postmodernbible

Cafepocalypsis: Intertextuality

Link: Caf頁pocalypsis: Intertextuality.

A good, if brief, overview here from Alan Bandy on Intertextuality. I think he limits intertextuality too much and fears the broadening of the category too much - but I would. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, I am Kristevan/Barthian through and through, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays Genette has me, and on Sundays, I don't really care!

Alan also gives a good overview of Hays - I've been reading this over the summer. It's an interesting, if overly wordy, book. I'll try and review it on the blog asap.

Pete

Donington

We took the family off to Donington Park yesterday to see some motor racing - the BARC Formula Ford and Classic Touring races.  There were six races - all pretty low key and fun!  Some lovely spins off the chicane and some wonderful throaty roars!  The kids all loved it and Sam's face when he worked out where we were going was absolutely amazing!  Not sure if it was better than being at Greenbelt...but it was fun.  Theresa did point out half way through about all the petrol, rubber and so on that was being wasted and then there were the jet planes taking off from East Midlands and roaring overhead...not very ecological!

Pete

Greenbelt

I am not going to Greenbelt.  It is not because I don't like Greenbelt.  It is just that I am too busy getting ready for the new year and have not really got into going to Greenbelt ever - like I don't go to Ascot, and I'm not a Quaker, and I don't do garden peas.  None of these things are wrong in themselves (apart from garden peas which are clearly of the devil) but I don't do them.  In fact I would love to do Greenbelt.  But I don't and am not.  And I feel a little left out by people telling me that everyone who is anyone in emerging church will be at Greenbelt. 

Personally, if this means I am a nobody in emerging church terms, then I shall take spiritual pride in acknowledging this fact before everyone - I am indeed nobody - I might even change my name by deed poll to Nemo Phillips but everyone would then think I was a fan of the dreaded fish!  Did anyone get the postmodern pun in the title - Finding No-one!!!  Ha!  (Nemo is Latin for "nobody/no-one").

But anyway, I ramble.  Here is a wonderful cartoon about alt.worship at Greenbelt that brought a smile to my face and made half of me wish I was there, and the rest quite pleased that I wasn't!

Yours in obscurity,

Pete (non-fish-based Nemo) Phillips

Blah Manchester

I see Phil Smith has made a comment on Blah in Manchester...missed all the fun while I was away.  Oh - twice!

There was also a comment on the Sanctus Blog - from Ben - more was promised but I can't find it...

There is a good alternative reading (well, not that alternative - I agree with it!) of the evening here from Liz

But I note TSK never managed to blog before he went off to the Baptist Do in Brum - pity...

Pete

Back in July

And before that I spent 24 hours in Durham at the Methodist Tutors Conference.  It was good to meet some old friends and some new.  We had some long discussions.  The highlights:

Tom Stuckey (President of Methodist Conference 2005) exploring some of the outcomes of his presidential address - fantastic - here is the full text of it if you haven't read it yet.Download the_god_who_inspires.doc

Tom's use of the Annie Dillard quote:

“Why do people in church seem like cheerful brainless tourists on a package tour of the Absolute?  Does any one have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we blithely invoke?  The Church are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Stewards should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash them to our pews.”

Pete

Enough looking back...onto the future...

Having said that  - it was good to get home!

Walking around Durham and spending time below the Cathedral on the River - a special place here me and God have spent some good times together.

Morning communion in Durham Cathedral where only me and one other person turned up - the priest did the communion and managed to completely ignore the fact that me and the young woman sat a few chairs away from me hadn't a clue what we were supposed to be doing and when!  Why didn't he relax and help us out a bit!

Discussion on theology and the church!

The Food!

Manchester Blah in July

Before going on holiday to France I attended the second Manchester-based Blog.  Well done to Ben and all at Sanctus One for the event.  It was great to meet up with people.  It was good to hear TSK at last - AKA Andrew Jones.  I've read his blog and heard so many people raving about him.  At last I could hear him myself.

Andrew talked about Aggregation - Emerging Church According to Manchester.  I'm sure that others will give a much better run down of what Andrew said.  His concept of Aggregation - the gathering togather or a group of people from disparate contexts (???) a la Message 2000 and Tribe kind of stuff was interesting - but I think actually downplayed the role of the emerging church in the Manchester area - it's a bit like saying that all there is to Emerging Church in the South East is Grace!

Andrew bases a lot of his talks on his heady mix of complexity theory, chaos theory and emergent theory - with a lot of talk about ant colonies and higher and lower level rules leading to emergent or controlled societies.  Ants don't need regimenting and nor should we - the problem with the church is that it never learnt properly from the un-led ants.  Well...no...this isn't the best interpretation of ant-culture and certainly does not match with the history of ecclesiology.  Emergent patterns of church seem to lead to pretty fragile and short-lived commnities rather than the sturdy mega-communities of nature and the organised church.  Let's not think that the fragility of the western church reflects the real situation of the global church!

I came away from the meeting with more questions about church and emergence - and a real feeling that we need to think through these issues at a very good academic level.  I know that a lot of people will think that this is simply an academic seeking to take over a populist movement - isn't that what the church and the institutions have always done - squashed a movement and turned it into an institution by academicizing it all.  Well perhaps.  But at the moment the rather rash and half-baked use of theories and counter-theories that are bouncing around the Emerging Church network will not sustain any kind of academic criticism - however nice the respective adherents of these theories are and however good they are at missional church!  Somewhere sometime someone needs to provide a proper academic rational for missional church, for emergent behaviour and for the existence of emerging church.  I don't see it in anything out so far.

But then, that's just my opinion and I haven't read nearly enough.

Here are some notes I made on the event - I was most unhappy in the last section and so tapered away here...my comments (brief) in brackets.Download Aggregation.doc

We met in some building on Deansgate.  I thought it was hilariously postmodern that on the whiteboard was scrawled the message: The Code for the Day is 494!  This has become an iconic symbol for me - I might even rename the blog!

Pete

A debate about intertextualty

Loren Rosson and I have been trading an email or two about intertextuality following our introduction about Esler's book.  I thought I'd put a few paragraphs on my blog just to record them...I think they raise some important points about the book and about my own feelings about intertextuality.  So here they are:

I think you are limiting intertextuality to Esler's terms.  Intertextuality is as much a part of an oral culture as any other culture.  The point is that ever 'text' is linked to every other text in some way or other.  You can see the interplay between 'texts' within the oral culture of classical and Hellenistic Greece or the Hebrew narrative/dialogic culture.  So of the literature performed within fifth century popular culture in Greece (NB NOT READ) depended upon an intertextuality with Homeric (and other) themes drawn from myth and tradition.  The rabbinic discussions of what the biblical traditions (ORAL and SCRIBAL) meant show again an interply between different elements of text - intertextuality.

Just two examples here of how intertextuality is not what Esler thinks it is and it has little or nothing to do with solitary reading within scholarly studies!!!  Intertextuality is about the interplay of/within literature. 

And of course, there is another of Esler's errors - he says that literature is non-didactic - that it is about play or about self-referentiality.  Bunkum!  As you will know from your studies in Tolkein, or in Lewis or even more so, perhaps, in literary figures from Shakespeare to Dickens to Joyce, even the best literature can be intentionally didactic and is rarely self-referential! 

The other thing that is bugging me is the insistence that ancient mediterranean cultures were illiterate - possibly with only 5% of people literate.  But then Esler talks about graffitti about prayers to Peter and Paul in Rome.  From my own studies I know about graffiti in Pompeii and in Asia Minor; we know of the shopping lists and other written ephemera from Egypt; we know of the Vindolanda tablets.  All of these represent some pretty low social status skills are reading and writing - which are of course two different skills - you can read without being able to write!  But I don't think it would just have been properly trained slaves who would have gone around Pompeii writing up graffiti about their favourite prostitutes or politicians or how much they won on the races!  I think I am yet to be convinced that the ancient mediterranean cultures (what  farce to suggest that it was one culture!  As a Classicist by training I refuse to accept that Greece and Rome were the same culture - and how about the Estruscans and the Carthaginians?) were as oral as Esler wants us to believe...

Mmmm...

Pete

Another View on Esler for the time being...

Thanks to Mark Goodacre who tipped me off about a review of Philip Esler's book on the web - on Loren Rossen's weblog - it's lengthy and follows Esler's arguments and basically agrees with everything Esler says.  How can you write off the contribution of Hans Georg Gadamer because you find one line in his work which might suggest that conversation i about agreement?  How can you even think that Paul Riceour thought that the solitary study of texts in an isolated scholarly community was more important than interpersonal communication?  I have to say that rather than seeing straw men being cut down in the first half of the book, I saw a lot of straw men being built up so that Esler could happily knock them down.  I don't see a credible or effective appaisal of Gadamer, Riceour or Derrida - never mind Barthes!  And how can you deal with Wolfgang Iser in one page????

Mmm...Can't wait to see what people at the British New Testament Conference think about it...

Pete

Back

Well, we are back from sunny France.  Had a great time - first in Brittany near Lorient - much beach-time, speaking French, enjoying markets and relaxing with the family.  Spent a weekend near the Loire in Angers and travelled up to Saumur (see pic) on the Sunday - fantastic place!  Stopped at a little village for the annual Trocs et Puces market (fleamarket!) - and saw an amazing church or two...more later, perhaps.  Then we went to the excellent Spring Harvest site in the Vendee - speaking on the Art of the Parables - went incredibly well and the site is just great - the kids had a brilliant time and met some great friends - as did Theresa and I.  Loved the opportunity to talk about New Testament things to a group of very receptive people.  Managed to get into narratology, art and theology, social context stuff, and so on - even some basic missiology.  Good deep talks that I felt went well.  They were certainly received well!

I've been reading a few books while out there.  One is by the Dean of Grace Cathedral - Reimagining Christianity.  I will review it on here when I get round to it in the next few days...strange book!

I've also been reading Philip Esler's "New Testament Theology".  I wish I knew beforehand that Philip was going to slate postmodernism, Derrida and Barthes, Intertextuality, textuality and just about everything else which I enjoy about New Testament studies.  And I wish I knew he was going to do it so badly!  It was funny that I was speaking on the parables because as I shouted at Philip's book on the beach at St Gilles I just kept thinking of the speck and the log. 

There is some great stuff in the book - good to read again about Buber and 'Ich-Du' dialectic.  Good to see Schleiermacher from a different point of view.  Good to hear of an acknowledgment of intercultural studies breaking in.  But I am afraid that if only Philip had been as gracious to Gadamer, Barthes and Derrida, as he is to Schleiermacher, Rosenzweig and Buber, then I think this would have been a much better and so much more usable book.  I've got bogged down at the moment in his whole discussion about postmortem existence.  It seems a bit far-fetched.  But if you have pushed the whole concept of theology as a dialogic engagement between living people, I suppose you have to do what he is doing.  Strikes me that there are easier ways of doing theology than holding a seance!  sorry, that was a misrepresentation.  More on this book in a separate posting I think!  Has anyone else read it?

Anyway, back to hundreds of emails and juggling kids and work!  Help!

Pete