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Dennis, I think my post must have been unclear. A couple of comments, in an attempt to clarify: On Fri, 2 May 1997, Dennis D. Martin wrote: > And how would one know that these texts were not written with the intent > of explaining Christianity? Only if one knows that Jesus Christ was not > the fulfillment of the Jewish Law and Prophets. Christians know that he > was, non-Christians know with equal conviction that he was not. Your > daily explanations to your students sound, at least as described here, > like an effort by one true believer to convince other true believers of > the falseness of their beliefs. Not the falseness of their beliefs, just the non-universal nature of their assumptions. It is certainly not my intention to convince them that their beliefs are wrong, and were I to attempt to do so, my attempt would be doomed to failure. Rather, I tried to encourage them to explore/examine the culture that produced these texts, and to try to do so without assuming that that culture was somehow incomplete and primitive. > > Of course, the Christian interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures presumes > that Jesus Christ as Messiah was intended as such from eternity and that > all of God's acts throughout time point toward the Incarnation. This is a > sweeping claim and one that non-Christians rightly do not accept. But how > can you be so sure you know the "intent" of the Author of the Hebrew > Scriptures? Perhaps because you do not believe what Christians believe > (about Jesus of Nazareth and hence about the Hebrew Scriptures--the two > are an inseparable package for Christians but not for non-Christians). I don't know the intent of any authors. One thing I neglected to mention in my post was that the texts themselves change this way and that according to the assumptions the reader(s) bring to them. > > Given your beliefs (non-belief in Christianity as universal truth), one > can understand your daily efforts to set the minds of your students > aright. But that would be a situation of conflicting beliefs, not of a > self-evidently superior explanation of the meaning of the Hebrew > Scriptures patiently correcting a self-evidently false explanation of the > Hebrew Scriptures. Perhaps. But I do think it's a bit unfair to assume that my purpose is to somehow change a belief. For the purposes of the class, I merely insisted that we consider the texts in the context of the culture which produced them. How my students use these texts to explain, define, challenge, or support their personal religious beliefs is their business, not mine. [paragraph deleted] > One might gently point out to Christian students that they are reading the > Hebrew Scriptures through Christian eyes and that not everyone does so. > But I suspect they might already know that, give that they are committed > Christians. Or, if indeed they are not aware of this, they might receive > this knowledge quite readily. They might continue to believe that their > beliefs are correct and the beliefs of others, including the way those > beliefs influence the reading of the Hebrew Scriptures, are wrong. But Actually, we had quite a few productive discussions about reading through Christian eyes. Such discussions are especially useful for opening up further discussion about constructing readings of texts. But, as I have said, my job is not to induce them to abandon their religious beliefs, even if I wanted to do so (which I certainly don't). [rest of paragraph deleted] > Your students are in effect pointing out to you that they are > committed to their faith. Why this should be held against them or why > they should be patronizingly set straight by those > who are committed to other faiths or to the faith of no-faith, I do not > entirely grasp. But that is probably because I am biased. This is a bit difficult to respond to, because it had not occurred to me that insisting on an acknowledgement of the cultural context of the texts would be patronizing. Nor do I have any reason to hold my students' personal beliefs against them, Christian or otherwise. What I can say is this: they had no problem reading Greek and Roman texts with an eye toward the cultural windows (however small) such texts leave for us. I simply wanted them to attempt to approach biblical texts with the same method. We worked out, as a class, how we might go about trying to do so; what we came up with was a phrase that went something like "the text we are working with is our 'world'." Many of my students had never read any biblical texts (something which surprised me). Here and there, they expressed surprise at what they found (my personal favorite was the class-wide reaction to Moses; one student said "How did we get from the Moses of the Bible to Charleton Heston?"). We talked a lot about those surprises, and, as far as I know, none of them shook the foundations of anyone's faith. [last two paragraphs deleted] I don't know if what I've had to say clears up the muddy parts of my inquiry or not. But I do hope it's at least clear that a great deal of our class work with these texts was to explore cultures that are long gone and not to debate the validity or invalidity of personal religious faith. Beth Crachiolo University of Iowa [log in to unmask] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%