Over at Bible and Interpretation a small debate is underway between Niels Peter Lemche and Hector Avalos. Now, while I see some problems in Hector’s arguments and some noisy but unexamined ghosts, Niels Peter’s piece is one of the most problematic I have read for a long time. In brief, it is Eurocentric, elitist and given to interpretive tunnel-vision, thereby not seeing the cosy relationship with theology in what he champions.
30 October, 2010
Niels Peter Lemche’s (very) problematic article
Posted by stalinsmoustache under biblical studies, historical criticism | Tags: Hector Avalos, Niels Peter Lemche |[12] Comments
30 October, 2010 at 8:12 am
Lemche’s thesis in a nutshell: might makes right, majority rule. Geesh never heard that one before.
30 October, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Original is certainly not what comes to mind when I read it. Pondering a longer reply, if B&I are interested.
31 October, 2010 at 6:36 am
i dont really think youve read him correctly ro. he’s not being elitist in the way you seem to believe. rather, his position is that people who don’t know what they’re talking about, shouldn’t talk.
it’s really a reasonable and sensible position and has nothing to do with elitism.
31 October, 2010 at 7:02 am
The key image doesn’t help: the vast mass of believers are still stuck in the jungle of superstition while the reasoned few have emerged from the jungle. And I would add that at Copenhagen, where Niels Peter, works, there are deep structural connections with the church, so much so that on could argue that the approach he champions fits in very snugly with the church, where those superstitious types hang out.
31 October, 2010 at 1:33 pm
Exactly, the imagery says much about the messenger. I’m with you on your suspicions, Roland.
31 October, 2010 at 7:22 am
true the central image is uniquely ill suited to communicating, in english, what he’s after. but the concept, qua concept, is sound.
31 October, 2010 at 7:14 pm
Jim, I can well understand Niels Peter’s sentiments: a desire to negate those dreadful fundos and their claim to some sort of authority on matters biblical. However, the way he frames it is in terms of a scholarly elite, who are the only ones qualified, due to a highly specialised training, to say anything worthwhile concerning the Bible. I am afraid that this is both anti-reformed and elitist and indeed undemocratic, for it leaves the ordinary reader disqualified from reading the Bible for themselves and taking a position. Sure, you get all sorts of wacky ideas that way (but scholars are also given to wacky ideas) but it is a basic reformed principle to give the Bible back to everyone and not leave it as the reserve of a clerical elite. Finally, what bothers me about these arguments, as with those going on in the SBL, is that there are intra-church arguments: the liberals vs the fundos, the scholars vs the ignoranti and so on.
1 November, 2010 at 7:23 am
“basic reformed principle”?? now you’re just pulling Jim’s tit.
And anyway, their original argument with Rome was over the identity of those who mediated the book of the unlearned to the great unwashed, not over their existence. The teachers were to teach the pastors (eg the Institutes by Calvin the Scholar, orig in Latin, the language of scholars for other scholars) and the pastors were to teach the congregations (eg. the Sermons by Calvin the Pastor, in French to the French). For Calvin and the Reformed, if you wanted to know Amos, you must know Pliny and Aristotle (ie. the elite knowledge of the elite), as well as the original languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic), the Church Fathers, and Rabbis – because only thereby could you know the cultural context and circumstance of the book and the mind of the author (or so the Reformed did think).
And did you really mean “undemocratic and elitist” in a bad way? Sounds good to me.
1 November, 2010 at 10:52 am
Now you’re teasing, Deane.
1 November, 2010 at 11:14 am
Maybe a little.
1 November, 2010 at 10:54 am
But one thing: to know Amos you needed to read the Bible. Calvin was a little sceptical about that Greek knowledge – corrupted theology, you know, introduced paganism into theology, as Rome does.
1 November, 2010 at 11:14 am
Ok.