I am currently teaching an introduction to the Bible to our church's Sunday morning adult education forum. As part of that introduction I have written a brief introduction to hermeneutics in general and to post-modern hermeneutics as I learned them in seminary in particular. I thought that work might be of interest to others, so I am posting it here.
Bible 101, Session 3
Hermeneutics
An Introduction to the Theory of Interpretation
Questions for the session:
Is it possible to read a text without interpreting it?
Where does the meaning of a text reside?
Does a text mean the same thing to everyone?
Does a text mean the same thing in all times and places?
How do we go about proper interpretation of a text?
Hermeneutics
The fancy word “hermeneutics” means the theory of interpretation. We used to joke that the great benefit of a seminary education is that we can use the word hermeneutics in a sentence. It’s easy to be flip about it, but hermeneutics is (are?) really, really important. Learning the principles of post-modern hermeneutics that I discuss in this handout was an eye-opening, nearly life-changing experience for me in seminary.
But why do we have a theory of interpretation at all? Isn’t reading a text just about reading the words and understanding what they mean? Well, no, that isn’t all that reading a text is about. The process of a reader reading and understanding a text is actually quite complex. Post-modern hermeneutics exposes and explains that complexity.
Modernist hermeneutics
Whether we know it or not, most of us in our context today come to a Biblical text, or any text for that matter, with what we can call a modernist hermeneutic, a modernist theory of interpretation. Modernism is the worldview that developed during the European Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Those times have been called the Age of Reason. In the Enlightenment human reason came to be regarded as the measure of all things, of all truth. The Scientific Revolution was a big part of the Enlightenment. A major consequence of the triumph of reason and science was that the European view of truth was reduced to factual truth. (For a longer although still very brief discussion of this development see Chapter 1, “The Rise of the Materialist Worldview and Its Effect on Christianity” in my book Liberating Christianity.) History came to be seen as the effort to discover about the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” “how it actually was,” to discover the facts about the past, in a famous phrase by the German historiographer Leopold von Ranke. (At least it’s famous with us professionally trained historians.) Truth came to be considered as something factual, objective, and unchanging.
We are all children of the Enlightenment. That fact has many, many consequences, of most if not all of which nearly all of us are completely unaware. We take the modernist worldview for granted. We think of it just as the way things are, always have been, and always will be. In that conception we are quite simply wrong. The pre-modern world operated with a very different worldview, and the post-modern world is developing a new worldview that rejects many of the foundational assumptions of modernism.
Modernist hermeneutics is rationalistic and oriented toward facts. It assumes that texts that sound to us like they are reporting facts are indeed reporting facts. A text may be wrong about what the facts are or were. Reporting sometimes contains factual errors, but we assume that reporting objective, observable, verifiable facts is what journalism, history, biography, and all scientific writing are all about. Because modernism assumes truth to be objective, that is, to have a reality of its own outside of the meaning that a particular reader gives to it, it assumes that a text means the same thing to every reader and in every time and place. Modern hermeneutics assumes that a text means what its author intended it to mean and that no other meaning can legitimately be found in it.
A good example of modernist hermeneutics that may be a bit easier to understand than the concept is when applied to the Bible is the demand by conservative politicians for “strict construction” of the United States Constitution. These politicians say judges must only determine the original intent of the “framers” of the Constitution to determine what any Constitutional provision means. Then the judge must simply apply the framers’ original intent to the case before the judge. The judge’s job, in this view, is not to discern what a Constitutional provision might mean in our contemporary context. It is only to discern what it meant when it was drafted.
Modern Biblical literalists use modernist hermeneutics. They read the Bible as if it were reporting facts, which to a considerable extent it does not and never intended to do. They assume that every Biblical text has one objective, discernable meaning and that no other meaning someone claims to have found in the text is legitimate. The assumption of modern Biblical literalism is that if a text is not factually true it is not true at all. That assumption is grounded in the rationalistic, scientific modernist worldview. It is a modernist hermeneutic. That hermeneutic was well expressed by a woman who once said to me “I want my Bible straight, without interpretation.” Her statement assumes that every Bible text has one set meaning that can be discovered simply by reading it, without interpretation. It is grounded in modernist hermeneutics.
Post-Modern Hermeneutics
Post-modern hermeneutics rejects most of the assumptions of the modernist worldview and of modern hermeneutics. Post-modern hermeneutics begins with the assumption that meaning, any meaning, is not an objective, absolute, discoverable thing. Meaning is something that the human mind creates. Humans are meaning-making creatures. That may indeed be the most basic definition of what it means to be human that we can come up with, one that more than any other definition distinguishes us from other animals. Interpretation is the quest for meaning; and humans make meaning, it doesn’t exist apart from the human mind that creates it.
If meaning is something the human mind creates and not something with objective reality apart from the human who makes it, then the meaning of text does not and cannot reside in the text itself. It must be created by a human reader who encounters the text. For post-modern hermeneutics, then, meaning arises and can arise in the encounter, and only in the encounter, of a reader with a text. The meaning does not reside in the text itself. The reader adds it to his understanding of the text.
The realization that meaning is not something that has objective reality apart from a human mind that creates it and that the meaning of a text therefore does not reside in the text but arises from the encounter of a reader with a text has several important consequences, several other hermeneutical principles that necessarily arise from that basic understanding. One is that the idea that anyone can read a text without interpreting it is a conceptual impossibility. Reading is unavoidably interpreting. We may not be aware that we are interpreting a text that we’re reading. We probably think that we’re just reading what it says, but we’re not. On its own the text says nothing. In a very real sense the text exists as a text only when someone is reading it. We may experience a text as simple and has having an obvious meaning. That experience of the text is itself an interpretation. A text that seems simple to us may be impossibly difficult for someone else. Take a text, for example, that might appear in a driver’s education manual that says “insert the key into the ignition.” Simple, right? Well, to those of us who have lived with automobiles all our lives yes, it is simple; and its meaning is pretty obvious. But read that text to a member of a tribe living deep in the rain forests of the Amazon who has never seen a car before, and that text will be impossibly dense and incomprehensible to that person. The reader makes all the difference. Same text, very different experience of the text, very different interpretations of the text.
This principle, and indeed all hermeneutical principles, can apply to things other than texts. In the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy an African tribe living in the Kalahari Desert finds a Coke bottle. The people have no idea what it is. The strange artifact introduces the concept of property to the tribe with all of the conflict property can bring, conflict hitherto unknown by these people. So they decide that the gods, who to them obviously put the Coke bottle there, must be crazy. We would much more likely interpret the presence of the bottle to mean that someone had left it there; and if there was no one to have left it there, we might guess that it fell out of an airplane, which is what actually happened in the story. Same Coke bottle, different interpretations of its origins and its meaning by people coming to it from radically different contexts. And it’s not that the African tribe members are wrong. Within their culture, their world, they are not wrong. Their interpretation is different from ours, but for them it isn’t wrong. It gives the Coke bottle a meaning that makes sense in their context. We say the bottle fell out of a plane, but who is to say that the gods didn’t cause it to fall out of a plane?
The story of the tribe and the Coke bottle illustrates another hermeneutical principle that arises from the realization that meaning arises only in the encounter of a text, or anything else, with a particular human reader or observer. Every reader comes to a text in her or his own particularity. Every human being lives in a particular context. Her context consists of things she shares with other human beings living in the same context, things like religion, socio-economic status, culture, and so on. Yet each human being lives within his context with particularity, as a particular human being not totally identical to any other human being. A person’s particularity consists of the way that she lives as an individual within her life’s context. When a person reads a text he does so from and with his human particularity. He brings some things to the text that he has in common with others in his context, but he brings other things to the text that are unique to him, to his individual life experience. The meaning of a text arises in the reader’s encounter with the text in all of her particularity, both those things that she has in common with others in her context and things that are unique to her. The particularity of no reader is exactly the same as the particularity of any other reader. Therefore, the meaning of any text can and probably will differ at least to some extent depending on who the reader is.
Perhaps an often used illustration from the recent history of Christianity will make this point clearer. The native peoples of what is now Latin America were introduced and converted to Christianity (sometimes forcibly, but we need not go into that atrocity here) by Europeans. Those Europeans and their descendants became the dominant elements in all Latin American countries. They told the native people what Christianity means. At the risk of oversimplification that is regrettable but unavoidable here we can say that the European masters and their clergy allies told the people of Latin America that Christianity is about how you get to heaven when you die. That’s how these dominators of the culture interpreted Christianity. It is how they interpreted the Bible. It’s what they told the people they should be concerned about.
Then, in the second half of the twentieth century, a strange thing happened. Some of the people in Latin America began to read the Bible for themselves. They read it by themselves, but more importantly they began to read it together with others who shared their living context, their place in life, their culture, their poverty, their marginalization within their own societies. They formed what are called in English Base Communities where they studied the Bible and talked about its meaning either with no participation by clergy or with clergy, usually Catholic priests, who were sympathetic to them and the harshness of their living conditions. When they began to read the Bible without direction from those who had for so long told them what it means they made a startling discovery. To them, it didn’t mean what they had been told it means at all. It meant something quite different. The Bible to them isn’t about how you get to heaven when you die, it is about justice, especially justice for the poor, here and now, in this life, on this earth. Out of these Base Communities came Liberation Theology, a Christian theology that focuses on Jesus’ call for the establishment of the Kingdom of God as a call for social, economic, and political transformation in the direction of justice for the poor here, now, not there, not then.
Who was “right”? The dominant forces in those societies who said that Christianity was about how you get to heaven when you die or the poor people who said that it is about economic justice on earth? Both of them were. For the wealthy and powerful Christianity is about salvation as getting to heaven when you die. For them the Bible perhaps calls for charity toward those in need, but it isn’t political, and it certainly isn’t about economic revolution. For the poor and disenfranchised it may also be about how you get to heaven when you die, but first and foremost it is about God’s demand for justice for the poor. Different people with different particularities read the Bible differently. These meanings of the Bible didn’t exist as detached objective realities. They arose in the encounters of different people with the same texts.
There is one more conclusion from the basic post-modern insight that meaning derives only from the encounter of a reader with a text that we must consider. Because meaning is not found in the author’s text alone, a text can have a meaning that is actually different from the author’s original meaning, one that the author may not have intended at all. I have certainly had the experience of people finding meaning for them in my sermons that had never occurred to me. I suspect that all preachers have had that experience. But again perhaps an example from outside the Bible will help. In Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for Godot several characters are waiting for their friend Godot to show up, to join them. Throughout the play they wait and talk and wait and talk. Godot never appears. Godot is absent. Many readers interpret the play as being about the existential experience of the absence of God. Although Beckett, despite being Irish not French, wrote the play in French not English, the missing character’s name that begins with God has supported that interpretation of the play. Many people find in it a story about the absence of God.
Samuel Beckett, the man who wrote Waiting for Godot, always insisted that his play is not about the absence of God. He said he intended no such meaning when he wrote the play. We have to take Beckett’s word for that. So we accept that the author never intended the meaning God is absent. Does that mean that all of us who find a story about the absence of God in the play are wrong, that that meaning simply isn’t there? No, it doesn’t mean that at all. Beckett, like all authors, lost control over the meaning of his work as soon as he turned it over to a reader. Finding a meaning about the absence of God in Waiting for Godot doesn’t require us to rewrite Beckett’s text. We find that meaning in the text that he wrote. That meaning arises in the encounters of a great many people with Beckett’s text. It actually is quite irrelevant that Beckett himself didn’t intend that meaning.
Scholars express this truth by saying that a text has a “surplus of meaning.” A well-written text will have the meaning that the author intended. As the example of Waiting for Godot shows it may well have other meanings too. Sometimes it is difficult or impossible to determine what meaning an author intended, especially if the author lived a very long time ago in a very different historical context from his work’s current readers. Yet the text can still have meaning for its readers even if they don’t know what the author intended. It may not be the meaning the author intended. Fine. The text still has a meaning that arises, as all meaning does, from an encounter of a reader with the text.
The Bible and Hermeneutics
The principles of hermeneutics—any hermeneutics—apply to the Bible in the same way that they apply to any other text. After all, whatever else it may be, the Bible is at the most foundational level a collection of written texts. We encounter it the same way we encounter any other written text, by reading it (or having it read to us, which for our purposes amounts to the same thing). As is true of any other text, the Bible has meaning only when a human being, a meaning-making animal, reads it and creates a meaning from it. Even if we accept for the sake of argument that the words of the Bible are inspired by God, or even if they come directly from God the way Muslims say the words of the Qur’an do, we still encounter those words the same way we encounter any other words, by reading them. The dynamics of interpretation, that is, hermeneutics, therefore unavoidably apply to the Bible the same way they apply to anything else.
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