On 3/4/15, we were joined by our former guest Law Ware to discuss two 1973 Paul Ricouer essays on applying hermeneutics to religion: "The Critique of Religion" and "The Language of Faith." Listen to the episode now.
"The Critique of Religion" advised religious folks that they need to take the criticisms of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud seriously. He conglomerates them all in a description of "false consciousness": Granted that you believe what you do because it seems sensible in some sense for you, where does this "sense" come from? What are the psychological and social factors behind your accepting what you do, and are they covering things that you should be aware of, and which would likely change your beliefs if unearthed?
In "The Language of Faith," Ricoeur outlines what is need to engage religious texts and ideas after they've undergone such a Critique, and the focus is on symbolic language, much as for Jaspers. If the occurrence of a literal, bodily resurrection of Christ is pretty unlikely, then how else can we take this "truth" as a calling for life without putting our critical faculties on hold?
There's lots more to say, but given that the episode will be released in just a few days at this point, I'll leave it there; the readings are short enough that you should read along.
The Ricoeur essays can be found in the 1978 collection The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work
We also refer on the episode to Rudolph Bultmann's essay "Kerygma and Myth," by Rudolph Bultmann, which you can read here.
On 3/15, Law will rejoin most of us to discuss Jesus's Parables, including a commentary by Ricoeur, "Listening to the Parables of Jesus" from 1974, which is the next essay in the same collection, or you can read it here. We'll have some additional readings for that episode, but I'll post those later.
tricky grounds yer walking here, if we avoid taking the whole Bultmann-ian plunge into theology I think there is some philosophical paths to stroll (tied in with earlier and hopefully ongoing engagements with existentialisms, phenomenologies, and pragmatisms) as to questions of how much of ‘getting’ something is a matter of applying/constructing some roughly scientific method or is a matter of hitting/artific(e)ing some experiential gestalt switch of lived experience, perhaps a kind of middle position it something like Bert’s work on skills/know-how/expertise: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/paper_socrates.html
I am a diligent listener of your podcast. It makes my 1 hour commute to Wilson (as a company chaplain) brisk.
Your hour-plus long conversation is a model I shared with my pastor-formation group, wanting our conversations to be equally rigorous and humorous.
I enjoyed your episode on Ricoeur and write more in response to the conversation than the writing.
-Demythologization project of Bultmann (and somewhat in Ricoeur via influenc) is a historical undertaking. Bultmann demythologizing from the vantage point of his own mythology: the Western individual existentialism. Bultmann’s mythological individual man of angst war birthed out of need to distance himself from the “evil” of Nazism which took the open door of liberal theology to anthropology and replaced revelations (what God says) with ideology (what the State/Volk says). The reader always bring his own mythology (system of symbols) into the reading.
Seeing all of the Bible as mythology is sleight by a supercilious reader who doesn’t take to heart the sober warning of Gadamer, that the text is also critical of the reader, that the reader must be read.
The mythology of the three-tiered world is not the myth in the bible. It is a medieval framework.
The Bible has many different myths for it is a collection of writings by authors in different times. Demythologization-project is, in that way, naïve an ahistorical.
Myth as the opposite of fact is naïve. Riceour is brilliant in showing how myth expresses truth which propositions (science) cannot. But myth is not always a system independent of events. Some myths are and thus more parabolic. But some myths are historical: they are events told to carry symbolic truths which are not the events themselves but are not independent of them. That is, myths are better understood in the larger framework of story-telling. All stories have mythological elements, even history that meets the modern day rigor of fact-checking. Whenever we tell events, we tell them as stories, and to tell them as stories is to tell them mythologically, that is, to tell them to say something more that just relaying of the events. People at different times and cultures, had different understandings of relation to truth and fact, i.e. what is pure myth (non-event) and what is mythological (events wrapped with symbolic claims). But people were not so naïve that they could not tell a parable from a real story.
When people heard Jesus tell the story of the prodigal son (more aptly named prodigal father for so prodigally welcoming back his lapsed son), their eyes might have teared but they did not go out looking for that father to pin the father-of-the-year ribbon on him.
When Paul told the story of the resurrection of Jesus, he meant it as retelling of an even that happened. The rejection of it as a historical event, which some in the Corinthian church was already doing (pre-Bultmannians?) was to undo the whole edifice of faith. Yes, the myth of resurrection, especially in Paul’s theology, is far greater than the event itself. But the myth grows out of that event.
Christianity is founded on its faith in that historical event. To deny that the church did not adamantly claim the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection is to loss all point of signification. What does a Christian refer to if he can have any view of Chris?. When you keep stretching a word to cover more under its canopy, it will break. At certain point, to mean many things is to be meaningless.
There is another way of approaching the Bible. First is Gadamer’s road, to let the Bible be critical of us. Leslie Newbigin – an agnostic, turned missionary, turned cultural critic from his faith vantage – says that science, as good as it is, is grounded on improvable axioms – he cues Thomas Kuhn for this. Science, at its foundation, is a matter of faith as much as faith is.
Science denies purpose as a category, categorically. Faith accepts purpose as category. Purpose does not deny cause-and-effect. Purpose can be an agency that coincides with cause-and-effect. Purpose is a relational matter and as such you need revelation. What if resurrection is that revelation? (This is such condensed form of the argument that it does not do justice to Newbigin’s brilliance).
For Newbigin, resurrection was a new way of knowing. You accept resurrection as an axiom, and then you use reason grounded upon that revelation to make sense of the world, and in that sense, the bible. Bible as mytho-historical book points to resurrection. If you accept resurrection than the bible becomes more than just a mytho-historical book. Why wouldn’t a God revealed in resurrection want to continue to speak to us? At that point the bible is neither mere myth or a historical retelling. It is a story, a story that is true because of its mataphorical power, because it is about events, but mostly because it is God revealing Himself.
A second way to approach is actually the Jewish way of reading (and this second goes well with the first). This approach, you would think, is obvious seeing that Jesus and most all the other writers of the book (both the Hebrew and the Christian testaments) were Jews. As such it was book from the community and for the community. In fact, salvation in Christianity can only be understood in this Jewish contexts (N.T. Wright is a prolific writer who keeps calling us back to this Jewish background of the Christian story).
Salvation for Paul was never about heaven and hell. In fact, Paul doesn’t even mention hell in his letter to Rome (or on any of his other letters for that matter). For Paul, salvation was about becoming the people of God who lives with the faith that God will one day rule over the earth justly, and that such life of faith is not passive waiting, but active preparation. Jesus’ resurrection is the proof of the coming resurrection, and resurrection in that story is God’s defeat of death, and God’s defeat of death points to God’s defeat of sin, and sin is the cause and evidence of the brokeness of our world. Sin is not a person skipping Sunday school. It is the sense that everything in the world is not fully right.
In this way I agree completely with Seth. The way back to the Bible is the Jewish story, people of God. Christians have been misreading their own story, and because of it they have been fighting over unnecessarily over heaven, hell, and six day creation, myths that are actually not even in the bible. And Bultmann and demythologization is on the same road of bad reading by setting up the Western individual as the main reader. Salvation for the angst man to live authentically is as self-centered and flat as the salvation from hell for heaven. Salvation as the full restoration of all people to God, to each other, and to this earth (the Kingdom of God coming down) is robust and truthful to our human longing. It is what Christ’s resurrection promises.
P.S. I would love to hear you guys do a podcast on Leslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, where he talks about translation (he gets real philosophical), and how though John uses logos to speak to the Greek readers, he challenges that whole notion from the start by saying, “the word became flesh.” Translation is where both languages are changed. Logos changes the understanding of Christ, but Christ also redefines Logos. John’s gospel is sorely misunderstood.
Hi, Samuel, there’s a lot in your missive here, and I don’t feel I can respond to it adequately except to point at discussions yet to be had (or that should be had) on or related to the podcast.
I’m sure you’re going to find my off-hand remarks about Jesus Seminar resurrection debunking (episode 113, to be released in April) to be inadequate to the point of infuriating, as I had just listened to Thomas Sheehan’s Stanford seminars on the topic, where he says (for instance) that Paul did not preach the bodily resurrection: His argument was based on an issue of translation, and I can’t reproduce it, but the gist was that the word Paul uses is something like “exalted”, i.e. “Jesus died, but as soon as he did, God raised him to His right hand.” …And that the whole initial insertion of this trope into the Jesus story was a matter of trying to cope with the fact that their leader was executed by searching scripture (Isaiah and Daniel, mostly, I guess): all the good Jewish martyrs of history get raised, and then (later) look, Jesus was fulfilling all these prophecies!
I’m sure you’re more familiar with this area of research than I am (Law also mentioned N.T. Wright during the conversation), and I welcome your participation in the Not School group we’re going to have in April on Sheehan (see my more recent post about #113 for the link). I can see a lot of reason to question the historical methods that folks like Crossan and Sheehan are using, though I don’t, however, buy the idea that it’s at all compatible to be doing such research into facts and that you can yet say that some alleged facts are just going to be taken as bedrock postulates of faith, which is the position I saw in some things online and which I’ll as a hypothesis attribute to N.T. Wright.
Another discussion should be about myth, which I don’t think I much understand enough to say whether your claim that myth can surround historical events or not. You seem to be saying that if they’re meaningful and have the proper resonance, then they’re “mythological.” So the election of the first black president could somehow be mythological (mythic?), pointing to this landmark race-relations event or something like that. We had a recent Not School discussion about Jaspers on symbol that sounds related to what you’re talking about, but couldn’t make a lot of sense of that either.
I listened to Crossan on this evangelical Christian podcast where the host (and later callers on the podcast) just couldn’t get Crossan’s theology: how he could not believe in the historical event of resurrection yet still find something life-changing in the meaning of it as a myth. I likewise can’t adequately recreate that exchange but wouldn’t mind having him on the show to explain.
I was not familiar with Newbigin and encourage you to pitch a Not School group to read some of his stuff. At this point I’m doubting that we’ll ever do enough modern Christian episodes to get to him: I see definitely a Tillich in the future, we’ve had one long-planned (with people from the God Complex podcast) on faith, I’d like to read some Whitehead on God, I listened to enough of the Philosophy for Theologians podcast that I’m inclined to treat Van Til at some point (I’m less sure about that), and then of course we’ll do more Kierkegaard and already have Augustine on the calendar and Aquinas will come too. So that’s a lot of Christianity on top of this Jesus Parables one coming out as #113, when we’ve not so much as cracked the Upanishads or done Confucius…
Thanks for listening and weighing in! We very much welcome your input and interest! Best, -ML
Thanks Mark,
I appreciate your reply.
-yes, your example of the first black president having mythical interpretations (forging of new race relations) is exactly what I mean. When American history book talks about how George Washington voluntarily stepped down after his second term, they are saying something about America – a nation that will not tolerate dictators. It happens in common events (as when a man finishes his last push up and his partner slaps him in his arms and says ‘you are the man’ – there is a whole myth about manhood in that statement). Every story is mythical because of the metaphorical nature of language and why we tell stories (a way to make sense not just of our experiences but of life).
-yes to Whitehead and Process Theology.
-yes, i would love to hear philosophy of other religions and not just Christianity. Islamic philosophy would not only bring great insight to Western philosophy (we rediscovered Aristotle through them), it would also be useful in the current West-Islam relations that is fraught with stereotyping. Someone like Avicenna would contradict some of our biases. It would also be great fun.
got another 404 at link :
http://rel.as.ua.edu/secure/rel372murphyricoeur.pdf