Meeting God in the Sound

 A good section of Deanne  Galbraith's  "Meeting God in the Sound"  is available to read on Google Books, pp. 120-126 here  . 

 It's a chapter in  The Counter-Narratives of Radical Theology and Popular Music: Songs of Fear and Trenbling (MIke Grimshaw, ed.)

(HT: Beth Maynard's post, Sacralizing the profane and profaning the sacred)

The headings are:

• U2's Two Audiences: Two Hearts Beat as One
• Immersion in a Sonic Baptism
• Performing Future Hymns in a Stadium Rock Cathedral

figural Christology: reading backwards within the flowing stream of time

 Scot McKnight:

Believing to Understand

Richard Hays on figural Christology.

by Scot McKnight

What disturbs the professor is that so many read their New Testaments with nary a glance at the Scripture reference notes in the central column of many Bibles or printed in the footnotes in others. What disturbs the reader is what one finds when one pursues those cross-reference suggestions.

We need go no further than Matthew's first chapter. The original woman in mind in the famous "the virgin will conceive" was a "young woman" already married to Isaiah and pregnant and soon to bear a child. But the Greek translation, the Septuagint, turned the Hebrew almah into parthenos, which meant "virgin." Matthew, knowing Jesus was born of a virgin, chose the latter on which to hang this profound interpretation of the conception and birth of Jesus. In chapter 2, the holy couple, after having spent time in safety in Egypt, return—and Matthew finds a golden egg in a text that had nothing to do with the Messiah. Matthew brings rugged realities and scriptural patterns together: If Jesus is the Son of God, if he spent time in Egypt, if YHWH called Israel his Son and out of Egypt summoned them to the Land of Israel, then Jesus somehow needs to be seen fulfilling that text too. It's all in Matthew 2:1-15. Or take John 5:46, which tells us in the words of Jesus "If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me." If there is so much Jesus in Moses, why did so few recognize him when he came? Over and over we see this interpretive approach to the "Old Testament" when we pay close attention to the cross references in our Bible, at once opening a world of glorious discovery and faith and re-imagining history and at the same time provoking us into pondering what kind of readings these early Christian hermeneuts were offering their readers.

....The grip of historical method has historians by the neck, but not so the new "theological interpretation of the Bible" crowd, now on full and detailed display in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. For the historians, what the original author meant—only what he (or she) meant—is all that matters; for the theological interpreters, while authorial intent certainly matters, it is not all that matters. What matters perhaps more is what mattered to Jesus and the apostles, and what mattered to them is now mattering more and more to Christian readers of the Bible. The tight grip of the historians has been loosened. More and more we are learning to see the Bible as an inter- and intra-textual reality; only by embracing its central vision—Jesus as Messiah—can one read that Bible well.

Richard B. Hays, in the published version of his Hulsean Lectures in Cambridge, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness, proposes that Jesus read the events of his life "backwards" and in so doing taught Christians how to read the Old Testament "forwards." As he puts it, "the Gospels teach us how to read the OT, and—at the same time—the OT teaches us how to read the Gospels. Or, to put it a little differently, we learn to read the OT by reading backwards from the Gospels, and—at the same time—we learn how to read the Gospels by reading forwards from the OT."

Hays opens by appealing to the term "figural" to describe this backwards reading, and so we hear Erich Auerbach boiled down into New Testament hermeneutics:

There is consequently a significant difference between prediction andprefiguration. Figural reading need not presume that the OT authors—or the characters they narrate—were conscious of predicting or anticipating Christ. Rather, the discernment of a figural correspondence is necessarily retrospective rather than prospective. (Another way to put this point is that figural reading is a form of intertextual interpretation that focuses on an intertextuality ofreception rather than of production.)

That is, time and later perspective generate new readings:

Because the two poles of a figure are events within "the flowing stream" of time, the correspondence can be discerned only after the second event has occurred and imparted a new pattern of significance to the first. But once the pattern of correspondence has been grasped, the semantic force of the figure flows both ways, as the second event receives deeper significance from the first.

Hays, well known for his brilliant studies of how Paul read the Bible,[3] is concerned in this book with the Gospels, so we are treated to four separate, succinct introductory essays into how the Evangelists read the Bible backwards. The result is a masterpiece. Hays shows that the Evangelists had a "high" Christology, one that was shaped by the divine identity of Jesus... Matthew, Hays concludes, is not so indirect {as Mark}.  Indeed, he says Matthew "is producing an annotated study Bible, providing notes and references that will give the uninitiated reader enough information to perform the necessary interpretation." One quick reading of texts like Matthew 24:15, which updates Mark's more allusive reference in Mark 13:14, is enough to see Matthew's annotations in context. But there's far more to Matthew than this, as we indicated in the opening paragraph above. For Matthew, Jesus is Immanuel, God's presence among us—seen in worshiping Jesus (14:33) and in Jesus as present (18:20) as well as in his promise of continued presence (28:20). Matthew "believes and proclaims that Jesus is the embodied presence of God and that to worship him is to worship YHWH—not merely an agent or a facsimile or in intermediary"—and this takes a unique form: "the one who was crucified and raised from the dead is himself the embodiment of the God who rules over all creation and abides with his people forever."

...The historian and the apologist may cry out for a place at the table, but the hermeneutical loop eventually closes in and begs the reader to believe. For such a reader, believing that Jesus is the Son of God, the Bible suddenly makes (new) sense. Can any Bible reader not recognize what John does in 1:1 when he says all over again "In the beginning"? But now something has changed. Jesus has been inserted into the narrative, and the beginning has been christologically reframed: the Logos, Jesus, the Son of God, the Messiah, the incarnate one, is the Creator and the Life who gives eternal life. Whether it is the Temple (John 2:13-22) or the feasts of Israel (John 10:22-30; 19:14), under John's guidance they are all about Jesus—and the reader who sees they are about Jesus can rightly understand what the Temple and the feasts were designed to do. What then is John's approach? "John understands Scripture as a huge web of signifiers generated by the pretemporal eternal Logos as intimations of his truth and glory."  LINK

prank with a point

Kudos to Volkswagen

"Meeting God in the Sound: The Seductive Dimension of U2’s Future Hymns"

Beth  tips  us off to what sounds like a great chapter by Deane Galbaraith in the new book,
The Counter-Narratives of Radical Theology and Popular Music: Songs of Fear and Trembling.  
How can you go wrong with a chapter called Meeting God in the Sound: The Seductive Dimension of U2’s Future Hymns?: 

Beth notes that Galbraith "employs Jean Baudrillard's distinction between the production of meaning and the seductive capacity of text' and uses such as a grid for the U2 discussion.

Preview:

Meeting God in the Sound: The Seductive Dimension of U2’s Future Hymns

How have U2 achieved popular and economic success in a music industry which, on the face of it, is not terribly receptive towards pop-stars who like to write hymns and - as on their U2 360 tour - build cathedrals? This paper examines the role played by U2’s emphasis on the formal, mystical, and experiential aspects of their music, and how that emphasis coincides with a religious trend which since at least the 1960s can be located throughout the arts, popular music, and—in a perhaps surprising association—charismatic and evangelical Christianity. To do so, the paper concentrates on the manner in which the sonic fabric of U2's 2009 album No Line On The Horizon is subtly interwoven with Christian hymns, in ways that are suggestive, evocative, and usually highly ambiguous. When—as often in U2 songs—the song’s seductive form takes priority over the production of content, and evocation takes precedence over precise meaning, U2 manage to open up a space for what, to many listeners affected by a prevalent neo-Romanticism, will count as a spiritual experience.

More Info: in The Counter-Narratives of Radical Theology and Rock’n’Roll: Songs of Fear and Trembling. Ed. Mike Grimshaw. Radical Theologies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.  link

"Literary Forms/Physics Formulas": chapter of 20 of "Art and Physics" by Shlain

other chapters here

“books talk to each other"

As Umberto Eco has written in his essay “Borges and My Anxiety of Influence,” “books talk to each other.” And if indeed “books talk to each other,” there is also a conversation—often unspoken—that goes on between fiction writers critics, and translators. -Link:Lydia Davis's Proust: The Writer as Translator, the Translator as Writer - 

Intertextuality in Biblical Studies: A Core Bibliography

photo: ChrisHarrisson.net

Intertextuality in Biblical Studies: A Core Bibliography

"Free your mind and your ass will follow" -Bono Subversio Vox

I'm sure some never got the reference to Bono's (punch)line in this 1994  acceptance speech. I had to google it myself..
.
It's from the 1971 Funkadelic song  by the same name:

Free your mind and your ass will follow:

The kingdom of heaven is within
Open up your funky mind and you can fly
 Free your mind and your ass will follow
 The kingdom of heaven is within

How would you interpret Bono's  use of that line in the context of the speech?
Funny the post on SongMeanings suggest the meaning is obvious (:
It can't be (just) a throwaway chance to use "colorful" language..
It's always about subversio..and always prayer to Bono Vox.
Achtung, Sitz Im Leben, Baby!
Get on your boots..

The Bible in 3,000 words...or one...(anything but a 140-word tweet)

Mark Meynell was asked to summarize the metanarrative/message of The Bible...He did it in
3, 000 words...But in ONE word, it's about

hope..

Here it is in article form; here as ITunes audio, here below is a version of it on video (2 parts):


I would love to see this on a "Visualizing the Bible" chart.


Of course this is the guy who did the something similar with another work of art (lesser, of course...but inspired by the former, as always), U2's "No Line" album

Grace breaks into a sound:

An album in three acts

ACT 1: Private agonies and devoted joys

ACT 2: Itchy feet, bombast and wry smiles

ACT 3: Doubts and grace in the Middle East

Read it here

Related , see Brian Draper's, "Stop Helping God Over the Road – A Meditation Using Lyrics from U2’s New Album, No Line on the Horizon,"
which consists entirely of quotes from the album, in chronological order. THis helps with the (meta)narrative and flow of the disc/story...here
(HT: Beth)

Visualizing the Bible

Chris Harrison and Christoph Römhild came up with this graphic, which I often project in Bible classes when talking about structure, chiasm and inclusio. Often the students have heard about this; having googled it under "Bible lights."

"The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc - the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect. "
- LINK (Click to learn more, enlarge, see more examples, or order a copy)

Christianity Today says, "the two became enthralled with elegantly showing the interconnected nature of Scripture.. The graph won an honorable mention in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Science journal.'