(10:54 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Theses on Scripture

1. The texts we now know as Scripture -- the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament -- arose during moments of intense creativity and transformation in the cultural and political history of the people of Israel.
   
   
2. Given the wide variety of historical circumstances and creative personalities that contributed to the production of those texts, "the Bible" as a single document is necessarily a self-contradictory text.
   
   
3. The preservation of these texts is not originally bound to the bolstering particular institutional claims, other than the claim to a certain continuity with an ongoing cultural/political tradition (i.e., Judaism and/or Christianity).
   • We must therefore expect and thus take into account the "abusive" and a posteriori nature of most institutional readings of scriptural texts.
     
   • We must similarly avoid the mistake of simply consigning these texts to their institutional fate. These texts, as texts, are the property not simply of the institutions that happen to have preserved them, but of humanity at large. The institutional readings that have attempted to subvert the texts' original import do not exempt us from the responsibility of hearing the texts on their own terms.
   
   
4. Those who do simply dismiss these texts, which represent many of the most intensely creative moments of one of the most distinctive and fertile cultural traditions in human history, based on the institutional uses to which they are put are making a two-fold mistake:
   • First, they are denying themselves potentially very useful resources on the basis of a political agenda. Whatever the practical necessity of such a move, such limitations must be rejected in principle.
     
   • Second, even if they acknowledge the fact that the scriptural texts address contemporary political issues (economic justice, ideology critique, etc.), they too often succumb to a facile "presentism," according to which those texts that have been produced later in human history must necessarily address those questions more adequately. Even if such a contention is true in particular cases, it must never become a matter of a priori presumption.
   
   
5. Any political discourse claiming universality must be as willing, in principle, to be instructed by Isaiah as by Plato, by Paul as by Marx.

1. Yes, I'm talking to you, my dear sister.
   
2. All of this can be developed out of my reading of the parable of the dishonest manager.

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