Week 1: Texts and Worlds/Community Theme #1: Creation and Community

As you'll remember, when I took a version of this class at FPC (it wasn't a U yet), I had cool typewriter

I look forward this class..I think you'll' enjoy it, too..
 ...I did when I took it in 1983>>

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STRATEGY: 
BIB 314 asks, "Who is Jesus?"

and "What is Church?"







This class asks

• "1)How do I read a text of Scripture via a Three Worlds approach?"
• 2)"What does Scripture have to say about community?

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Do The Handicapped Go to Hell?"

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Watch  this edited version South Park's "Do The Handicapped Go to Hell?" episode below,
The rest of the episode may be terribly offensive to some, I am not endorsing it...but those bits are prophetic, here it is:

 TEXTS.
a TEXT is technically ":any message  in any medium, designed to communicate anything"
so obviously the Bible counts as a TEXT message.

Texts need contexts.

Thanks for texting me (cell phone) random text messages during class to illustrate that texts need contexts.

GODISNOWHERE:  is it GOD IS NOWHERE  or GOD IS NOW HERE?

How you read the text changes as much as everything.

Spaces matter.

Like this:

Professor Ernest Brennecke of Columbia is credited with inventing a sentence that can be made to have eight different meanings by placing ONE WORD in all possible positions in the sentence: 

"I hit him in the eye yesterday."

The word is "ONLY".

The Message:

1.ONLY I hit him in the eye yesterday. (No one else did.)

2.I ONLY hit him in the eye yesterday. (Did not slap him.)

3.I hit ONLY him in the eye yesterday. (I did not hit others.)

4.I hit him ONLY in the eye yesterday. (I did not hit outside the eye.)

5.I hit him in ONLY the eye yesterday. (Not other organs.)

6.I hit him in the ONLY eye yesterday. (He doesn't have another eye..)

7.I hit him in the eye ONLY yesterday. (Not today.)

8.I hit him in the eye yesterday ONLY. (Did not wait for today.)

                              -link 

Like this 'text message' from Jesus:

I SAY TO YOU TODAY, "YOU WILL BE WITH ME IN PARADISE.'

or is it,

I SAY TO YOU, " TODAY YOU WILL BE WITH ME IN PARADISE."

The original manuscripts of the Bible not only run all letters, all caps, together, but include no punctuation.

Punctuation matters.

Everything is  context.

Context is everything.

By the way, that last statement was a chiasm (we'll define that later)..

 i..won't even mention the "but, cheeks" story (:  

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WORLDS 

We became familiar/reacquainted with the "Three Worlds"  concept which comes from your Hauer/Young Textbook, see especially chapters two and three, and see class notes.
Here  below is how one student summarized the worlds (she has more detail here)


Literary World--The literary world of the Bible is simply the text itself, apart from anything outside the text.  We mean the world (or, better, worlds) created by the text; the words on the page, by the stories, songs, letters and the myriad other types of literature that make up the Bible.  All good literature (and the Bible is, among other things, good literature) creates in readers' minds magnificent, mysterious, and often moving worlds that take on a reality of their own, whether or not they represent anything real outside the pages (Hauer and Young ch 2).

Historical World--The historical world of the Bible isthe world "behind the text" or "outside the text".  It is the context in which the Bible came to be written, translated, and interpreted over time, until the present.  In studying the historical world of the Bible, we look for evidence outside the text that helps us answer questions such as, who wrote this text, when was it written, to whom was it written, and why was it written.  We also probe the text itself for evidence that links it to historical times, places, situations, and persons (Hauer and Young 2)..



Contemporary World--The contemporary world is the "world in front of the text" or the "world of the reader."  In one sense, there are as many contemporary worlds of the Bible as there are readers, for each of us brings our own particular concerns and questions to the text.  They inevitably shape our reading experience.  We are all interested in answering the questions of whether the Bible in general, or particular texts, have any relevance to our personal lives (Hauer and Young  ch3).
-Brolin 

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We noted how careful we should be reading texts:

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Fantastic job, making observations of Philemon, already preparing for your signature paper. Remember to look for any clues/cues to tome/emotion/volume. Remember this video?:
Keep your notes.
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Chiasm:

Chiasm

From the ridiculous:

• "I am stuck on Band Aid..
• "Never let a kiss fool you..

To the sublime:

• "Ask not what your country can do for you..
• "God is good all the time.."
• "When the going gets tough.."
• "Accept rejection.."

To the biblical:

• The first shall be last...
• Whoevers humbles themself will be exalted...
• You do unto others...

Chiasm(definition) ).. once you are attuned to seeing them in Scripture (and most ancient literature) it seems they are everywhere.

Sometimes they are.
Who can argue that "the first shall belast/
the last shall be first" is a chiasm?
A-B-B-A, X pattern.


(and this one, because it's in Matthew [20:16], will be important
for our class.
But often the chiasm is wide enough to spotlight and intended embedded theme in between the endpoints.

And to really help us get what the Spirit is saying...structurally.

People remember how to perform a piece of music by using musical notations on scale. A similar solution to the problem of remembering how to perform a piece of dance has been solved with the use of Labonotation. In antiquity, it seems most written documents were intended to be read aloud, hence to be performed. The purpose of writing was to facilitate remembering how the document went when one read it aloud. But how did one make paragraphs or mark off units in a document read aloud? It seems that the main way to mark off a unit was to use repetition of words and/or phrases at the beginning and end of a unit, either alone (as in Matt 5:3, 10,"...for theirs is teh kingdom of heaven) or in parallel bracketing fashion (as John 1:18). The Greeks called such parallel brackets a chiasm, after one half of the letter "chi" (our 'X"), thus ">."-Social Science Commentary on the Gospel of John, p. 295, emphasis mine.. a free read online here.

See also:

• Chiasm led me to Christ"

     (a great story from a recent FPU grad)
• Detecting chiasm
• chiasm: an intro
  
  
• Chiasm in the Bible

In fact, they can become as large as life,  See
James B. Jordan, “Chiasm and Life” in Biblical Theology Basics:

“Very much of human life is ‘there and back again,’ or chiastic. This is how God has designed human beings to live in the world. It is so obvious that we don’t notice it. But it is everywhere. This shape of human life arises ultimately from the give and take of the three Persons of God, as the Father sends the Spirit to the Son and the Son sends the Spirit back to the Father. We can see that literary chiasm is not a mere curiosity, a mere poetic device to structure the text. It arises from the very life of God, and is played out in the structure of the lives of the images of God in many ways and at many levels. It is because human beings live and move so often chiastically, that poets often find themselves drawn to chiastic writing. God creates chiasms out of His inner life, and so do the images of God.

Biblical chiasms are perfect. That is, they are perfectly matched to the human  chiasms they address and transform. As we become more and more sensitive to Biblical chiasms, we will become more and more sensitive to one aspect of the true nature of human life under God. We will be transformed from bad human chiasms into good human chiasms. In this way, becoming sensitive to chiasm can be of practical transformative value to human life, though in deep ways that probably cannot be explained or preached very well.

One further thought. We saw in our previous essay that chiasms often have a double climax, one in the middle and the greatest at the end. The food we bought at market is put away in the cupboard and refrigerator when we get back home. Moving forward to a final climax is what all literature does, whether it has a middle climax or not. (Shakespeare’s five-act plays always move to a climax in the third and in the fifth acts.) This is just another way that human life matches literary production, in the Bible as well as in uninspired human literature. Becoming familiar with the shape and flow of Biblical texts will have a transforming effect on human life.”

James B. Jordan, “Chiasm and Life” in Biblical Theology Basics.

-link, Michael Bull’s blog: Theology you can eat and drink

Mike Rinaldi, a Visalian, and filmmaker (and Fresno Pacific grad) told this   story at the first "Gathering to Bless Christians in the Arts":
Blake Snyder, the screenwriter behind the classicSave The Cat"  book became a Christian not long before he died. 

Often at this point in such a story, folks ask "Who led him to Christ?" 

Go ahead and ask. 

The answer is: 

Chiasm. 

It happened in large part because Mike, not even knowing if such a well-known and busy writer would respond to his email,  asked him if he had heard about chiasm. 

Turns out Snyder was fascinated with it all, and Mike was able to point out chiastic structure and shape in scriptwriting....and one thing led to another...and then in Scripture. 

All roads, and all chiasms, lead to the Center and Source. 


Mike, of course, learned chiasm in THIS CLASS.

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__ The "Everything is Spiritual" video on Genesis 1-2: (also on moodle) --
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How do you define culture?

So many possible definitions:

• Paul Hiebert:  “learned patterns of behavior, ideas and products characteristic of a [group of people]."
• Simone Weil:  "What is culture?  The formation of attention."
• Other definitions here
• Interesting  the  definition of culture within a hospital

How about:

   "a way of thinking, feeling, valuing and acting by one or more people."

Dan Nainan:
 

Remember: you can delete the Romans scripture. Focus on  Exodus 20 and 34, and Matthew 5-7.

On the letter assignment, simplify the assignment, so you are writing to your cohort, explaining any tradition, cultural or otherwise, you have: how you do holidays at home, how you share job responsibilities at work..anything that is a tradition.   You can ignore the A and B options on syllabus, unless you choose to do it per syllabus. If you don't have the textbook you need to do this, the pages are copied here below. 

I know you don't all have your books yet.  Do the best you can for know. 

Hauer and Young pp 290-291 (right click, then click again to enlarge)

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