*** warning - research post - normal readers beware ***
Markus Bockmuehl in Seeing the Word (see earlier post for details) offer fives theses on the implied reader of the New Testament, which I have reduced down to a few phrases (so there's a level of interpretation here)
The implied reader is:
- a stakeholder
- a convert to the gospel
- a person who sees NT as authoritative
- a person who is part of a faith community and reads within that community
- a person inpsired by the Holy Spirit who expects the NT to speak
From this I have postulated an equivalent five that might perhaps apply to the reading of Baptist history
The implied reader is
- a stakeholder
- a committed Baptist - or at least committed to understanding Baptist ways
- a person who is looking for some sort of authoritative information
- a person who will probably be part of a Baptist community, but who will probably read in splendid isolation
- a person for whom this information is somehow relevant
I'm not entirely sure that the 'essence' of these are necessarily all that helpful - though I need to think about it more. Anyone reading any non-fiction or text book presumably hopes it will give reliable information and be relevant insome way. The reader will in some sense have a committment to the ideas or ideals contained.
This is not do belittle or diminish what I've read, on the contrary, it is only in seeing it written down that I became aware of these factors - yet another 'duh, I'm so fikk' moment (or an 'aha! now I get it moment', to be more positive). I think these five themes can be useful questions as I seek to 'paint' my implied reader - how is this person a stakeholder? what kind of authority might this person assign this information? And so on.
Alas, when I think of real readers of much Baptist history - and even of the Bible - the gap between implication and actualisation can seem enormous.
Comments
I remember being fascinated by a piece written by (I think) Robert Kysar about the rhetorical strategy of John ch 10. It highlighted the way the (actual?) reader was drawn to agree with Jesus against the people he was arguing against. His statement that they could not/would not accept his truth claims placed the reader in the position of wanting to take Jesus' side (or at least having to pick a side). John is pretty polemical and has the stated intention of writing "that you might believe". The debate then is over whether John's gospel was written to evangelise intrigued outsiders, or to fortify people with an existing commitment (or to steer people with an existing commitment into a particular way of believing).
Most NT literature sets out to persuade in one way or another (discuss).
How persuasive does the Baptist material you're researching set out to be? And who's it trying to persuade?
Different questions from yours? Unless the writers' rhetorical strategy is to speak to an implied 'reasonable person in the pew'/'committed person in the pew'/'radical person in the pew') and persuade the actual readers that's the sort of Baptist they'd like to be and here are some patterns for being so.
Good questions Andy - I'll get to them eventually no doubt.
A week or so after reading Underwood, I am still left feeling he's writing for a bunch of 20 something blokes, all very earnestly training to be Baptist ministers and secretly yearning to be successful.
Other Baptist writers have (allegedly) aimed at the person in the pew, but sometimes I think their aim is to make boring sermons seem interesting compared with history and/or to provide a cure for insomnia. That's a bit mean, and I need to reread them properly with these questions in mind, but does ANYONE who doesn't have to actually read these books?
You're right of course. I wouldn't originally have read any Baptist publications if either
a) I hadn't needed to find something out; or
b) I hadn't needed to understand my tradition more as a prospective Baptist minister (so that I could then go on to understand that virtually none of the people in our pews could give a toss about covenantal relationships, pre-Union doctrine or 'denominational' statements, as most of them were Baptist either through marriage, geography or an accident of birth).
If people in the pews had wanted to read history in those days I guess they'd have read popularisers like Bryant or Trevelyan (or whoever their predecessors were - Arthur Mee???).
Very interesting... as always! Cheers from -Switzerland-.