Working on Sacramental Epistemology
If we consider the implications of Part I and II, then we must come to terms with knowing as a fundamentally personal act that is skillful, embodied (even cognitive acts of knowing), and situated in space and time Knowing is personal as a fiduciary relationship with the known. In other words, you have to commit yourself to knowing in order to know. That means that epistemology is a risky endeavor on all fronts, even knowing the truths of and from God. And this is what we find in the scriptures.
In Part I, I began to describe knowing as an act, rather than knowledge as a thing. If knowing is fundamentally an act, then we should describe what that act looks like. For Polanyi, knowing is a trajectory. So we shouldn’t talk about an epistemic structure, per se, but rather of “coming to know”. For instance, I am in the process of coming to know my oldest child’s temperament. It is a vector that I must pursue in order to know my son. We can evaluate Polanyi’s active knowing under two rubrics: synchronic analysis and diachronic analysis.
This is a three-part series I wrote for Per Caritatem in an attempt to summarize Michael Polanyi’s thought and its implications for theology. Although it barely scrapes the surface of his thought, it serves well enough as an introduction. Continue reading ‘Series on Michael Polanyi: Part I’
We may be tempted to see 3’s under every stone in the scriptures (re trinity hunting). But one perspicuous case is in the same story analyzed previously (Genesis chapters 2 & 3). Here we have one round character: YHWH Elohim (he is a round character by Edward Forster’s Aspects of a Novel analysis in that YHWH has possibly conflicting traits). This round character fashions another character from the dirt. And then there were two. Continue reading ‘And Then There Were Three: The epistemological trifecta’
Although I will need to further justify an analogical reading of the creation narrative from Genesis, the immediate concerns are how does the narrative speak to us and how does it describe us qua knowers? Again, the longitude of this project is to determine a) if there is a prescriptive way of knowing from the scriptures and b) is that ‘epistemology’ monolithic throughout? It appears rather obvious and consequential that we should begin with the best possible purview of knowers prior to The Fall. Further, I have claimed Continue reading ‘Are we ‘creatures bound’?’
As an anthology of texts, the scriptures catalogue the spectrum of communicative act through verbal media (and non-verbal if the accounts within are included). Long sets out to disentangle the modern reader from the prior quests to disentangle the texts. He accomplishes this through a graded course that both indoctrinates us in the technical categories and holds out for us a guided way to view texts in their fitting history. Continue reading ‘A Brief on Long’s “The Art of Biblical History”’
Let me first state my love-hate relationship with Hegelianish writer-response texts where a strong position is stated and then disparate responses are given in order to balance or sharpen the original essay (although this is even the exact form Descartes’ Meditations). Here I will offer a select response on several of the essays.
Wolterstorff, revealing his epistemological commitments, says of requests and promises, “Neither of those consists of transmitting knowledge or of making something available to be known.” I am not sure what he means by this, but clearly revelation is now in the category of ‘what can be known’. This claim, among others, reveals his lean toward the authorization of the texts through deputization and appropriation. While we enjoy the same concerns for how God uses the sacred texts, I am not sure that this brief essay convincingly gives us reason to form worldview from hermeneutics. Rather, it gives us impetus to think of worldview as hermeneutics. Continue reading ‘A Brief on “Disciplining Hermeneutics”’
Powell’s text acts to walk the reader through a straightforward understanding of narrative criticism with some comparison to other methodologies. He does a suitable job of situating narrative criticism amongst the other critical methods in chapters one and two. From that point on, he develops the narrative of narrative critique. His helpful analogy reserved until later likens the elements of narrative to the parts of speech. SO that an event represents a verb, characters are nouns, adjectives are traits, and settings act adverbially.
Powell’s objective is to show how narrative criticism gives a responsible reading and deflects the main objections. Continue reading ‘A Brief on Powell’s “What is Narrative Criticism?”’
Silva divides his text in seven: biblical description, scientific approach, historical aspects, two sections on biblical language, and transmission of the texts. After a glimpse of illustrative narrative and an amusing analysis in the introduction, the first section heads the text by doing hermeneutics rather than showing. Through a creation lens, Silva reveals a sufficient pattern to believe that language holds a unique place in the cosmogony and human dominion itself. Going further, written language is elevated in ‘key situations’ of redemptive history. Then, in a bizarre conflation (that may be a contrivance of my ignorance), Silva shuns ‘bibliolatry’ and yet appears to conflate O Logos with the English denotation of ‘word’. Incarnation and language are then fused as a core construct (more to come). Continue reading ‘A Brief on Silva’s “God, Language, and Scripture”’
Vanhoozer provides a binary system for analyzing the idea of ‘meaning’ and its relationship to a ‘text’: undoing and doing. The text is massive and probably offers superfluous analysis to those not already drenched in the subject matter. In the first part, undoing, Vanhoozer exhaustively reviews the stances of the deconstructionist, namely Derrida, Ricoeur, Nietzsche, et al. He contrasts the multiplicity of deaths (re reader, author, meaning) with the positivist strains of Hirsch, Austen, and himself.
Continue reading ‘A Brief on Vanhoozer’s “Is There a Meaning in this Text?”’
