Many thanks for all your theological and philosophical reflections. Those that deal with the interpretation of the Bible touch me particularly. In addition to my work on Gnostic texts, I teach ancient Christian literature and appreciate the beauty of the various exegesis of the ancient Christian writers. I really agree with you about those peremptory fundamentalisms, in an epoch of increasingly literalist treatments of scripture, religious and secularist alike. We no longer understand what is a religious language.
I would say that the Bible is not made up of naïve and uplifting stories. You know it well: It begins with a fratricidal murder, continues with incessant massacres and wars, blessings but also many curses, adulterers. For example, among many others, the story of the rape of Dinah by Shechem in Genesis 34, which ends in retaliation in the form of a mass slaughter. It really cannot be said that the Bible suffers from idealism or untimely naivety. That's why I also appreciate it.
And that's also why I am sensitive to the reactions of contemporary Jewish writers who see the biblical narrative as a laboratory of theological ethics. For example, Robert Alter, who was a professor of Hebrew and literature at Berkeley, California (The art of Biblical Narrative and The art of Biblical Poetry, New York, 1981 and 1985) insists, as many others, that the accounts require a moral evaluation of human behavior and behaviors that confront God and man in complex and provocative situations. This is what Meir Sternberg calls "the drama of reading" (The Poetics of Biblical Narrative).
For Alter, the valorization of this type of reading is also a form of Jewish reappropriation of the tip of the revelation of the Hebrew Bible. The immense metaphorical and typological system between Old and New Testaments is fascinating, and full of grandeur. It nevertheless obscures the ethical drama that occurs in the story told by the Bible. All the richness of the drama, in its political, erotic, religious and ethical stakes "disappears in a fog of archetypes". This is to be discussed.
Besides, as you said, the often quoted rabbinic saying, "The Torah spoke in human language," and the fact that the Bible, for a Christian, is not the word of God: it is a word or words about the Word, the Logos, allow us to discern in these stories, the biblical God changing from a warlike tribal chief into a more abstract personification of the realities of love, justice and universalism.
Once again many thanks for these reflections in our post-narrativity world.
Anne Pasquier, Université Laval, Québec (I'm sorry for my bad English)
Since I see another request below, I’ll throw one out as well. Would you consider a reflection some time on the nature of time (comparing its fallen and its higher forms)?
I remember seeing that lecture at Pepperdine on Youtube when I went on my first DBH deep dive. It's probably the main reason I gave up wasting emotional and intellectual energy on literalism and inerrancy, so thanks for that.
As someone raised in the CoC, knowing very well they are among the *most* fundamentalist sects of "restorationist" protestants in the world, it's amusing to me that you were invited to speak at this event. Someone may have read a book or two of yours and found it agreeable, and so thought you a good speaker to have, but had they any idea of the potential for their audience's ears to bleed and eyes roll back, I'm not sure they'd've been as eager to have you.
Would you mind publishing the Greek for the Nyssan snippet? I argued precisely about this passage in a rocor Seminary class but the translation I had access to was indeed a bit different in semantics.
Many thanks for all your theological and philosophical reflections. Those that deal with the interpretation of the Bible touch me particularly. In addition to my work on Gnostic texts, I teach ancient Christian literature and appreciate the beauty of the various exegesis of the ancient Christian writers. I really agree with you about those peremptory fundamentalisms, in an epoch of increasingly literalist treatments of scripture, religious and secularist alike. We no longer understand what is a religious language.
I would say that the Bible is not made up of naïve and uplifting stories. You know it well: It begins with a fratricidal murder, continues with incessant massacres and wars, blessings but also many curses, adulterers. For example, among many others, the story of the rape of Dinah by Shechem in Genesis 34, which ends in retaliation in the form of a mass slaughter. It really cannot be said that the Bible suffers from idealism or untimely naivety. That's why I also appreciate it.
And that's also why I am sensitive to the reactions of contemporary Jewish writers who see the biblical narrative as a laboratory of theological ethics. For example, Robert Alter, who was a professor of Hebrew and literature at Berkeley, California (The art of Biblical Narrative and The art of Biblical Poetry, New York, 1981 and 1985) insists, as many others, that the accounts require a moral evaluation of human behavior and behaviors that confront God and man in complex and provocative situations. This is what Meir Sternberg calls "the drama of reading" (The Poetics of Biblical Narrative).
For Alter, the valorization of this type of reading is also a form of Jewish reappropriation of the tip of the revelation of the Hebrew Bible. The immense metaphorical and typological system between Old and New Testaments is fascinating, and full of grandeur. It nevertheless obscures the ethical drama that occurs in the story told by the Bible. All the richness of the drama, in its political, erotic, religious and ethical stakes "disappears in a fog of archetypes". This is to be discussed.
Besides, as you said, the often quoted rabbinic saying, "The Torah spoke in human language," and the fact that the Bible, for a Christian, is not the word of God: it is a word or words about the Word, the Logos, allow us to discern in these stories, the biblical God changing from a warlike tribal chief into a more abstract personification of the realities of love, justice and universalism.
Once again many thanks for these reflections in our post-narrativity world.
Anne Pasquier, Université Laval, Québec (I'm sorry for my bad English)
Since I see another request below, I’ll throw one out as well. Would you consider a reflection some time on the nature of time (comparing its fallen and its higher forms)?
Would you consider a movie list in the future? Maybe titled. David’s top 100
I remember seeing that lecture at Pepperdine on Youtube when I went on my first DBH deep dive. It's probably the main reason I gave up wasting emotional and intellectual energy on literalism and inerrancy, so thanks for that.
As someone raised in the CoC, knowing very well they are among the *most* fundamentalist sects of "restorationist" protestants in the world, it's amusing to me that you were invited to speak at this event. Someone may have read a book or two of yours and found it agreeable, and so thought you a good speaker to have, but had they any idea of the potential for their audience's ears to bleed and eyes roll back, I'm not sure they'd've been as eager to have you.
Would you mind publishing the Greek for the Nyssan snippet? I argued precisely about this passage in a rocor Seminary class but the translation I had access to was indeed a bit different in semantics.