Three weeks into the Sunday evening theology class at The Mission, and it continues to edify. Sam is a fantastic instructor, almost Sproul-like in his ability to speak conversationally yet in a way where you could transcribe his lectures, word for word, and it would translate almost perfectly into print. The title of the course is “Wrestling with Scripture II: Kings, Prophets, and Wisdom” and it covers the prophetic and wisdom literature of the Old Testament. The reader for the course has been challenging\u2014but in a good way; the authors, particularly Walter Brueggemann, seem to adopt a more higher-critical stance on the text (they all conspicuously avoid gendered pronouns for God, among other things), but still have a deep reverence for the content in spite of the fact that they seem at times to subtly undermine\u2014perhaps intentionally, perhaps not\u2014the kind of circular reasoning that often bolsters an uncritical position on biblical inerrancy. I appreciate that; it feels like they’re demonstrating a safe space, a way forward, a place I can intellectually inhabit. I haven’t raised that point with Sam yet, but I feel like he would be sympathetic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One question I did<\/em> pose earlier this evening was about the recommended framework with which to approach the book of Jeremiah. The book is an account of the prophet’s experience of the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 587 BCE and the cataclysmic, profoundly traumatic experience that was, primarily for the nation, but also for him as someone who felt called to be a messenger of or advocate for God’s truth to a thoroughly apostate covenant people. The text for that part of the course was an excerpt from Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery<\/em> (a book I should probably read in its entirety), one of the first to recommend a trauma-informed reading of Jeremiah as a way to parse the author’s mindset and make sense of his many seemingly-contradictory truth claims. Herman’s book identifies categories a people group experiences as they live through a historical trauma like the one Israel suffered, categories like Constriction (Numbing), Hypervigilance, Fragmentation, and Doublethink. Those could all be unpacked at length, and Sam did to a degree during the allotted time, but in my own study, the categories really resonated with me personally in thinking about my own experiences of the past year (and more). So my question for Sam was whether it was appropriate to derive any kind of solidarity as an individual<\/em> from experiences the prophet related with the goal of giving voice to something communal<\/em>. In other words, I want to be very carefully on guard against the this-is-what-it-means-to-ME hermeneutic so prevalent in the average home Bible study or Sunday school class. To take something penned in the context of the community and scale it down, as it were, and map it onto my own life as a default just seems… Disrespectful of the text, somehow? Or like I’m moralizing something that has no business being moralized. Sam recommended a couple of books that I’m going to add to the Goodreads list. But\u2014and I discussed this with my counselor on Friday\u2014regardless of what application, if any, I draw from Jeremiah’s text, learning about those categories of trauma has been helpful in labeling experiences I’ve had, and labeling, naming, is the beginning of finding meaning in them, and integrating them into my concept of Self. More work to do, but it feels like a few more puzzle pieces fitting into place. Do I feel any different? Not really. But if there’s anything I’ve learned recently, it’s that I can’t engineer feelings; all I can do is plant the mental groundwork and trust that it will, somehow, some way, bear fruit. That’s the hope, at least.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three weeks into the Sunday evening theology class at The Mission, and it continues to edify. Sam is a fantastic instructor, almost Sproul-like in his ability to speak conversationally yet in a way where you could transcribe his lectures, word for word, and it would translate almost perfectly into print. The title of the course […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3245"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3245"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3255,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3245\/revisions\/3255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}