Walter Brueggemann wrote a great article for Theology Today back in the 90s. He relates the Old Testament texts to current ecclesial issues in an interesting, thought-provoking and classical Brueggemann way.
He points to the difference between modeling the praxis of communities on the Monarchy experience versus the exilic experience. In the exilic experience the community is a textual community. The experience of the textual community is a marginalizination and it responds by favouring specific. particular and 'peculiar' texts.
Yet simultaneosly there is an experience of pluralism and diverse interpretations in the textual community. There is still a process of canonization and a supreme appreciation of the text as authoritative. Yet there is no single, authoritative interpretation only authoritative texts. Thus (it seems to me) there is midrash.
Brueggemann links the experience of exilic Israel as a textual community to the experience of Post-Christendom.
I wonder: is there away to be a textual community as the Church in the 21st Century? With the splitting of the Anglican communion the fundamentalist-modernist debate is returning. Can this type of Ecclesiology provide a way forward or will it lead to other dead ends?
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