In the fourth and final volume of his study The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge, 2013), sociologist Michael Mann describes social power as “the capacity to get others to do things that otherwise they would not do.” By whatever means, power moves people to act. The first such social power, which Mann calls ideology, “derives from the human need to find ultimate meaning in life, to share norms and values, and to participate in aesthetic and ritual practices with others.” Ideologies necessarily change in response to societal crises: “Ideologies become especially necessary in crises where the old institutionalized ideologies and practices no longer seem to work.” Ideology is a dynamic response to upsets in the other sources of power, which he lists as economic, military, and political. Ideology steps in to supply power to move people beyond the crisis. Ideologies “fill the gaps” with hermeneutics akin to new theologies, religious revivals, reinterpretations of ancient symbols and stories.
This is where literary, historical, and social science criticisms serve canonical biblical studies, as each helps to study emerging ideologies within the biblical canon. Articles in the current issue of BTB examine ideologies rising to fill gaps in living realities of the biblical peoples.
Sandy Habib, in “Who Converts Whom? A Narrative-Critical Exegesis of the Book of Jonah,” charts the story line in the Book of Jonah in its various narrative stages. A new ideology unfolds with admirable craft and not without some ironic humor. A multi-faceted conflict emerges in Jonah: between Jonah and himself; between Jonah and God; between Jonah and the people of Nineveh, a one-sided conflict directed against non-Hebrews. The new ideology addresses Jonah's conflicts, dispelling them by portraying him as an ironic character.
Steven Muir, in “Vivid Imagery in Galatians 3:1—Roman Rhetoric, Street Announcing, Graffiti, and Crucifixions,” studies the significance of Paul's curious phrase, “It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly exhibited as crucified.” In 1 Corinthians 4:20 Paul writes that the Kingdom of God is proclaimed not in speech but in power; accordingly, Paul's speech and proclamation were “not in wise words but in demonstrations of spirit and power.” Muir concludes: “We need to reconsider Paul as a speaker and oral teacher, a topic hardly addressed in scholarship.” Paul presents his own sufferings as enabling him to re-present and portray Christ's suffering as a kind of spectacle for his audience.
Jason J. Ripley identifies an incarnational ecclesiology in Luke's theology in “‘Those Things That Jesus Had Begun to Do and Teach’: Narrative Christology and Incarnational Ecclesiology in Acts” Portraying the followers of Jesus as replicating the Jesus of the Gospels, Luke centers on Jesus as prophet par excellence. The prophetic ministry of both Jesus and the apostles include activities of healing, exorcism of demons, and even the raising of the dead. The church's conflicts, such as the resistance to the inclusion of the Gentiles, reflect the struggles in Jesus’ own lifetime against received beliefs and practices. Ripley concludes: The study of Christology in Luke “must also attend to the narrative Christology constructed via Luke's incarnational ecclesiology in Acts.”
Vincent Pizzuto delves into the contemplative in “The Deus Absconditus of Scripture: An Apophatic Hermeneutic for Christian Contemplatives,” expressing the need to “crack open the Bible in order to peer deeply into the transformative beauty contained within.” Realizing that “all language about God is finite and thus is necessarily an impoverished expression of the infinite,” an appropriate approach to knowledge of God is “to pry loose our hold on the sublime images we would otherwise delude ourselves into accepting as adequate descriptions of the Divine.”
