Articles
 Justice for All
 Church in Decline
 Striking Similarity
 The Efficacy of Prayer
 Are You Ready for Change?
 A Question of Vocation
 The Challenge of Change
 Elul 24
 Elul 23
 Elul 22

Series [All]
 Administration
 Elul 5777 (9)
 Exploring Translation Theories (25)
 Live Like You Give a Damn
 Memory and Identity
 The Creative Word (19)
 The Cross-Cultural Process (7)
 The Old Testament is Dying
 The Oral Gospel Tradition (4)
 We the People (8)

Archive

Sunday, 23 October 2016

The Difficulty with New Truth?

The Creative Word: Canon as a Model for Biblical Education, Second Ed.,
Walter Brueggemann, Fortress Press, 2015, page 91-92

Brueggemann has no illusions about how difficult it is to bring and share new truth.

New truth in this prophetic canon is thus very much like "Catch-22". If one speaks it, one flies against old truth ad by definition is wrng, excluded and dismissed. Almost any new revelation will have to battle for legitimacy, beginning with he presupposition that new revelation thatt disrupts the old truth is illegitimate. The new truth will amost inevitably sound irreverent, disrespectful and illegitimate. It will immediately be in conflict with revelation in the old consensus. The ones who so speak will be regarded either as crazy (cf. Hosea 9:7) or as treasonous (Amos 7:10-11; Jeremiah 38:4).

The second part of the canon - The Prophets - immediately provokes conflict and abrasion and raises another question.

The educational question, then, is how to pick one's truth, how to know what is true among alternative truths. Such education is tricky because it means immediately placing in jeopardy the old consensus we have worked so hard to establish.

Posted By Jonathan, 8:00am Comment Comments: 0