I got an email just now from my friend the rector at the local Episcopal church and his signature includes this quote:
"A literalist interpretation of Scripture tells us that God is a rock that sent a bird to cause a virgin to give birth to a loaf of bread. And this is supposed to be an improvement on obtaining a chiseled code of conduct from a flaming shrubbery in a cloud. If a literal understanding is all that is required for faith, then I'm a yellow ducky." Rabbi Ben Sylva
8 comments:
I have mixed feelings on reading such things, delightful as they are. Such a very sensible attitude is incompatible with adherence to religious tradition (although this tradition is a very interrupted and fragmented thing). It goes together with the impression that a number of Christians feel that they can believe or not believe anything they want, so long as they maintain formal adherence to the institution of Christianity. There are many aspects of Christianity that can bear updating, but most subdivisions of the institution find it excruciatingly hard to do so. If the updating is to be done on an individual level, then much of what is well thought out may be lost as individual thinkers become inactive or die. This loss means that many beginning participants and renewers of the tradition need to start anew with every generation, as if electricity had to be rediscovered in every generation, which slows progress to a crawl. It is a puzzling business for this benevolent spectator.
LF
I agree with his conclusion, but not his means of arriving at it. The germane question is not "does the scripture actually say this?",. but, if you knew for certain that that really were the thrust of scripture , would you believe it? In other words, are you more attached to your own taste in tenets, or to truth which is independent of your belief or disbelief, and which may be unpalatable?
LF, that applies much more to American Protestants than to most other Christians. Part of having an established Church is the belief that what has gone before has already been decided.
[Joel puts on his Zero Mostel voice]: Tradition... TRADITION!
The writer quoted was a rabbi, who I understand to be contrasting a Christian (Protestant, I am sure, like Joel)literalist interpretation of the Bible to
a traditional Jewish one. The literal one really gets you in trouble; you have to believe that the value of pi is 3, for instance. I'm not sure whether it is the issue of literal versus traditional interpetation, or Jewish versus literalistic Christian religion was in the forefront of the thought of Rabbi Ben Sylva. Almost as stimulating is that the rabbi is quoted by an Episcopalian.
LF
(Protestant, I am sure, like Joel)
Nope. I'm one-a them Cath-a-licks! :)
The reason I brought up traditional interpretation is that it mitigates literalism while still allowing a definitive meaning to be assigned to a passage. Literalism leaves a great deal of room for individual interpretation (does he mean a yellow rubber ducky, or one with feathers?), whereas tradition provides a means of distinguishing between the sacred and the silly.
Of course I have been aware for some time that you are Catholic, Joel; my meaning was that such literalism is usually Protestant.
I am sympathetic that many Protestants would rather take some religious passages and concepts to be metaphoric. The trouble with that is that the choice of the metaphor is arbitrary. A tradition of textual interpetation is one way to deal with that problem, but it is not the only way. For instance, history of various sorts illuminates interpretations of texts. At this point, scholarship less often relies on patristic interpretations, preferring to rely on historical documentation and analysis of various sorts, even in such excellent Catholic works as the Jerome biblical commentaries, parts of which are very good in both editions.
LF
LinguistFriend, do you see a distinction between tradition and history? G K Chesterton once said that tradition means not limiting the franchise to those who are walking around at the time. That sounds to me like it bears a strong resemblance to reading texts through historical lenses. Tradition could be defined as truth narrowed down by history.
Tradition is of many sorts, including many which have nothing to do with fact. Languages, for example, are products of tradition, as are cultures in general. History, basically fact-oriented, tries to generalize to some extent over pure lists and documentation (although they are its foundation), and make inferences about why things happened, causal relations in the past. Otherwise it is the empty chronology of what happened when.
Yes, I think that tradition and history are different things; tradition can be part of the material that history works with, but they are not the same. Science can contribute to history and even grow out of it; the philosopher/historian Robin G. Collingwood wrote some interesting things about this. Buildings and machines can be built using the results of science, but when those
results have become traditional and are not well understood because they are taken for granted,
and are handled mechanically by a poor engineer, the building is in danger of falling down, like the Tacoma Narrows bridge. The same, of course, is true of the thought-structures of religion.
LF
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