Reposted from Isaac David Haymes timeline ... I have always inclined to a more Antiochian school of biblical hermeneutics …. this lecture by David Bentley Hart has made me think again. His presentation of the literalist reading of the Yahwist creation / fall account, deriving as it so clearly does from ancient myths predating the strict monotheism of later Judaism (ie henotheism) clearly shows I think that the Fathers (and even Southern Baptist fundamentalists) have never embraced the text in its original forms (plural) but rather have interpreted it creatively in line with ongoing revelation. He shows that the allegorical method is crucial to an ongoing revelatory hermeneutic. For example, nowhere in Genesis 2 does it say that the serpent is the devil but that has become a necessary allegorical interpretation in order not to accept an account of disorder in creation in terms of some sort of fabulous aetiology …. ie., how the snake lost its legs and how humans lost their innocence. He also makes the provocative but I think insightful comment that Marcion characterised certain Old Testament texts correctly as pre-monotheistic and problematic, but his heresy was in how he developed a response to that realisation. Literalists often do that. Those who do not accept the Church often do that. You could therefore say something similar about the way that the heterodox handle historical criticism of the Bible today. Few take the gnostic / Marcionite route of rubbishing difficult texts by consigning them to an evil Demiurge but the end is the same … the loss of the text. Here Hart says that we do not need to lose the text; indeed we never have done so as Orthodox. We just have to accept that without the inspired community of the Church we have no text at all. This is what liberal Protestants will not face. No Church, no text. Please do listen to this short recording … it picks up about half way through, a slow burn! youtu.be/EOShHXaqt0M
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 09:40:31 +0000
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