Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

I’m in New York for my annual city fix taking in the Trinity Institute for the 13th year running. Walter Bruggeman is our speaker this morning and it promises to be rich. He is going to take apart the argument over biblical criticism and open the flood gates of postmodernism. I’ll keep you posted here in real time.

1/20/11 9:14 am – Bruggeman lays out where his argument will go: critiquing criticism. He nicely sets up three approaches to studying the Bible that have dominated since the 17th century when doctrine trumped the early freedom of the Reformation. The three – Orthodoxy (the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it), Rationalism (biblical criticism that dissects the text and isn’t concerned with the surface reading) and Pietism (the Bible as a spiritual guide).

9:28 am – What a great teacher. After giving the most cogent summary of 300 years of Bible study, he states baldly, “it does not make any sense to keep this 19th century debate going.” He is calling for a new approach that doesn’t fall into either orthodox absolutism or the pseudo-scientific rationalism of the evolutionary scheme that the biblical criticism approach has become. May I note he is one of the masters of this approach?

9:33 am – Now he has our attention. What’s next? Again, the consummate professor declares, “I want to share three things that I have learned.”

9:34 am – Thing one. Paul Ricoeur, a French philosopher who I had the honor of hearing lecture at Yale Divinity School has taught Bruggeman that you must consider the pre-critical approach (Orthodoxy in Bruggeman’s schema), and the critical approach (the rationalism of Bruggman’s argument) but then one must move to the post-critical, typified by Bruggeman as “a second naïveté.” (Postmodernism has entered the building). An aside about Clinical Pastoral Education “where you start out thinking everyone loves everyone, then you learn your mother doesn’t love you and you end up seeing she loved you the best she could” got some laughs from us CPE alums.

9:45 am – Thing two. Ouch. Even Bruggeman is a postmodernist. Here he shares that he has learned two new approaches to scripture that are necessary beyond rational biblical criticism. These are:

1) Rhetorical Criticism. This method proposes we go inside the text to see how the text works and sees the text as integral groups of signs and symbols. “Utterance generates an empowered community of text creatures who don’t need to go behind the curtain.” Narrative rules, even if there is no longer a Master Narrative.

2) Social Scientific Methods: Sociology, Political Economy and Liberation Theology. These ideological critiques recognize that any time we are interpreting a text it is within at least two fields of power: the one where we reside and the one in which the text came into being. No more can anyone claim that a text is objective.

9:56 am - Thing Three. We have to study scripture much more like a Jewish rabbi (you know, like Jesus, the rabbi, did.) Freud is Bruggeman’s example of a rabbi – someone who knows that “the self is thick, layered, conflicted. We pause in front of the text with wonderment and awe and deny any thinness. We are created in the image of a God who is thick, layered, conflicted.” He ends asking the assembly to resist orthodoxy, rationality and the easy technological solution. Wow.

By national canon, every clergy person is required to perform continuing education every single year and record their effort with their bishop. I thank God that the Trinity Institute continues to give me such a rich setting for mine. All this and a Broadway show to boot!