J.N. Darby’s End-Times Family Tree: Is Dispensationalism from the Bible or Evangelical Tradition?

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Cyrus Scofield, Dallas Theological Seminary, David L. Cooper, dispensationalism, Gog, Hal Lindsey, J.N. Darby, John Nelson Darby, John Walvoord, Late Great Planet Earth, Left Behind, Lewis Chafer, Rayford Steel, Tim LaHaye, Tribulation

In his 1970 work, The Late Great Planet Earth, Hal Lindsey claims that the complex system of dispensationalism he professes simply ‘falls out’ of a plain reading of the Bible; it requires little theological education and no knowledge of the dispensational theories of others – though he is quick to assure readers that he does actually have formal theological training. They are the only ones who don’t have the NT wrong. On his biblical interpretation, he claims to be doing nothing more than “diligently [seeking] to follow” the plain sense of the biblical text. He quotes David L. Cooper’s 1940 work, When Gog’s Armies Meet the Almighty in the Land of Israel:

“When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense; therefore, take every word as its primary, ordinary, usual, literal meaning unless the facts of the immediate context, studied in the light of related passages and axiomatic and fundamental truths, indicate clearly otherwise.”

Another well-known author of some of the most popular Christian fiction ever written, Tim LaHaye, adheres to the same idea, calling this sentiment of Cooper’s “the golden rule of biblical interpretation.”

However, it is possible to trace the development and transmission of these ideas right back to John Nelson Darby.

John Nelson Darby has been called the “father or dispensationalism.” While he was not the first to explicate the idea of dispensationalism, it was he who expanded on and developed the complicated theory of salvation history, which identifies a series of epochs following one another in a linear fashion. He was also the first to solidify the concept of the rapture of the church, based on 1 Thessalonians 4:17. Darby had significant influence on Cyrus Scofield’s beliefs during the Bible Prophecy Conference movement throughout North America at the end of the nineteenth century, and there is no doubt that Scofield borrowed copiously from Darby while writing his annotated Reference Bible.

Where does the trail lead from there? Scofield became a close friend and colleague of Lewis Chafer, who went on to found the Evangelical Theological College, which would eventually become the Dallas Theological Seminary. Chafer taught at Dwight L. Moody’s Northfield School in Massachusetts from 1902-1910. During this time, he came into contact with Scofield, who, fresh from the Bible Prophecy Conference movement of the late 1800s, encouraged Chafer’s development as a theologian and preacher. Chafer explicates in an article in Sunday School Times, published in March, 1923, that Scofield was profoundly instrumental in his adoption of his dispensationalism.

In 1924 Chafer, founded the Evangelical Theological College. In 1936 it underwent a name-change to become Dallas Theological Seminary and Graduate School of Theology, finally becoming simply the Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) in 1969. Its first students were a small group of only thirteen that were taught under the guidance of Chafer, who presided over the school from 1924 until 1952, at which point John Walvoord took over as president. Walvoord and Chafer were like-minded colleagues that shared many similar ideas. In 1926, Chafer wrote one of his most significant publications, Major Bible Themes, of which Walvoord revised and updated in 1974. During Walvoord’s presidency at DTS, who else but Hal Lindsey attended the institute, and it was here, under the direction of Walvoord and his staff that Lindsey solidified his pretribulational, premillennial dispensationalism.

The final link in this chain is Tim LaHaye. While LaHaye never credits Lindsey for any of his ideas, it is clear that he has relied on large parts of The Late Great Planet Earth for his writing of Left Behind. While reading The Late Great Planet Earth, there are clear similarities between the two authors’ work: from Lindsey’s account of modern warfare during the Tribulations and LaHaye’s description of World War Three, to the words of LaHaye’s main protagonist, Rayford Steel, on his learning of his wife’s disappearance in the rapture – “Rayford had to direct people to the Bible… he had begun taking [his wife’s] Bible everywhere he went, reading it wherever possible;” compared with Lindsey’s, “I’m going to find myself a Bible and read those very verses my wife underlined. I wouldn’t listen to her when she was here…” Compare Lindsey’s account of a football game, “It was the last quarter of the championship game…only one minute to go and they fumbled – our quarterback recovered…when – zap – no more quarterback – completely gone, just like that!” with LaHaye’s soccer game, “most of the spectators and all but one of the players disappeared in the middle of play, leaving their shoes and uniforms on the ground.” Though these similarities may seem coincidental, when reading the two books simultaneously, the parallels between the books are striking, especially in the depictions of the events that occur during the Tribulations.

Although neither Lindsey nor LaHaye ever explicitly deny that their ideas stem from this tradition, they are both self-deceived in their belief that the ideas they profess are merely interpretations of “the plain sense” of the biblical text.

The Bad Boys of Prophecy

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Co-write Tim Bulkeley’s Book with him!

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Motherly God-language, Tim Bulkeley

Tim Bulkeley, Old Testament lecturer at Carey Baptist College, Auckland is writing a book. And utilising the easy interactivity of the internet, he is writing it with you. Yes, you can have your say, and it could very well change the shape of the book.

And if it does, I guess you can claim co-authorship credit on your C.V.

The topic is “motherly talk of God from the Bible, and from great Christian theologians from the past.” And the book’s title is, currently, Not Only a Father: Motherly God-language in the Bible and Christian Tradition – although that may well change over time. In order to read the book as it currently stands and to make comments, or engage in discussion with others, have a look at the digress.it website.

Here’s the suave-looking Tim himself:

U2 Conference T-Shirt

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t-shirt, U2

The first academic conference on U2 has just got even better. It now has its own limited edition T-shirt! Available until 16 Oct 2009.

That’s my paper title that I’ve highlighted on the conference T-shirt, because, after all, how many times do you get a conference t-shirt with your paper title on it? Ah, the pride (in the name of love) with which I will wear it! 

Come along if you’re somewhere near Durham, NC next weekend (2-4 October). They’ve even managed to put on a U2 concert in a nearby Raleigh baseball stadium on the Saturday night.

If, however, you can’t make it, then I understand the conference organisers will be publishing a book containing some of the papers. And there’s a great variety of papers on everything concerning U2 from a whole host of disciplinary perspectives. I’m quite looking forward to hearing some of them. It’s good to get some interdisciplinary insights going on about a single topic. Will they be even better than the real thing?

Dysenchanted Worlds: Rationalisation, Dystopia, and Therapy Culture in Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit

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Children of Men, commodification, disenchantment, dystopia, Georges Bataille, Henning Mankell, Jean Baudrillard, Kurt Wallander, Logan's Run, Max Weber, Never Let Me Go, New Age, Ninni Holmqvist, PBRF, rationalisation, Sweden

Proving that we here in the Dunedin School are interested in books other than the Bible, we turn our attention in quite another direction and continue our ongoing discussion of rationalisation – or disenchantment – and human society (see more on this here, here, here, here, and here).

Whoever pushes rationality forward also restores new strength to the opposite power, mysticism and folly of all kinds.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Right now, no-one else is doing fictional social commentary about the continuing process of rationalisation quite as well as Scandinavians.  From Jens Lien’s lithe, brilliant 2006 Norwegian film The Bothersome Man, which envisions the afterlife as a sterile, highly controlled modern city, to Let the Right One In, which unearths an unspeakable, timeless evil living on the perfectly planned streets of Stockholm (or perhaps this evil is created by or drawn to the city because of its inhuman perfection), there is a whole host of powerful narratives emerging from the northern reaches of Europe, narratives which seriously question the social costs of quantification and reduction of all things, human life included, to exchangeable commodities.

To these more fanciful works, we need to add the growing numbers of excellent Swedish crime fiction, a list which must include Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (along with the two other titles in his Millennium Trilogy), which puts a very human face on the immense suffering and violence that goes on, unnoticed and unremarked, in the interstices of rationalised societies.  The gold standard here is probably set by Henning Mankell’s brilliant Kurt Wallander detective novels, which are so popular in Germany that Mankell outsells J.K. Rowling.  Over the course of nine novels, Wallander, a kind of dishevelled, stoic, and utterly baffled Everyman, fights a losing battle against a tide of violence and senseless crime in what should, by all accounts, be an earthly paradise of social planning, a triumph of the welfare state.  The Wallander novels are shot through with a crawling sense of dread that is shocking not because it is so out of place in the quiet towns of southernmost Sweden, but because it quickly becomes so natural,  because it feels so familiar.  Mankell turns what could be boilerplate police procedurals into both a highly-nuanced character study and a far-ranging, even courageous theodicy that could only have emerged out of one of the most secular nations on earth.  The Wallander novels amount cumulatively to a systematic interrogation of the failures of the welfare state and a deconstruction of the social engineering promises that were made so easily, and with remarkably little foresight, in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.  (Incidentally, for the uninitiated, the suburb English-language BBC production Wallander, with a doughy and heartbreakingly human Kenneth Branagh as Wallander is a great point of entrée into Mankell’s world; for those of you who still read books,  I’ll recommend 1995’s Sidetracked as a personal favourite among the novels).

To this illustrious list we should now add Ninni Holmqvist’s compelling and unjustly overlooked first novel The Unit (2006), an examination of the failures of the present through the classical allegorical strategy of the dystopia.  The story is told by Dorrit Weger, a fifty-year-old woman who, as the novel opens, has been moved to something called ‘the Unit’, about which the reader knows nothing.  As the story unfolds through Holmqvist’s quiet, precise, understated prose, we learn only gradually what the Unit is and why Dorrit finds herself there.  In the future Sweden in which the novel is set – and its exact timeframe is ambiguous, though it is not too far in the future – anyone who has reached the end of their usefulness to society is taken to the Unit, where they are used for medical experiments and as living organ banks, forced to donate their organs one by one until they donate a vital organ, say the heart or the lungs.  ‘Final donation’ is in fact the Unit’s callous euphemism for death.  Dispensable Elsa, in an attempt to be light-hearted about her fate, jokes with her friend Dorrit, ‘We’re like free-range pigs or hens.  The only difference is that the pigs and hens are – hopefully – hopefully ignorant of anything but the present’.[1]

This is no prison camp, however, at least not in the traditional sense and this, for some reason, just makes the fate of Dorrit and her fellow ‘dispensables’ all the more repellent.  The Unit is an immaculately constructed alternative world with no view of the outside.  It is a prison, without question, but it is a comfortable prison.  There are shops, gardens, healthy restaurants, and plenty of amusements.  Everything is clean, rational, and as humane as such a thing could possibly be.  The dispensables, within the confines of their role as human capital, are treated with respect and encouraged to pursue their own interests and look after their own (decidedly relative) wellbeing.  Neither is the selection of people for the Unit random or unexpected; the selection criteria are highly rational, highly quantified, and systematised to remove those all-too-human elements of chance and luck.  Anyone who does not work in a vital field – teaching, nursing, etc. – and who remains childless is destined for a one-way trip to the Unit when they reach a certain age.  For women, the cut-off age is fifty, while for men it is sixty.  Even this has a rational justification; male sexual function has a slightly longer life-span than female, thus men retain their usefulness for longer.

The Unit is many things: it is a moving study of the intense and genuine friendships that quickly develop within the pressure cooker atmosphere of the Unit among people who know they have, at most, a few years left to live; when Dorrit meets Johannes and falls in love, it is a refreshing (and refreshingly frank) study of a sexual relationship between two characters past middle age, a time of life that most popular fiction, Harold and Maude notwithstanding, renders oddly asensual; and, in the end, it is simply heartbreaking, especially when Dorrit reminisces about her simple life outside the Unit and about her dog Jock, who she was forced to leave with friends when she taken to away.

In the final analysis, what The Unit, with its focus on the usefulness or utility of human beings, is criticising is rationalisation, the increasing dominance of instrumental reason, and how this effects people living in rationalised societies.  What matters in a rationalised or disenchanted system is what works, not what has meaning.  Only that which conforms to a narrowly-defined idea of function has proper, demonstrable value.  Those in Holmqvist’s dystopian future who find themselves in the Unit fall outside the brutal calculus of value that equates usefulness with the biological necessity of reproduction.  The world that supports the Unit is thus in this sense a subsistence economy that places the highest interest in its own survival.  Holmqvist makes it apparent that members of the Unit have internalised this value system, as we see Dorrit fretting, even after being labelled as dispensable, about being ‘unusable’ as a medical commodity within the Unit itself.  She also spends much of her time – tellingly, she follows standard week-day working hours even while inside the Unit – writing a novel about a mother who gives birth to a deformed baby, in which she muses, ‘The question was: Is this mother to be regarded as a parent in the practical, concrete meaning of the word?  Is she to be regarded as needed?  The question was: Is a person needed if she gives birth to a child that will never be able to bond with her, and will never be able to make any kind of contribution?’[2]

Rationalisation, first theorised by the sociologist Max Weber in early years of the twentieth century, has arguably held up better than its contemporary, the secularisation thesis.  There are a number of sociologists, theorists (including yours truly), and philosophers who have done some very interesting work within a Weberian framework, working with what Weber famously called ‘the disenchantment of the world’.  One of the more prominent of these thinkers is Georges Bataille, who captures the long and ultimately indeterminate struggle between instrumental and values-based rationalities when he writes of ‘the poverty of utility’.  Bataille’s related concepts of accursed share and sovereignty have strong resonances with both Weber’s disenchantment and Jean Baudrillard’s concept of symbolic exchange.  Bataille’s concept of the sovereign is also related, not coincidentally, with his challenging theory of religion, which in turn owes a good deal to Weber’s narrative of rationalisation and its identification of religious and economic history.[3] Echoing Jean Baudrillard’s concept of ‘symbolic exchange’, which celebrates the extra-economic and extra-instrumental use of goods, Bataille writes critically of the ‘servile man’, who ‘averts his eyes from that which is not useful, which serves no purpose’.[4] He opposes the servile to the sovereign: ‘The sovereign I speak of has little to do with the sovereign of States, as international law defines it.  I speak in general of an aspect that is opposed to the servile and the subordinate’.[5] The sovereign, then, stands apart from and opposed to the closed system of political economy, as does symbolic exchange; indeed, Bataille champions the ‘opposition to the mercantile spirit, to haggling and self-interested calculation’ that is embodied in true exchange.[6] In the world of The Unit, human beings are understood only in relationship to their use value and are thus granted different levels of exchange value in a brutal, mercenary logic where a single older woman is worth demonstrably, quantifiably less than a young single mother of young boys.  There is a good deal that this kind of instrumentalisation misses, of course, and Weber, when formulating his theory of rationalisation, noted that disenchantment carries with it necessarily a dehumanising element.  When Dorrit finds out her sister had been in the same Unit and had died a few years previously, she rages against the narrowness of this calculus of value: ‘But what about me?  Perhaps I needed my sister, why doesn’t anyone think about things like that?’[7]

Though exploitative medical practices and the disposal of the aged are classic themes in dystopian fiction, from Michael Bay’s patently awful film The Island to the classic (both in novel and film form) Logan’s Run, to Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (soon to be released as a film), The Unit is still compelling, neccessary reading, due in no small part to the fact that it is far more grounded in the realities of the disenchanted, rationalised world than many of these other texts. After all, what makes any dystopia work is that it is believable.  This is why Alfonso Cuaron’s film Children of Men is so striking, so haunting: it is chillingly plausible; its account of the future is so convincing as to seem almost inevitable.  What makes Holmqvist’s nightmare so recognisably grounded in our reality is that she draws out the connections between rationalisation and commodification, which are inextricably linked in consumer capitalism.  Dorrit tells a friend:

I used to believe that my life belonged to me … Something that was entirely at my disposal, something no one else had any claim on, or the right to have an opinion on.  But I’ve changed my mind.  I don’t own my life at all, it’s other people who own it … Those who have the power, I suppose … The state or industry or capitalism.  Or the mass media.  Or all four.  Or are industry and capitalism the same thing?  Anyway: those who safeguard growth and democracy and welfare, they’re the ones who own my life.  They own everybody’s life.  And life is capital.  A capital that is to be divided fairly among the people in a way that promotes reproduction and growth, welfare and democracy.  I am only a steward, taking care of my vital organs.[8]

As a condemnation of an increasingly rationalised world where everything and, more importantly, everyone, can become a unit of economic value, The Unit is a very fine novel and a nice bit of social criticism.  However, there is something going on further in the depths of the text that should be immensely troubling to anyone invested in the idea of therapy.  That the usual therapies of our world go on unhindered with the Unit, that Doritt regularly visits a psychologist, or that art therapy is available to the doomed residents, suggests something deeply subversive; that the whole therapeutic ethos that dominates contemporary European cultures, with its rhetoric of healing, wholeness, mind-body unity, self-awareness, and self-fulfilment and its social structure of support groups, twelve-step programs, talk therapy, is nothing more than an integral part of the rationalised and rationalising apparatus that prepares and maintains human capital.  That very few of the people who work at the Unit (though they live outside of it) have any intimation of the sheer hypocrisy of the whole enterprise is telling of the perverse coexistence of the recognisable world of therapy and the utterly ruthless logic of exploitation and violence that exists behind the whole edifice of the Unit.  Slavoj Žižek gets at this point in his contributions to the recent The Monstrosity of Christ:

Spiritual mediation, in its abstraction from institutionalised religion, appears today as the zero-level undistorted core of religion: the complex institutional and dogmatic edifice which sustains every particular religion is dismissed as a contingent secondary coating of this core.  The reason for this shift of accent from religious institutions to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism.[9]

This paints the whole of The Unit in a new light and draws out the fact that the novel voices a criticism of the whole edifice of contemporary spiritual/therapeutic culture, most visible in the New Age movement, which often calls for a reversal of disenchantment and the creation of a ‘reenchanted’ world (and here Thomas Moore’s best-selling book The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life is but one example).  Viewing it from the angle set out by Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, what is going on in the development of the whole therapeutic ethos is in reality very different.  In important ways that go largely unspoken, the world of universal individual achievement, the world where we can go to a yoga class or purchase ancient Mayan herbs to mediate the effects of a stressful life, is a world not unlike that of the Unit, and we, as its residents, are not unlike the human capital that is corralled there to serve a purpose and then to be discarded when our usefulness is finished.  All of this raises a series or vital, necessary question: Is therapy really just another management technique and, worse, one that many people gladly submit themselves to?  Are we concerned with all of this healing and wholeness because it allows us to more effective employees, voters, and consumers?  Is all of this a symptom of the commodification of the human subject?  Is the New Age, rather than a new era of freedom and respect for the individual, in reality an ideal embodiment of disenchantment and a pathway to an even more dysenchanted world?

Sheer pointlessness is a deeply subversive affair.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory

Brief excursus on rationalisation and the contemporary university: That this poverty of utility has permeated the contemporary academy to an unprecedented degree goes perhaps without saying.  That the value of university research and teaching is now primarily filtered though economic concerns is immediately obvious to anyone working within the Performance Based Research Funding (PBRF) system in New Zealand, a system which imposes an inappropriate and ultimately harmful standard of ‘excellence’ and ‘performance’ drawn from the business world and situated within a narrowly-prescribed system of valuation.  Education is not a product, nor is it a service and to treat it as such has serious detrimental consequences, such as the need to court and treat students as customers.  On the reverse side of the coin, we find significant numbers of students who are unwilling or simply unable to make the intellectual leap to find the value in studying something that will not help them find a job or in studying for a purpose other than gathering marks towards a degree.  The great tragedy here when thinking about the value of the study of religion, or any of the Humanities for that matter, is that, in spending time and energy attempting to prove their worth in the narrow strictures of utilitarian and economic value, scholars are distracted from doing work that is truly valuable (Mark Bauerlein has an excellent piece on this in the Chronicle of Higher Education).  Perhaps all of this ultimately breaks down to a question of belief; either one believes that the pursuit of knowledge is valuable in its own right, or one does not.  This may be one of those things about which one must square one’s shoulders and declare, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other’.

As the Unit’s librarian Kjell tells Dorrit early on in her stay, ‘there are so many intellectuals here.  People who read books … People who read books tend to be dispensable.  Extremely’.[10] That the Unit is also home to a number of artists and writers should perhaps come as no surprise, for the arts, like the pursuit of knowledge, are formally – and often economically – useless.  That these things make life worth living is, of course, of no consequence.

---

[1] Ninni Holmqvist, The Unit, translated by Marlaine Delargy (New York: Other Press, 2006), 52.

[2] Holmqvist, Unit, 93.

[3] See Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 35-42 and 90.

[4] Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 2, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 15. Emphasis in original.

[5] Bataille, Accursed II, 197.

[6] Bataille, Accursed II, 42.

[7] Holmqvist, Unit, 136.

[8] Holmqvist, Unit, 103.

[9] Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, edited by Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 28.

[10] Holmqvist, Unit, 48.

Fitzmyer’s Neutral Historical Criticism

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Fitzmyer, historical-critical method, neutrality, no true scotsman

Joseph A. Fitzmyer recently published The Interpretation of Scripture (2008), which is subtitled In Defense of the Historical-Critical Method. The way he sees it, the historical-critical method is a “neutral” method. One can either employ this neutral method to Christian ends, by adding on presuppositions of faith and belief, or one can employ the neutral method in service of the Devil, by adding on presuppositions opposed to Christian dogma (and Fitzmyer cites the work of Reimarus, FC Baur and DF Strauss in this latter category):

“Since the historical-critical method is per se neutral, it can be used with such faith presuppositions. Indeed, by reason of them it becomes a properly oriented method of biblical interpretation, for none of the elements of the method is pursued in and for itself.  They are used only to achieve the main goal of ascertaining what the biblical message was that the sacred writer of old sought to convey – in effect, the literal sense of the Bible.” (69)

So even though the method was developed as a result of Enlightenment ideals of freedom from dogma, and before that from Reformation ideals of freedom from tradition – despite the genealogy which gave rise to it – the historical critical method is a neutral method.

As theoretical logic this is probably quite right. It doesn’t matter what your motives are for constructing a method; evaluation of a method as ‘neutral’ or ‘biased’ depends wholly on the mechanics of the method itself.

But in practice the historical critical method is never simply a matter of theoretical logic. It is always pressed into the service of some overarching project, whether Calvin’s attempt to establish a rival magisterium in the Bible, or Kant’s and de Wette’s project to establish a rival to church dogma, or the project of most recent confessional biblical scholars to serve the church.

So, for example, even if there is no a priori reason why the historical-critical method should favour atheistic material monism rather than theism, its utilization by material monists will practically always favour atheistic conclusions, whereas its utilization by theists will almost always favour theistic conclusions. For the method is inseparable from its background presuppositions. These conclusions may not technically be the a priori result of employing the method, but due to the  background, such conclusions are effectively a priori (or if you like, they are a priori results masquerading as a posteriori results – the situation of the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy).

So in explaining an event – say the Resurrection of Christ (just to get away from 586 and all that) – although the method has the theoretical appearance of a netural method, there is no hope in hell that an orthodox Christian historical critic will ever weigh the evidence in favour of the Resurrection not occurring, and there is the same chance that an atheist will view the evidence as demonstrating a miracle.

The historical critical method is never in reality “neutral” – even if it is in theory.

The Prosaic and Authoritative Parts of Job make it interesting

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authority, divine retribution, Job, no reason whatsoever, prosaic, satan

The poetry between Job and his friends is just a nice distraction. The really interesting innovation in Job occurs in the prologue, divine speeches, and epilogue. For while Job protests against divine retribution as much as one can, he ultimately keeps within the system upheld by his friends. That’s why he’s still looking for a Redeemer in the god who is tormenting him. He doesn’t seriously consider any other option. For all its facade of dissent, Job 3-31 is, in the main, an argument carried out within the system of divine retribution, in the well-worn mode of other ancient Near Eastern conversations.

But compare satan’s point in Job 1:9-11 and 2:3-6. The satan is challenging the very system of divine retribution itself. Do people serve God for reward, or only for God’s own sake (for no reason at all)? Now this is true innovation. And then the divine speeches refuse to give any reason for obeying God. The ground for obeying God is moved to a whole new level. Retribution is not the whole story, and it isn’t the most important principle of divine ethics anymore. Now, this is interesting! It removes God’s actions from any possible human scrutiny, asks the question Job did not ask (and was ignorant of; 9:17 is still dominated by expectations that divine retribution is the norm), and makes the protests of Chs. 3-31 beside the point. Protest against God requires at least some guaranteed grounds of his ethical actions, but once he is free of any knowable principle for action, protest is futile – Job can only keep silent and withdraw. Divine retribution can be used to justify almost anything as ‘good’, from the fall of a proud man to the holocaust of an entire people. But the transcendence of God lets him do absolutely anything he wants. And with any such totalising move, this results in an endless supply of suppressed voices to recover. Submission to the discipline of absolute authority is so exciting to think about! The prose and the authoritative divine speeches provides the really interesting departure and development within the book of Job.

It’s now gone 5:00 a.m. I should really stop thinking about Job when I’m in bed (proof-text: 4:12-16).

Job, A God Not Quite Beyond Good and Evil, Unlimited Semiosis and Limitations of Meaning: Or, James Harding is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrongity Wrong

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Dostoyevsky, James Harding, Jean-François Lyotard, Job, Roland Barthes

(loosely continuing this conversation.)

Some of the individual sections of Job – especially Job’s speeches – open up the ethical imagination, giving rise to an endless chain of questioning by generations of subsequent readers. One of the main reasons for this is not hard to find: the book provides one of the most fundamental challenges to and protests against God’s actions in the Hebrew Bible, and one of the most puzzling (non-)resolutions to these challenges and protests. There is a story about some nineteenth century author – I forget who, but he was irreligious, and I’m guessing it was either Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde – who stayed up all evening reading the book of Job, immersed in its poetic passages, in awestruck appreciation of its artistry. For him, it was the only thing worth reading in the Hebrew Bible.

But Job doesn’t just open up ethical questions. It also closes them down. Reading Job requires that we take notice of both its open and its authoritative voices. For Job, as a whole book, shuts down the conversation as much as it opens it up. Job must be appreciated in the straitjacket of its full dimensions as well as in light of the counterhegemonic voices it contains.

The attempt to control and restrict the meaning is not something that occurred when the book was canonized. Already, the prologue, epilogue, and divine speeches provide Job with an authoritative voice within the writing of the book itself. Does it succeed in closing down the meaning completely? Not at all. But like a canon, authoritative voices obscure and replace the earlier forms with new meanings, tainting the whole, reconstituting its emphases and intertexts rather than completely silencing the text. (And these authoritative voices also fail to be quite as comprehensive as they try to be, the necessary failure of hegemony that preserves the voices of dissent, and makes us smirk at power…)

The final effect of the book of Job (in the perspective of its disharmonious totality) has its closest parallel in Dostoyevsky’s novels, where I always find the dissenting voices more interesting than the whole into which they are forced. There is room for seeking out these conflicting voices, but against the Romantic claims of ‘polyphony’ (or worse, a text which ‘deconstructs itself’, whatever that means), this is a job for interpreters to do, to read the text against its dominant and dominating grain. Barthes was right (in S/Z): truly open (writerly) texts are nowhere to be found; conversely, the classic texts were never multivalent, they are only ‘moderately plural (i.e., merely polysemous).’

But there is an ever-present risk in attempting to flush out these suppressed counter-voices. In straining to find the useful, liberating parts, do we necessarily and consequentially redeem the text? Is this not a further way that the hegemonic voice assimilates dissent (e.g. ‘anybody can become President of America, because Capital gives everyone an equal chance!’)? Isn’t this the problem with Trible’s project, if it is left there? Her mosaic (of Miriam) is quite brilliantly constructed, but turning it into a Mosaic (with an upper-case ‘M’) not only reinscribes the dominant ideology, but appears to redeem the text. The same can be said for the recent flurry to find isolated verses in the New Testament which demonstrate its amazing power for political liberation from colonial and imperial power. Or, again, the current greening of scripture, you know, that book which begins with the command to rape and pillage the Earth. (And yet, a nagging doubt: why do these uses all seem to come along after the secular movements which inaugurated them, if they were to be found in the Bible all along?) Do these endeavours really liberate, or are they ways in which hegemony accommodates dissent so that it cannot explode into real opposition?

But more concretely… Job 21:5 would be a wonderful verse to support an ethical response based on the Other… if it weren’t in Job. Unfortunately, though, it is. And it comes immediately after Job 21:4, which notes that Job’s problem is not with other people, but with God himself, and with a doctrine of retribution that Job (the person) never challenges (he only challenges what he sees as God’s poor implementation of retribution, first in relation to himself, and, when this doesn’t convince his friends, belatedly in relation to others: the poor, the victims). The immediate ethical response to an Other, the face which appears before us, has to be read against the grain in Job. The reason Job thinks that his friends should put their hands on their mouths is that Job (a righteous man) is being punished (the retributive punishment for the unrighteous). This is the mouth-covering horror of it. It is this theological, reflective consequence – utterly removed from any personal ethical response – which is in view here. It is ethics subsumed under human-divine relations, not human-human relations. Job’s instructions to his friends to put their hands over their mouths has the double purpose of getting them to shut up so he can take his hand off his own mouth and accuse God of causing unjust punishment for a righteous man (21:3; cf. 7:11), and letting them know that their proper response should be horror rather than blame at the failure of retribution (21:6-7 & ff).

If God were merely amoral and capricious in his divine speeches, that woud be one matter. But God attempts both to insist on his righteousness and also insist on his superior knowledge. It is this combination that results in a further injustice, what Lyotard terms ‘absolute injustice’, in that Job is not only arbitrarily punished – but his very ability to protest has been taken away from him. Coming at the end of the book of Job, after all Job’s speeches, the divine speeches always have this ‘higher’ ethical purpose in mind. If Job is at all associated with ancient Near Eastern wisdom, I don’t think one can separate out God’s appeal to cosmic order from ethical order. See, for example, chapter 28. And God certainly doesn’t separate the two in his divine speeches. To the contrary, he links his withholding of light with punishment of the wicked (Job 38:15) – a strange action for an ‘amoral’ God. When he cross-examines Job in the interlude to the divine speeches, it is ‘good’ and ‘evil’ which is explicitly at stake (40:8) – unspeakably, Job’s goodness and God’s evil. If God were just claiming to be amoral, that would not leave the book of Job so haunted with injustice. We would simply conclude that God abdicates any ethical responsibility. Fair enough, it’s a big task. But because God is claiming to follow some moral law that is above any earthly comprehension, especially Job’s, he becomes absolutely injust: Job is not only dealt with arbitrarily, but has been robbed of his ability to protest. This is not only a silence in which Job’s complaints are unanswered by God in Job’s own terms, but a silence which has rendered all protest unanswerable. ‘Yhwh’s revelation to Job does not promote dialogue; it ends it’ (Morrow 2006: 145).

As Philip Davies concluded, it is fine to take ethical points from the Hebrew Bible, but only if accompanied by the realization that we are cutting and pasting according to our own standards. Otherwise, such an approach faces the risk of redeeming the text and legitimizing its dominant ideology, an ideology which is, in large part, simply banal.

– Deane

586 and All That: Or, a Brief and Arguably Irrelevant Biblical Footnote to the Problem of Explanatory Redundancy

Tags

arguable irrelevancy, Christian Orthodoxy, Deuteronomistic History, divine intervention, Emmanuel Levinas, Ernst Troeltsch’, God in History, Greg Dawes, Richard Rubenstein

Under what circumstances could it be said that this or that event in history is the result of divine intervention? If such an event can be explained satisfactorily in mundane terms, without appeal to divine agency, is there any need to posit a remainder? Is it then redundant to invoke the deity in order to explain that event? The ramblings that follow were provoked by a well-argued seminar paper last Friday by Greg Dawes, who revisited Ernst Troeltsch’s seminal essay on historical and dogmatic method in theology. While Dawes (and everyone else in the room) was primarily interested in the question of whether or not, and under what circumstances supernatural agency can reasonably be invoked in order to explain a given event in history, I am more interested in the genealogy of the question. I am less interested in whether some god or other is acting in history than in why some people feel it necessary to suppose that such a god might be so acting. Why do some theologians, historians, and philosophers feel it appropriate, necessary, or at least not implausible to suppose that a deity (generally a deity that bears more than a passing resemblance to the god of Christian orthodoxy, whether or not this is admitted) has acted in history? As a biblical scholar, and a rather aberrant one at that, I am getting used to asking questions that no-one else is really interested in, but let me proceed anyway.

The answer, I suspect, has nothing much to do with proper historical method at all, though in framing the answer thus I am begging a range of questions: what is proper about a particular construal of “historical method”? Is “historical method” an oxymoron, that is, is the study of history necessarily something that can be reduced to a “method”? It has to do with the application, whether acknowledged or not, of an entire epistemic framework that specifies in advance the basis on which explanatory adequacy is to be judged. Even if this epistemic framework is not invoked in the process of explanation, its ghost continues to work between the lines, so that “God” crops up as a plausible agent in the explanation, even if all the other elements in the explanation fall into the category one might loosely and inadequately term “secular.”

The origins of this framework of explanation lie, I would argue, in the process of explaining, in theological terms, how belief in the justice, power, and knowledge of the just and compassionate god of Israel’s tradition (Exodus 34:6-7; Jonah 4:2) could be maintained in light of the catastrophe of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian army in 586 BCE. This is an event that can be explained without any obvious remainder in mundane, geopolitical terms: the puppet king of Judah, Zedekiah, rebelled against his Babylonian master and received in his body the due penalty for his error. Blinded and in chains, he was taken captive and his erstwhile capital, Jerusalem, with the temple of its god Yahweh, was reduced to rubble, its inhabitants reduced, according to the book of Lamentations, to boiling their own children in order to survive (Lamentations 4:10), obliterating in the process the children who would tend their parents in their dotage, the hope for future descendants to continue the heritage of Judah, and arguably the humanity of both the parents and the children as well.

Outside the framework provided by the sacred traditions of early sixth-century BCE Judah there is no reason to suppose any other factors than the logic of human warfare and empire building were involved. Indeed, the Nachleben and Wirkung of this framework have highlighted its dangers in the ethical sphere. This is already evident in the voice of daughter Zion in the book of Lamentations (see, e.g., the works of Tod Linafelt and Carleen Mandolfo), but is arguably evident in the use of the analogy of 586 to explain, in theological terms, the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Romans in 70 CE (see 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch), and is surely evident in the attempt by some to use the analogy of 586 to explain the Shoah, as divine retribution for assimilation on the part of some Jews to the wider secular/Christian norms of post-Enlightenment European culture. The ethical inadequacy of the analogy lies behind both Emmanuel Levinas’s reflections on “useless suffering” and Richard Rubenstein’s controversial rejection of covenant theology.

The fact is, though, that to a sixth-century BCE Jew confronted with the events of 586, to interpret history in non-theological terms would have made no sense because God had not yet disappeared, and was in no danger of dying. He (i.e. Yahweh) may have been hiding, or less powerful than Marduk, or angry with his people; or she (i.e. the Queen of Heaven – see Jeremiah 44) may have been upset that she had not received any libations recently. The “Yahweh is angry with his people” option is the one that won, as the many layers of the Deuteronomistic History, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Twelve, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Daniel amply attest. There was nothing inevitable about this victory of deuteronomic orthodoxy as, again, the many layers of the works just listed (esp. Jeremiah and Ezekiel) also amply attest. This, too, can be explained in mundane terms: male, Yahwistic, deuteronomically-inclined scribes saturated in the theology of covenant inscribed in the texts that would control the future development of post-exilic Jewish theology their own interpretation of the events of 586 BCE.

Two points need to be made. First, in terms of the Hebrew Bible, the scribes responsible for works deemed scriptural in Judaism and Christianity also preserved and transmitted the works that point to the deconstruction of the dominant, theodic interpretation of the events of 586 BCE (see Job and the counter-voices within Lamentations, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and some of the Twelve, esp. Jonah, Habakkuk, and Malachi): the Hebrew Bible is dialogic, not monologic, and reflects a critical theological conversation around the meaning of history. The whole conversation may well be redundant, but that is another matter. Second, it makes little sense, and is of little interest, to invoke supernatural involvement in any historical event without a pre-existing theological framework within which such involvement can be explained. Such explanation can only meaningfully take place in relation to such a framework, not in relation to the methods of historical criticism. What is at stake is not the explanatory value of theistic explanation in relation to non-theistic explanation, but the cogency of the entire prior theological framework that makes the former possible.

What, in biblical terms, is this framework? Well, that are a number of possible construals, but I would argue that the construal that best represents the biblical evidence, supported by the dominant voices in the Hebrew Bible (albeit undermined by the counter-voices in Job, Lamentations, and the Latter Prophets) emerges from the imposition of the treaty model on divine-human relations within Israel, classically defined in Deuteronomy. It invokes a particular construal of divine retribution: observe Yahweh’s commands and be blessed, or disobey those commands and be cursed. This construal of divine retribution is, furthermore, bound up with a particular construal of valid prophecy: a prophet is true if he or she speaks in the name of Yahweh (Deuteronomy 13:1-5) and if what he (e.g. Jeremiah) or she (e.g. Huldah) says comes true (Deuteronomy 18:15-22; Jeremiah 27-29). This then lays a great deal of authority on the linguistic-rhetorical ingenuity of the prophet who wants his words to be deemed true: make them non-falsifiable (thus Jeremiah), not open to disconfirmation (thus Hananiah, more a victim of prophetic ineptitude than pseudo-prophetic mendacity). It makes perfect sense to construct a prophecy that no-one will live to see literally fulfilled, but that future generations will re-interpret (Daniel 9) and re-interpret again. All of this assumes a particular understanding of time, to which the deity is somehow bound. Time is linear, and the observance of the terms of the treaty, together with the fulfilment of prophecy, are constrained by the arrow of linear time.

This framework sets the terms by which a theistic explanation of a particular event in history might be regarded as valid. More strongly, it establishes under what terms an explanation of an event affecting the people of the covenant could be considered adequate. This is why communal laments such as Psalm 44 and Psalm 80 work: the god of the covenant must exist in some relation to events affecting the covenant people, otherwise the entire theological edifice crumbles.

My point, I think, is that in an intellectual context shaped, at whatever remove, by the effects of traditions such as we find in the Deuteronomistic History, to invoke God as an essential element in an adequate explanation of an event does not simply raise the question of whether a theistic explanation is adequate, necessary, or even possible. It raises the question of whether an entire string of theological presuppositions and implications can be admitted as elements bearing on the adequacy of the explanation. Now I have been to some extent reductionist in focusing so squarely on the events of 586 BCE, but I have done this not because these events are the only analogy that could be drawn on in constructing a theistic explanation of an event, but because these events, or rather one canonically sanctioned construal of their theological significance, provides the generative analogy that even makes possible subsequent theistic explanations for historical events in contexts influenced by the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity.

There are other possible points of departure. In a confessing Christian context it would surely be essential to ask the question, “What might it mean – I can hear Will Sweetman’s teeth grinding from here – to construct a theistic explanation for a historical event in light of the incarnation, or the descent of the Holy Spirit, or the ascension of Christ, or the divinely-bestowed mission of the Church, or the Christian hope of resurrection?” These are compelling questions that I don’t yet want to get into, for two reasons, both of which would require an acre of exploration. First, it seems to me that the Christian inheritance of the sacred texts of pre-Christian Judaism means that even to ask, in a Christian context, how God is involved in history is ultimately to exhibit one’s dependence on the generative analogy of 586. Second, and in tension with this, there are properly theological issues to be dealt with. How is the question of divine involvement in history to be located dogmatically? Is it a question primarily of the possibility of divine revelation, of the authority of Scripture, of the doctrine of God, or of the implications of the incarnation? Is it a question primarily of epistemology (how can we know that God is involved in this event?) or of ethics (is it ethically defensible to posit God’s involvement in this event?)? Reflections on these questions will have to wait.

References

Levinas, Emmanuel. “Useless Suffering.” Pages 450-454 in Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust. Edited by S. T. Katz, S. Biderman, and G. Greenberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Repr. from The Provocation of Levinas. Edited by R. Bernasconi and D. Wood. London: Routledge, 1988.

Linafelt, Tod. Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Mandolfo, Carleen. Daughter Zion talks back to the Prophets: A Dialogic Theology of the Book of Lamentations. Semeia Studies 58. Leiden: Brill, 2007.

Rubenstein, Richard L. After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism. 2d ed. Johns Hopkins Jewish Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Troeltsch, Ernst. “Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology.” Pages 729-753 in Religion in History: Ernst Troeltsch. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1991. German: Troeltsch, Gesammelte Schriften. Tübingen: Mohr, 1913. Originally published 1898.

Feast Your Eyes on This! St Clair (Dunedin) Surfies …

Tags

Bible and Critical Theory, Dunedin, St Clair, Undie 500

What you might expect to see WHEN you come to the B&CT Conference next Feb …

This guy’s name is Little Ollie and you might get lucky enough to see him:

OR, if you prefer …

Dunedin? IT’S ALL RIGHT HERE!

And these guys are STUDENTS, in case you didn’t realise – a migratory species of bird that arrive in February …

The First Academic Conference on U2

Tags

fallen angels, The Hype and the Feedback, U2

Unusual conferences are great! In a couple of weeks I’ll be flying out to Durham, North Carolina to take in the first academic conference on U2.

The conference program is here and includes stuff from a whole range of different disciplines. I’ll be presenting on fallen angels in U2’s music, and the interrelationships with ancient Jewish and Christian accounts – and mixing it up with some thoughts on how to avoid the ‘original versus deviant copy’ approach to reception history.

If you’re intrigued, come along! Registration is open to anybody who’s interested.

Bible and Critical Theory Seminar Call for Papers: Dunedin 7-8 February 2010

Tags

b&ct, bible & critical theory, Dunedin, pubs

The next Bible and Critical Theory Seminar will be held in Dunedin, “the nerve centre of innovative biblical studies in New Zealand” (R. Boer).

Important Information first:

DATE: 7-8 FEBRUARY 2010

CONTACTS:

James Harding (james.harding(at)stonebow.otago.ac.nz)

Roland Boer (roland.t.boer(at)gmail.com)

Papers are invited on all aspects of the intersections between the Bible and critical theory, which also includes matters of religion, politics and culture.

Due date for paper proposals: 31 December 2009.

Apparently James and Gillian are working their way through each of Dunedin’s pubs, in order to select the venue. I hear that the front-runner at the moment is the Captain Cook Tavern, well patronized by University of Otago students.

Update: The venue will be The Bog. See here for the location.

Update: Transport and Accommodation details.

Job, Adolf Hitler, and the Ethics of the Hebrew Bible: Or, why Philip Davies and Deane Galbraith are More or Less Wrong

Tags

Adolf Hitler, Deane Galbraith, Gilgamesh, Job, Philip Davies, Qumran

Job is, as St Jerome understood well, the slipperiest of the biblical books. It is also one of the rare moments when the Hebrew Bible truly approaches literary and philosophical greatness. In this it ranks alongside the Epic of Gilgamesh as a treasure from the ancient Near East. Its complexity scares me, which is why I have a monograph worth of drafts still sitting unpublished on my hard drive. As a corollary of its complexity, it fascinates me that so many generations of readers have felt compelled to close down its ambiguities and to redeem its horrors: for the god this book offers us is truly a monster. No wonder there is so little evidence of its authority in the sectarian scrolls from Qumran (except perhaps in the Hodayot) or in the New Testament (except perhaps in Romans), no wonder the rabbis debated its meaning so vigorously, and no wonder its reception history is one that reflects the endless attempt to own its meaning. Job becomes patient, he becomes a type of Christ, and so on.

Marc Chagall's 'Job's Despair' (1960)

I have here the modest aim of offering a footnote to Deane Galbraith and Philip Davies, via a slight detour through a revisionist approach to the personality of Adolf Hitler. In a recent interview in Der Spiegel, Birgit Schwarz has suggested we need to reconsider Adolf Hitler’s conviction that he was an artistic genius. This is the theme of her book Geniewahn: Hitler und die Kunst (Böhlau, 2009). For Schwarz, Hitler’s conviction that he was a genius misunderstood by those who rejected his art was at the centre of his worldview. Along with his deep inner conviction he needed a community of admirers, of which Josef Goebbels was a fine example, to bolster this delusion. This delusion of genius carried with it the conviction that Hitler was above morality and thus permitted to do anything: “The genius has outstanding ideas, and they must be implemented, even if they are completely amoral.”

The Yahweh of the book of Job is a Genie in the Hitlerian sense. That is, he is utterly amoral by virtue of being an artistic genius above the banalities of the human world in which puny, scabby little Job finds himself mired. This is how he answers Job in Job 38:1-41:26. “Will you condemn me that you may be justified?,” asks Yahweh in 40:8. He asks this in the context of asserting that because he is such a genius that he can create the marvellous cosmos, from the morning stars to the dumb ostrich, he is in no way bound by the kind of morality Job understands. In this I suggest Deane Galbraith is slightly missing the point by suggesting that Yahweh “simply demands obedience without justification.” That, perhaps, was always to be read between the lines of Job 23:12, but the focus in the Yahweh speeches is on Yahweh’s genius, not Job’s obedience. Job submits after a fashion to this dreadful god, but his obedience is not quite the point. It is that to whatever little world of justification Job may feel himself to belong, Yahweh is too much of a genius to worry about it. He can treat Job as a pawn in his cosmic game of oneupmanship with the Accuser without scruple.

But to leave the matter there would be to do an injustice to another genius, the greatest of all ancient Hebrew poets, from whose stylus this masterpiece has proceeded. (S)he was a genius in our sense of an extraordinary talent, not in Hitler’s. This is obvious, given that her name and personality have vanished behind her creation. This creation has much to teach us in the ethical sphere. If there truly exists a god such as the one portrayed in Job, He has nothing to teach us about ethics. As Job himself learns, true ethics begins when we face one another and acknowledge our common humanity (Job 21:5). Here Philip Davies is far too simple in his rejection of the Hebrew Bible. The problem lies as much in the sphere of textuality and the nature of Scripture as in the sphere of ethics in sensu stricto.

Marc Chagall's 'Job Prays' (1960)

Davies’ reflections have much to commend them. It does seem prima facie that it is ridiculous to suggest that the religions of the world have given humans ethics that bestow value on human life: frequently the effects of these traditions have shown the opposite. The “divine command” approach to ethics so fundamental to the Hebrew Bible and to many communities of its readers is arguably not a question of “ethics” at all. For a start, it is inseparable from ancient Near Eastern treaties, in which people were compelled under threat of torture, genocide, and exile (see Deuteronomy 28 for a particularly edifying example) to obey the suzerain king. Such treaties offer the framework for biblical ideas of covenant, and are the reason biblical ideas of covenant are inseparable from ancient Near Eastern notions of kingship. The Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible was created in the image of an ancient Near Eastern despot. If we focus on “codes” of law in the Hebrew Bible, we are more or less lost with respect to ethics. As in Job 1-2, we are surely unable to serve Yahweh gratuitously, because if we fail to serve him he will afflict us with blight and mildew (or at any rate a gruesome skin disease).

But is this all? It seems to me at least that part of the purpose of the book of Job is precisely to deconstruct the covenant on which such a hideous and inadequate moral code is based. It deconstructs it by exposing the unspeakable deity at its root. If, however, we shift our attention from Job 38:1-41:26 and look at the dialogue, we see an attempt to negotiate an approach to ethics that is based not on obeying the random precepts of a capricious (and generally invisible) deity, but rather on attention to the suffering of the Other. Job commands his friends to look at him and be appalled (Job 21:5) – that is, engage with him as he is, rather than explaining his place in an irrelevant and dehumanizing ethical system that buys divine righteousness at the price of human dignity. An ethic that begins with Job 21:5 cannot be a matter of a code of law but must be negotiated in the mess of human life.

For this we need not simply a text but a community of readers, and this is where the problem lies with Davies. He reifies the text in a manner more akin to some (by no means all) of the advocates of theological hermeneutics to which he is so implacably opposed. Scripture only exists, however, in its recognition as such and in its consequent use in the context of an interpretive community. We receive Scripture through the lens of Talmud (in Judaism) or apostolic tradition (in Catholic and Orthodox Christianities). While these traditions provide frameworks that are used to limit the meaning of Scripture, the availability of Scripture to an infinite readership means that its meaning cannot be controlled. There can be no “biblical values” without a community to pick and choose from the smorgasbord of biblical options, yet at the same time there can be no limit on a given reader’s reclamation of Scripture from those who would construe such “biblical values” as the hermeneutical key to scriptural interpretation. More simply, Scripture can be taken to mean (almost) anything; consequently it actually means nothing. The range of possible construals is radically open.

Back to ethics. Job 21:5 can be construed as the key to the deconstruction of the ethical system that the Job of the prologue had taken as read. In the canon of the Hebrew Bible as a whole, it is perhaps Leviticus 19:18 that has that honour. This is because to command someone to love their neighbour as they love themselves is to command something that cannot really be codified. While “love” in the context of ancient Near Eastern treaties tends to be a matter of unquestioning obedience, what might it mean to love one’s neighbour in that sense? The radical openness of this command, not to mention its resistance to definitive codification, is arguably what made it so central to the ethics of the synoptic Jesus and of the Hillel portrayed in b. Shabb. 31b, as well as the command on which much of the work of Emmanuel Levinas could be construed as an extended commentary.

So readers make Scripture, and readers make biblical values. Davies is right that it is to some external set of values that such readers in fact make appeal when they attach themselves to “biblical values.” But it is in the engagement between readers, interpretive communities, and the sacred texts that are constituted by them that such values emerge, and in this more complex sense it could just be asserted that “religion” (on some level) has, by an extended process of extrapolation, given us ethical values we can live by.

Dunedin’s own Pruitt-Igoe: The Burns Building

Tags

Arts, asbestos, Burns Building, Dunedin, Otago, Pruitt-Igoe, sewerage, sheep's arse, traumatized

Perhaps the most famous urban housing project was St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe – a paragon of modernist vision, theoretically perfect in conception, and – as a result – an unmitigated disaster for human habitation. Built in 1954, the multi-story housing was such a failure that it had to be demolished by 1972.

But here in Dunedin, we have our own monument to modernist vision. And it has survived!

Dunedin’s own Pruitt-Igoe is known as The Burns Building, and is home to the outcasts and pariahs of academia (practitioners of the Arts). While Pruitt-Igoe was unable to withstand the postmodern turn of the latter Twentieth Century, the inhabitants of The Burns Building (and in particular the long-time prior inhabitants of the fifth floor) have blissfully ignored such passing trends. Despite the lingering asbestos, the sewerage smells which waft up from the ground floor, and a design which shows all the aesthetic flair of a sheep’s arse, The Burns Building has withstood the test of time!

Today, the legacy of Pruitt-Igoe survives only in photographs and the trauma-plagued eggshell minds of its former inhabitants. But The Burns Building survives and continues to traumatise its own inhabitants to this very day.

But let these pictures speak for themselves:

Pruitt-Igoe:

Burns:

Pruitt-Igoe:

Burns:

Pruitt-Igoe:

Burns:

Pruitt-Igoe:

Burns:

Pruitt-Igoe:

Burns:

Pruitt-Igoe:

Burns: