Daily Archives: September 14, 2005

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Constructing the object

September 14, 2005 10:25 am ,

I’ve been thinking about the ‘construction of the object’ – i.e., the way that different communities with different interests will not only interpret an object in different ways, but may be said to have different objects – to have something different in mind when they refer to supposedly the same object. I don’t think that acknowledging this is immediately and necessarily a step into a malign postmodernist relativism; I think one can make sense of it even within a naively realist view of the world.

If I were, say, a police investigator working on a case, ‘The Bible’ might mean ‘This specific Gideon’s Bible with the torn leaf and the blood-stain’ – and there would quite possibly be no interesting relationship between that object and other books with similar words in.

If I were the forensic expert on the case, interested in how this book was used to batter the victim, ‘The Bible’ would most significantly be a member of the class of objects of this size, weight, shape, hardness and flexibility.

If I were the investigator, after a significant development in the case, trying to break the code that I now realise was used by the murderer and his accomplices, I might be interested in Bibles of exactly this edition, with exactly this pagination, on which a cypher has been developed – and no others. Nothing else would count as ‘The Bible’.

And so on.

By ‘construction of the object’, I simply mean this process by which the interests of the investigator pick out certain features of certain objects, as members of certain classes. Of course, I do perhaps go further than my little police story warrants when I claim that no ‘construction of the object’ is independent of interests – but I don’t think I necessarily step out of the sam naively realist world in doing so. There is, after all, a story to be told as to why Christians are able to say ‘Bible’ and mean a whole family of texts in different languages, with somewhat differing tables of contents – while Muslims properly mean only texts in Arabic when they say ‘Quran’. To say, ‘No, what “Bible” really means is…’ is always a statement made by some person or group that uses the word in particular contexts for particular purposes.

And, of course, you’re now meant to make a further step and think not just that identification of what is meant by ‘Bible’ might work in this way, but that identification of the meanings of the Bible will work this way – perhaps even more so.

Posted in: Hermeneutics

Abducting John

September 14, 2005 9:50 am ,

ἐγένετο Ἰωάννης ὁ βαπτίζων ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ καὶ κηρύσσων βάπτισμα μετανοίας εἰς ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν

Mark 1:4

Questions about providence and supercessionism – about what is implied about the nature of the Hebrew Scriptures when Mark says that the coming of Jesus took place ‘as it was written’ – can, I think, be clarified by thinking about John the Baptist.

I don’t think we should lose sight completely of the independent reality of John. It is at least possible to ask whether John is rightly – fairly – interpreted in the Gospel. Perhaps, to some observer of John’s ministry who was not one of Jesus’ disciples (and perhaps to John himself) it would have seemed an odd claim to make to call him the fore-runner, the announcer, the evangelist of Christ. Perhaps it could reasonably have been said that this was not really what was going on, or that it was only one strand of what was going on – and an ambivalent, debatable, soon-questioned strand at that. We can find traces in the Gospels themselves which might lead us to such a conclusion. From such a perspective, the Gospel of Mark’s use of John might appear as abuse – as a violent mis-reading of John, the abduction of John.

To take Mark’s Gospel seriously, however, is to take seriously the claim that John’s identity as fore-runner, as messenger of Christ, is his real identity, his true identity: that even if it was to some extent despite himself, and even if it was with demurrals and qualifications, John did prepare the way for Christ and so made way for the King.

Reading this text with a critical eye, I have to ask what it means to say of John that, even if it was for him and his explicit intenions an accidental or half-hearted matter, even if it was an ‘ambivalent, debatable, soon-questioned strand’ of his ministry, so overwhelming and so central is the truth for which he did in fact make way that his pointing to it is his truth – that whatever else we might have been able to say about him is cast into the shadow by this.

Part of the answer must surely lie in the claim that he “did in fact make way” for Jesus. I don’t think we should downplay this. I’d like to draw upon some classic ecclesical reflection on Mary to put this strongly: I think we could consider John as, to an extent, Theotokos, God-bearer: his ministry provided the matrix for the birth of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus’ humanity was shaped by this context, and – perhaps – shaped decisively. And I think I’d want to claim that, from the little we know of John’s ministry, it makes sense to say that he was able to play this role because of a fundamental ‘be it unto me according to thy word’ – a fundamental obedience or openness to God that characterised his ministry.

Yet I think we can say all this, about John’s obedience, and about John as Theotokos, without denying any of our critical suspicions about how John himself might have treated the claim that he was nothing more or less than Jesus’ forerunner.

…to be continued.

Posted in: Mark 1:4-8