The word of god from living voices: Orality and literacy in the Pentecostal tradition

Pneuma

Volumn 27, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 225-255

  Camery Hoggatt, Jerry ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84865342160     PISSN: 02720965     EISSN: 15700747     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/157007405774857337     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. There is a good introduction to the New Hermeneutic in Paul Achtemeier's work by that title (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969). A fine representative collection of essays, including essays by Fuchs and Ebeling themselves, is to be found in James M. Robinson and John Cobb, Jr., eds., The New Hermeneutic (New York: Harper and Row, 1964).
2. See Cassirer's magnum opus, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-57),
3. and his programmatic exploration, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale University Press), esp. chaps. I and II, 1-26.
4. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), esp. 3-9.
5. Hans Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1960), 419.
6. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).
7. Edward Sapir, "Language," in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1933).
8. This essay is also found in Culture, Language and Personality: Selected Writings of Edward Sapir, ed. D. G. Mandelbaum (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1957), 7-32.
9. Benjamin Whorf, Collected Papers on Metalinguistics (Washington, DC: The Department of Foreign Services Institute, 1952), 162.
10. Sapir, Language, Culture and Personality, 162.
11. The attentive anthropologist reader will note that what I am advocating here is sometimes referred to as "The Great Divide" theory of orality, and may object that that theory has engendered an expansive discussion among anthropologists. For a sweeping overview, see Michael E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffmann, Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution (Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 279-80. I would urge my reader to note that I am not embracing a rigid break in human thought processes based on emerging technologies, but the more modest claim that changes in technology assist human reasoning in particular directions, while limiting them in others. This thesis is compatible with either resolution of the debate. What is in view is not the reasoning of the mind as such, rather the more informal processes by which societies come to believe that certain things are true. What happened in the past is only tangentially relevant to my thesis.
12. Donald Foss and David Hakes, Psycholinguistics: An Introduction to the Psychology of Language (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 384.
13. The mental operations that factor here are explored in some detail by Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1983).
14. Polanyi identified an important aspect of mental processing explored earlier by George Miller, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," Psychological Review 63 (1956): 81-97.
15. The mind, it seems, can manage only a limited number of "chunks" of information at a time. The way in which the mind manages linguistic information is rightly the subject of the subdiscipline of psycholinguistics, on which I have based my study of biblical exegesis, Speaking of God: Reading and Preaching the Word of God (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), esp. chaps. 4, 5, and 6, pp. 47-85.
16. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966).
17. Jerry Camery-Hoggatt, Grapevine: The Spirituality of Gossip (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press), 2002.
18. See also Jerry Camery-Hoggatt and John Court, eds., Irony in Mark's Gospel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
19. Camery-Hoggatt, Grapevine.
20. Sapir, Language, Culture and Personality, 162.
21. I have explored this in an earlier essay under the rubric, "The Hermeneutic of Everyday Life." See Grapevine, 84-94.
22. On this and other arguments in favor of slavery, see Jim Hill and Rand Cheadle, The Bible Tells Me So: The Uses and Abuses of Holy Scripture (New York: Anchor, 1996), 3-6. Note especially the counterargument on pp. 7-10.
23. Isak Dineson, Out of Africa (New York: Random House, 1937), 259.
24. Benjamin Whorf and John B. Carroll, eds., Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 213f.
25. From a 1975 interview, "Interview on the Prison: The Book and its Method," in volume 1 of Dits et écrits, p. 752.
26. Reference in J. Faubion, ed., Power (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), xv-xvi.
27. Camery-Hoggatt, Grapevine.
28. Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember (Cambridge: Harper and Row, 1984), 165.
29. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 7.
30. Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967);
31. Rhetoric, Romance and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972);
32. Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977);
33. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen: Routledge, 1982);
34. "Writing Is a Technology That Restructures Thought," in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. G. Bauman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986);
35. "Text as Interpretation: Mark and After," Semeia 39 (1987): 7-26.
36. Jack (John) Goody and Ian Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy," Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (1963): 304-45;
37. repr. in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 30 (this citation and those that follow refer to the pagination of the reprint).
38. Goody and Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy," 31.
39. Hobart and Schiffmann, Information Ages, 23.
40. Goody and Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy," 36.
41. I have in mind here Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), which traces out the use of mnemonic devices to preserve memory. Such devices value precise wording primarily in sacred stories, oral contracts, and genealogies, but freely adapt to working in other situations.
42. Tex Sample, Ministry in an Oral Culture (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 18.
43. L. Sprague de Camp, The Ancient Engineers (New York: Ballantine, 1960), 4.
44. An alternative view is put forward by Robert Pattison (On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock [Oxford: University Press, 1982], esp. chap. 4, "When Media Collide," 86-117). Pattison argues that many of the cultural advances made possible by print were in fact already in the works well before Gutenberg's invention of the printing press. An example is Lollardy, an English dissident movement that advocated the role of individual conscience already in the fourteenth century. In this view, print did not create the social changes associated with the Protestant Reformation; it reacted to them. Gutenberg was not an ideologue, but a businessman. In response, I would point out, first, that in the absence of print the Lollards did not have the means to disseminate its ideas easily and widely, and second, that the basic thrust of its theology was essentially oral (see p. 100). While they affirmed, as would Luther two hundred years later, the right of the individual to interpret the Word for himself (the masculine gender here is context-appropriate), what they regarded as Word of God was what was heard, rather than what was read. Furthermore, Lollardy was an heretical sect, but in its challenge to the view of authority codified in the formal Latin of the Church, it looked backward to orally transmitted traditions of dissonance. At most, what Pattison establishes is that the interactions between media and culture are complex and reciprocal.
45. Howard Goss, Winds of God (Comet Press, 1958), 65.
46. For this quote I am indebted to John Nichol, The Pentecostals (Plainfield, NJ: Logos, 1966), 77f.; Nichol does not give full documentation of his sources.
47. Sample, Ministry in an Oral Culture, 13.
48. Nichol, The Pentecostals, 57.
49. Sample, Ministry in an Oral Culture, 7'.
50. Allene M. Summer, "The Holy Rollers on Shin Bone Ridge," The Nation 121 (July 29, 1925), 138.
51. I have in mind the kinds of issues raised in Simon Chan (Spiritual Theology: A Systematic Study of the Christian Life [Downers Grove: Intervarsity, 1988])
52. and Joseph Kitagawa (The Christian Tradition: Beyond Its European Captivity [Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992]); note the subtitle of Kitagawa's book.
53. See esp. Alvin Padilla, "Living in the Hyphen: Theological Literacy from an Hispanic American Perspective," in Theological Literacy for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Rodney Petersen and Nancy Rourke (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002), 229-41.
54. Alkiviadis Calivas, "Theology and Theologians: An Orthodox Perspective," in Theological Literacy for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Petersen and Rourke, 23-38.
55. See the essays in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991);
56. an especially thoughtful review is by William H. Myers, "The Hermeneutical Dilemma of the African American Biblical Student," 40-56.
57. Robert Allen Warrior, "Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians: Deliverance, Conquest, and Liberation Theology Today," Christianity and Crisis 49 (1989), 261-65. Warrior writes poignantly of the struggle to read the story of the conquest of Canaan: "As a member of the Osage Nation of American Indians who stands in solidarity with other tribal people around the world, I read the Exodus stories with Canaanite eyes. And it is the Canaanite side of the story that has been overlooked by those seeking to articulate theologies of liberation. Especially ignored are those parts of the story that describe Yahweh's command to mercilessly annihilate the indigenous population."
58. Robert McAfee Brown, "My Story and 'The Story'," Theology Today 23 (1975): 172.