Reading Genesis 18-19 in this Society, a Post-Meeting
Commentary
Chad Pecknold, University of Cambridge
I stood in the hallway in a hotel
in Denver, waiting for someone outside the room where I met with the Society
for Scriptural Reasoning for the first time.
There was hope in the waiting.
And this comment records some streaming-reflections on the practice of
reasoning around Genesis 18-19 in this Society, after the fact.
Every Reading a New Reading (Wolfson)
I have written down the word "pray" in notes to myself about Abraham
"bowing" towards the ground (18.2ff), which strikes me as part of the
logic of this text, the enactment of prayer-in-body (seeing, sitting,
standing, walking, washing, eating, drinking, judging, speaking,
communing). I misread my handwriting and think for a moment that it
says "play" rather than "pray." For this moment I read Abraham as
playing - and think immediately of Sarah's laughter (18.12-15) and of
the levity that attends the sons-in-law (not in body), so that they
"play" with the urgency of Lot's warnings (19.14). For this moment my
misreading leads me deeper into the text (or does it?), and I am
reminded that it doesn't say "play" but "pray" - but my own
self-correction is now irrelevant.
I now am reading a tension between laughter and judgment in this text, in this
Society. Professor Wolfson writes: "The
originality of hearing-again is predicated on the recognition that every
reading has the potential to be new and, consequently, the writing of a text is
never complete for in each moment both the substance of text and reader is
refashioned" [see
link
for context].
The various notes I have made to myself now all appear to lend
themselves to this laughter and judgment-which I take, in a pragmatic
sense, to be "musement" and correction.
That is, in Peircean terms,
the play, musement, or abduction which leads to hypothesis-making (e.g. by
misreading 'pray' as 'play') is bound by neither deductive nor inductive logic,
and is then refashioned by reparative judgments (from 'play' to a thickened
description of 'pray') in a constant opening up of 'original' horizons. Is this a novel reading?
The
tension between musement and correction unfolds for me again as I think about
Professor Watson's typology. I am
uneasy with it. What seems to him most
"theologically profound" (namely, Justin) strikes me as coming too close to a
closing-off of the text because it
seems to exclude the undiscovered profundity of the other readings. It closes off, rather than opens up, because
it makes judgments that do not 'play' well with others
. Do I mis-read him? Is that an unfair judgment? There is, surely, another way to read
Watson. But then I also worry again
about what seems to be the dismissal of Augustine as Reader. For him, Augustine is "most problematic" and
he seems to exclude him for fear of his very "attractive" reading (even
invoking the language of temptation). I
would have thought that the "most problematic" could also be academic code for
dismissal and the dismissal of that which is 'other' in Augustine's reading
should itself be a problem for us as a Society. This is too easy, too quick a dismissal. It closes us off from an original
reading. For this moment, my misreading of Watson (if
it is a misreading) leads me to think that the logic of musement and correction
could be happening in his paper too (whether intentionally or
unintentionally). The movements between
Gunkel and Calvin, between Augustine and Justin play together as mutually
correcting each other, inviting other bodies into this movement of play and
correction in the community of inquiry.
Inscribing Flesh (Kepnes)
A very brief comment by Steven
Kepnes about "inscribing flesh" prompted me to look again at his
written response to Elliot Wolfson. "If we follow what Buber called the
leitworte or leading words as the key to the text's own
immanental form of reasoning, the words "I, Me and You" (given often in
Hebrew suffixes) jump out at us and call for interpretation." This is
given "incarnational" significance, or rather "the dynamic of
immanence," reading God's appearance as physical - in a triadic way.
This is given "incarnational" significance, or rather "the dynamic of
immanence," reading God's appearance as physical in a triadic way. This is to read the sign of God onto flesh,
and also to play this sign against the (painful) brit of inscribing flesh in circumcision. It is the writing onto flesh, apparently, which moves us from
brit to brit olam, and which inserts the letter "heh" in Abram's name. In
these senses inscribing flesh becomes an invitation to the eternal reading and
re-reading of this embodied covenant.
The writing and reading of bodies has this transformative quality:
playing, judging, mourning, healing, correcting, leading us into life, into
this embodied covenant.
Laughter and the play of language in the face of judgment, or
correction, or attempts to address suffering stand as dialectical
figures in my own reading of this text, at this moment, in this Society.
Not only in times of crisis, but perhaps especially in times of crisis,
we turn to Torah. That is, we turn towards that which is most
generative - the embodied covenant, the Word, the invitation to renewal
- and the promise of laughter. It seems to me that this promise comes
to us by way of mourning, by way of judgment and correction - and that
tension between laughter and judgment is a tension worth having in our
ways of reasoning and reading the inscribed - an inscribing that always
points beyond itself and opens up into life.
Call it scriptural reasoning.
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