Seeds of a New Hermeneutical Principle: Liberative Difference

The day before yesterday I bumped into our postman. He looked really gloomy. 'I'm really sorry' he said 'But the BNP have got the royal mail to deliver their election leaflets. It makes me feel dirty....as if some of the people I deliver letters to just don't matter...'

Our postman was right...The splintering of marginalised urban communities, the demonising of ’the stranger’, the scapegoating of the British-Muslim community since 9/11 and the political abandonment of progressive multiculturalism sustain a model of citizenship that is premised on this ethic of oppressive difference.

We get divided into camps....religious as well as cultural....and when we are divided the only people that win are the BNP. But life's not like that is it? Those of us who live in big cities know just how everyday diversity is. We live in what's been called the 3rd space...different identities fusing, changing, re-creating something new in the city.

How can people of faith [often just as guilty of camp mentaility and race based thinking as anyone else] move beyond thinking it's OK in 2009 for a group of white dancers to come to a church social 'blacked up'? [It didn't happen in case you'er wondering but only because the Minister said 'No way.'] We need to move beyond saying 'Isn't diversity wonderful, just like a beuatiful rainbow.' Diffference isn't always wonderful...Let's be honest there are ways of thinking and acting that we say are OK but we recoil from because they are oppressive. So let's get real. Maybe what I want to call 'liberative difference' can help us out and help to put the BNP in their place....What do I mean?

Just this....As we engage in the life of the city and the life of our faith communities

Does the person we engage with accept or resist the dynamism of plural urban life? Do they see their own take on life as something that is open to change/challenge? Do they accept that people with other ideas/cultural stories are partners in struggle [or are they seen as competitors?] Do they see difference as a sign of life or a portent of doom? Are they ready to share with others in a coalition for social justice?

I really do believe that as I read my own scriptures and see the way in which Jesus depicts difference as gift that it can become a motor for real progressive change in the city. Not change that's a mask for conversion, but change that respects those with whom we share the city as partners, or even sisters and brothers....That's what I see in Jesus and that's why it makes my blood boil when the BNP parade around as if they were Christians....Let's be clear you cannot be a racist and a Christian....No ifs, no buts...That's why I get angry when my own Methodist Church is too slow and too hesitant to be up front with every single Methodist in Britain: 'Voting for the BNP is not compatible with being a member of the Methodist church...Choose one or the other but if you choose the BNP then you will no longer ne a part of the Methodist church.' Let's stop mucking around!

Liberative difference is built upon the divine bias to the stranger and the excluded

Liberative difference is a hermeneutics of the excluded and the demonised.

Liberative difference expresses the fluid, intra-contextual character of urban society.

Liberative difference enables a new conversation about ‘place’ as significant and multiple.

Liberative difference moves urban faith and politics beyond all forms of raciology

Liberative difference resources shared liberative praxis.

Liberative difference dubs prevailing antagonism towards difference, which becomes the driving force behind inclusive, networked liberative praxis.

Liberative difference enables a new critical multiculturalism to emerge which recognises the importance of the development of a progressive critical white identity.

Liberative difference unmasks and resists theological camp mentality.

I want to be able to look my postman in the eye and say, 'I said No to the BNP. So can you.' Don't we all want the same?

Readings of the Bible within dominant theology and theologies of liberation which perpetuate the myth of Christendom in a post-religious context are unlikely to have little impact beyond a declining Christian remnant. Readings of the Bible within dominant theology and theologies of liberation which neglect diversity and implicitly promote theological camp mentality implicitly preserve the hegemony of an excluding political and religious elite. A new urban Biblical hermeneutic is needed which is rooted in a nitty-gritty reading convention where the awkward questions of marginalised urban communities are not avoided, moralised or fenced off behind doctrinal orthodoxy.

This new approach will be underpinned by the insights garnered from reception theories within cultural studies and a reader response model of Biblical hermeneutics, comparable to that utilised by Rowland, Vincent and Davies and Beckford.[i] Writing from a postcolonial perspective Segovia illustrates the dynamic challenge embodied by reader response approaches to the Bible which locate the act of meaning-making, not in text or church, but in the encounter between the reader and scripture. This implies that there can be a range of alternative readings and invites, as Beal notes.[ii] Such fluidity can tend towards relativism unless it is informed by a guiding hermeneutical stance, or reading strategy. However, as Segovia notes, reader response hermeneutics can wrestle the privilege of interpretation away from ‘experts’, instituting a new democracy within Biblical hermeneutics.[iii] Fowler describes this paradigmatic shift, ‘No longer can meaning be understood to be a stable determinate content that lies buried within the text, awaiting excavation… meaning becomes a dynamic event in which we ourselves participate.’[iv]

It is because the act of reading the Bible is potentially a subversive co-operative venture that a political urban Biblical hermeneutic premised upon liberative difference and an option for the oppressed avoids the charge of relativism. In the hands of a conscientised reader the Bible can become a source of liberative reflection and counter hegemonic praxis, not an irrefutable canon of doctrinal orthodoxy as Tamez, Bauckham, Pixley and Clodovis Boff confirm.[v] Through the use of ideological criticism, as Stratton observes, a new and liberative Biblical hermeneutic can arise which interrogates both text and dominant traditions of Biblical criticism on the basis of a careful examination of the nature and location of power and its hegemonic character.[vi] In a diasporan urban context such an approach should be supplemented by an engagement with the counter-hegemonic postcolonial Biblical hermeneutics exemplified by the work of Sugirtharajah.[vii]

On this basis a new urban Biblical hermeneutic will assert a paradigm of insignificance and reversal which is characterised by the counter-hegemonic use of scriptural symbols which, when framed by a hermeneutics of liberative difference, can be brought into a mutual dialogue with emancipatory descriptors of urban life and struggle. This new Biblical paradigm can feed emerging urban communities of faith and resistance which provide the interpretive communities within which this paradigm is articulated.

Within the Gospels Jesus prioritises insignificance as a vehicle for a series of liberative reversals which dubbed the religious and socio-cultural hegemony.

[i] See Davies and Vincent, Mark at Work; Rowland and Vincent, Bible and Practice; Beckford, God and Gangs and Jesus Dub and Chris Rowland in Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert, ed., Reading from this Place Volume 2: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in Global Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 169-182.
[ii] Timothy Beal, in A.K.M Adam, ed., Handbook of Postmodern Biblical Interpretation (St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press, 2000), 128-130.
[iii] Segovia in Segovia and Tolbert, Reading from this Place Volume 2, 7-15.
[iv] Robert Fowler, Let the Reader Understand; Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 3. See also 25-26.
[v] Richard Bauckham, The Bible in Politics: How to Read the Bible Politically (London: SPCK, 1989)
142-150; Pixley and Boff, The Bible, the Church and the Poor and Tamez, The Bible of the Oppressed.
[vi] Beverley J. Stratton Beverly, in Adam, Handbook of Postmodern Biblical Interpretation, 120-127.
[vii] See Sugirtharajah, Voices From The Margin and Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation, especially 43-70 and 179-200. Sugirtharajah identifies a spectrum of counter-hegemonic postcolonial Biblical readings: Dissident, Resistant, Heritagist, Nationalist, Liberation and Dissentient.

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Salma Yaqoob calls for a big turnout on Birmingham jobs march « Birmingham Respect

Salma Yaqoob calls for a big turnout on Birmingham jobs march

Councillor Salma Yaqoob is backing the national ‘March for Jobs’ taking place in Birmingham this Saturday, 16 May. She is calling for a big turnout to send a strong message to the government that protecting jobs must come first. Councillor Yaqoob said:“There is hardly a family in the country which has not been affected by the recession. With unemployment now over 2.2 million, every day brings new job losses, and people across Birmingham are worried for their future. Huge sums of money have been used to bail out the banks. We need to see the same commitment to keeping people in jobs, and investing in vital industries to see them through this crisis.

“The government has its priorities wrong; with billions earmarked for wasteful and unnecessary projects like ID cards and the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system. It is time to send a strong message to the government that protecting jobs must be its first priority. That is the right way to protect individuals and families, but also to boost the economy at a time of economic crisis.”

The demonstration, organised by the Unite union, will assemble at 11am on Saturday 16 May at Highfield Road, Edgbaston (corner of Hagley Road), and march to Centenary Square for a rally.

http://birminghamrespect.wordpress.com/

BIRMINGHAM URBAN THEOLOGY FORUM

University of Birmingham
Urban Theology Forum

invites you to share in an afternoon seminar entitled:

SPACES OF RELIGION AND ECONOMY IN

A TIME OF UNCERTAINTY

To be given by

Stephen Willey [Chaplain @ NEC Group]
Gregory Roberts [Postgraduate student, University of Birmingham]
Markus Vinzent [University of Birmingham]

In the John Kydd Room at Elmfield House, University of Birmingham (Selly Oak Campus), Bristol Road, Selly Oak [just opposite Weoley Park Road]


Wednesday 24th June from 2-4.30pm

Please let Martin Stringer (m.d.stringer@bham.ac.uk) or Chris Shannahan (cjshannahan@googlemail.com ) know if you are able to attend.