I had a chance to take my "Dust and Ashes in the Anthropocene" talk for another spin today. It was perfect timing, as the Sophomore Tutorial ended last week, and I have to start thinking about next semester's classes, one of which is called "Religion and the Anthropocene." My hosts were an almost secret dinner society on the Upper West Side. The audience of eight, including sociologists of New York religion, a pair of retired university professors, and a few people from less well-known seminaries, turned out to be the perfect size for a great discussion.
The most interesting question was whether my "conjectural future exegesis" was really eisegesis - and if that was a problem: "fifty years ago I would have said it was," the questioner observed. Does the Anthropocene change the rules? I qualified that when new questions were put to a text which enabled us to make sense of things in it which didn't make sense before, that seemed like exegesis to me. But at least one of the things I mentioned in my talk - Deborah Bird Roses' interpolating a stray dog into the scene of Job's abandonment, changing everything - was clearly adding to the text!
In fact my argument, closer in approach to the sociologists than to the theologians, was never really about "the meaning of the text" so much as the meaning different people make of the text. I certainly have ideas about the "meaning of the text," and can poke holes in many other interpretations, but I still don't feel quite qualified simply to interpret the text. Interpreting it for the Anthropocene I can perhaps do. But do I really dare say that Job now calls us to ecological conversion, to ask the beasts and learn from the trees, to make kin with the non-human world? Or is it the moment calling, with old texts falling in line or destined to fall by the wayside?
Eisegesis or exegesis - do we have time for the distinction any more?
The most interesting question was whether my "conjectural future exegesis" was really eisegesis - and if that was a problem: "fifty years ago I would have said it was," the questioner observed. Does the Anthropocene change the rules? I qualified that when new questions were put to a text which enabled us to make sense of things in it which didn't make sense before, that seemed like exegesis to me. But at least one of the things I mentioned in my talk - Deborah Bird Roses' interpolating a stray dog into the scene of Job's abandonment, changing everything - was clearly adding to the text!
In fact my argument, closer in approach to the sociologists than to the theologians, was never really about "the meaning of the text" so much as the meaning different people make of the text. I certainly have ideas about the "meaning of the text," and can poke holes in many other interpretations, but I still don't feel quite qualified simply to interpret the text. Interpreting it for the Anthropocene I can perhaps do. But do I really dare say that Job now calls us to ecological conversion, to ask the beasts and learn from the trees, to make kin with the non-human world? Or is it the moment calling, with old texts falling in line or destined to fall by the wayside?
Eisegesis or exegesis - do we have time for the distinction any more?
