It's a wonderful world where Monday's post isn't posted until Wednesday evening. I'm slowing down this month: lots of packing and stacking; getting the house ready; writing and painting. I'm reading a lot: commentaries on Colossians, Hebrews, and Amos; Barth, Jungel and various New Testament and history of Jesus surveys; the comic vision of the Bible; poetry. I had been working on a sermon on Amos 8 that focused on Bodies and how it's our bodies that betray us, how our bodies hunger for God's word, how the body of society betrays the bodies of the poor and weak and finally the strong - but how we are Christ's body, and how Christ's body is both word and body, and that in Christ we are healed from the depletion and despair Amos outlines for us - that is: I was going to take the Amos passage and turn it into a eucharist message. But since there's no quorum this Thursday I'll do another passage. The passage for the Sunday following my rescheduled examination committee is Hebrews 11:28 - 12: 2. It's about Christology: who is Jesus? What does it mean that he's the author and completion of our faith? Why don't I just preach any old sermon to the committee? Authenticity - it has to be authentic for me. And authenticity is specific to time and place. I could do the Isaiah 5 passage or the Psalm or the Luke passage. Christology though interests me at this time. I've begun rereading Meier's Marginal Jew as well as Grillmeier's work on Christology. These in conjunction with Ehrman's work, Misquoting Jesus, which is a great lay exposition of his Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, have given me a lot to think about. Ehrman's work, which highlights the textual vagaries of the "inerrant" word, is one reason that Barth's caution against a paper Pope is important in knowing Jesus. This is why we say scripture contains the word of God: Jesus is the Word - not to be confused with a collection of symbols indicating phonetic actions and mental uses - Jesus is the Word in that he lives out in actuality (not symbolically) God's intentions and loving sovereignty - a loving sovereignty that is cruciform and weak rather than indifferently powerful. That is: from Genesis to Revelation, Jesus has to be the focus of our interpretation - otherwise we are in danger of lapsing into treating the text as a rule book, or a source book of folk tales. What Ehrman has done is destablize the matrix of infallibility a supposedly inerrant word would create: a fortiori subverting our tendency to cherry pick texts in support of our causes and projections. Ehrman's "attack" or insight brings us back truly ad fontes: to the oral culture the Jesus story was crafted in; the oral culture Jesus acted in. I read today an article in New Testament Studies about how our emphasis on the text blinds us to the oral nature of the act, the event of Christ. The oral word is a performative word in that it is always a word spoken in dialog and in group participation. This article clarified for me a phrase from Papias, where Papias says that he sought out those who had known the disciples "for I did not consider what came out of books would benefit me as much as a living and abiding voice." [Papias 3.3 apostolic fathers / loeb classical library. Bart Ehrman translator]
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
It's a wonderful world
It's a wonderful world where Monday's post isn't posted until Wednesday evening. I'm slowing down this month: lots of packing and stacking; getting the house ready; writing and painting. I'm reading a lot: commentaries on Colossians, Hebrews, and Amos; Barth, Jungel and various New Testament and history of Jesus surveys; the comic vision of the Bible; poetry. I had been working on a sermon on Amos 8 that focused on Bodies and how it's our bodies that betray us, how our bodies hunger for God's word, how the body of society betrays the bodies of the poor and weak and finally the strong - but how we are Christ's body, and how Christ's body is both word and body, and that in Christ we are healed from the depletion and despair Amos outlines for us - that is: I was going to take the Amos passage and turn it into a eucharist message. But since there's no quorum this Thursday I'll do another passage. The passage for the Sunday following my rescheduled examination committee is Hebrews 11:28 - 12: 2. It's about Christology: who is Jesus? What does it mean that he's the author and completion of our faith? Why don't I just preach any old sermon to the committee? Authenticity - it has to be authentic for me. And authenticity is specific to time and place. I could do the Isaiah 5 passage or the Psalm or the Luke passage. Christology though interests me at this time. I've begun rereading Meier's Marginal Jew as well as Grillmeier's work on Christology. These in conjunction with Ehrman's work, Misquoting Jesus, which is a great lay exposition of his Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, have given me a lot to think about. Ehrman's work, which highlights the textual vagaries of the "inerrant" word, is one reason that Barth's caution against a paper Pope is important in knowing Jesus. This is why we say scripture contains the word of God: Jesus is the Word - not to be confused with a collection of symbols indicating phonetic actions and mental uses - Jesus is the Word in that he lives out in actuality (not symbolically) God's intentions and loving sovereignty - a loving sovereignty that is cruciform and weak rather than indifferently powerful. That is: from Genesis to Revelation, Jesus has to be the focus of our interpretation - otherwise we are in danger of lapsing into treating the text as a rule book, or a source book of folk tales. What Ehrman has done is destablize the matrix of infallibility a supposedly inerrant word would create: a fortiori subverting our tendency to cherry pick texts in support of our causes and projections. Ehrman's "attack" or insight brings us back truly ad fontes: to the oral culture the Jesus story was crafted in; the oral culture Jesus acted in. I read today an article in New Testament Studies about how our emphasis on the text blinds us to the oral nature of the act, the event of Christ. The oral word is a performative word in that it is always a word spoken in dialog and in group participation. This article clarified for me a phrase from Papias, where Papias says that he sought out those who had known the disciples "for I did not consider what came out of books would benefit me as much as a living and abiding voice." [Papias 3.3 apostolic fathers / loeb classical library. Bart Ehrman translator]
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