You are listening to
Tim Bulkeley's 5 minute Bible What did the text mean?
when I set a student exegesis assignment I used to
ask students to summarize the meaning of the text
for the ancient hearers in one sentence or two
never more than fifty words Students have two problems with this
they're not beset like biblical scholars are by difficulties
defining which ancient hearers we'll come back to that
their first problem is being brief, saying anything
in less than fifty words! I've got a Sansblogue post which addresses that issue.
but the second is that they often tend to forget
that the the text ever had ancient hearers
yet the Bible is a record of communicative acts
and communicative acts are always contextual
communication always happens between
two people or groups of people
in particular contexts. Several of these five minute podcasts address this issue
There are some holy books like perhaps the Koran
that are believed to be timeless and de-contextualized
there are others like perhaps the I Ching
that are thought of as magical or quasi-magical, with their ability to address
people in all sorts of times and places, but the Bible
is "just" a complex communicative act
it's a very complex one according to Christians, since it involves the Holy
Spirit
communicating with people in all sorts of times and places
through human active communication at particular
times and places (that's what some hermeneuts and if the art and science
of understanding
is hermeneutics then pursue does it is surely a hermeneut!)
that's what some hermeneuts call the double agency
double agency of Scripture, double agency sounds like a
a complicated highfalutin idea but it's really quite simple
and actually we're quite used to the notion
of doubly agented texts in everyday life
all messages except ones that are
written or transmitted through one of the modern newfangled electronic media
have double agency when
a diplomat took a message from his king to another country
the message
was delivered by the diplomat but on behalf of the King
it was presumed to be doubly agented
of course, biblical scholars make the human agency of this double agency
in itself more complicated because they noticed that many biblical texts
seem to have been edited thus adding
layers to the human agenting of the text
but still the notion that
an Old Testament text was addressed to ancient Israelites
and or ancient Judahites or Jews before it was addressed to modern Christians is surely
not a difficult one to grasp
yet students find it difficult, because
we Christians have become use to
using the bible as a band-aid, we grab a bit of Bible
and we slap it on whatever issue or problem is in front of us today
with no thought as to where this bit of Bible came from
or what it was intended to do
it's a bit like someone who goes into the tool shed
and grabs a saw and uses it to hammer in a nail
for a really neat example of how all this works out
try listing to my podcast on the Lost and Found Parables in the Luke 15
in the meanwhile I do hope that you discover the Bible as something much
deeper and richer than just a band-aid
bye for now, God bless