Thursday, January 08, 2015

reading Scripture with its own hub symbols (not our own), prophetic (not royal) consciousness, and outwordliness of the third (not 1st or 2nd) kind

Note: if anyone reading this has all three of these books, let's get together yesterday(:
1) Kent Blevins:

Webb discusses 'hub symbols'--our deepest values, those things most sacred to us to us,  the self-evident facts that are assumed as part of the way things  are.. The hard truth is that we do not go to the Bible and derive our values from it.  Every one of us has a system of hub symbols formed before we ever consciously  engage  the Bible..If we have a truth-seeker's openness to correction, that hub symbols inherent to the text itself will gradually become more and more powerful....  p107, 117 of "How to Read the Bible Without Losing Your Mind"

2)How is this mode of reading/re-reading related to what Brueggemann has coined
prophetic consciousness (vs. royal consciousness)?.  See especially chapter two of "The Prophetic Imagination" (The Royal Consciousness: Countering the Counterculture):

The task of
prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish,
and evoke a consciousness and perception
alternative to the consciousness and
perception of the dominant culture around us  (3)

 ....The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.” (pg. 45)

3)And how is all this a Pauline  "otherwordliness of the third kind" via a centered/fuzzy setness:

It is not an outworldliness not just in the sense that a Christ-believer objectively belongs with and in a future state (of being justified by God on the day of judgement and taking up some kind of life in the heavenly politeuma), nor in the sense that he subjectively understands himself, for his own individual part alone, as belonging with Christ. No. It is also an outworldliness of the third kind we identified. It is one that shows iteslf in 'the present evil world' to which Paul has  been crucified, namely in  a specific  set of genuinely other-regarding mental attitudes towards other human beings (believers and non-believers) and in the practice of that set — in that world. -Troels Engberg-Pederrson, Paul and the Stoics, p 177

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