I’ve very much enjoyed dipping into Stanley Fish’s provocative and engagingly written essays in Is There A Text In This Class?
Fish is asking whether author, text or reader determines meaning and concludes that all three are shaped by and shape authoritative interpretive communities.
This seems to me a valuable insight – especially if we think a bit more about our interpretive community.
If my interpretive community is just me, or me and my mates, or me and the academy (the bigger books on my shelves), it seems to me that we’re going to go badly wrong.
Our interpretive community must be the church. And not just 234th strict and peculiar ana-Baptist church continuing, but the church down the centuries and across the world, the Communion of Saints.
Which of course includes those saints who will come after us, as we trust the church will mature and grow in her understanding. Which gives our readings an element of provisionality. And suggests an eschatological horizon: only in the New Creation together with all God’s people will our reading be perfected.
And our community, of course, includes the human authors of the Bible and their original intended audience.
But ultimately our reading goes beyond Fish soup, for our fellowship is also with the Father, Son and Spirit: the divine originator, centre and judge of the church, the ultimate author of the Bible and our interpretive community, in whom we live and move and have our being.
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5 comments:
I agree.
I was going to write some kind of essay about this but then I got seduced by the Jordan stuff.
Marc
Thanks for this - really helpful. I look forward to reading the PhD when it's finished, along with all the spin-off articles! Looking fwd to seeing you tomorrow.
Hey, great to meet you kinda today marc - sorry I didn't actually get to shake your hand etc. Some other time maybe?
Dear Mr. Lloyd,
Our names are James Schooley and James Netto and we are Upper Sixth pupils at Westcliff High School for Boys. We are currently in the process of creating a yearbook for pupils who joined the school in 2000 and are leaving in June after A2 Levels. As part of our yearbook project, we are seeking out teachers who have been particularly memorable to us during our seven year stay at Westcliff in the hope that they might agree to provide a comment and recent photograph to wish leavers the best for the future. This is something that has never been done in any past yearbooks and we can assure you that we have gone to great lengths searching for you on Google for the past few evenings!
We eventually stumbled across your blog and photo page and were particularly pleased to see how successful you have been since you left Westcliff. Congratulations on getting married and getting a PhD! The vast majority of our year has matured and we are ready to move onto to the next stage of our lives; university for most of us! We want to create the best yearbook yet to provide people with some great memories of the school to take away with them. We know that you are a particularly memorable former member of staff, and hence we would be delighted if you would do us the honour of providing a brief comment about your memories of the school and the class of 2000.
If so, please could you email us at jamesnetto@bluebottle.com, as any correspondence would be greatly appreciated. We hope this is not too much to ask!
Thank you in advance,
James Netto and James Schooley
Class of 2000 Yearbook Committee
j. schooley and j. netto,
those of us who know Marc from outside school can well believe that he was an extremely memorable teacher. do please feel free to share any particular memories, foibles, eccentricities...
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