After listening to the podcast and then reading the comments from Rick and the reply by Tyler, I'm thinking that part of the hidden problem is that language itself transforms the conversation. Tyler hints at it when he says that the conversation is emerging. The truths I think we're interested in are the ones where we are in relationship with God, whether it is through the Bible, the Spirit, or the creation.
Language itself is not stable enough to provide the exactitude that the historical critical method might require, if what we're looking for is "the words of God". Where I can say that I know what the Bible says, and I know what God has conveyed to me by the spirit, and what living in the world provides as far as connection with God, I can't know these things with the exactitude that would be required to point at them and have them reveal God on their own. Every attempt to allow the emergence of truth is an interaction with texts and the reality of God and the universe themselves. This event, of course, is what is expected from "sons and daughters of God" (Romans 8:19) to express in finishing the work of God in the world.
The best we can do is to allow the words to put us in a state where God is, and in doing so to retain the constant interactive contact that we require to function as oracles. Or, likewise to experience the interaction between a person and God that has become momentarily the oracle of God. These are not slices of time, but transcendent moments, when the barriers to understanding have allowed light, and heaven into the conversation where God resides.
If we're waiting for language to settle down, we shall wait forever.
I like Joseph and Tyler's assent to this process as the state of being a human in Christ.
I do wonder whether a misreading of Genesis about original sin has broken our ability to move past it.
You hit on two things we didn't really discuss in the interview, but that are essential to the overarching study.
1. The first is the fact that evangelicals seemed to have a very different conception of the capacity of language than, say, philosophical hermeneutics. My comment about "emerging" is a subtle nod to Gadamer (and, through him, Heidegger), who argues persuasively that no one really "directs" a conversation; both participants "fall" into it. This obviously comes from his systematic working out of the hermeneutical implications of Heidegger's Dasein, in which Heidegger argues that interpretation is, in some sense, "seeking after" something we already know, because if we didn't know what we would be seeking, we wouldn't be seeking at all. Even more, we wouldn't know it when we found it. But, of course, (according to his thinking) when we find an interpretation, we intuitively know we have found what we've been looking for, even without being able to articulate exactly what we were looking for beforehand.
2. The second is that the evangelical argument was essentially that there are either two options, pure objectivity or pure subjectivity, and that anyone who questions pure objectivity of language, interpretation, or hermeneutics has abandoned themselves to inevitable subjective and reader-centric readings (following the argumentation of E.D. Hirsch Jr.). This has always struck me as foolhardy, at least regarding biblical interpretation, given how often the biblical writers found references, meanings, and significances in the Old Testament that clearly required later events in salvation history to become clear (1 Cor 10:1-6, for example). The historical-critical method can't effectively account for this phenomenon if we link it with a commitment to the inerrancy and inspiration of Scripture.
All these thinkers, including others like Wittgenstein, of course, make arguments similar to yours, and with great effect, as well. However, one of the biggest unexplored issues in the project was their deficient view of "truth". For twentieth-century evangelicals, truth was purely an epistemological idea (via the correspondence theory). But the whole notion of biblical truth, especially in the way you frame it, is a lot more complicated than this, because the foundational statement about what is "real" and "true" is both about Jesus' identity and about our identity in Christ and the present experience of the Christian in this world, seems far more than mere Enlightenment epistemology can account for.
Grateful for the conversation, though I heard the two of you saying different things in the final quarter. Your guest Tyler Beam seems to do word switching where it appears “word of God” gets collapsed into “Bible” and thus he cannot have it be a “book”, but something more. This would be accurate in my reading if in fact “word of God” in its uses cited was in fact to be collapsed into “Bible”. However, you offered the trialectical hearing of “word of God” as not only the enscripturated, but also the enfleshed and the proclaimed as taking this up. It felt to me like you spoke past each other as I don’t see that he picked up on your distinctions at any point in the conversation.
I actually do recognize the distinctions you are pointing out. My point was more that the NT authors themselves often operate more fluidly than our later academic categories sometimes allow.
Part of the difficulty is simply compressing a much larger argument into a single conversation. But if you look at Paul in Romans 9, for example, he moves seamlessly between God speaking, Scripture speaking, and the prophet speaking in ways that suggest he did not operate with the same sharply differentiated categories that we often do, which is something that deserves more attention.
Could my language use more precision? Possibly. But I would still defend the basic thrust of what I said, based on how the NT writers cite and therefore seem to think about their received biblical text. I actually think we were saying much the same thing, though dialogue like this inevitably lacks some precision since it’s an emerging conversation.
So I was not trying to collapse everything into a vague or undefined category. Rather, I was arguing that the apostolic witness often understands the “Word of God” in a more integrated and dynamic way than we tend to in our post-Enlightenment (and particularly evangelical) context. Unfortunately, we were almost at an hour, so there wasn’t too much time to get into the finer points of nuance.
It does indeed seem very much to be the case that the apostolic witness regarded such in a more living manner (especially as the texts in use were not a settled matter, but separated scrolls which belonged to one another in various ways and for various uses within given communities). It just seemed you word swapped "word of God" for "Bible" and never picked up on Joseph's multivalent engagement. It would seem that may be the more helpful way (at least for my own reading of it).
After listening to the podcast and then reading the comments from Rick and the reply by Tyler, I'm thinking that part of the hidden problem is that language itself transforms the conversation. Tyler hints at it when he says that the conversation is emerging. The truths I think we're interested in are the ones where we are in relationship with God, whether it is through the Bible, the Spirit, or the creation.
Language itself is not stable enough to provide the exactitude that the historical critical method might require, if what we're looking for is "the words of God". Where I can say that I know what the Bible says, and I know what God has conveyed to me by the spirit, and what living in the world provides as far as connection with God, I can't know these things with the exactitude that would be required to point at them and have them reveal God on their own. Every attempt to allow the emergence of truth is an interaction with texts and the reality of God and the universe themselves. This event, of course, is what is expected from "sons and daughters of God" (Romans 8:19) to express in finishing the work of God in the world.
The best we can do is to allow the words to put us in a state where God is, and in doing so to retain the constant interactive contact that we require to function as oracles. Or, likewise to experience the interaction between a person and God that has become momentarily the oracle of God. These are not slices of time, but transcendent moments, when the barriers to understanding have allowed light, and heaven into the conversation where God resides.
If we're waiting for language to settle down, we shall wait forever.
I like Joseph and Tyler's assent to this process as the state of being a human in Christ.
I do wonder whether a misreading of Genesis about original sin has broken our ability to move past it.
You hit on two things we didn't really discuss in the interview, but that are essential to the overarching study.
1. The first is the fact that evangelicals seemed to have a very different conception of the capacity of language than, say, philosophical hermeneutics. My comment about "emerging" is a subtle nod to Gadamer (and, through him, Heidegger), who argues persuasively that no one really "directs" a conversation; both participants "fall" into it. This obviously comes from his systematic working out of the hermeneutical implications of Heidegger's Dasein, in which Heidegger argues that interpretation is, in some sense, "seeking after" something we already know, because if we didn't know what we would be seeking, we wouldn't be seeking at all. Even more, we wouldn't know it when we found it. But, of course, (according to his thinking) when we find an interpretation, we intuitively know we have found what we've been looking for, even without being able to articulate exactly what we were looking for beforehand.
2. The second is that the evangelical argument was essentially that there are either two options, pure objectivity or pure subjectivity, and that anyone who questions pure objectivity of language, interpretation, or hermeneutics has abandoned themselves to inevitable subjective and reader-centric readings (following the argumentation of E.D. Hirsch Jr.). This has always struck me as foolhardy, at least regarding biblical interpretation, given how often the biblical writers found references, meanings, and significances in the Old Testament that clearly required later events in salvation history to become clear (1 Cor 10:1-6, for example). The historical-critical method can't effectively account for this phenomenon if we link it with a commitment to the inerrancy and inspiration of Scripture.
All these thinkers, including others like Wittgenstein, of course, make arguments similar to yours, and with great effect, as well. However, one of the biggest unexplored issues in the project was their deficient view of "truth". For twentieth-century evangelicals, truth was purely an epistemological idea (via the correspondence theory). But the whole notion of biblical truth, especially in the way you frame it, is a lot more complicated than this, because the foundational statement about what is "real" and "true" is both about Jesus' identity and about our identity in Christ and the present experience of the Christian in this world, seems far more than mere Enlightenment epistemology can account for.
Grateful for the conversation, though I heard the two of you saying different things in the final quarter. Your guest Tyler Beam seems to do word switching where it appears “word of God” gets collapsed into “Bible” and thus he cannot have it be a “book”, but something more. This would be accurate in my reading if in fact “word of God” in its uses cited was in fact to be collapsed into “Bible”. However, you offered the trialectical hearing of “word of God” as not only the enscripturated, but also the enfleshed and the proclaimed as taking this up. It felt to me like you spoke past each other as I don’t see that he picked up on your distinctions at any point in the conversation.
Thanks for watching!
I actually do recognize the distinctions you are pointing out. My point was more that the NT authors themselves often operate more fluidly than our later academic categories sometimes allow.
Part of the difficulty is simply compressing a much larger argument into a single conversation. But if you look at Paul in Romans 9, for example, he moves seamlessly between God speaking, Scripture speaking, and the prophet speaking in ways that suggest he did not operate with the same sharply differentiated categories that we often do, which is something that deserves more attention.
Could my language use more precision? Possibly. But I would still defend the basic thrust of what I said, based on how the NT writers cite and therefore seem to think about their received biblical text. I actually think we were saying much the same thing, though dialogue like this inevitably lacks some precision since it’s an emerging conversation.
So I was not trying to collapse everything into a vague or undefined category. Rather, I was arguing that the apostolic witness often understands the “Word of God” in a more integrated and dynamic way than we tend to in our post-Enlightenment (and particularly evangelical) context. Unfortunately, we were almost at an hour, so there wasn’t too much time to get into the finer points of nuance.
Thanks for watching!
It does indeed seem very much to be the case that the apostolic witness regarded such in a more living manner (especially as the texts in use were not a settled matter, but separated scrolls which belonged to one another in various ways and for various uses within given communities). It just seemed you word swapped "word of God" for "Bible" and never picked up on Joseph's multivalent engagement. It would seem that may be the more helpful way (at least for my own reading of it).