The meaning of “modern”
Hello everyone, its John Feeney – good job on the site Josh – here is my first post.
Just something to chew on here. Recently I was involved in an email conversation w/Frank Valdez and other re “the weaknesses of modern hermenuetics” – right off the bat I take issue with this remark.
Bear in mind that when Frank uses the word “modern” he is making reference to virtually any school of thought that emerged since about the sixteenth century.
Prior to the Protestant Reformation (circa 1517 – 1650) the dogmas of Roman Catholicism were the only rule of biblical interpretation that existed in the European Church. So when he is dismissive of “modern hermenuetics” he is being dismissive of virtually all Protestant (and even later Roman Catholic) approaches to this question – including the views of interpretation held by the reformers the English Reformation that produced our own Anglican tradition in the Episcopal Church that he and I both belong to. The idea of recovering both a liturgy and scripture that was in the common language of the people was a central theme and concern of the Reformation in England. We would not have an English Bible at all were it not for the Reformation.
This rejection of “modernity” in favor of a very Medieval Catholic view of Christianity is an idee fixe of both Frank and Billy, about which I have profound reservations – as I think do the great majority of Christians. I’m afraid I don’t share this interpretation of history, although I know it has become intellectually fashionable in some circles within the Church these days – as I see it the Church, beginning around the 4th century and certainly by the time of the Reformation had transitioned from being a “church” to a powerful transnational political institution that used language as a means of control over a largeley illiterate population. Latin became the language of the initiated and the scriptures and the worship liturgy could not be understood by the people. I view the sixteenth & seventeenth century as a time when people were becoming increasingly literate and educated and attempting to recover what over a millennia of encrustation by a controlling church had concealed. In this connection, I’m not sure that “modernity” is such a dirty word – even for Christians in this so-called “Post-modern” age.
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October 20, 2008 @ 3:46 am
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joshua said,
October 20, 2008 @ 8:24 am
Hey John,
point well taken. I think the problem that frank and billy daniel, et. al. see in modernity is how these ‘literate and educated people’ have taken their intellectual enlightenment to staggering heights of hubris. Very much in the tradition of the very ‘powerful transnational political institution’ that held them back, people have a tendency to use their new found hermeneutical liberation as a weapon, defending what can be at times, a very myopic view of scripture.
of course, all of this talk of biblical linguistics is not so much rooted in the history of ecclesial theology, but a european academics stretching from Descartes up to and beyond Jacques Derrida—a movement from the egocentric ‘i think therefore i am’ to the atheistic ‘play of the signifier’ wherein no text can be tied to a single scrutable ground. Meaning simply slides along the surface of the text. Text of course, being any object under analysis, not simply words on a page. This ‘linguistic turn in phenomenology’ is now (fashionably) utilized by many to shape a fragmented, mosaic-type worldview. Christians like Billy and Frank, must take this intellectual shift into serious consideration if one is to continue to engage in ‘meaningful’ forward thinking theologies with white, well educated, philosophical elites. People like Bruce, however, must wrestle with this thinking in order to engage the nihilism of the largely colored (not just black), illiterate (academically speaking), poor disenfranchised.
Modernity is not so much a ‘dirty’ word as it is an immaterial one. regardless of the virtues the enlightenment brought to history, its role has continued to play a particular part in shaping the collective egos of the western world. a new language, or worldview, has dawned. this very blog, in where i am attempting to open up a multi-faceted approach to dialog (myriad readers; myriad writers), hopes to signify a creative and thoughtful response to this reality.
John Feeney said,
October 21, 2008 @ 9:14 am
Hi Josh, John Feeney again,
I think it has largely been American fundamentalism that has adopted this “very myopic view of Scripture” to which you refer. The fundamentalist phenomenon within evangelical Protestantism emerged in part with the emphasis on so-called “personal” salvation that had become popularized in the “camp-meeting” revivalism of early 19th century American frontier expansion, and in part with the emphasis on the notion of a “verbally inerrant” Scripture that originated with the “Princeton theology” developed at the tail-end of the 19th century. It should be borne in mind that both of these strands of thought that produced “fundamentalist” Christianity have a distinctively “made-in America” stamp on them and actually part company with classical Reformation orthodoxy in several critical areas.
The Reformers held a high view of biblical authority and believed strongly that the Word should be made available “in a language understood by the people” – to paraphrase the expression used in the 39 Articles of the Church of England (Circa 1558) – but they also shared the Catholic understanding that the Word was ultimately the community-property of the preaching, worshipping and believing Church and not something to be interpreted willy-nilly by private indivduals or used as a club to advance private spiritual or political agendas. In this regard I actually do agree with what Stanley Haurwas argues in his excellent book, Unleashing the Scriptures.
I think what has happened is that the American consumer oriented culture has so co-opted popular religion that classical orthodoxy – Protestant as well as Catholic – has gotten lost, at least in much of American religious culture. The fundamentalist phenomenon really burst into national prominence among mainstream Americans with the rise of the Religious Right in the 70’s and 80’s, which I believe was a reaction to the social, cultural and political upheavals of the 1960’s – a kind of conservative counter-revolt really. Prior to about 1975, Christianity of this “fundamentalist” sort was a cultural phenomena largely to be found in rural areas, and particularly in the Deep South. However, over the last three decades it has expanded its reach to the whole society and even made substantial inroads into the mainline traditional Churches which had for much of the 20th century been bastions of theological liberalism.
What is interesting is that the “culture wars” debates that today seem to dominate the Church, are largly a fight between theological liberals and theological fundamentalists – the voice of authentic historic orthodoxy (as understood by any strand of the Christian tradition – including the tradition of the Protestant Reformation, English as well as German and Continental) is hardly to be heard, and people seem to have forgotten that it ever existed.
That said, I don’t see any reason to “throw the baby out with the bathwater”.
Best regards,
John Feeney