roachboy

since each movment--heretical at the outset, a denomination later if it manages to crete an institutional space for itself---defines the nature of the text and the criteria for defining closeness to it, it follows that each can be seen in entirely historical terms as manoevering in what amounts of a field of cultural production. since the texts--in this case the bible---are not themselves open to question, position is defined by controlling the variables outlined above.

this is the point at which historicizing and belief can run into conflict---what is at stake in the definitions of the status of the texts and the meaning of the term closeness is position--these are defined relationally with reference to other positions as they obtained at the points of origin (the emergence of the heretical impetus and that of the institutionalization of that impetus--the routinzation of charisma if you like) and not with direct reference to god--which, if you push this logic far enough, becomes little more than a textual function defined by the parameters put into place by the development of the instituional/denominational position.

this would be the problem created by introducing an historical sense into questions of interpretation, which in this space seem inevitably to run into questions of denomination/social position--and this is what people who operate within any of these spaces as believers have to limit.

asaris is quite up front about this, which i applaud (that is the sound you hear...)

i suspect that it is easy from this point to derive how i would, as someone who operates outside of this problem, would turn this logic onto his position.
and this is what i was trying to point to in the initial post.


i work as a historian in the three-dimensional world (sometimes in here as well, but i try to not let that part come in so much)--i am interested in the notion that history can corrode certainty, can undermine the sense of stability of the present, that it can push you into a space of thinking---this for political as well as methodological reasons.

so i do not subscribe to the translation of edmund burke that asaris worked into the above responses--nor to montaigne's more political ambiguous version, which arrived at a similar relation to tradition as a function of skepticism.

to get back to the question of interpretation, then, i would not route myself through consideration of tradition as if that in and of itself legitimated the argument i was making--simply because it does not operate as a singular term (this follows from the above) nor does it operate as binding.

how then would you address questions of validity?

it comes down to the usage of sources and the persuasive power of the argument--formal criteria--across which the rhetorical matters of defining the nature of the text and the meaning of closeness of faithfulness to it are all in play. from my viewpoint, these are basically political matters.

all this as an index of how quickly positions can diverge and how far they can diverge given the presence or absence of the structuring assumption of belief.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite