Today I am short on time to get together a proposal for this year's DPT work.  This is bad news, I don't like being this close to a self imposed deadline and having nothing done.  A couple of weeks ago the ideas wre flowing nicely then a whole heap of important, interesting stuff came along and forced them out of my brain - and unfortunately not onto paper, literal or virtual.

I think that what I am wanting to dothis year has something to do with the hermeutical task of both reading and writing history.  My central, generic question for all of this is along the lines of 'what is an/the appropriate way of using historical documents in theological reflection' and my specific focus is 'Baptists considering the potential for change.'  I have to keep writing these down as they tend to get nuanced as I go along and there are always new and exciting 'side streets' opening up along the way.

This year's focus is on denominational history writing, and I think what I want to is probably two-fold:

1. To re-read key BUGB 'endorsed' texts to try to anser a series of questions:
   • What prompted the production of this document?
   • Who wrote it?  Allied to this, who commissioned/sponsored it?
   • When was it written?
   • What is included?
   • What methods or assumptions undergird the writer's approach?
   • Have primary sources or other references been identified - e.g.
     church books/minute books, press cuttings, denominational archives, etc?
   • What is the 'feel' and 'trajectory' of the document?  What is the
     document trying to do? 
   • Who is the target audience? 
   • Is it forward looking?
   • Does it endeavour to evaluate or simply to record
2. If possible, and following item 1 above, to interview or correspond with, some of the authors to explore their responses to (some of) the above questions and to compare the findings.

My feeling is that this would be valuable for various reasons:

1. It will help me to learn to read history in a different way - i.e. that I come to it with a set of questions that are not 'what happened in 1864,' expecting a 'gospel truth' answer, but actually 'what is going in the writing' as well as 'what is this document saying to me'
2. If it is possible to obtain responses from some of the writers, it will allow me to test out, to some degree, the degree of correspondence between their intent and my reading - connecting a 'real writer' to a 'real reader' and maybe allowing some picture of the 'perceived writer' and 'ideal reader' to be deduced?  (I feel a diagram coming on here...)
3. What I hope the work will do is then to begin to question how useful the history writing is for theological reflection - whether that might be on Baptismal practice, potential for change, atonement theories or anything else.   As a 'frinstance,' the 17th Century debate over singing of hymns affected both strands of English Baptists, with the majority of published rhetoric being by a couple of Particular Baptists, yet most histories report this as an issue affecting the General Baptists.  My suspicion is that the reasoning runs roughly thus: the General Baptists are seen as the heretics, and there is a suggestion that most of them slid off into Unitarianism, they are the 'baddies.'  In C20/C21 English Baptists cannot imagine not singing, even if we squabble over books, words, guitars and data projectors.  To acknowledge that we once squabbled over whether or not to sing is a tad embarassing.  So let's say it was the heretic Generals who didn't like it, then we have mentioned it but can distance ourselves from it.  I can't prove this is the case, it is my reading of someone else's writing - my hermeneutic if you like.  Setting aside, for a moment, this perceived distortion, the 'high level' histories don't seem to be much help understanding underlying thinking, it is necessary to go back to the dusty musty documents of the time - which of themselves are an incomplete and biased record.  This is fun for me, for not much use to normal people who have neither the access not inclination to dig them out.  The more practical question that arises is, I think, can we find a way of writng and reading history that is more than summaries but that actually helps us to think - history that 'speaks to us' that has 'light and truth' of how God's people wrestled with issues or situations in a way that does inform our present and shape our future?  All of this is a long way down the line, and certainly not this year's project.  For now, I think I have to be content with beinning to relate better history and hermeneutics along with a bit of literary stuff; thankfully this does connect back to last year's work on congregational studies, which as well, otherwise I'd be, in a word, stuffed!

Point 3 above should be more than one paragraph but I can't fathom out how to get this thing to let me do it so the formatting is right!  Sorry, I haven't finally learned how to write long paras.

Now the challenge is to turn this waffle into a workable proposal and email it north by midnight!