I continue to re-present my understanding of how we use the Bible in different ways. I hope that the ideas come into better focus, that the images and metaphors take on greater clarity over time. In a side conversation at the Truth Conference, an image emerged that I have reflected on somewhat and think might be helpful.
The pre-modern reader of Scripture tends to think of the meaning of the Bible as a single whole, with God as the sender of the message, the text as the message, and him or herself as the receiver of the message. The person often will say that the receiver is "all people," but in practice this amounts to saying that "I" am the receiver--when you place yourself in your default perspective as having the same message as everyone else, you have automatically implied that those whose default perspective is different from yours are less the receiver of the message.
And this is a crucial point. The text may be the same, but the meaning of the text changes as the "sender" and "receiver" are altered. The same message for all times and places is simply not a possibility of language.
So the pre-modern and the fundamentalist (quarter modern, three-quarter pre-modern) reader fiddles with the definitions of the words of the text to create a unified meaning to the text.
The modernist evangelical reader also seeks a unified meaning to the text while at the same time trying to listen to the words in terms of their original meanings in specific contexts and cultures. This is a more daunting task. It requires at the very least for the interpreter to abstract principles from individual contexts, pealing off circumstantial and cultural forms from essential substance.
What I have pointed out in my "Postmodernism and the Bible" paper is that this process of abstracting and integrating is something that the Bible itself does not and cannot do for us. It is something we by the very nature of the linguistic situation are forced to do from the outside looking in.
The phrase that emerged from the conference conversation is "alongside the text." The ideas that we call "the Bible," the truths that we call Christian, emerge alongside the Bible. They are not the Bible itself, for they are reflections on individual texts. They are not the Bible alone, for we bring all sorts of things to our reflections on those texts, not only our reason and experience but our culture and traditions as well.
I want to explore this image of using the Bible as Christians--living alongside the text in the space where the Spirit, theology, and the church meet at a table to discern God's will and revelation. It involves letting the books of the Bible be themselves without shoving a bunch of preconceived notions down their throat. It acknowledges that we will need more than the original meaning--we will need the Spirit to hear God's voice in these words for today authentically. And we will need a hefty communion with the saints both past and present, for they are the body that the Spirit indwells.
Let's journey alongside the Bible together...
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2 comments:
It requires at the very least for the interpreter to abstract principles from individual contexts, pealing off circumstantial and cultural forms from essential substance.
Meaning that they attempt to do violence to the text. The attempted divorce from context, especially cultural context, can be damaging. They are seeking universal principles through the use of universal reason that would have been very alien to the culture that they are trying to interpret; they treat the ancients as simply less philosophically informed moderns, ignorant of the way that their cultural values shaped their more abstract notions (if we can use that term, given its current cultural ethos).
In the Biblical world, the "culture" was central to self-identity: the historical ties to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the temple rites with their ties to the heavenly temple, the numerous use of familial terms (brother, sister, seed), etc. are continually referred to in reference to Israel. To divorce an Israelite and their views from their culture is to kill their identity and views, to show them in an inappropriate light, and thus perhaps not show them at all. Maybe this isn't what your statement was intending, but I think it hightly dangerous (despite its being done for at least 300 or more years within Christian 'theology').
Thanks for important critique, Kevin. I am wanting to move beyond what I've called a modernist evangelical hermeneutic. The main problem I have with the abstracting principles approach is that it does not take seriously the dialog between biblical books or the development of understanding within the canon and beyond. In this regard, the Asbury concept of "evaluation" (I prefer to call it "integration") is in my opinion a significant advance beyond the standard evangelical hermeneutic. It allows texts as they were to dialog with each other.
Dr. David Thompson of Asbury put it this way, "I guess I'm okay with it being messy." In my next post I thought I would apply what I have in mind to Jehu in the Old Testament.
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