Posted by
Rob on Wednesday, June 18, 2008 5:29:03 PM
After doing my best to kill off my readers, first by not posting anything for a fortnight, and then posting 10 pages at once,
I resume the normal programming for those Darwinian survivors of intellectual fitness.
Peter Leithart, professor of theology and literature at
New Saint Andrews College
and pastor of Trinity Reformed Church in Moscow, Idaho, wrote a book review in First Things entitled
Scripture as Participation that resonated with my postings on recursion. He writes,
In proposing a participatory vision of history, Levering, who
teaches at Ave Maria University, challenges ideas that shaped the
development of historical-critical biblical scholarship.
From the rise of nominalism in the Late Middle Ages through the
modern period, history has been conceived in an atomistic and “linear”
fashion. History consists of discrete events, and the forces of
historical causation are all immanent within history. It’s not
surprising that secularists would gravitate to a linear notion of
history, but theologians and biblical scholars have eagerly accepted
the same theory. The result for biblical studies, Levering shows, is a
gradual but unmistakable drift from theological interpretation of
Scripture toward a purely immanent understanding of the history
recorded in the Bible and of the goals of exegesis...A “participatory” understanding of history, by contrast, recognizes
that history is an “ongoing participation in God’s active providence.”
...
To understand history, it’s necessary to consider its “vertical” as
well as its “horizontal” dimensions. The implications for exegesis are
obvious. If history is purely human, then a nontheological
interpretation of the historical record suffices. If, however,
“history” is humanity’s participation in God’s providence, then
“history” includes robustly theological/metaphysical events and
realities, such as creation, the call of Abraham, exodus, exile,
return, incarnation, Pentecost, and the ongoing participation in Christ
that is the Church. History writing is a record of divine
interventions, and if this is history, then a “historical”
interpretation of Scripture has to reckon with theological and
metaphysical realities.
Levering (and Leithart) are drawing attention to the Enlightenment practice of discounting anything remotely "supernatural", which, frankly, makes it hard for Christians to exegete Scripture. However there is another aspect to this Enlightenment exegesis beyond its rejection of miracles, and that is its understanding of itself.
The object of investigation—God’s providential history—is not “out there”; interpreters participate in the reality they study.
which inspired the following e-mail to Leithart:
"...All that to say that I've had a lot of free time recently and have been blogging quite extensively on religion and science issues. The website is http://procrustes.blogtownhall.com/ where I'm afraid my postings are too long for the average web surfer. So let me direct you to some posts on "Participatory Theology" where I refer to it as recursion, and equate it with the "Holy". Recursion turns out to be the most difficult concept science has ever had to deal with, beginning with Kurt Goedel's 1935 Incompleteness Theorem that devastates Bertrand Russell's program of logically exorcising metaphysics from philosophy. It shows up in a marvellous 1979 book "Goedel, Escher, Bach" that was very influential in my formative years. It shows up the book of Job, as the theme that unlocks the mystery of theodicy (see http://rbsp.info/rbs/RbS/JOB/job.html).
It shows up in neuroscience as the mystery of self-consciousness. It shows up in God's call to Moses, "I am that I am". It shows up in Genesis 1:1 where God creates the world with words that are defined in verses 8 and 10, leaving us to wonder which came first, the word or the world? It is the mystery of word, man and God that they are all defined self-referentially. Thus in chapter 2 when Adam receives the breath of God, it is the self-consciousness of language that makes him like God, and it is that same language that describes the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Well, I promised you some links:
Recursion and the Beatitudes--http://procrustes.blogtownhall.com/2007/08/13/the_beatitude_spiral.thtml
Recursion and Genesis interpretations--http://procrustes.blogtownhall.com/2007/07/07/yacc_part_3.thtml
Recursion in Presbyterian exegesis--http://procrustes.blogtownhall.com/2007/07/05/pomo_church.thtml
Recursion in Preaching styles--http://procrustes.blogtownhall.com/2007/06/28/pomo_language.thtml
So when you wrote about participatory theology, you were talking about `holy exegesis'.
And once holiness is seen as the use of recursion, it becomes mathematically exact to say that un-holy exegesis done
without recursion cannot achieve the same results as holy exegesis.
Therefore the grammatico-historical method that does not permit the theology to feed back on the history lacks
recursion and cannot attain the same conclusions, it must be un-holy. Whether it is wrong or not
depends on your view of Truth, which, according to the one who said `I am the Truth', is also recursive."