Keeping religion away from the BIble?

There’s an interesting conversation going on between (among others no doubt) Doug Mangum, Phil Sumpter and Ken Brown about (historical) objectivity and (religious) interpretation of Scripture.

There was a time, many moons ago, when I believed there was an (essentially singular) objective and original meaning to texts which should control our interpretations, and that we could recover it through presuppositional awareness and careful historical criticism. Oh the hermeneutical innocence of youth.

I still think there is an original meaning to a text, and that careful study of ancient texts can help us discern some (perhaps a lot) of what it was. It is not only our own presuppositions, however, that prevent us from fully discerning that meaning, though they can certainly get in the way. It is that we simply don’t know all the things that the original speakers and recipients knew. Even knowing the same cultural world, they must from time to time have said the ancient equivalent of “Oh, you mean X” “No, actually I mean Y”. Knowing less of the linguistic and cultural contexts within which they could sometimes misunderstand each other, we must necessarily misunderstand them more.

When it comes to religious texts, such as scripture, we are rather prone to assume “this is that”, though less than past generations did. Witness the ways, for example, in which hardly anyone questions whether the Pentecost narrative of Acts, the worship of the Corinthian Church, and the contemporary experience of glossolalia are all describing the same phenomenon. Historical enquiry only becomes possible when there is an appreciation of the otherness of the texts, and a good sense of history helps the conversation between past and present to be wary of cutting the interpretative conversation short in this way. This is, I take it, at least in part what Doug’s Ziony Zevit quotation is getting at.

Otherness, however, is only part of the story, and an assumption (sometimes a desire to find?) that the original meaning is different from contemporary meanings may in itself mislead. The contemporary experience of glossolalia may in fact help us to a better interpretation of the ancient text, and “this” may indeed be “that.” In neither case, however, is it simply a question of a past meaning and a present one.

The text-in-transmission generates meanings other than the original meaning as people, cultures and texts converse with each other. When the text is canonised and placed alongside others, new conversations open up. The New Testament, whatever else it is, is also the fruit of having a Jesus-shaped conversation with the Law, the prophets and the psalms. In that conversation the text is changed as much as the interpreter, sometimes, as one translation is preferred to another, quite literally.

Within the pages of the Hebrew BIble the pre-exilic texts are reshaped and retold in post-exilic editions, and original meaning and context alike are (hopefully soundly-based) conjectures that are as much about mapping the story of the text as exploring its meaning. What historical criticism can do is elucidate the conversation and help us hear the voices that went into speaking the text. What tradition does, at least in part, I suggest, is help us hear the ways that different people have listened to the text.

I wonder therefore, whether public (historical) reading, and community (traditional) reading, has to be put into any kind of necessary opposition. Certainly there are forms of both which will not give the other house room. I would like to think there are also forms of both which can sit down at the same table for a good conversation around the text.

Tagged as: hermeneutics, History, tradition