In his history of American movies (thanks again Ken Myers), David Thomson notes that “there was in the ordinary lifestile of the first moguls a steady habit of gambling.” David Selznick, he says, “lost a couple of million dollars in two years.” No wonder: Their whole industry is a form of gambling: “Making a movie is not a wise, judicious use of money . . . . But to make a movie puts on in line, notionally, for a very... Read more
In her recently-published Rituals of Spontaneity (Baylor), Lori Branch investigates the shift from ritual to emotional expression in liturgy, poetry, romance, consumer behavior from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. She asks, “How and why did the popular conception of poetry shift from ritual recitation and communal performance to the unstoppable pouring forth of the individual inspired heart? How was it that the history of Christian worship seemingly stopped on a time – that an evolving millennium-and-a-half liturgical tradition suddenly... Read more
Helmut Thielicke says that Lessing cannot find the absolute of reason in the relativity of history because “history is an accumulation of the accidental and irrational.” Behind the epochal hermeneutical ditch between the truths of reasons and contingencies of history is a loss of any sense of providential history. Or, perhaps only a Calvinst can really oppose Lessing. Read more
Helmut Thielicke says that Lessing cannot find the absolute of reason in the relativity of history because “history is an accumulation of the accidental and irrational.” Behind the epochal hermeneutical ditch between the truths of reasons and contingencies of history is a loss of any sense of providential history. Or, perhaps only a Calvinst can really oppose Lessing. Read more
Lundin sees a link between (some) Protestant hermeneutics, Schleiermacher, and the quest of the historical Jesus. The common factor is a search for a pure origin: “In the nineteenth century the quest for scriptural purity and origins assumed a number of guises. In some quarters, it became the drive to recover the exact mental state of the author (Schleiermacher), while in other instances, it involved the search for the unadulterated person of the historical Jesus (Strauss, Renan, and others). Here... Read more
Thanks to Tim Enloe for getting me a copy of David Rankin’s 2004 article, “Class Distinction as a Way of Doing Church: The Early Fathers and the Christian Plebs” ( Vigiliae Christianae 58). He examines the way the terminology and orders of Roman society were imported into the church. As early as Clement of Rome, for instance, the word laos is being used to refer to the “laity,” rather than to the people as a whole: (more…) Read more
Problems of communication are often explained in terms of the inherent limitations of language. But this, of course, assumes that the mind’s thoughts are whole, complete, and comprehensive until they have the misfortune to issue into the cold nasty world in speech and writing. But this, of course, is just another version of gnostic hermeneutics. Much better, as Gadamer argued, to see the fractures not in language but in the human mind itself: (more…) Read more
It’s a strange hermeneutical theory that doesn’t want to deal with words, but that’s the way many modern hermeneutical systems (beginning with Schleiermacher) work: The interpreter is trying to slip past the veil of language to the mind behind. Inky words on rag-and-wood-pulp pages are just too physical to communicate ethereal consciousness. Lundin suggests that Hirsch and others would want to revise John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Mind, and the Mind was with God, and the Mind was... Read more
Lundin suggests that “At the core of Hirsch’s appeal is a promise dear to American culture – that we can return to the innocent origins and begin history anew . . . . Hirsch wants a ‘ruthlessly critical process of validation’ to establish the facts of original intent and thus to clear the historical ground stretching between an author and us.” As Lundin rightly notes, this is the same aspiration found in Schleiermacher’s mind-meld hermeneutics. It is also thoroughly gnostic,... Read more
Roger Lundin comments on the ironies of evangelical support for ED Hirsch and its frequent suspicion, if not outright condemnation, of Gadamer: “There are manifold ironies to the conservative embrace of Hirsch and spurning of Gadamer. At their heart is the fact that Hirsch’s theory of intention has its roots in the same theological system that produced the Christological heresies these Protestants deplore. To counter subjectivism, that is, many Protestant critics have adopted an understanding of language and consciousness that... Read more
Leithart
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