A Primer on Hermeneutics (4) Those of you who have engaged the discussion of hermeneutics from a more scholarly perspective know that I am presupposing all the conversation from Dilthey to Wittgenstein, Saussure to Derrida, and everything in between. One cannot in a FB post educate lay people on these issues apart from reading the plethora of work written in the last 120 years. Nor can we expect these folks to read these authors. So please understand I am making huge leaps in these posts to get to the heart of what I perceive to be the most significant issues. On the other hand I want to say to all of you who have never read this immense literature that it is beneficial and worth reading if you ever have the interest and get the opportunity to do so. Fewer things are more difficult than trying to summarize the debates in this area for the past century. Ever since Friedrich Schleiermacher changed the parameters of the hermeneutics conversation around 1800, the question of how we interpret the Bible has become enmeshed with both the text we read and ourselves as readers. These two poles of interpretation (or what Anthony Thiselton, following Georg Gadamer calls ‘the two horizons’) suggest that it is impossible to go back to the pre-modern way of interpreting Scripture as though all we needed to do was to ‘find out what the author was saying.’ We now know that we impose interpretations on texts, we do not simply find them. Every interpretation is both an engagement with the perspective of the author and the perspective of the reader. Both ‘horizons’ have to be taken into account. This means that YOU as a reader of scripture are not simply figuring out what an author is saying, as though you could figure out his/her mind by parsing an original language. It also means that any time YOU interpret a text you are saying something about yourself and your social location. Texts in this sense are not neutral. We Christians have chosen the Bible to be the ‘Text’ by which we understand or interpret our experience. We could have chosen White Fang by Jack London or The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky or the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx. All texts have something to tell us about ourselves. But the Bible is the text by which Christians seek to understand their ‘meta-narrative’, the big picture or story of life. In a previous post I noted that there is a way of understanding the progression of insight, using the categories of Paul Ricoeur, from first naivete to critical distance to second naivete. People in a first naivete come to the Bible with a ‘God said it, I believe it, that settles it for me’ approach. That works usually until a personal crisis. Then that person moves to critical distance. They begin to question whether what they have been taught is true or whether the biblical text actually says what the person(s) in first naivete assert it says. Most Christians in America remain stuck in these two choices. For some, the Bible is the unquestioned Word of God. For others, there are significant problems with the text. Neither of these persons has yet learned the importance of moving to a second naivete. One way of discussing the double sided nature of interpreting texts is to observe, as does Anthony Thiselton (Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self) that a first naivete has the form of a ‘positivist enquiry.’ By this he means that the reader reads texts as though the self was neutral. It has two dominant forms in our culture: that of someone like a Richard Dawkins and that of a Mark Driscoll. Both approach texts/objects as though the observer was ‘tabula rasa’ (a blank slate) and as though the subject (the reader) could objectively determine the ‘reality’ (or understanding) of the object of inquiry. This is the old split made famous by René Descartes, known as the subject-object split. As I mentioned in a previous post, even modern quantum physicists no longer work with this approach to science. Thiselton, commenting on Ricoeur (who is commenting on Freud) confirms that interpretations “simply confirm that ‘double meanings’ in texts simultaneously hide and reveal, conceal and disclose” (69). This is the same thing I asserted in a recent post about the bloody character of language. Here is that excerpt: “Language is bloody. It is not clean. It did not then originate in some heaven of heavens but in the abyss of false accusation, death and cannibalism. Human language is full of lies and deception. It masks. Language is therefore not the best medium to bring divine communication. It took the real act of the death of Jesus and his pronouncement of forgiveness to overturn language. His bloody cross spoke truth to language in language. His resurrection vindicated his truthfulness to language by language. Language is bloody; we ought not to trust it completely. This is how we got to this post-modern state we are in where many experience everything as relative. The hermeneutics of suspicion (Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Feuerbach) grounds all modern discourse. Foucault and Habermas have shown how power agendas take our language and use it. George Orwell wrote (1984) about this capacity for ‘doublespeak.’ In other words, our current condition of deconstructing human communication, recognizing its dark side and its power grabs is essential if we are going to move past the pre-modern emphasis on the purity of language (represented by certain rabbinic traditions and certain Jewish, Muslim and Christian theories of the inspiration of sacred texts). If you find yourself a post-modern Christian but still feel you have to hold onto pre-modern views of the Bible, know this: Language is bloody, deceptive and manipulative because human symbolic communication is corrupted by our scapegoating tendencies. Yet, just as God did in the dying Jesus, God is able to ‘speak’ to us a redemptive word, a word that heals and brings peace. As Karl Barth puts it “revelation is a gain to language.’ God’s self-revelation at the heart of the victimage mechanism is also redemptive, we call this at-one-ment. In the cross God has also brought truthfulness back to language. But language can only be true if it bears this cruciform character, if it speaks honestly about the ‘other’, if it speaks forthrightly about its persecutory character.”
Posted on: Fri, 17 Jan 2014 13:27:50 +0000
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