Oh, no! Not Rudolf Otto, but Bakhtin! Or “the asymmetries in Christian consciousness”

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Don’t you just love these two sentences?

At the end of the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries there was renewed emphasis on revelation of the living Word of God heard in worshipping communities, as contrasted with supposedly universal conceptions of deity identified with Hellenistic philosophies and inferences drawn from “religious” experience. Dialectical theologians (Brunner, Gogarten, Tillich, and, some would add, Barth) located hearing God’s Word in human responses normatively linked with canonical texts recording putative divine-human encounters during the history of salvation. (1)

I am a postmodern, not a scholarly or a coherent.

The main reason I’m not a scholar is that I don’t know how to use big words. “Dialectic” threw me this morning. I’m sure I could throw it around with the best of them when I was (by that time somewhat) in graduate school pursuing my second PhD. But these days my most common conversational partners are nineteen-year-old fraternity brothers and sorority sisters at the once and future home of the George W. Bush Library. They don’t know from “dialectic,” and I’ve forgotten.

I shouldn’t lie. The main reasons I am not a scholar are that I am not smart enough and I have no discipline (hypergraphic writing is much like my kitchen sink much of the time—beautiful and/or useful things are piled there, but sorting them out is just too much trouble).

My second-favorite graduate school professor in studying for my second-favorite unfinished PhD (sorry, Cynthia, Robert wins here) used the old saw, “I write to know what I think.” I have a different take on that. I write so I know THAT I'm thinking (no Descartes here, thank you). Otherwise, it all (I mean ALL OF IT, all of everything) washes together in a sea of unreality, and I am never sure if I dreamed what I said a moment ago or thought it or heard someone else think it. However, when I write it, I can see it. Or can I? I think I would be a great study for someone researching, Uh? what do they call it? Quantum physics? I forget. You know, parallel universes and all that stuff (that 2004 movie, What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?). You see why I say I’m not a “scholarly” or a “coherent.”

I realize that no one (should anyone stumble upon this page) can be particularly interested in reading through the fevered and completely disorganized stuff I put out in strings of words. But that makes me, I guess, the consummate postmodern. “Whether liked or not, postmodernism has affected all, especially the young. ‘Whatever’ has become a favorite word for the younger generation, and it expresses quite accurately the affect of postmodernism.” (2)

This, today, is one of my “whatever” compilations.

I’m still after the numinous (thank you Rudolf Otto). But I do have other fish to fry. I want to know (really, I do) how one gets on in this world, with or without the numinous as guide. I am a Lutheran, of sorts. So I hear and talk a lot about “grace.” But I’ve also read Dostoevsky and a bit of Bakhtin, and they don’t talk so much about grace as about getting “holy” (or some other concept I don’t quite understand). I don’t want to be “moral.” I have no concept what that might look like. I don't know if it looks anything like “holy.” In the article I quoted yesterday, Denis Müller addresses the issue of “morality.” He says the insistence by some that issues such as homosexuality are “moral” issues leaves those insisters in the position of asserting that one must “be moral” in order to understand “what is moral.” So I don’t even want to go there.

I’ve strayed a long way from “SO LONGS MY SOUL.” Or have I? What is that longing for me? It has (at least) two edges (a sword with three or for or five edges?). The first is, as I have already expressed, the desire to “know” God—or something like that.

The second longing is to know how to live in this world for the rest of my time here. I haven’t been very good at it up till now. The problem with that is the mixed message my culture and my received religion both send me on the subject.

Here’s a sample of both, rolled into one. Remember, I’m one of those postmoderns.

The Greek word porneia in Matthew 5:32 and 19:9 has been translated in many different ways in the various English Bibles. The RSV translates it as "unchastity." The NAB chooses "unlawful marriage"; the Jerusalem Bible as well as the Gideon uses "fornication," and the King James uses "adultery." What is the exception to divorce of which Matthew speaks? If only all contemporary Jews and Christians could be transported back a few thousand years and learn Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, maybe then people could have some idea of what the Word of God actually means.

Postmodernism makes believers uneasy, and when believers are also exegetes the uneasiness can be terrifying. Throw in religious leaders and the problem intensifies. The scholars often will say one thing, the religious leaders will say another, and the ordinary member of the faithful will live another. Whether liked or not, postmodernism has affected all, especially the young. "Whatever" has become a favorite word for the younger generation, and it expresses quite accurately the affect of postmodernism. (2)

Whether or not I am a postmodern, I do see clearly how all of this, all that I’ve strung together today makes sense. “What is an author?” Thanks, Mr. Foucault.

See, I AM a postmodern.

(1) Slater, Peter. “Bakhtin On Hearing God’s Voice.” Modern Theology 23:1 (January 2007).
(2) O'Grady, John F. "Postmodernism and the Interpretation of Biblical Texts for Behavior. " Biblical Theology Bulletin. 33.3 (Fall 2003): 95
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