Faithful Reading: Poststructuralism and the Sacred

1996 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 270-287
Author(s):  
David Rutledge
Keyword(s):  
Western Culture ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Important Field ◽  
Universal Values ◽  
Universal Truth ◽  
Determinate Meaning

AbstractIn its subversive interrogations of universal values, objective criteria for meaning, canonicity and other hallmarks which distinguish the Literary, poststructuralism appears to confront all that is "sacred" in the privileged texts of Western culture. Particularly in biblical criticism, insofar as the sanctity of the text and the inviolability of its truth claims are held to be unquestionable, poststructuralism is often denounced as anathema, or at least inappropriate, to exegesis. It is argued that if determinate meaning is inaccessible through language, and universal truth a chimera, then according to poststructuralist tenets the Bible is, like all literature, "Just another text." This paper entertains another possibility: that poststructuralism in fact places the Bible in a position of singular significance. If claims for the "sacredness" of certain texts are precisely where poststructuralist critics direct their efforts, then biblical texts, whose claims for sacredness are more insistent and dogmatic than most, should provide poststructuralism's most contentious (and therefore most important) field of operation. Interrogating the sacred, far from being an iconoclastic pursuit, is an inevitable consequence of the reception of sacred texts-indeed, of language-in culture. By way of illustrating this point, I offer a reading of the Garden of Eden story (Gen. 2:4b-3:24) which incorporates insights offered by Jacques Derrida's critique of logocentrism. What poststructuralism demands, in the final analysis, is not the abandonment of meaning but its reconfiguration: notions of faithful reading and respect for the text which embrace difference, ambiguity and an understanding of the sacred as the site not of uncontestable command, but of enquiry and interpretation.

scholarly journals John Calvin and postmodern spirituality

2010 ◽  
Vol 44 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
P.H. Fick
Keyword(s):  
Life Experience ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Community Knowledge ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Universal Truth ◽  
Postmodern Spirituality

Postmodernists reject universal truth claims and brand them as violent impositions on a person by powerful institutions. Postmodernist spirituality seeks for a more subjective, life- experience based attitude towards values and truths of the Bible and relationship in community. Careful consideration should be given to the issues of community, knowledge/truth, faith, and faith experience. This article will show that, in his “Institutes”, Calvin gives ample attention to faith, the liberating truth about God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and to the Chris- tian’s intimate relationship with Him. Being in Christ, commu- nion with Christ or the “unio mystica cum Christo” through faith as a central theme in Calvin’s theology, needs to be redis- covered and re-applied to reformed spirituality as apologetic means in a postmodern world. This treasure should satisfy the kind of spirituality postmodernists yearn for.

Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henk Nellen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Dutch Golden Age ◽  
God's Word ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
The One

Did innovative textual analysis reshape the relations between Christian believers and their churches in early modern confessional states? This volume explores the hypothesis that in the long seventeenth century humanist-inspired biblical criticism contributed significantly to the decline of ecclesiastical truth claims. Historiography pictures this era as one in which the dominant position of religion and church began to show signs of erosion under the influence of vehement debates on the sacrosanct status of the Bible. Until quite recently, this gradual but decisive shift has been attributed to the rise of the sciences, in particular astronomy and physics. This book looks at biblical criticism as, on the one hand, an innovative force and, on the other, the outcome of developments in philology that had started much earlier than scientific experimentalism or the New Philosophy. Scholars began to situate the Bible in its historical context. The seventeen chapters show that even in the hands of pious, orthodox scholars philological research not only failed to solve all the textual problems that had surfaced, but even brought to light countless new incongruities. This supplied those who sought to play down the authority of the Bible with ammunition. The conviction that God’s Word had been preserved as a pure and sacred source gave way to an awareness of a complicated transmission in a plurality of divergent, ambiguous, historically determined and heavily corrupted texts. This shift took place primarily in the Dutch Protestant world of the seventeenth century.

Bayle, the Bible, and the Remonstrant Tradition at the Time of the Commentaire philosophique

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria-Cristina Pitassi
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reason ◽  
Natural Light ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Absolute Norm ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Status

Bayle’s equivocal relationship to Arminianism is here examined from the perspective of the status of the Bible. Though rejecting the doctrine that every word was to be considered divinely inspired, Bayle did defend the divinity of Scripture in his polemic with Jean Le Clerc. For Le Clerc, biblical criticism could solve theological conflicts by discovering the authentic meaning of Scripture, but Bayle insisted that natural light precedes exegesis, and revelation is limited to those matters that do not conflict with reason. He dissociates himself from Socinianism by distinguishing moral from speculative reason. Only moral reason offers an absolute norm. Bayle disregards the Arminian distinction between what is against reason and what is beyond reason. His Commentaire philosophique juxtaposes the natural light that can identify divine elements in the Bible with our historical reality that frustrates its capacity for apprehending religious truths. Thus Bayle inevitably clashes with the Arminian tradition.

Conclusion: The Bible Human and Divine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Word Of God ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
Public Church

The conclusion recapitulates the variegated dynamics at play in the interpretation and use of the Bible in the Dutch Public Church when Spinoza articulated his biblical criticism. Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus did not suddenly open the eyes of his contemporaries to the technical and philosophical problems of identifying a text with the Word of God. Rather it arrived at an extremely delicate moment, when forces from various directions were already contesting one another over the authority to interpret Scripture in their own ways. These forces had their own momentum when refuting Spinoza’s outlandish appeal to biblical philology, and responded in turn to one another inlight of the new reality. In result, by 1700 the space allowed for exegetical variety within the doctrinal enclosure of the Public Church had gradually widened, but it remained a contested terrain where innovations were easily considered, or branded, harmful to ecclesiastical unity.

Spinoza’s Biblical Criticism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Divine Election ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Way

Chapter 1 homes in on Spinoza as a Bible critic. Based on existing historiography, it parses the main relevant historical contexts in which Spinoza came to articulate his analysis of the Bible: the Sephardi community of Amsterdam, freethinking philosophers, and the Reformed Church. It concludes with a detailed examination of the Tractatus theologico-politicus, Spinoza’s major work of biblical criticism. Along the way I highlight themes for which Spinoza appealed to the biblical texts themselves: the textual unity of the Bible, and the biblical concepts of prophecy, divine election, and religious laws. The focus is on the biblical arguments for these propositions, and the philological choices that Spinoza made that enabled him to appeal to those specific biblical texts. This first chapter lays the foundation for the remainder of the book, which examines issues of biblical philology and interpretation discussed among the Dutch Reformed contemporaries of Spinoza.

Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660-1710

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Dutch Golden Age

This book investigates the biblical criticism of Spinoza from the perspective of the Dutch Reformed society in which the philosopher lived and worked. It focusses on philological investigation of the Bible: its words, its language, and the historical context in which it originated. The book charts contested issues of biblical philology in mainstream Dutch Calvinism, to determine whether Spinoza’s work on the Bible had any bearing on the Reformed understanding of the way society should engage with Scripture. Spinoza has received massive attention, both inside and outside academia. His unconventional interpretation of the Old Testament passages has been examined repeatedly over the decades. So has that of fellow ‘radicals’ (rationalists, radicals, deists, libertines, enthusiasts), against the backdrop of a society that is assumed to have been hostile, overwhelmed, static, and uniform. This book inverts this perspective and looks at how the Dutch Republic digested biblical philology and biblical criticism, including that of Spinoza. It takes into account the highly neglected area of the Reformed ministry and theology of the Dutch Golden Age. The result is that Dutch ecclesiastical history, up until now the preserve of the partisan scholarship of confessionalized church historians, is brought into dialogue with Early Modern intellectual currents. This book concludes that Spinoza, rather than simply pushing biblical scholarship in the direction of modernity, acted in an indirect way upon ongoing debates in Dutch society, shifting trends in those debates, but not always in the same direction, and not always equally profoundly, at all times, on all levels.

Biblical Criticism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Briggs
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Authorial Intention ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Interpretive Method ◽  
Interpretive Practices ◽  
History Of Biblical Interpretation ◽  
The Impact

The Bible as a text can be read with or without reference to its compilation as a theologically constructed collection of sacred Jewish and Christian books. When read without such framing concerns, it may be approached with the full range of literary and theoretical interpretive tools and read for whatever purpose readers value or wish to explore. Less straightforwardly, in the former case where framing concerns come into play, the Bible is both like and unlike any other book in the way that its very nature as a “canon” of scripture is related to particular theological and religious convictions. Such convictions are then in turn interested in configuring the kinds of readings pursued in certain ways. Biblical criticism has undergone many transformations over the centuries, sometimes allowing such theological convictions or practices to shape the nature of its criticism, and at other times—especially in the modern period—tending to relegate their significance in favor of concerns with interpretive method, and in particular questions about authorial intention, original context, and interest in matters of history (either in the world behind the text, or in the stages of development of the text itself). From the middle of the 20th century onwards the interpretive interests of biblical critics have focused more on certain literary characteristics of biblical narratives and poetry, and also a greater theological willingness to engage the imaginative vision of biblical texts. This has resulted in a move toward a theological form of criticism that might better be characterized as imaginative and invites explicit negotiation of readers’ identities and commitments. A sense of the longer, premodern history of biblical interpretation suggests that some of these late 20th- and early 21st-century emphases do themselves have roots in the interpretive practices of earlier times, but that the Reformation (and subsequent developments in modern thinking) effectively closed down certain interpretive options in the name of better ordering readers’ interpretive commitments. Though not without real gains, this narrowing of interpretive interests has resulted in much of the practice of academic biblical criticism being beholden to modernist impulses. Shifts toward postmodern emphases have been less common on the whole, but the overall picture of biblical criticism has indeed changed in the 21st century. This may be more owing to the impact of a renewed appetite for theologically imaginative readings among Christian readers, and also of the refreshed recognition of Jewish traditions of interpretation that pose challenging framing questions to other understandings.

scholarly journals The Impossible Spaces: A Commentary on Gen. 2:8–15

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 656
Author(s):  
Santiago García-Jalón
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Text ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Narrative Device ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Structural Differences

A close analysis of the text of Gen. 2:8–15, pertaining to the Garden of Eden, shows the structural differences between said text and others from ancient mythologies that mention or describe a paradise. Likewise, that analysis suggests that the data provided by the Bible to locate paradise are merely a narrative device meant to dissipate all doubts as to the existence of a garden where God put human beings. Similar to other spaces that appear in the Bible, the Garden of Eden is, in fact, an impossible place. Throughout the centuries, however, recurring proposals have been made to locate paradise. As time went by, those proposals were progressively modified by the intellectual ideas dominant in any given era, thus leading the representations of the location of Paradise to be further and further away from the information provided by the biblical text.

scholarly journals Jung, the Pentateuch and ethics

2004 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 653-675 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eben Scheffler
Keyword(s):  
Modern Human ◽  
Analytical Psychology ◽  
Carl Jung ◽  
Ethical Behaviour ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Psychological Biblical Criticism ◽  
Genesis 1

This article reflects on the contribution  that can  be made to the interpretation of the Bible by employing the analytical psychology of Carl Jung. After some relevant biographical considerations on Jung, his view of religion and the Bible is briefly considered, followed by a look into Genesis 1-3 in terms of his distinction of archetypes. It is suggested in the conclusion that Jungian psychological Biblical criticism can lead to a changed, but fresh view on the ‘authority’ or influence of the Bible in the lives of (post)modern human beings and their (ethical) behaviour.

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