Emergents sometimes exercise a deconstructive critique of the Bible’s view of God. Sometimes I hear it in ways that are no more interesting than Marcion’s old (and heretical) critique of the violent God of the Old Testament. Yet upon close inspection, the rumblings are subtler and more sophisticated, and the struggle is palpable and genuine. For some emergents, the Bible includes portrayals of God that cannot be squared with their understanding of a God of love.
Scot McKnight, “The Ironic Faith of Empergents,” Christianity Today, September 2008, 63.
Showing posts with label deconstructionism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label deconstructionism. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Monday, October 19, 2009
Stop Sign Exegesis
Hermeneutics in Everyday Life (from Playing With Fire, Walt Russell, page 49)
Suppose you’re traveling to work (on an east-west road) and you see a stop sign. What do you do? That depends on how you exegete the stop sign:
1. A postmodernist deconstructs the sign (that is, knocks it over with his car) ending forever the tyranny of the north-south traffic over the east-west traffic.
2. Similarly, a Marxist sees a stop sign as an instrument of class conflict. He concludes that the bourgeoisie use the north-south road and obstruct the progress of the workers on the east-west road.
3. A serious and educated Catholic believes that he cannot understand the stop sign apart from its interpretive community and their tradition. Observing that the interpretive community doesn’t take it too seriously, he doesn’t feel obligated to take it too seriously either.
4. An average Catholic (or Orthodox or Anglican or Methodist or Presbyterian or Coptic or whoever) doesn’t bother to read the sign, but he’ll stop if the car in front of him does.
5. A fundamentalist, taking the text very literally, stops at the stop sign and waits for it to tell him to go.
6. A preacher might look up “STOP” in his lexicon and discover that it can mean: 1) something which prevents motion, such as a plug for a drain, or a block of wood that prevents a door from closing; or, 2) a location where a train or bus lets off passengers. The big idea of his sermon the next Sunday on this text is: “When you see a stop sign, it is a place where traffic is naturally clogged, so it is a good place to let off passengers from your car.”
7. An orthodox Jew takes another route to work that doesn’t have a stop sign so that he doesn’t risk disobeying the Law.
Suppose you’re traveling to work (on an east-west road) and you see a stop sign. What do you do? That depends on how you exegete the stop sign:
1. A postmodernist deconstructs the sign (that is, knocks it over with his car) ending forever the tyranny of the north-south traffic over the east-west traffic.
2. Similarly, a Marxist sees a stop sign as an instrument of class conflict. He concludes that the bourgeoisie use the north-south road and obstruct the progress of the workers on the east-west road.
3. A serious and educated Catholic believes that he cannot understand the stop sign apart from its interpretive community and their tradition. Observing that the interpretive community doesn’t take it too seriously, he doesn’t feel obligated to take it too seriously either.
4. An average Catholic (or Orthodox or Anglican or Methodist or Presbyterian or Coptic or whoever) doesn’t bother to read the sign, but he’ll stop if the car in front of him does.
5. A fundamentalist, taking the text very literally, stops at the stop sign and waits for it to tell him to go.
6. A preacher might look up “STOP” in his lexicon and discover that it can mean: 1) something which prevents motion, such as a plug for a drain, or a block of wood that prevents a door from closing; or, 2) a location where a train or bus lets off passengers. The big idea of his sermon the next Sunday on this text is: “When you see a stop sign, it is a place where traffic is naturally clogged, so it is a good place to let off passengers from your car.”
7. An orthodox Jew takes another route to work that doesn’t have a stop sign so that he doesn’t risk disobeying the Law.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900)
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are: metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
In Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 483.
In Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 483.
Derrida, Jacques
Derrida defines deconstruction as a “decentering” process in which the central locus of a structure, that which gives it meaning, coherence and presence, has been disrupted and has become a “nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions come into play…Derrida means that there is no actual “presence” of meaning in a text, because the symbols can no longer be identified with the original meaning. In the act of writing, the author’s intention (indeed his very presence) has been “expelled” from the autonomous text, which now “plays” in whatever interpretive playground the reader brings to it.
Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 483.
Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 483.
Deconstructionism
They [deconstructionists] are not hermeneutical anarchists but seek to free the reader/interpreter from the “false” constraints of Western thinking and from the search for final meaning in a text. From their viewpoint, they are liberationists!
Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 485.
Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 485.
Deconstructionism
Five criticisms of deconstructionism from Thiselton:
1) If textual meaning is a community product, texts can never transform readers “from outside"
2) prophetic address has lost its power and in fact achieves the opposite, for its message is constructed by the very community it purports to address
3) notions like grace or revelation are illusions, since there are no givens
4) the “message of the cross” becomes no more than the “linguistic construct of a tradition”
5) nothing can ever be counted as error in the development of doctrine, for it is all little more than a social construct.
In Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 482.
1) If textual meaning is a community product, texts can never transform readers “from outside"
2) prophetic address has lost its power and in fact achieves the opposite, for its message is constructed by the very community it purports to address
3) notions like grace or revelation are illusions, since there are no givens
4) the “message of the cross” becomes no more than the “linguistic construct of a tradition”
5) nothing can ever be counted as error in the development of doctrine, for it is all little more than a social construct.
In Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 482.
Deconstructionism
Since all language is metaphor, and since metaphor is “dead of meaning at its core,” language is characterized by “absence” (the absence of literal meaning and of hermeneutical constraints). Therefore, multiple meaning necessarily results, as the perceiver provides the content for the autonomous and empty metaphor.
Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 476.
Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 476.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)