as “The Worst Books Ever Written” before (digressive additional link (stop smirking, students of mine): Fred’s post yesterday on despair and suicide. I’d want to argue with him on several points, but only in the friendly, appreciative “Don’t you want to say. . .” way); now, it seems, Cross Currents editor Charles Henderson joins the chorus.

I wish I had room in my teaching schedule to lead a group through the Book of Revelation. As I read responses to Left Behind, I can’t help thinking that the most effective counterargument to LaHaye and Jenkins’ weirdly anti-literal interpretation would simply involve reading the texts carefully. As Fred’s most recent post shows in painful detail, there’s nothing “obvious” or “literal” about the prophetic fulfillments that LaHaye et al. purport to discover. But if you’ve been reading Revelation attentively all along, it’s hard to imagine that you find any of L&J’s snake oil convincing anyway.

Granted that word-for-word matching isn’t the cardinal characteristic of good translation, wouldn’t it be fair to translate dipsychos as “half-hearted”? It gets at the sense of divided sentiments better in colloquial English than does “double-minded,” which sounds more like multiple personality disorder to me.
Continue reading “Pondering”

Mustering my tattered energies, I put together a very short contribution to a project in which Blogaria’s own Mark Goodacre is involved: a textbook on methods of New Testament interpretation, with examples of each approach. My assignment was to describe “the history and theory of Theological interpretations of the New Testament” – in 700-800 words. The brevity was, of course, an attraction and an impediment at the same time. I managed to say most of what I wanted to, but goodness gracious, what gross oversimplification!

Now, to finish grading, produce three overdue lectionary essays, three overdue book reviews, and close out the academic year. (Mini-essay after the jump)
Continue reading “Whew!”

Thinking in the shower this morning — really, why don’t I just spend the whole day there? it’s when I arrive at most of my best ideas — it occurred to me to summarize my area of scholarly interest as “systems of expression and inference.” That touches on the way that articulating and uptake constitute complementary aspects of the same process: we speak/write as “I want David to understand this when I address him, so I’ll say that, which seems most likely to evoke the reaction I want,” and we hear/read as “I’d most likely have chosen those words to evoke that reaction.” The expression and inference are systemically related, and no single “law of meaning” governs all such systems. They interact and deflect one another such that one can never fully isolate a natural sign or a conventional signifier and assert a single determinate meaning for it.

Thus assertions about reading “literally,” whether in favor or against, always operate by excluding pertinent contextual data; there’s no “literally” there. (Fred Clark has been pursuing this topic with his characteristic exquisite patience here and here.) Words never arrive at our attention without some accent or inflection, and if we devised a way to transmit them “neutrally,” that very “neutrality” would communicate some metatextual data, in the way that people frequently infer a great deal from a “robotic” voice. Words in a book signify differently from words spray-painted on a wall; words spoken in a flat, unmodulated tone signify differently from words whispered into one’s ear or shouted enthusiastically. But there’s no acontextual venue for words, so even the OED constitutes a context for meaning that affects interpretation (start, for instance, from its Englishness).

Anyway, the shower ended, so I have to go get grubby and shower again to figure out what comes next. But that phrase, “systems of expression and inference,” I want to save and return to.

A couple of weeks ago — can it really have been that long? that recent? — Seabury celebrated a communion service in a context defined by the music (and politics) of U2. This is, in essence, a great idea — and I say this in large part because I had it, ages ago, but never did anything about it. No, but really, it makes a certain sense for people to worship God with songs with which they actually feel comfortable, which they love, which they understand to express their own deep feelings about God.

After the service, someone stopped me to ask what I thought, and while I hesitated I was told, “I figured that an Anglo-Catholic like you wouldn’t like it.” Errrr — it’s not my churchmanship that was hesitating. I can easily cope with diverse modes of worship, and I can compliment praise music and folky-casual liturgy when they’re offered with integrity and excellence. (That doesn’t mean I understand why anyone would worship that way just that I’m capable of appreciating excellence in casual-praise worship.) I wasn’t hesitating because of my liturgical theology, I was hesitating because I like U2.

The service involved playing songs by U2 over the Garrett Seminary chapel’s amplification system, which for the first few selections involved painful equalization that grossly overemphasized the high end and midrange (Adam might as well have been sitting out those selections). After the EQ hit a more balanced range, the other main problem with this programming choice became clear. It just plain feels weird to sing along to recorded music, especially so when a moderate proportion of the congregation doesn’t know the music as well as you do and are trying to follow the lyrics on the overhead projection screen. I will sing along enthusiastically in the car, or while I’m washing dishes, or walking, or just listening to the stereo — and sometimes I’ll sing along at live performances, though I prefer hearing the actual performers. But a large gathering of people singing along to recorded music just gave me the creeps.

The PowerPoint slides exemplified the un-subtle literal representation school of illustrating music. Love = people holding hands, poverty = starving African child, and so on. Bono doesn’t usually hit the heights of lyrical nuance; he more often falls within the bounds of the excellent-conventional use of language, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But when those lyrics are juxtaposed with [attempts at] direct illustration, the combination draws the whole matter closer to cliche. Which again makes it harder to sing along.

The best aspect of the whole evening came when the music button person played a version of the Sursum Corda that seems to have been edited together from instrumental portions of U2 compositions — I couldn’t identify any specific source, because the editing and the match of melody to words worked so well that it conveyed the impression of actually having been composed for the purpose. That I could sing to.

For the rest, I’d rather have sung along to Garrett’s house band performing the music, or have listened (not sung) to recordings of U2. I’d rather have heard the music through a clearer, more well-balanced sound mix. I would have liked to have sung “Gloria” in a eucharistic setting, but maybe Latin is the one language that’s absolutely forbidden. But none of the above criticism derives from my being a fussy Anglo-Catholic. If anything, I’m a fussy U2 admirer, and that particular service did not (I think) make the strongest possible case for their liturgical pertinence.
Continue reading “Blasphemy and U2”

First, Margaret pointed me to these photos of a recently-discovered owl species (“Strange Owl” — I love it! Xenoglaux, literally “strange owl” in Greek); with our public affinity for matters glauxological, and my family’s history of involvement with owls, I couldn’t omit mention of it here.

Second, I’m preaching Wednesday at Seabury’s chapel service; the texts are Daniel 3:14-28 (omitting 21-23), Canticle 13 from the BCP, and John 8:31-42. I belabor the topic of John and Judaism enough outside of chapel that I think I’ll concentrate my attention on John 8:32 (“You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free”), but I’m not sure yet.

I’m ba-a-a-a-ack.

What do theologians do when they go away to an academic conference?

The answer presumably involves someone in conference planning who doesn’t keep alert to online jargon (definitions two and three).

My response to Dale Martin’s Sex and the Single Savior follows in the extended link at the bottom of this post. The session was delightful; it began with Daniel Boyarin looking up and down the dais at Amy Hollywood, Stephen Moore, Dale Martin, Serene Jones, Jon Berquist, and me — and saying, “I love being on a panels like this. It’s like Cheers.” He also got off the zinger of the evening when Serene suggested that Dale wrote with a disingenuous irony comparable to that of the Bush regime: “The only difference between George W. Bush and Dale Martin is that Dale is actually from Texas.” Dale shocked a number of audience members (and some panelists) by asserting his unwavering commitment to doctrinal orthodoxy.

Yesterday was devoted mostly to mop-up shopping (I bought my copy of Robert Jewett’s monumental Romans commentary, to packing and to travel, though I ran into B.J. and Rodney at the departure gate at National Airport and pitched to them an idea for a book series. On the book production front, both Faithful Interpretation and Reading Scripture With the Church sold out at their respective display booths, and Faithful Interpretation received a favorable short notice in the Christian Century.
Continue reading “Filling In The Blanks”