knowledge

Seeing the Biblical Text Through New Metaphors

July 8, 2010

We need some new metaphors. I think it is quite clear the two bucket theory is untenable, and the owners manual for life metaphor reduces the bible to a behavior manual. Both the theory and metaphor generate so many problems that it is time we start searching for an alternative approach to the text.

This is always how paradigm shifts occur. When a paradigm is initially adopted it answers a variety of questions very well. Those adopting the paradigm realize it doesn’t answer all questions and those unanswerables go on a shelf for further reflection and research. No paradigm is perfect, no model can answer all the questions.

Eventually the current paradigm, always historically and contextually rooted, answers fewer and fewer questions well and the shelf with the unanswerables becomes overloaded and near collapse. This is when a new paradigm begins to emerge. We are undoubtedly living in such a new paradigm time.

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Comfortability With Our Limits and Open to the Other

May 10, 2010

Can we grow to the place we are comfortable with our knowledge limits and open to what others can teach us? Are we open to the idea we do not have all the answers and much of what we hold is simply wrong, we just aren’t sure which parts?

I am not sure we are. Taking this position would seem to fly in the face of the very system the church has engaged where mythos has collapsed into logos. Where the power of the story and narrative (mythos) is overshadowed by the rules, rationality and certainty (logos). Another word use for this by experts like Karen Armstrong is “fundamentalist system;” rules, doctrines and lifestyle statements to insure as much conformity and uniformity as possible. This is the essence of the socialized mind we have been discussing.

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