Reading the Christmas Stories: What is biblical criticism? Part 3

Hopefully you have all done what I suggested last time and made notes on both of the nativity stories. Below are my notes (sorry for the bad formatting, WordPress for some reason does not allow arbitrary css styles on html elements, so I just gave up and let wordpress format it as it saw fit).

Reading the Christmas Stories: What is biblical criticism? Part 2

Now, let’s all do a little critical reading of the Bible together.

Dallas Bible Events

There are a couple of events in the Dallas area that I will be attending in the coming months. I thought others might like to know about them. Both are free and open to the public. If anyone wants to get together before or after I am open for that. If you don’t want to see me, I can’t say that I blame you, but the events should be pretty good.

What is biblical criticism? Part I

What is Biblical Criticism?

If you read a book on biblical criticism, you are likely going to be confronted with a large number of terms which describe various types of biblical criticism. For example, I just finished reading To Each its Own Meaning, which dedicates one chapter each to different types of criticism. Here are the chapter titles: source criticism, form criticism, tradtion-historical criticism, redaction criticism, social-scientific criticism, canonical criticism, rhetorical criticism, structural criticism, narrative criticism, reader-response criticism, poststructuralist criticism, feminist criticism, and socioeconomic criticism. That’s a lot of criticism! As I read the book I started looking for commonalities; why can so many things be called criticism? I think they all share three basic assumptions regarding epistemology, univocality/multivocality, and methodology.

The Trinity, Two Formulations

Yesterday, I heard St. Augustine’s formulation of the Trinity. He gives it as a series of logical propositions as follows:

Mormon Anxieties

A week or so ago some state had some vote about marriage, or so I have heard. It was discussed ad nauseum in the bloggernaccle, if I remember correctly. In all honesty, as a mostly libertarian, I couldn’t have cared less about the whole thing, especially since I no longer live in said state. What I did find interesting was the whole discussion in the ‘nacle and in church, which I think revealed something very important about us Mormons: our fundamental anxieties.

Translation Styles and Book of Mormon Apologetics and Exegesis

For the past couple of days I have been reading An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon. Like most books or papers on the Book of Mormon I have read, it lacks a theory of Book of Mormon translation and suffers because of this lack. I would like to propose a rule for all future efforts at Book of Mormon apologetics, archaeology, or exegesis. The rule is that before you do anything you have to lay out your theory/explanation of the translation style used in translating the Book of Mormon. This means that before you attempt to explain something about the text you have to explain what kind of text you are working with.

Ledges on the Slippery Slope

One of the better bible blogs is Alan Lenzi’s Bible and Ancient Near East. He is also the featured interviewee at biblioblogs this month. I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Where we fail: Mormon pedagogy and Fowler’s Stages of Faith, Part Three

The main distinguishing feature of Stage 4, Individuative-Reflective faith, is the capacity and need for critical reflection. The critical reflection is directed both at the self and at a faith tradition. Religious symbols are no longer taken to be ontological realities, but are transformed into conceptual meanings. It is a stage of demythologizing. Finally it is a stage of tension between one’s subjective feelings and the pursuit of objectivity.

Where we succeed: Mormon Pedagogy and Fowler’s Stages of Faith, Part Two

I think that we Mormons help people transitioning from Fowler’s stage 2 to Fowler’s stage 3 remarkably well. I think saying we are in the top 5 or 10% here would not be exaggerating. For those who are not familiar with Fowler’s stages I’ll give a brief summary of stages 2, 3, and the transition in between, followed by why we as Mormons do so well.