Ben Griffith: What the Tea Party And Evangelicals Both Get Wrong
What is interesting and troubling at the same time is that the Tea Party is using the Constitution the same way that so many fundamentalist Christians use the Bible. The basic idea for fundamentalist Christians is that simply reading the Bible will cause you to arrive at a basic meaning that all rational beings should automatically interpret -- the plain sense meaning. They deny any kind of subjectivity in the reading process; there is no textual agency taking place. The text speaks its meaning to the passive reader.
Many Christians place enormous emphasis on the text of the Bible as the ultimate source of information and compliment their high view of Scripture with an equally high view of an interpreter's ability to objectively read the text and arrive at the same answers. Much the same way, Tea Party proponents have elevated the Constitution's status and claimed that every reasonable person should read it and automatically come over to their side.
A belief that a text speaks its own meaning and should convince someone based on its own inherent meaning not only ignores the past half century of philosophical thought, but it brims with the arrogance required to claim that everyone who disagrees with you is either too incompetent or too dishonest to acknowledge the obvious meaning. A personal claim to objective reading exhibits an inability to claim the subjective influences that alter each person's perception and gets in the way of healthy dialogue whether political or religious.
Ben Griffith: What the Tea Party And Evangelicals Both Get Wrong
this is a hermeneutic and maybe an epistemic observation.
is it accurate?
Many Christians place enormous emphasis on the text of the Bible as the ultimate source of information and compliment their high view of Scripture with an equally high view of an interpreter's ability to objectively read the text and arrive at the same answers. Much the same way, Tea Party proponents have elevated the Constitution's status and claimed that every reasonable person should read it and automatically come over to their side.
A belief that a text speaks its own meaning and should convince someone based on its own inherent meaning not only ignores the past half century of philosophical thought, but it brims with the arrogance required to claim that everyone who disagrees with you is either too incompetent or too dishonest to acknowledge the obvious meaning. A personal claim to objective reading exhibits an inability to claim the subjective influences that alter each person's perception and gets in the way of healthy dialogue whether political or religious.
Ben Griffith: What the Tea Party And Evangelicals Both Get Wrong
this is a hermeneutic and maybe an epistemic observation.
is it accurate?