Skip to main content

Home/ BS2615-1-WI10/ Group items tagged Messianicity

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Sterling Field

'Deconstruction in a Nutshell' in a Nutshell - 0 views

  •  
    Straight from the words of Derrida in an interview. Came across this quote which does a good job of describing a deconstructionist approach: Derrida says, "There is the general structure of Messianicity as the structure of experience, and on this groundless ground there have been revelations, a history which one calls Judaism or Christianity and so on. That is a possibility and then you would have a Heideggerian gesture, in style. You would have to go back from these religions to the fundamental ontological conditions of possibilities of religions, to describe the structure of messianicity on the groundless ground on which religions have been made possible (23)".
Joe MacDonald

What is Historical Criticism? « Messianic Jewish Musings - 1 views

  • Alan Cooper spoke basically to say that for Jewish readers it is not difficult to uphold historical critical views of the text at the same time as upholding Torah as sacred authority.
  • Peter Machinist defined historical criticism as reading the Bible from its human side and seeing it as rooted in historical realities.
  • Francis Watson
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Francis Watson of Durham University gave a provocative lecture. He said we should abandon the term historical criticism altogether for the following reasons: (1) Biblical scholars are not historians and should not imply that we are. (2) Historical criticism is not a neutral characterization. In its origin the term referred to textual criticism, which is about restoring texts. Historical criticism, by contrast, has been about doubting them. The historical critical movement has had an agenda to criticize, in the harsh sense, other views of the Bible. (3) Historical criticism has claimed that its methods are objective, neutral, and not about dogma. This has been shown to be a farce. (4) The real issue has been modernity and rationalism versus tradition. (5) Historical approaches to a text are far from the totality of the work we do. Much Biblical scholarship is not historical but interpretive. (6) The distance historical critics claim to put between themselves and the text is illusory. (7) Therefore, we should talk about biblical studies or scholarship and make the term historical criticism defunct.
  • Historical criticism, simply put, is the idea of studying the Biblical texts scientifically, which has led to dissecting the Bible into many alleged source texts.
  • First, it is important to know that historical criticism has fallen on increasing disfavor. The whole project is so rationalist and assumes the possibility of so much knowledge and the superiority of the modern over pre-modern cultures, that in this post-modern age, the enterprise is looking more and more imperialistic.
  • Legaspi traced the history of historical criticism and its move from seeing the Bible as scripture to seeing the Bible as simply a text.
  • One step in this journey was the Reformation, in which there arose a question for the first time about which version of the Bible and which selection of Bible books was valid.
  • The death of scripture in the West was solidified in 18th century German universities.
  • H-C was successful for a time, quite a long time in fact. My point was simply that it is no longer in a position to function as it once did. I don’t believe it is in an epistemological position inferior to that of confessional modes, i.e. regarding objectivity or tradition. But I believe that the discourse that it has framed is not a promising one for actual religious communities functioning now, in a post-Christian–not simply post-confessional–society.
  •  
    This is a very nice summary of several SBL papers addressing the issue of historical criticism. Several different views are expressed in a very well framed and concise manner.
1 - 2 of 2
Showing 20 items per page