It's Not Smileys You Losers; TNF XXXVI

[jwv]

The 36th stab at this whole thing was a very enthusiastic nite of Fiting that had most engaged for the entire three hours, and consequently fucked in tersm of schoolwork. But, this is what the Fites are all about. I think that a very empassioned War Room Council debate just naturally slid its way into the Nelson Room, as it should. The War Room

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N.T. Wright on "Doctrine vs. Parable," part I

[mightyrikimaru]

Incidentally, I recently came across the following thoughts on the battle between Parable and Doctrine in historian N.T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God:
The parable of the Wicked Tenants, obviously, does not stand alone. Telling stories was (according to the synoptic gospels) one of Jesus’ most characteristic modes of teaching. And, in the light of the entire argument so far, it would clearly be quite wrong to see these stories as mere illustrations of truths that could in principle have been articulated in a purer, more abstract form. They were ways of breaking open the worldview of Jesus’ hearers, so that it could be remoulded into the worldview which he, Jesus, was commending. His stories, like all stories in principle, invited his hearers into a new world, making the implicit suggestion that the new worldview be tried on for size with a view to permanent purchase. As we shall see in the next Part of the book, Israel’s theology had nearly always been characteristically expressed in terms of explicit story: the

N.T. Wright on "Doctrine vs. Parable," part II

[mightyrikimaru]

Continued from previous...
What sort of stories are most characteristic of Jews in this period? As we have already suggested, stories of all sorts can express the set of beliefs held by most Jews, including the belief that their god was the creator of the world; but this belief (unlike various forms of dualism, for instance) most naturally and characteristically comes to birth in stories about events in the real world. That is, when creational and covenantal monotheists tell their story, the most basic level of story for their worldview is history. To say that we can analyse stories successfully without reference to their possible public reference, and therefore that we cannot or should not make such a reference, is to commit the kind of epistemological mistake against which I have been arguing in the last two chapters. It is to deny referent by emphasizing sense-data. If we fail to see the importance of the actual historical nature of some at least of the stories told by Jews in this period, we fail to grasp the significance, in form