Most un-understandable topic in Divinity


A bit like Stirling Uni but less suicidal,  Nottingham University is scattered through an undulating green campus.  I recently gathered with 70 Thiseltonians for a Conference honouring the 75 year old star of modern Biblical Hermeneutics,  Prof Anthony Thiselton.  

He's a likeable John Stott type figure who broke down in tears when mentioning the support of his wife and family.  During the day seven academics presented papers looking at different angles of the subject.  

Now hermeneutics deals with how we communicate and understand things:  a film,  an Ibrox sign or a Pauline epistle.  It's currently the most important subject in Divinity.    Unfortunately the presentations were models of bad communication being papers read from manuscripts and not readily understandable.      But the chatting in-between was brilliant:

  •  "We live not according to the calendar but according to that which inspires us"  86 year old Jürgen Moltmann
  •  New Testament Christians used a pagan word for god,  theos,  but filled it with Christian meaning
  •  The Bible repeats the same story with slightly different content to fit what the writer is emphasizing


At the end of the conference I realized that hermeneutics is so interdisciplinary that nobody fully understands it - accept the one who is the Word.

Lake at Notthingam Uni campus

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A wonky couple of days

Only two weeks to go before semester finishes. Students are pretty stressed out. They cheered on Friday when class finished. Had a visit last night from an ex-evangelical pastor who's joined the Catholic church and now teaches religion in a an upmarket monks' school. He was keen to justify his actions so feel he's not at peace with the move. It made me think how poor the care of pastors is when things get difficult for them. And how astute Catholic clergy are, more so than their evangelical counterparts. Reading New Testament Theology by Philip Esler, who's trying to justify praying to the saints. Feel it's been a wonky couple of days.
Read more
Image
We’d love you all to visit us. So I hope what I write won’t scare anyone off. On Saturday afternoon, we went to see a comedy about French cooking. Before the film started, instead of warnings about mobile phones, there was a chilling re-enactment of children being kidnapped by guerrillas from a Colombian village. It was screened to make us remember another reality. The next day we heard of an entire football team, called the Peanut Men, being taken and murdered. They evidently sold peanuts on the border with Venezuela: not the most likely reasons for assassination. And last night two of our best loved lecturers, Don and Elizabeth Sendek, were attacked when their taxi drew into the Seminary residency. They lost their laptop, however mercifully not their lives – the city’s murder rate is escalating, the robbers were armed, and Don fought back. Before all this happened I had compiled a video of our students’ regional night with their different dances. h...
Read more

Night of the full moon

Image
It was the night of the full moon and we were invited to the cemetery. We were glad to have our street-wise friend Alejandro with us. There was a gap in the large railings that seal the entrance, just enough to allow a person to get through. Large bowls of fire lit our path as we walked amongst the towers of the dead. Burials are upwards in Latin American cities. We didn't really want to go and had no idea what to expect. The invite had come weeks before and without much thought I had given my word. Olwen put on a pair of comfortable shoes, Alejandro wore an american football top and I decided on my leather jacket for protection. That was justified when thunder cracked above the cemetery. Certain images still remain in my mind. There was the man completely in white who walked with a slow deliberate step: the angel of death. There was the young girl with a bouquet of flowers which she destroyed; we saw her entire life. And there was the patience and s...
Read more