There are two things that we need to talk about as we begin our Advent journey – one involves different ways to read the Bible and the other is Emergency mentality.
Bible
There seems to be 3 popular ways to read the Bible:
- Devotionally
- Literally
- Critically
Literal readings focus on what is happening in the text.
Devotional readings focus on what is happening in the reader.
Critical readings focus on what is happening along with and around the text.
Each has its own appeal – but the interesting thing is that depending on which approach someone is familiar with, they may be totally bewildered by the approach that they are least familiar with.
People who read the text literally may think, “it doesn’t matter what it means to you – it matters what really happened?”
People who read the text critically may think, “who cares if the physics make sense or the history lines up?”
People who read the text devotionally may think, “I don’t really care if there is a similar story in another religion or what was happening in another culture at the same time.”
Each approach has a strength and a blind spot.
I was raised reading the Bible devotionally for the most part and tried my best to take it literally. I was only later introduced to the critical approach in academia and now am most familiar with that perspective.
The one thing that I find most concerning about those who approach the text critically (and are bewildered by those who take it literally) is that I want to ask them, “but how does the text speak to you? What is it calling out to you? What does it want from you?”
We need to be careful in our literary analysis to not always stand above the text of scripture – to find ourselves only outside of it – and to do all of our work behind (and not within) the actual text.
So I am looking forward to spending the next month engaging the text devotionally as it has become sort of an unused muscle for my most of the time. This will be a nice change of pace.
Emergency
The other thing I want to address as we begin this series of reflection is the nature of “Emergency”. We live in an exceptional time and it manifests in a concerning number of exceptions.
In academic discourse we talked about thinkers like Bonnie Honig, in Emergency Politics, who says “The state of exception is that paradoxical situation in which the law is legally suspended by sovereign power.”
The problem is that we now live in a permanent state of emergency. The news can barely keep up with the daily barrage of previously unimaginable and outrageous happenings in our society and politics.
September 11, 2001 ushered in a state of perpetual exception. When people are scared they willingly sacrifice their freedom and privacy in exchange for safety. The State benefits from a frightened population and people are more willing to accept the exceptional measures.
A population is more willing to view as exceptional the excessive tactics and escalation of violence precisely because we now live in a permanent state of exception (or emergency).
“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” is a sentence by Carl Schmitt that introduces ‘political theology’. That word ‘exception’ is a key to understanding what is going on in our nation right now.
In the last four centuries ‘sovereignty’ has shifted from God and the King to the Nation and State. In that same work, Schmitt also says that “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”‘
In a fantastic article by Bruno Gulli examining Schmitt, Gulli explains “any person with special powers (or even simply a special sensibility) could be recognized as sovereign. This would be an honorary status conferred on him.”
It is interesting that the book begins with a storm. I am a big fan of the ‘perfect storm’ theory of crisis “where multiple negative factors converge simultaneously, creating a far more severe and destructive outcome than any single event could on its own”. I spend a lot of time tracking how smaller factors conflate or converge to form overlapping and seemingly insurmountable situations which create a sense of crisis – which subsequently leads to an emergency mentality.
One of the reasons that I was attracted to this book was the word ‘Emergency’, so it will be interesting to see where the author takes us in the entries that follow.
Bo Sanders: Public Theology 