SUGGESTION: Bible Tech 2011

George Somsel said:

To some they are apparently meaningful, but to me they are simply confusing.  Give me a WORD any day of the week.

To me it is a matter of matching the tool to the task. Graphic organizers are a key part of contemporary education so if I wish to communicate with the younger generation I have to be fluent in their form of communication. As for the word - I've published a fair amount of poetry for which the word is the artistic medium ... I have respect for it as well, when used appropriately.

It is actually some hermeneutical assumptions that give raise to my reservations.

Andrew Potter said:

MJ., could you elaborate on some of your reservations about hermeneutical assumptions?

Yes, if I also get to backtrack and give you more credit for flexibility than I had gleaned from the examples.[:)]

A bit of context: I am in the process of reading an advance copy of The Information: A History, A Theory and A Flood by James Gleick. Which means I have Father W. J. Ong, S.J. on my mind. Which means that I have the difficulty of an electronic information age individual's capability of reading the text with an oral mentality on my mind. I had, perhaps incorrectly, translated your "thing" into "statement or series of statements" - declarative statements no matter how conditional.

As I find some aspects of Jewish interpretation particular fascinating, I immediately began to wonder how one would represent stories interpreting stories. I can obviously fit the interpretations based on the 7 rules of Hillel (or similar schemes) into the model. But I am stymied as to how one handles a fictional narrative as theological reasoning. Yet Ong is convincing that an oral society thinks in the concrete rather than the abstract so that the story is in fact valid reasoning.

Seeing poem/story/music/art as thing 2, however, is easy to handle - I am very pleased you made provisions for it.

My second concern is a natural outgrowth of being Catholic. We tend towards the "both ... and..." rather than the "either ... or ...". My favorite  image for theological thought is a window in which the sides represent opposite/different positions that we can not reconcile - think of the question "Why does God permit evil?". With theology we can make progress narrowing the window i.e. limiting the possible answers but we can never point directly to a declarative answer. In this sort of situation a single element of reasoning can lead to two contradictory statements/things. T1-->R-->T2 and T1-->R-->T3 doesn't convey the entanglement of T2,T3. I specifically chose the word "entanglement" because of its use in physics - I want to imply that any change in R in either chain effects both T2 and T3.

My short answer would be that having reviewed the examples, I have reservations about my ability to designate the framework within which my R resides. I have reservations about my ability to link separate but interdependent results of a single reason applied to a single thing - especially when those results are "contradictory" in Western logic systems.

When I wrote my original post, I had erroneously thought the model required more conversion of Scripture and experience into propositions ... which might have sent me into my private rant on Locke. As I read more of the site, I realize that I was wrong on this issue.

Andrew Potter said:

you don't mind I'd like to make a few quotes from this thread.

I wouldn't mind at all. I will definitely watch your project with interest - and probably run some smaples through the model. Said samples being from narrative theologians, early church fathers such as Ephrem the Syrian and a rabbinic case or two.Nothing like trying the model to see how it fits.