Stop 3 of Volume One
for the Blog
As it appears that the company
that originally published the revised edition of my book Liberating the
Bible is no longer in business, I have been preparing a slightly revised
version of the three books that make up that revised edition. I intend to put those
volumes on Kindle Direct Publishing or get them out by some other means. As I
was reading Stop 3 of Volume One of that revised edition, Approaching the
Bible, it struck me that it is both really well done and very important. So I
am posting it here. Perhaps it will prompt you to buy the three volumes of the
revised edition of Liberating the Bible when they come out.
Stop 3
The Art of Biblical
Interpretation Part One: Hermeneutics
© Thomas Calnan Sorenson, 2021. All rights
reserved.
This book is Volume One of a
guided tour of the Bible. Most readers of this work have very probably already
read the Bible, or, more likely, they have read parts of the Bible. Not all
that many people have read all of it, although of course some have. I’d be
willing to bet (not that I’m a betting man) that by far most of the people who
have read the Bible or parts of it were unaware that as they read the Bible
they were simultaneously interpreting the Bible. Well, here’s the truth of the
matter: They were. They probably didn’t think they were. They’d probably be
surprised to be told that they were. Still, they were. As I hope to explain to
you here, it is impossible to read the Bible—or anything else for that
matter—without interpreting it. Just take that assertion as true for now, and
understand that because reading necessarily involves interpretation it is
really important to understand the basics of interpretation before we start
reading the Bible together. It is my aim to give you the basic understandings
and techniques of interpretation here.
All Reading Is Interpretation
In the course of my work as a
pastor I have had people say to me that they just want their Bible straight,
without interpretation. I suppose it isn’t a surprising request. After all, we
live in a culture that tells us that a document means what it says and says
what it means. If you want to know what a document means all you have to do is
know what it says. Some of us however have been exposed to a different
understanding of meaning. Any of us who have taken any sophisticated literature
courses know that different readers interpret literature in different ways.
Sometimes a passage is intentionally vague. In Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy did the protagonist
mean to kill the woman in the boat or not? Some read the book as saying yes,
others as saying no, and still others as the book not answering the question at
all. Each of those readings is an interpretation of the text. Many of us know
Orwell’s great book Animal Farm. The
characters are farm animals, but is the book only about farm animals? Or is it
about Communism? Or is it about capitalist society? It’s pretty clear that it
isn’t just about farm animals, but even saying that much about it is an
interpretation. Once we interpret the book as not really being about farm animals
we can’t help but ask what it really is about. We might give different answers
to that question, but no matter what answer we give we are interpreting the
book simply by asking and answering the question.
You may well be saying OK, but
some texts are so simple that no interpretation is involved in reading them. Yet
even when we read something like “See Spot run” we’re probably doing some
interpreting. At the very least we are forming mental images of the situation we
understand the text to depict. Those of us of a certain age may remember the
illustration of that text in our first grade reading books. That illustration
is an interpretation. It depicted Spot as a dog. It showed Spot running with a
particular gait. It may have shown the dog’s tongue hanging out even though the
text says nothing about the dog’s tongue hanging out. Even if we don’t remember
an illustration we probably form a mental image that is in effect an
illustration, and that image is an interpretation of the text. It fills out the
picture to which the text points with its three short words. It interprets what
“run” means. It interprets what Spot is and what Spot looks like. We really
don’t even read something as simple as “See Spot run” without interpretation.
The simple fact is that we really can’t read anything without interpreting it.
Seeing as how the Bible is the
subject of this tour, let me give an example from the Bible. We all know the
famous verse John 3:16, often said to be the most quoted verse in the Bible. It
reads, in the well-known King James Version translation, “For God so loved the
world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him
should not perish, but have everlasting life.” I am sure that Christians without
number have read, and do read, that verse with absolute certainty that they
know what it means and with absolute certainty that they are just reading it
and are not interpreting it. I’m afraid that the simple truth is that they are
wrong about that. Say someone reads the word “gave” as meaning sent to earth to
be crucified. I’m sure many Christians read the verse that way; but the verse
doesn’t say “gave to be crucified,” it only says “gave.” So “gave to be
crucified” is an interpretation of the verse even if the person reading it that
way doesn’t think that she is interpreting it but is only reading what is
there. Most Christians probably understand the word “believeth” in the verse to
mean “take certain alleged facts about Jesus to be true,” that he is God
Incarnate, that he is Savior, and so on. That’s mostly what “believe” has come
to mean today, to accept certain factual assertions that we take but can’t
prove to be true. Yet reading that meaning of the word believe into the text is
in fact interpreting the text. Scholars today don’t think that is what the
Greek word used here and many other places in the New Testament and that is
translated as believe means at all. They give the word a different definition,
which means that they give the text a different interpretation. There are
similar issues around the words that the King James Version translates as “have
everlasting life.” More modern translations tend to render that phrase “have
eternal life” rather than everlasting life. Most people probably read “eternal”
as meaning the same thing as “everlasting.” They think it means unending life
in heaven after death. Actually, in the Gospel of John that isn’t what eternal
life means at all. We won’t get to John until Volume Three of this tour, so if
you want to know now what eternal life means in John go look up John 17:3.
That’s where John defines it, and it has nothing to do with heaven. John gives
the term an interpretation when he defines it as he does in that verse. Readers
give the term a different interpretation when they define it differently.
However we define it, we are giving the verse an interpretation as we do.
These examples suggest a truth
about reading. It is simply impossible to read much of anything without
interpreting it. I suppose you could say that when you look up a phone number
in a phone book (or today more likely on line) you aren’t interpreting the
number when you write it down and dial it (or today more likely punch some
buttons on a phone, a motion we still oddly call dialing even though our phones
don’t have dials). You certainly aren’t doing any very deep interpreting when
you do that, but you are at least reading the number characters as actual
numbers, which I suppose it a very basic kind of interpreting. You are
interpreting the figure 6 that you see in the number as meaning you need to
press the 6 on your phone in the proper place in the order of the number. Even
in that simplistic, numerical example you are doing some interpreting.
Yet of course here on this tour of
the Bible we aren’t dealing primarily with numbers, and we aren’t dealing with
simplistic texts either. We will discover on our tour that the Biblical texts
are far from simplistic, sometimes maddeningly far from simplistic. Those texts
are extraordinarily complex. They come from cultures that understood reality
far differently than we do. They were written by people with what to us are
very primitive understandings of nature, the structure of the universe, and
humanity. Those understandings affected how they thought and how they wrote.
When we bring our very different understandings to our reading of the text,
what seems the obvious meaning of the text (in those cases where there is one)
is perhaps very different from what the author understood when he wrote it.
Those different understandings may well lead us to interpret the text quite
differently from the way the text’s author meant it. As we will learn shortly
that doesn’t necessarily make our interpretation wrong, but it does mean that
we are interpreting the text even when we think that we aren’t.
So on our tour we will look at the
nature of interpretation. We will do that in two stages, each of which has a
four bit word to name it. We deal first with “hermeneutics.” Hermeneutics is
the theory of interpretation. Then on our next stop we will take up “exegesis.”
Exegesis is the practice of interpretation. If we can’t read the Bible without
interpreting it—and we can’t—then we are well advised to understand
interpretation before we dive into the Bible. So here we go.
Hermeneutics Defined
The fancy word “hermeneutics”
means the theory of interpretation. We seminarians 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 really, really
important. But why do we have hermeneutics, 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, we have just seen that that isn’t all that
reading a text is about. The process of a reader reading and understanding a
text is actually quite complex. Reading always involves a process of
interpretation. Wherever there is any kind of process scholars will come up
with theories about how that process works. There are different theories about
the interpretation of a text that takes place in any reading. In particular
here we will deal with what I (and scholars generally) call modernist and
postmodern hermeneutics. I am an adherent of postmodern hermeneutics, but to
understand postmodern hermeneutics we have to start with what came before
postmodern hermeneutics, namely modernist hermeneutics.
Modernist Hermeneutics
Modernist hermeneutics is, I
suppose obviously by now, a particular way of reading and interpreting a text.
Actually, what is being interpreted doesn’t have to be a text. It can be
anything we perceive—a piece of art, music, you name it; but here of course we
are concerned with texts, so I’ll talk about texts. Modernist hermeneutics is
the way of reading and interpreting texts that is part of a much larger
worldview called modernism. Today we are all products of modernism. Modernism
has shaped our view of reality. It has shaped what we think is true and what we
think is good. To understand modernist hermeneutics—and you probably use
modernist hermeneutics even if you’ve never heard the term before—we have to
understand the larger concept modernism.
Modernism is the worldview that
develop during the Enlightenment, that revolutionary period of human thinking
that took place in western Europe in, roughly speaking, the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and the early part of the nineteenth centuries CE. It was shaped in
major ways by the Scientific Revolution that was a part of the Enlightenment.
As all progression in human thought is, the Enlightenment was to a considerable
extent a reaction against what had come before it. So to understand the
Enlightenment we have to understand the pre-Enlightenment worldview that
prevailed in western Europe for centuries if not millennia before the
seventeenth century. In particular we have to understand what the
pre-Enlightenment world understood to be the nature of truth and of how we come
to know truth. It’s not a simple subject, but we need here at least to scratch
the surface of it.
Before the Enlightenment western
European culture understood truth and how we know truth in a rather complex
way. Some commentators say that pre-Enlightenment people didn’t understand
truth as consisting of facts. They say that before the Enlightenment people
didn’t read the Bible literally, that is, factually. This school of thought
says that the understanding of truth as consisting of facts arose only in the
Enlightenment under the impact of the Scientific Revolution. We, or at least I,
might wish that were true, but I’m afraid it is an oversimplification.
Unfortunately, the fields of philosophy, theology, and Biblical studies are
often ruled by oversimplifications. Before the Enlightenment people did
understand facts to be truth. We humans can’t really live without understanding
truth as consisting at least in part of facts. Specifically, pre-Enlightenment
Christians and Jews did understand the stories in the Bible to be factually
true. That’s why, for example, the Roman Catholic Church reacted so strongly
against the developments in the science of astronomy by scientists like Kepler,
Copernicus, and Galileo. Those scientists, and others, used careful and
detailed observations of heavenly phenomena to overturn the old understanding that
the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun rotated around the
earth. That, of course, is the cosmology of the Bible. Christianity had
understood that cosmology to be factually true from its beginnings. When the
Bible says that Joshua caused the sun to stand still in the sky (Joshua
10:12-13) people believed that the sun moves across the sky as it appears to do
and that it could, and did, stand still. There is no reason for us to deny that
premodern people understood truth as fact. Marcus Borg calls the
epistemological state in which premodern people lived “precritical naiveté.”
People believed that the Bible was factual simply because, before the advent of
critical methods of analysis and scientific investigation, they had no reason
not to.
They did not, however, understand
truth only as fact, or at least the more sophisticated minds among them did
not. The premodern world understood kinds of truth other than simply factual
truth. Here’s a famous quote from the ancient church father Origen (active
early to mid- third century CE) that illustrates the point:
For who that has understanding will suppose that the first, and
second, and third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun,
and moon, and stars? and that the first day was, as it were, also without a
sky? And who is so foolish as to suppose that God, after the manner of a
husbandman, planted a paradise in Eden, towards the east, and placed in it a
tree of life, visible and palpable, so that one tasting of the fruit by the
bodily teeth obtained life? and again, that one was a partaker of good and evil
by masticating what was taken from the tree? And if God is said to walk in the
paradise in the evening, and Adam to hide himself under a tree, I do not
suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain
mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally.
Origen knew that the seven days of creation story found at
Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 makes no sense as fact. He knew that the story of Adam and
Eve in the Garden of Eden, found in chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis, is very odd
indeed if we insist on taking it as a record of actual facts. Yet he says that
these stories “indicate certain mysteries.” What did he mean by that, and does
what he meant mean anything for us?
What we see in this quote from
Origen is that premodern people weren’t tied to the Bible as fact. When Origen
says that the scripture indicates certain mysteries he is speaking of a kind of
truth that the premodern world most commonly called allegorical. Premodern
people had no problem with reading the Bible as what they called allegory.
Unlike Origen many of them did understand the Bible stories factually, but they
recognized both that there are other layers of meaning in the stories and that
their factuality just isn’t the most important thing about them. They were
comfortable with the understanding that the stories, so much more than being
mere statements of fact, point beyond themselves to a truth that cannot be
reduced to fact. At the end of this Part One I will introduce you to the
concept that symbol and myth are the language of faith and of the Bible. In the
ancients’ understanding of the Bible as allegory we see that, though they may
have used different language for the notion than we do, they too understood
truth to be far deeper than fact.
All of that changed with the
Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. In the Enlightenment human reason
became the standard for all truth. The Enlightenment had forerunners of course.
The origins of modern science, which because a major hallmark of the
Enlightenment, go back at least as far as Aristotle in the fourth century BCE.
The scholastic theology in the High Middle Ages, represented by towering
figures such as Anselm and Aquinas, was rationalistic in the extreme. Yet
before the Enlightenment human reason was not the only measure of truth and was
indeed not even the primary measure of truth. Rather, fundamental truth, the
most profound truth, came from divine revelation. Anselm and Aquinas used
reason in support of the truth they believed to have been revealed by God.
Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, the primary
text for classical atonement soteriology, sounds very rationalistic; but Anselm
simply accepted as divine revelation that God came to earth in the person of
Jesus of Nazareth. Before the Enlightenment in western Europe essentially
nobody doubted the reality of God. Anselm, Aquinas, and others may have made
rationalistic attempts at proving the reality of God, but they never thought
that faith in the reality of God depended on the validity of those
rationalistic proofs. God was more or less taken for granted, as was the
reality of God’s revealed truth.
That understanding of truth began
to change in the sixteenth century with new discoveries in astronomy brought
about by precise observation and measurement of the movements of heavenly
bodies. Then the credibility of the church and of the Christian faith generally
came crashing down for a great many people through a period of violence and
devastation in western Europe called the Thirty Years War. Between 1618 and
1648 forces identified in part by political allegiance but primarily as
Protestant or Catholic ravished cities and the countryside across western
Europe. The violence of the Thirty Years War would be surpassed by orders of
magnitude in the twentieth century, but in the first half of the seventeenth
century Europe had seen nothing like it.
In those conflicts Christians
slaughtered other Christians in enormous numbers. People of an intellectual
bent began to question the validity and authority of religious teaching when
religious teaching led to such widespread death and destruction, much of it
done at least nominally in the name of religion. People began to look for an
authority for truth other than the church, and that meant other than faith.
What they found was human reason. Before the Thirty Years War was even ended by
the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, Rene Descartes, a French mathematician and
philosopher, wrote cogito ergo sum, I
think therefore I am, and the world hasn’t been the same since.
In the decades that followed human
reason became the standard of all truth. In fields including philosophy,
political science, economics, demographics, and virtually every other field of
human knowledge reason ruled the day. Eventually Enlightenment philosophers
including Hume and Kant sowed the seeds of the end of the Enlightenment, but
that end would not come for a long time. Rationalistic thinking spread to the
New World and produced the American Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution. Rationalistic thinking eventually led in the nineteenth century
to the positivist philosophy of Comte and the dialectical materialism of Karl
Marx. The German philosopher Hegel went so far as to say that the real is the
rational and the rational is the real. By the early decades of the nineteenth
century human reason had displaced revelation as the standard of truth in
virtually every field of human endeavor.
As people began to apply the
methods of human reason to the physical world, scientific knowledge expanded
far, far beyond what it had ever been before. Scientific method became
sophisticated and powerful, revealing truths of which people had had no inkling
in earlier times. The discoveries of science astounded the general public and
advanced thinkers alike. People in fields as far from physical science as
theology began to want their truths to be like the truths of science—objective,
observable, verifiable. Science produced truths that were demonstrable in a way
that truth had never been before, or so at least it seemed at the time.
Thinkers across the board wanted to demonstrate their truths as convincingly as
science demonstrated its truths. The world that this kind of thinking produced
is what we call modernism.
There is a truth about science
that is actually profoundly significant for hermeneutics. Science deals with
facts. Science establishes facts. At least, science establishes what it takes
as facts until some new scientific discovery requires it to rethink what the
facts are. Scientific truths are demonstrable. They can be tested by
experimentation. Scientific truths are in that sense objective. The issue in
science, at least in theory, is not what someone thinks about something.
Scientists do disagree on some supposed scientific truths to be sure, but the
issue in their disagreement is less what someone thinks and more what the
demonstrable evidence shows. The issue in a scientific dispute isn’t as much
what works for a particular scientist as it is what the science itself
establishes as fact. For science it’s all about the facts.
As science swept all fields of
human knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it brought about a
radical change in what people began to understand as truth. Truth got reduced
to facts. The power of science is such that what constitutes truth in science
came to constitute truth in every other area of human knowledge. It came to
constitute truth even in religion. The rationalistic, scientific reduction of
truth to facts that could be understood to be absolute and objective produced a
new hermeneutic, a new understanding of how anything is to be interpreted. That
hermeneutic is modernist hermeneutics.
Modernist hermeneutics is probably
just what you take for granted. It is probably what you consider reading to be.
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 modernist hermeneutics, that is, with a
modernist theory of interpretation. We are all children of the processes that
developed modernism. We are all children of the Enlightenment. That fact has
many, many consequences, although most of us are completely unaware of them. 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. Modernism is the result of the Enlightenment and the Scientific
Revolution. That means that modernism is a very recent development in human
history, and it means that those of us who hold a modernist worldview are a
distinct minority among all the people who have ever lived.
Modernism of course includes
modernist hermeneutics. Modernist hermeneutics reflects all of the
characteristics of the broader concept modernism. It is a product of the
Enlightenment. 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 because facts, after all, are what any text must be
concerned with since truth consists only of 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 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 when the
concept is 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 today. Then a
judge must simply apply the framers’ original intent to the case before her.
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. The assumption behind this way of thinking is that
the Constitution has one objective, universal, and unchanging meaning. That is
a modernist assumption. That is modernist hermeneutics.
When most of us today read the
Bible we read it through the lens of modernist hermeneutics. We read the Bible
as if it were reporting facts, which to a considerable extent it does not and
never intended to do. We assume that every Biblical text has one objective,
discernible meaning and that no other meaning someone claims to have found in
the text is legitimate. The assumption of modernist Biblical hermeneutics 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 assumption is quite simply
wrong. Modernist hermeneutics has reached the end of its usefulness and is no
longer tenable. The failure of modernist hermeneutics is most clearly seen in
the things it requires the person of faith to accept as true—most of us would
say the things it requires us to “believe”—and in the things it requires us to
reject. Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 says God created the world in six days (seven
actually, but that story is usually called the six days of creation). So that
statement must be factually true. If story is true (and it must be true if it
is in the Bible, we assume) then there must be factual truth in the “days” that
the story recounts. That one is so hard to believe that some Christians take
“day” as a metaphor for some longer period of time, but they cling to some
factual truth in the six days account. If Matthew and Luke (but no one else in
the New Testament) says that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, then he must have
been born in Bethlehem. He must have been, we say, because if those stories are
not factually true there is no truth in them at all. Never mind that he was
known as Jesus of Nazareth not Jesus of Bethlehem. Never mind that Matthew and
Luke tell factually contradictory stories about how he came to be born in
Bethlehem not Nazareth. They say he was born in Bethlehem, so born in Bethlehem
he was. You can go to Bethlehem today and see the Church of the Nativity over a
place where those in charge will tell you Jesus was born. The New Testament
says Bethlehem, so Bethlehem it is, all the difficulties with that factual
conclusion to the contrary notwithstanding; and notwithstanding also that
Matthew’s and Luke’s purpose in saying that he was born in Bethlehem wasn’t
factual but confessional. Modernist hermeneutics says a Bethlehem birth must be
fact because only facts are true.
Critical Biblical scholars are reasonably sure Jesus was born in Nazareth not
Bethlehem, but modernist hermeneutics can’t tolerate such a conclusion. It
can’t tolerate it because if Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem isn’t a fact then there
is no truth in Matthew’s and Luke’s birth stories, fact being virtually the
only kind of truth modernism recognizes.
Numerous other examples could
easily be trotted out of the Bible to make the point. Joshua must have made the
sun stand still in the sky because the book of Joshua says he did. Jesus’
conception in Mary’s womb must have been virginal because Matthew and Luke say
it was. Jesus must have walked on water because the Gospels say he did. The
ancient Hebrews must have wandered in the desert for a long time, then waged a
military campaign to conquer Canaan because the Torah says they did. Modernist
hermeneutics takes all of these things and a great many more from the Bible as
historical fact, and contemporary Biblical criticism has cast serious doubt on
the factuality of all of them. If fact is the only truth, then a great deal of
the Bible is untrue. That is perhaps the bad news. The good news is that fact
is not the only kind of truth, and with that revelation we turn to postmodern
hermeneutics.
Post-Modern Hermeneutics
Post-modern hermeneutics rejects most
of the assumptions of the modernist worldview and of modernist 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,
and it does not exist apart from the human minds that create it. 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.
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 a 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 only arise in the
encounter of a reader with a text. The meaning does not reside in the text itself.
The reader adds it to her understanding of the text.
Note how different this
understanding is from the understanding of modernist hermeneutics. Modernism
assumes that truth consists of facts that exist independently of the subjective
human mind. Humans don’t create facts, facts exist in their own right. Humans
just discover them. Truth consists of facts, facts are objective, so truth is
objective. If truth is objective then meaning is objective. Meaning exists in
the facts that constitute it. Those facts are the same for everyone, so meaning
is the same for everyone. Postmodernism and with it postmodern hermeneutics
reject all of those contentions. Postmodernism introduces a significant element
of subjectivity into human thought, and postmodern hermeneutics reflects that
postmodern embrace of subjectivity.
I can hear many of you loudly
objecting at this point. How can truth be subjective? How can meaning be
subjective? If truth and meaning are subjective creations of the human mind
then anything goes. Then anything can be truth. Then facts can mean whatever
anyone wants them to mean. Believe me, I have heard those objections to
postmodernism and its postmodernist hermeneutics many times. I acknowledge that
they are a reasonable response when a person first hears of postmodernism and
postmodern hermeneutics. Yet I am convinced that postmodern hermeneutics has
discovered real truths about the interpretation of documents, including the
documents in the Bible. So we need to spend some more time on this issue before
we move on to a consideration of the implications of postmodern hermeneutics.
To understand anything about human
beings and how we think we need to start with the basic question of what it
means to be human. When we look at ourselves and how we function in life what
do we find? We find first of all that we are created as individuals. We may
live in community, but community consists of individual members. We are
conceived and born individually. Even if you are part of a multiple birth as I
am (I’m a twin) you developed and were born as an individual.
We exist within an individual center that we call the self. Each of us is
created as a centered self. From our self as a center we observe the world. We
experience a world that appears to us to be outside of us. We take in sense
perceptions. Assuming that we have all of the normal human senses we see
things, we hear things, we feel things, we taste and smell things that seem to
come to us from outside.
Everything we experience of what appears to us to be the world comes into our
center through our sensory perceptions.
Our minds take in the information
our senses provide, then they go to work on that information. The human mind is
a truly amazing thing. It creates a world out of the information it receives
through the senses. It makes sense out the jumble of sensations that bombard it
every waking hour. It filters, taking in some information and blocking or
discarding other information. A quick example: Every motorcycle rider knows
that riding is dangerous primarily because drivers of cars and trucks don’t see
motorcycles as readily as they see other cars and trucks. That’s why
motorcycles always have a headlight on and why rider safety classes tell us to
keep that headlight on high beam during daylight hours. That’s why
Harley-Davidson riders say “loud pipes save lives.” We bike riders are just
trying to get people who aren’t looking for us to notice us. We have to do that
because people tend to see what they’re looking for. We all tend to see what we
expect to see. Motorcycles aren’t invisible, but our minds filter out
information we aren’t looking for or don’t expect to find.
Our minds do that kind of
filtering all the time on all kinds of information. They filter, and they
organize. They create an ordered world out of chaos. They give the world its
character. After all, trees aren’t green. They just reflect light in certain
wavelengths. The green color that we see on them is a creation of our minds
working on that reflected light. Without a mind to create the sensation green
there is no green. Our minds give the world its sounds. After all, a symphony
orchestra doesn’t make sound. Its instruments just create sound waves,
vibrations in the air of certain frequencies and amplitudes. The sound that we
hear in a concert is a creation of our minds working on those sound waves.
Without a mind to create the sound of the violin section there is no sound of
the violin section. A tree falling in the forest truly makes no sound if there
is no one there to hear it. It just creates certain vibrations in the air.
Without a mind to create the crashing sound of a falling tree there no crashing
sound of a falling tree. Fresh bread baking in the oven emits no aroma. It just
puts certain chemicals into the air. The aroma, as wonderful as it is, is only
a creation of our minds. Without a mind to create the aroma of baking bread
there is no aroma of baking bread. I hear people thanking God for the beauty of
the earth. I say thank you God for creating us with means of creating beauty
out of light, sound, taste, and smell and giving us spirits that can enjoy that
beauty and be buoyed by it. The beauty isn’t out there. It’s in here. Our minds
create it.
Our minds create everything we
experience and everything we think we know. It cannot be otherwise, for we
exist as centered selves with senses and minds that respond (or at least that
we experience as responding) to stimuli that seem to come from outside us.
Because our minds create everything we experience and everything we think we
know, everything we experience and everything we think we know is subjective.
That’s what subjective means, after all. We as subjects create sense
impressions. We as subjects formulate ideas and come to understandings that we
call knowledge. We as subjects create meaning out of our perceptions,
experiences, and what we take to be knowledge. Because meaning is only a
creation of a human mind postmodern hermeneutics has got it absolutely right:
Meaning doesn’t reside in a text alone. It can’t. It can only be created by a
mind that reads the text. That’s why meaning is necessarily and unavoidably
subjective, that is, is created by an active subject; and it’s why postmodern
hermeneutics says that meaning arises in an encounter between a text and a
reader and does not reside objectively in the text alone.
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. 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.
If you doubt that, try having several people read the same text, any text, then
ask them what they read and what it means. You will almost certainly get
several quite different answers. 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. However,
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 for example 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 the 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 for
every reader who encounters the text.
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 ordinary, poor 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 (Comunidades
de Base in Spanish) 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, or it at least it isn’t only or primarily about that. 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, 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, though many of us, myself
included, much prefer the second of these interpretations. 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 don’t
exist as detached objective realities. They arise in the encounters of
different people with the same texts.
Of course, I oversimplify here as
I said. I and many of my parishioners, friends, and colleagues are rich and
powerful by the world’s standards. We come from the dominant culture in North
America, and that dominant culture in the North has said pretty much the same
thing about Christianity as the dominant culture in the South did for a very
long time. Yet many of us today agree that reading the Gospel of Jesus Christ
as being more about creating a world of peace and justice here on earth is more
correct than reading it as being about how we get to heaven when we die. We all
live in and are largely formed by a particular context, a particular Sitz im Leben to put some German words
on it. Yet we are not necessarily bound and limited by that context. Sometimes
we can transcend that context, although when we do we are undoubtedly using
tools and concepts that we got from the context in the first place. Pope
Francis for example is from South America and is of European descent, but he
too reads the Gospel as being about justice for the poor. God bless him for
that, but he is no doubt doing it with the sharp intellectual tools of his
Jesuit background and not completely independently of his personal context.
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. Again perhaps an example from outside the Bible will help. In
Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for
Godot two 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.
Beckett himself 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, but 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 had in mind. 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
or recited 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.
Many Christians today find that
conclusion difficult or impossible to accept. That’s because those Christians
are products of the Enlightenment and have not yet overcome the limitations of
modernist thinking. They understand truth only as fact, and they understand both
truth and facts to have objective reality separate from a person who encounters
them. This tour is not based on those understandings. In Volumes Two and Three
of this tour I may from time to time say what a text means. Please understand
that that is what it means to me. It
doesn’t have to mean that to you. Your human particularity is different from my
human particularity. The meaning that arises from your encounter with a text
may well be different from mine. I ask only that you take the texts we will encounter
seriously. That means understanding what a text actually says and understanding
something about its original historical context before you decide what the text
means to you. Perhaps the texts we encounter will mean the same thing to each
of us, but they may well not. Perhaps we could learn from each other more about
what a text means, or perhaps not. That’s OK. That’s postmodern hermeneutics.
