Is Prolegomena Permissible?

I was reading Covenant's own Dr. Michael Williams on the matter of systematic theology, and he covers a lot of very good ground. However he raises a question that I have struggled with for some time: should systematic theology burden Scripture with extra-scriptural prolegomena? That is not far from the problem Barth dealt with as he sought to have the Bible provide not just the answers, but also the questions for theology.

I would suggest that we must have prolegomena. We cannot come to the text tabla rosa, we will apply an interpretive framework to it. We bring our cultural and linguistic frameworks to the text; we bring our epistemological frameworks to the text; yes, we even bring our understanding of the text to the text. The hermeneutical spiral is what it is regardless of if we wished we could simply extract the text as we was meant to be known. I know Dr. Williams acknowledges this as well, and, for that matter, we have spent much of this semester in what appears to me to be the prolegomena of Covenant Theology, and so I am sure there is more to his position than what I have stated above. I need to talk to him on this subject perhaps, but I leave it to my readers for tonight: how do you deal with the tension between sola scriptura and the need for interpretive frameworks in reading that Scripture?

For me, I think, following Calvin and the Westminster Confession, I find it mostly helpful not to look solely to Scripture, but rather to place whatever I look at under the authority of Scripture. I would argue we must have extrabiblical assumptions, but that does not mean we abandon sola scriptura. What do you think?

It Came By FedEx...

…yes, Mac OS X 10.5 arrived at about 11:30 this morning. I'm getting ready to install it on one of my computers. Hopefully I will be good to go before the new OS even officially launches at 6:00 tonight!

Injured

Well, almost two weeks ago, I apparently injured my upper back and left arm. It wasn't very apparent at first, but really started to bug me after I participated in a few games of Wii Sports bowling (not surprising, since other than the lack of the heavy ball, one moves in precisely the same way as real bowling). I think the source may have been my purchase and subsequent carrying of the complete Catholic Encyclopedia (16 volumes), which I got for under $30 at a book sale at Covenant's library. It gradually got worse over the weekend before the last one and into last week, with the climax of pain somewhere between last Wednesday and Friday. Particularly since Wednesday or so, I've noticed typing irritated my upper arm and back, so I've been trying to spend my time on the reading I need to do with the plan of catching up on written — typed — things after a few more days. I think I'm slowly on the mend, finally. It hasn't been that bad, and I'm not writing this to complain, but merely to note the cause of my continued absence.

In the mean time, I have a post or two in my head for here and an article or two for OFB, but those will have to wait. I'll be back… (pun intended.)

George Wishart It Is

I have a lot of writing projects I want to do, but it seems like with as busy as semesters are, most of them get relegated to the “sometime in the future” stack. Especially book ideas, but even article ideas. One thing I have been in the mood to do for awhile is try my hand at a play again, but that, like the other ideas, has been relegated to the future bin. Now, I think that will change.

For my elective class on Presbyterian History, the term project is open to creativity, so I have discussed with the professor the idea of writing a historically grounded play. After a few false starts, I think I'm going to focus on the end of early Scottish Reformer George Wishart's life. There is a lot of intrigue involved, particularly given David Cardinal Beaton's unjust execution of Wishart and then the retaliatory death of the cardinal shortly thereafter. It seems like it has good potential for dramatization and wouldn't require a lot of artistic freedoms to create a good sense of timing (too much liberty in plot might not be good for a history project!). Hopefully I can take some time to dive into the Bard's histories once again to freshen up with some new ideas before I go forward; I'd also like to draw some ideas from John Webster. While both Shakespeare and Webster aren't quite contemporaries of Wishart's, the Elizabethan/Jacobean form will suit the story well and still be somewhat related in time to boot (not that it really matters).

Now I just need to collect interesting details from Wishart's life…

Late Night Haiku XXIV

LXVII. Odd night of fading past,
Yesterday, and now three years,
Trickle to a flood.

LXVIII. A new reminder,
That October into May.
Came unthought today.

LXVIX. The silence denotes
The long past sorrows of Time,
Never glancing back.

On Reading, Part IV: Mimetic Criticism

This is a continuation of my series on literary criticism and Biblical hermeneutics. You can find the previous pieces of the series here: I. Old Historicism, II. New Criticism, III.1. Reader Response, III.2. Reader Response Cont'd..

So far, you can see the progression we have made from the strong objective belief in authorial intent and historical influence, as it appeared in the Historicism, to the even stronger sense of the text as an objective reality of its own in the New Criticism, to the strong subjectivism that followed in Reader Response. I was inclined to skip over Mimeticism — which has some close ties with Reader Response — despite the fact that I find it interesting, because I have not spent as much time studying it as I would have liked to prior to commenting, and because I am anxious to move on to our next stop, Deconstructionism.

But, in Covenant Theology today the lecture outline contained a quote from Erich Auerbach's Mimesis and I decided I had to at least mention Auerbach's school as we continue this survey.

Mimetic criticism focuses on the text as that which portrays reality. There is a heavily Platonic sense to this critical school in at least some forms, given its sense that literature can illumine reality better than what we normally think of as “real life” can. The common analogy being Plato's Cave: if our experience is the flickering shadows on the cave wall, literature is perhaps looking in the pond outside the cave and seeing the sun reflected with relative clarity.

For some reason, my fascination with Mimetic Criticism has been largely in applying its principles to a Jungian archetypal model. Though Jung's ideas usually show up in Reader Response, it is my assertion that they fit perhaps better here, for my interest is in seeing how the author, reflecting on reality, creates the text, and not nearly as much on how the reader responds to the text. The archetypal figures do not just come out of the readers imagination to be imposed on the characters of the text, rather they exist in the text. Hamlet would not evoke archetypal inspired responses in readers if he did not fit the characteristics of the tragic hero to begin with. In a sense, to return to the New Criticism, we might say there is such a thing as an objective correlative — an objective feature of the text — which evokes the archetypal recognition in the reader.

Thinking about Auerbach reminds me of another point I find interesting with Mimeticism, however, and this one is more closely related to Biblical hermeneutics. While as a good Thomist (to the extent that Thomism does not impinge on my Barthian tendencies) I view too much emphasis on Plato to the exclusion of Aristotle as a bad thing indeed, I think the notion of the realm of the ideal forms is somewhat compatible with the Christian notion of God. If we follow Barth's emphasis on the self-revelation of God and the fullness of revelation in Christ Jesus, then it may make sense to say that the Bible, as the clearest witness to that revelation, points from lesser to greater views of reality. Furthermore, natural revelation (such as it functions at all) fits well the analogy of the shadows on a cave: it gives a highly distorted view of the true reality. Nevertheless, even fallen creation reflects the original Word of God, by which it exists.

While we want to be careful to avoid Platonic dualism in the church, I think this perspective need not lead us to that point. We do not want to say we are trapped in a lesser physical revelation, but rather that the created world is in its entirety a witness to God that is lesser not because it is bad, but rather because it is not direct. The true self-revelation of God in Christ is a direct viewing of the Creator by creation rather than merely a view of reflections.

Obviously, there is a lot of potential applications in theology to the basic framework of Mimeticism — I am not by any means doing it justice. But it is at least worth mentioning on the “Attractions Next Exit” sign, so that you may get off and explore it more fully before we pass it up en route to the bigger and more recent stops on the itinerary.

Gratitude and credit is due in large part to Dr. Ana Schnellman of Lindenwood University for the basic understanding of Mimeticism off of which I am working. Don't blame her, however, for my Jungian musings, those are my own reader responses to the ideas of this school.

Saturday 8

I'm trying a new meme from Saturday 8. Feel free to answer in the comments.

1. a restaurant was out of the food you wanted?
That would have been Sonic (“America's Drive-in”) a week or so ago. They had an equipment breakdown and could not serve a whole bunch of different menu items.

2. you were dumped/divorced by a significant other/spouse?
Never. It is rather hard to be dumped if you've never had a significant other, now isn't it? If the question were when was I relatively directly rejected by someone who perhaps eventually could have been a significant other, that would have been just about two years ago.

3. you were denied a promotion?
Never. I'm my own boss, so I promote myself every time I ask for a promotion.

4. you didn't get the job you applied for?
The last consulting bid I was turned down on was this past week. The only formal job application I've filled out was one I filled out in August at the request of the professor who wanted to hire me as a TA. I'm now happily doing a few TA duties on the side.

5. a friend cancelled a lunch date (or other meeting) on you?
In the other meeting department, I had a small group meeting canceled three weeks ago. I didn't know until I arrived to attend.

6. someone took credit for something YOU did?
This spring.

7. an appliance (or something in your home) broke?
Last month the Microwave died.

8. you were denied something credit-related? (loan, credit card, a rental, etc.)
2004. I tried to apply for an Amazon.com Visa, but I didn't have enough credit history for it. I went with my bank's credit card instead, which worked out fine, although it lacks any kind of rewards program.

Greek Tidbit: Granville Sharp

Well, Mike asked for a little sample of Greek weekly. I'm not good at doing things weekly, but I'll provide one for this week, at least! This is an interesting grammatical rule which came up when I was teaching the high school Sunday School class at my church last week. We were looking at Titus 2.13, “while we wait for the blessed hope—the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ” (NIV). Now, it seems natural enough that the author of the epistle is referring to Jesus as “our great God and Savior.” But, it could also be read, theoretically as “our great God” and also “our Savior Jesus Christ.” I noted in passing that there existed a grammatical rule in Greek that helps argue for the first reading.

Much to my surprise, I found out the class was really interested in hearing about this grammatical rule, so I told them it was called the Granville Sharp rule, and explained it something like the following. When there are two singular, non-proper nouns (e.g. God and savior) that have one article (“the”) in front of them, and those two words are joined with a conjunction (“and”), they both refer to the same thing. Granville Sharp, in formulating his rule, was a “little” more precise than that, but such is the gist.

In Greek, the text looks like this: “προσδεχόμενοι τὴν μακαρίαν ἐλπίδα καὶ ἐπιφάνειαν τῆς δόξης τοῦ μεγάλου θεοῦ καὶ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ.” Notice the part in bold. The article is “τοῦ,” and the two titles applied to Jesus are “μεγάλου θεοῦ” (“great God”) and “σωτῆρος ἡμῶν” (“our savior”). The conjunction (“καὶ”) is right were you would expect it to be. So, as you can see, all the necessary components of Granville Sharp's rule are present. To answer one common question, yes, “God” is non-proper; we talk about gods or a god in English, and such usage would have been even more common in polytheistic Graeco-Roman culture.

So there you have it. Now, Titus 2.13 is not the most helpful verse in many discussions on the deity of Christ, even with Granville Sharp's rule, because of the question of the authorship of the Pastoral Epistles. That is, even if I affirm the Pauline authorship of them, many others do not, so even now that you are armed with this useful Greek tidbit, it will not necessarily be a convincing verse to many. Then again, even if it was without a doubt Pauline, it would remain unconvincing to many, so perhaps authorship really does not matter in this case.

First Post of My New Year

Well, I didn't have a chance to go with the very good suggestions of either Travis or Mike, but since today (or rather, now, yesterday — the 24th) is my birthday, I thought I should put up the first post of “the new year.” Perhaps tomorrow I shall see if I can do one of those suggestions…

You Pick, I Write

I admit that asisaid has been a little lacking in meaty content lately. I have been letting my series on theological-literary criticism interactions lapse, and I have not touched my unsystematic systematic theology project in a few months either. Come to think of it, I also owe all of you another installment in my little fiction series, Wittenberg. (If you haven't yet seen the existing installments, all currently running asisaid series other than the lit crit one can be found in the gray box at the top of the front page entitled “Currently Running Series” — I'll have to add my criticism series there too.)

My excuse for all of this? School work and other obligations have left me feeling less inspired and energetic than usual to put my thoughts to paper. I do have thoughts on all of those things list above, as well as others, so if you have anything you'd like to see me write on — either continuing a series or starting afresh — mention it in the comments and I'll try to follow your requests.