Postmodern Authoritarianism

Oliver O'Donovan makes an appeal to the postliberal theology school of Yale for his treatment of Scripture, whilst making use of the super-realists who produced the Jerusalem Declaration (who'd hardly rate the Yale approach - and there is a Yale approach).

What is the Yale approach but the non-objective fixing of the grammar of texts to identify a community by its performance of the texts, e.g by public reading. It's a cultural icecube: culture from the past frozen because it cannot be objectified today. Or, using the words of O'Donovan himself:

we cannot simply take it up and put it down, but read it as the church, depending on it for our identity

Trouble is language is always dynamic and changing. In a kind of linguistic Darwinism among the cultures, accents became languages, languages start to mix and borrow, and concepts full of meaning in one context shift in another, and the shift gets transmitted back. Yale wants everything frozen: the last gasp of historical authoritarianism after all the current reasoning has been lost.

So time to do a bit of postmodern deconstruction on this article then, if we are talking about text. Some word and phrase selections are extracted:

• a huge mountain of over-confident speculative rubble
• arose a doctrinal and apologetic way of talking about Scripture, one driven by the pastoral need
• icon of revelation for us
• "Authority" is a term of practical reason
• "translated", "read", "preached", "taught" and "obeyed"
• "hear", "read", "mark", "learn", "inwardly digest"
• New literature is more elusive
  
• the reader is, and must remain, an unknown
• the writer is always a prior and unnegotiable quantity
• fashionable... "reading against the grain" is simply a battle to suppress the text
• the text lacks resources to resist the violence offered it
• the strength the text has offered
• an implicit hierarchy of texts
• the logic of a canonical text
• a reading in faith - not as opposed to reason, but as a founding moment of reason's exercise
• a reading in love
• a search for such a "first text", a text to illuminate all texts
• aesthetic values will not point us to the authority of the canonical text
• The privileged book
• the Christ-moment which fulfils the promise of history
• words of Christ are already interpretations of Holy Scripture
• God's self-emptying into Scripture
• the history of the law-text, the history of God's manifest will
• Reading is a Christological business
• the authority of Scripture... the attested reality of God's acts disturb the ideal constructions and zealous projections of human piety
• the authority of Scripture in the church arm it against the greatest danger of a culture that declares itself "post-modern"
• translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed
• plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church's historic and consensual reading
• a disciplined act of plain and simple reading
• interpretation must happen in due order, under the command of the text
• a proper value assigned to the corporate exercise of public reading
• primary to the catholic identity of the church gathered as the reading and recitation of Scripture
• It is the nuclear core
• not trying to manipulate or evade its claims...
• guided by moralistic ideals, has surely crossed the line at which interpretation becomes domestication
• a strange and slightly mystical claim, that the text has its own ongoing life in the life of its readers
• In extending the authority of the text to cloak the vagaries of its readers, it dissolves the text's critical authority altogether
• challenge, out of the text itself, even the most historic and consensual readings if they are downright wrong
• the Bible is not the creation of the church's reading but its judge
• the reading of Scripture is a collective enterprise
• insights of one generation and another will complement each other
• Good interpretation
• a proper test of our readings
• a great deal of normative weight to tell us
• what obedience is all about
• we may confront the indeterminacy of practical decision
• authority is genuinely a practical, not merely a speculative category
• There are mistaken ways of hearing that promise.
• ...we are advanced where Jesus and the apostles were naive, we are developed where they were primitive, and so on. [irony]
• measured by a norm, which is the works and words of Jesus, the perfected law which lies at the heart of Scripture
• [God] judges the ambiguous proposals of science, literature, culture, politics, economics - yes, and sexuality
• reading the text for our time, but also reading our time from the text
  
• what we need as we read
• shall not need to look elsewhere
• God's masterful government of history

This is not an argument, but a construction of vertical authoritarianisms, phrase after phrase of stacked up texts emphasising discipline and regulation. It should be seen for what it is, as a skyscraper of piled high crates and why this article should be rejected as nothing more than an artifice reaching up, pressing down its mass, and swaying in the wind.

Instead, living now, read in creative dialogue, in reflection on what is there, not upon a book of rules, and read along with the reading of other books of life.