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Deep Linking the Scriptures
Today news items starting popping up on "Deep Linking" as a story surfaced about a newspaper demanding that sources link only to their home page, a nd not directly to internal articles via their URL. It's a phenomenon known as "deep linking" (first I've read of it), but it's been going on as part of the currency of regular day to day Net copnversation, particularly on Weblogs.
It seems this is a candidate for jumping onto another Theoblogical Issue: deep linking as it relates to the Bible or Scriptural references. It's something that has been handed down for centuries in religious circles. Quoting a passage in relation to something being talked about. "Proof-texting" is how it often characterized. The Bible is a "Deep Link" source , by its very nature, inviting one to summon a particular section as dialogue between the holy tradition and contemporary issues.
The danger always exists, that the link does not pull enough context with it. The publishers lamenting the "deep linking" tendencies of "competing" websites are concerned with having the follower of a link know who owns or who has written this piece of content. But theirs is not a concern with proper contextualiztion of the point of the story. Theirs is advertising and "click-throughs" and proper accounting for the copyright of the story. The Bible has a different underlying reason for presenting context: to avoid overly simplistic, and eventually legalistic "proof-texting". The wider and more elaborate the context provided for a story, the better fulfillment of its message that will occur. The very structure of hypertext itself will aid , I think, in the easy "zooming out" from a particular passage to its wider context, for the very placement of a story often belies its hermeneutic in the eyes of the writer. It's sitz in leben (setting in life) is all important for relaying an theological point somewhat in tune with the intent.
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© Copyright 2003 Dale Lature.
Last update: 9/23/2003; 3:35:17 PM.
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