Below are some of the notes and quotes from my introduction to biblical workshops for the ‘Table Spirituality’ unit I taught recently with Simon Holt for Whitley College. It includes key elements of the ‘hermeneutic’ (way of interpreting Scripture) that has been significant within the Urban Seed/ Seeds Network journey.
1.The approach of William Stringfellow,
2. The idea of the ‘Economy of God’ articulated by Ched Myers and Wendell Berry, a window into a ‘socio-political’ approach.
3. The approach of Clarence Jordan and the Cotton Patch Versions of the Gospel
4. The Circles of Story: A window into a ‘narrative/literay’ approach.
The theological exploration of biography or the theological reconnaissance of history are apt, and even normative, styles because each is congruent with the definitive New Testament insight and instruction: the Incarnation… biography (and history), any biography and every biography, is inherently theological in the sense that it contains already – literally by virtue of the incarnation – the news of the gospel whether or not anyone discerns that.
We are each one of us parables.
William Stringfellow : A Simplicity of Faith
The Streets, the Powers, and the Word: Learning from William Stringfellow
Charles L. Campbell: Interpretation 51 (October 1997)
- Principalities and Powers
- Resistance and Hope
- Busyness and Slowing in order to become apprentices of those who are poor, homeless, imprisoned, or abused
- Reading the Bible on the Streets
I spend most of my life now with the Bible, reading or more precisely, listening. My mundane involvements- practicing law, being attentive to the news of the moment, lecturing around the country, free-lance pastoral counseling, writing, activity in church politics, maintaining my medical regime, doing chores around my home on Block Island – have become more and more intertwined with this major preoccupation of mine, so that I can no longer readily separate the one from the others. This merging for me of almost everything into a biblical scheme of living occurs because the data of the Bible and one’s existence in common history is characteristically similar. One comes, after a while, to live in a continuing biblical context and so is spared both an artificial compartmentalization of one’s person and a false pietism in living.
Wiiliam Stringfellow: Instead of Death 1976
- Communities of Resistance & Hospitality;
- Preaching as exposing the powers through clear speech or burlesque;
- Preaching as en-visioning alternatives,
- Preaching as ‘common sense’ shattering hope in the face of death.
THE ECONOMY OF GOD
…is an attempt at capturing for our contemporary context something of the subversive power that ‘the Kingdom of God’, the central image of Jesus’ teachings, had in a world of real kings and kingdoms.
The biblical understanding of “economy” is grounded in the ancient Hebrew spiritual exercise of ‘keeping Sabbath’. It is neither solely material nor spiritual, but extends to encompass all aspects of what it means to produce and consume as a human being in complex relationships.
Beyond money, this economy includes elements of time, of energy, of work and of re-creation, of relationship with the spiritual, the created order and other people.
Embracing the economy of God involves a realisation that abundant grace underpins an ethic of redistribution of enough that is the only way out of the spiritual and material slavery that is so characteristic of the dominant economy of our world.
The Great Economy/Kingdom of God…
1. Includes Everything
2. Has an Order: Everything is joined and connected to the Economy and each other.
3. This Order is greater than what we can every fully know.
4. Presuming or violating the Order has severe penalties.
5. We Cannot foresee an end to it.
‘The Two Economies’ (1983) in The Art of the Common Place: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, Counterpoint, 2002
Ched Myer’s does a great overview and critique of different attempts to re-contextualise and re-frame what the Kingdom of God may mean in different cultural and economic contexts in his book ‘Who Will Roll Away the Stone”, Orbis Books, 1994
CONTEXTUAL RE-WRITES/ TARGUMS: Clarence Jordan & Cotton Patch Quotes from the introduction to Paul’s Epistles, Cotton Patch Version:
Translating Events of Scripture, not just Words. “Translations have left us stranded in some faraway land in the long-distant past. We need to have it come in our tongue and our time. We want to be participants in the faith not merely spectators. In the story of the Good Samaritan, we need to participate in the story, so we change Jerusalem and Jericho to New York to Boston, or our hometown to the next. Change the setting from 1st century Palestine to 20th century America.”
Social and Physical Location: Jordan determined to take the Scriptures out of… “the classroom and stained glass sanctuary and put them out under God’s skies where people are toiling and crying and wondering, where the mighty events of the good news first happened and where alone they feel at home.”…”the locale of these letters [i.e., translated ones, not original ones] is the South. Cotton has figured prominently in the problems of this region—problems to which the letters eloquently and pointedly and compassionately speak.”
Call to Action:Speaking of working together at Koinonia Farm in southwest Georgia…
“like their predecessors in the Bible, humble people, I have longed to share God’s word with them. So in making the translation, I have kept in mind the little people of great faith who want to do better in their discipleship but have been hindered by big words they don’t understand or by ancient concepts they don’t grasp.”
Some insisted to Jordan that his translation was not “elegant, dignified, or even nice.” He has let the earthy NT participants speak for themselves, which is why he used “hell no” and “damned bastard.” He said there was no overt “intent to shock, offend, or startle—or please—anyone.” He did not want to shield anyone from the blunt, vigorous language of the book.
We must learn to read beneath the words, between the lines, attuned to what the ancient Rabbi’s called the ‘white fire‘of the blank spaces as well as the ‘black fire’ of the words. – William O’Brien
CIRCLES OF STORY
Ingredients to help us enter the overlapping zone of discipleship imagination, inspiration and transformation where the Word becomes Flesh amongst us…
BIBLICAL STORY INGREDIENTS
Behind the Text: Event > Text
Historical, Social Science, Form, Source, Redaction Criticism.
Within Text:
Textual, Translation Theory, Canonical, Rhetorical, Narrative, Structural, Post Structural Criticism
In Front of Text: Text > Reader
Reception History, Theological Interpretation, Reader Response, Feminist, Queer, Liberation, Socio-political, Black, Postcolonial, Asian, Ecological Criticism
Paula Gooder, Searching for Meaning: An Introduction to Interpreting the New Testatment SPCK, 2008
SOCIAL/COMMUNAL STORY INGREDIENTS
A variety of communities is envisages:
Church
Family
Media
Local area
City
Nation
Economic, social, cultural, political and religious worlds
Principalities and Powers, Spirit / Signs of the times
Hidden Worldviews: Eight Cultural Stories that Shape our Lives, by Wilkens and Sanford 1.Individualism, 2.Consumerism, 3. Nationalism, 4. Relativism, 5. Naturalism, 6. New Age, 7. Postmodern Tribes, 8. Therapy
Tools:
Centre/Margins – Songlines Mapping Exercises
Exposure walks
Analysing texts
Theatre of Oppressed: Augusto Boal
Community Profiles/ Surveys
Tracing products to their source
Newspaper / Cartoon / Pop Culture analysis
PERSONAL STORY INGREDIENTS
Personality Tests: Myers Briggs, Enneagram
Family Graphing/ Gena-gram/ Cultural Mapping
Narrative Therapy: Michael White: You are a parable!
