 This page is an archive from the previous version of The Row Boat, which is why it doesn't look and work the same as the current version. However, these archives are fully functional and integrated with the new system.
Why does this site permit advertising?
Powered by Little Logger |
The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Popularizing Paul11/14/2006 12:33:55This weekend with an old friend I went to see Garry Wills give a public lecture in a Santa Barbara church-turned-theatre. He talked about his new book What Paul Meant, which came out tight on the heels of another called What Jesus Meant. It is a funny thing to come across Wills doing religion at this point in my life, as if he is following me. When I was in high school I read a book of his about leadership. Long before that, my father had him as a teacher in graduate school, in the English department at Johns Hopkins. That Wills is so spread in his interests means that, when he finds a new interest, we start to wonder, why this one? The careful academic study of religion isn't electrical engineering, but it has produced a few things here and there that are useful to the world. Most of them have never been packaged or distributed. One of the foundational accomplishments, that which really made the field possible, is historical criticism in biblical scholarship. By reading very carefully and thinking hard, scholars have learned a lot about who wrote what in the Bible and how it was gathered by human editors. At the same time, so many of the people who know the Bible so well are pretty much unaware or uninterested in these discoveries, because the churches and synagogoues they go to don't preach them. Fortunately, Wills, along with a handful of others like Richard E. Friedman and Bart Ehrman, does. Unlike someone like Ehrman, though, Wills does not present himself as only interested in history. He is interested in spiritual insight. In the course of his talk, he uses a solid knowledge of New Testament scholarship to argue for a certain theological-contextual reading of Paul. To give you an idea, he concludes with the most fuzzy passage in all the epistles, 1 Corinthians 13. Then he says, "That's Paul." It is an interesting act of selective reading, one that Wills claims is justified. The passages he doesn't like, for example, he generally claims as interpolations by someone other than Paul. The letters he doesn't like were of course not written by Paul. Since Paul is earliest, Wills suggests, he is the most reliable. Thankfully, though, he rescues himself from silly assumptions by using Paul to demonstrate the disagreement that was present in Christianity from the beginning. In any event, it is good to see someone well versed in biblical scholarship teaching and preaching to the public about it all. But it is a little troubling to see how particular opinions about historicity are used to buttress theological claims. Like that celibacy is a 4th century intrusion on Christianity, which is simply not true. But more importantly, it fails to recognize the ways in which theology should be understood as a careful decision made by the present with eyes to the past, not merely following what we now perceive to be historical, or ahistorically received by faith, or whatever. It is a funny thing, no matter how you slice it, making normative judgments about society in the present based on (or in terms of) a certain text of the past. That is not to say I think it is a bad thing. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
|
| |
