Parliament Funk

“A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.”

- P. J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores, xxv.

There's an awful lot of politicking going on right now about issues I care about. I get frustrated with Washington and with myself about how issues are framed and approached. As a member of a religion that has been oppressed, ignored, and manipulated by the government (as well as one that has used the government to oppress and manipulate), church-state relations are always kind of foggy to me.

It strikes me as odd (maybe even hypocritical) that folks who normally tell us to keep our Christianity out of politics (for example, on abortion, LGBTQ issues, what have you) see no problem with using Christianity to criticize the government's stand on immigration (SoJo, I'm talking to you!). I'm pretty sure that a lot of this comes down to how we view the perspecuity of Scripture (at least in the Christian tradition). What does it address, and what doesn't it address? Where are normative statements and where are descriptive statements? How do we discern?

In my seminary training, there was no course offered on hermeneutics - the science of interpretation. We're paying for it now that we have a little bit of biblical knowledge, a whole lot of "praxiological reflection," and no where to hang it all within a system because - other than systems theory - there is no acceptable systematic expression of life because that's a product of European intellectual hegemony. Most of my assumptions are either implicitly derived from the way confessional documents interpret Scripture or are simplistic statements that need to be parsed (such as Scriptura sacra sui ipsius interpres, which assumes that the Scriptures have both veritas and claritas). I've been supplementing my training by reading folks like Craig Blomberg, but it would have been nice to have this in the curriculum.

What to do....