in search of areté

There is something going on in Christian forums and comment threads these days that I understand but don’t want to believe.

Having spent the better part of a year hanging out at one forum in particular - Theologica - and the blog closely connected with it – Parchment & Pen – I keep witnessing this something with regularity. And while I understand what drives and sustains it, I just don’t want to believe it to be true.

Forums thrive on discussions and exchange of information on whatever subject is in view at the moment. These subjects range from doctrinal positions to understanding particular verses or passages to defending one’s theological tradition. And what keeps happening is this:

People are more interested in stating their own opinions, observations, and beliefs than discovering what might be the truth – or at least closer to the truth – about an issue.

Whether in a forum or a comment thread, people go back and forth espousing what they think things mean or what they believe a passage to say or what they understand as the truth. Not only do such people not do research for themselves, they also are uninterested in listening to someone else who either does do research or is a more knowledgeable person in the field.

At Theologica, for example, Marv is quite knowledgeable of and proficient with New Testament Greek. When others make unsubstantiated or just plain wrong claims about what a passage is or isn’t saying, Marv is usually there to help any and all understand things better. I always look forward to his comments.

But not everyone wants to hear him or consider what he says. There are some – thankfully – who do listen and consider what he says. But many, many others act as though it’s just Marv’s opinion and therefore can be ignored. Or they consider their own grasp of the language – usually via Vine’s or Strong’s – to be equal to his or even superior. So they don’t listen.

There are some Reformed people afoot at Theologica, too, who are quite knowledgeable about the Reformed tradition and its doctrines. But their understanding of their own belief system is often ignored because a critic has his or her own understanding of what Calvinism is really about and what Calvinists really believe.

In a word, what seems to be lacking is humility. By humility I do not mean some smarmy self-deprecation meant to demonstrate just how humble they truly are. I mean knowing who they are and who they are not, what they know and what they don’t know.

Teachability is symptomatic of humility. When someone is willing to listen to someone else who knows more or understands more, and will go so far as to reconsider their own position, humility is present.

But I don’t find that much.

And I don’t want to believe that people want to maintain and puff up their own ignorance because, well, it’s their ignorance and not something that someone else told them. It’s as though they would rather be wrong and original than right and indebted to someone else.

This kind of thinking is a death knell for growth and maturity. It pretty much guarantees that people will remain at their present level of understanding – or ignorance – as long as they refuse to listen or allow that they might not know as much as they think.

It does not bode well for them individually or for the church in general. God help us all.

NOTE: I recently wrote the following series elsewhere and thought I should bring them over here, too. They are in inverse order here for the purpose of making reading through them easier.
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In the erudite and ethereal discussions that tend to pop up around here now and then, people use terms such as “historical-critical method,” “form criticism,” “source criticism,” and “redaction criticism” – phrases that exclude most of us from the essence of the conversation. We are left on the sidelines like eunuchs in a harem, knowing that something is going on but not sure exactly what.

Hoping to expose the mystery of so-called higher criticism (at least for myself), I have undertaken to shed some light on the matter by answering a simple question: What if we treated one another’s written statements in the same way many people treat the Bible, i.e., through the lenses of higher criticism? I am not saying that higher criticism is bad – far from it! – but only that more pedestrian documents and writings should be able to enjoy the same scrutiny and privilege as does the Bible. It could serve to further our understanding of both higher criticism and what is actually being said. But what would that look like?

Well, let’s see. Let’s take something said elsewhere on Theologica and subject it to higher criticism, perhaps thereby ennobling the common to the glorious and correcting the misleading to the truth.

I will use the following petition of Rey to clarify my point:

I might conclude from this unexamined passage a number of things: Rey is hungry, it is late, Rey is afraid of the dark and dislikes cold weather, he likes to eat catfish after cooking them, he has no catfish recipes of his own other than those that require a grill, he has strange hopes. But without closer inspection or the corrective lenses of higher criticism, I could be perilously wrong. In fact, in the opinion of more than a few higher critics, I definitely am wrong.

There are three primary types of higher criticism: form criticism, source criticism, and redaction criticism. I’ll give a quick explanation of each before applying them to Rey’s cry for help.

Form Criticism (FC) examines the previous forms a document might have been in prior to what is now in front of us. We know, for example, that prior to the synoptic Gospels being written they existed in an oral form. FC looks at the effect previous forms have upon the final product.

Source Criticism (SC) seeks to find other documents, both real and hypothesized, that might have been used by a writer in producing the text we have. Again, with the synoptics, it is believed by some that Matthew and Luke may have used Mark as source material for their own gospels, and/or relied upon an unknown source (Q) for information.

Redaction Criticism (RC) tries to determine the theological purposes of the writer by looking at how they used the materials to organize or otherwise emphasize things in their books. It assumes, rightly, that each author has a particular perspective and purpose in writing that is not limited to historically reporting what has happened.

We’ll begin our search for the true truth about Rey’s catfish petition in the next post.

Form Criticism (FC), you will remember, examines the previous forms a document might have been in prior to what is now in front of us. We know, for example, that prior to the synoptic Gospels being written they existed in an oral form. FC looks at the effect previous forms have upon the final product.

Our text under consideration now is a petition that Rey made recently:

According to Carson, Moo, and Morris – which is not a law firm – there are a half dozen assumptions made by FC scholars that we will adapt and apply when possible to Rey’s text.

1. “The stories and sayings . . . circulated in small independent units.”

2. “The transmission of the material can be compared to the transmission of other folk and religious traditions.”

3. “The stories and sayings . . . took on certain standard forms . . . for the most part still readily visible [in the text].”

4. “The form of a specific story or saying makes it possible to determine its Sitz im Leben (”setting in life”) . . .”

5. “As it passed down the sayings and stories . . . [the] community not only put the material into certain forms, it modified it under the impetus of its own needs and situations.”

6. “Classic form critics have typically utilized various criteria to enable them to determine the age and historical trustworthiness of particular pericopes.”

Such is the nature of form criticism and how it enables us to better understand the otherwise completely incomprehensible text provided by the Rey Community.
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Next we will further our understanding of Rey and catfish through the lens of Source Criticism.

I earlier defined Source Criticism as a discipline that seeks to find other documents, both real and hypothesized, that might have been used by a writer in producing the text we have. It has its own unique contributions to the study of our text,

We have already demonstrated through the use of Form Criticism that Rey’s missive did not suddenly appear in its final form as a result of him sitting down and simply typing the text. It was the result of a collaboration of his community with various members providing their own oral traditions that resulted in the text as we now have it. Those oral stories would eventually have come down in written form, and Source Criticism will help identify the sources the author must have used in putting together his own retelling of the accounts.

When studying something like the Synoptic Gospels, which allow us to compare and contrast the differing accounts of the life of Christ, it is easier to identify various sources. Such is not the case with the text in front of us, which means we will have to rely on what we already know about use of sources by authors.

The text reflects disparate sources connected by transitions such as “and” and the use of punctuation, particularly “.” (period). It is safe to say that Rey had before him at least five sources: (1) information about the time of day, (2) some sort of weather report, (3) a meteorological report showing both sunrise and sunset times for the date of the incident, (4) evidence from an unknown source about the status of the grill (whether “turned on” or not), and (5) a document or portion of a document revealing the existence of something called “online,” which is apparently a state that human beings can enter into and become.

It is very likely, however, that later collections that included some but not all of the aforementioned fragments were extant at the time and available to the author. These may be referred to as S (for “Situation”) and P (those documents pertaining to the “Petition” itself). A Two-Source Theory (no longer held by conservative scholars) maintained that Rey had at his disposal S and P but none of the other source materials. A more recent and thus truer theory-become-fact position is known as the Two-Plus-Some-Others Theory. This position (held by most at Theologica) reveals that the author relied on S and P, plus an unknown number of specific fragments (ranging in number from 1 to 43,234).

Whatever the number of sources, however, the priority of S – which simply means that it was written first – is maintained by all. It was the first source to come into the author’s possession and served as a template for all additional information, even though some of the later sources might have been earlier.

Equally obvious to the Source Critic is the absence of any sort of search engine that the author might have used to discover recipes for his family’s meal that did not involve time, weather, astronomy, grills, or “onlines.” It goes without saying that, had the author had such information or access available, he would have utilized it and we would not now have the text we have. Rather, it would have taken the form of “Hey, I found a cool recipe for boiling catfish” or some such thing.

With the enlightenment of Source Criticism, therefore, we can now understand that Rey relied on written documents no longer in existence to compile his account as we now have it in the text. The individual sources, upon with the author heavily relied, contributed to the final form of the passage.
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Finally, we will look at Redaction Criticism to further enhance our understanding of the text. Only then will we be able to say with confidence that we understand the story, whether historical or not, as written by Rey.

The final stage of composition for our text -

- necessitates our discovery of the influence of the individual author upon the account. This is the realm of Redaction Criticism, which “seeks to describe the theological purposes of the [author] by analyzing the way in which” sources are used. “Redaction” is a jargon term meant to exclude the hoi polloi from understanding something simple.¹ A redactor is an editor; redaction criticism examines the editing done by the author in the course of telling his story.

Again drawing from CMM (Carson, Moo, and Morris), we can apply Redaction Criticism to the text. There are five basic elements to RC, but I’ll only address four. The last one isn’t really worth the time. Here goes: