(Ir)religiosity

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You know that another semester is gearing up when I don’t have time to write up a blog post.  I have been writing though.  One of my tasks this semester in my constructive theology class is to comment upon various theological concepts and to, as much as I am suspicious of the enterprise, develop a systematic of sorts.  So I will be sharing some of my statements periodically in hopes that they will spark some conversation.  I hope you will excuse the more scholarly form and academic tone.  Keep in mind that all this is provisional, unfinished, and ad hoc. I have no interest in dogmatism or I wouldn’t be studying theology; I’d be enrolled in a “Bible School.”  Each section begins, in true Barthian form, with a summary sentence of the following discussion.  I look forward to the dialogue.

The locus of Christian authority and the centerpiece of revelation lies in the God who was revealed in the  incarnation of Jesus Christ — Scripture bears witness to this reality; as such the bible is the primary source of revelation and it becomes the contextual word of God through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as it is responsibly interpreted and faithfully performed in the community called church.

God is the locus of Christian theological authority, more specifically, the God that was revealed in the historical incarnation of Jesus Christ. But what is the nature of that authority? Often in public theologizing appeals to religious authority are made in order to validate and legitimize specific truth claims to simply settle the issue in hand. In that sense, such authorities are more authoritarian than they are authoritative. This is problematic because theology, as a finite discipline, “is always potentially vulnerable”¹ and therefore can make no completely absolute or objective claims. Authority in the strict sense must therefore be abandoned lest theology be relegated to the sphere of modern, post-Enlightenment science, a move that has become all too popular since Descartes and Kant. Furthermore, since religious and theological authorities always require responsible interpretation, the order and placement of authority in the line of normative argumentation must be reversed so that it is not at the end of theologizing as a validator of certain claims, but rather at the beginning as the starting point from which all theologizing emerges.²

What then, are the sources of theological authority? Scripture is without a doubt the prime source of authority and the primary source of God’s special revelation insofar as it points to the person and work of Jesus Christ. It is not, however, the only source nor does it exist in a vacuum; like any other text, it requires responsible interpretation. In our time the claim that “Scripture interprets Scripture” without any subjective mediation is wholly untenable and makes for a wholly irresponsible hermeneutic. Here the so-called “Wesleyan quadrilateral” is helpful. If Scripture is the primary source of theological authority and the locus of Christian revelation then tradition, reason, and experience — helpful sources of authority and revelation in their own right — constitute a sort of hermeneutical triad by which Scripture is responsibly interpreted in various contexts and performed, that is made incarnate, by various communities.

Through responsible, communal interpretation, Scripture becomes the Word of God and is thus authoritative for Christian thought and practice. As Karl Barth writes, “The Bible is God’s Word to the extent that God causes it to be His [sic] Word, to the extent that He [sic] speaks through it.”³  Through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit the text becomes the word of God as it is read, interpreted, and performed by the church. This does not mean, however, that the text (each passage, chapter, or verse) as a single, fixed, objective, and determined meaning for all places and in all times. Such an illusion is unsustainable for at least three main reasons.⁴  First, as finite persons each of us is socially, historically, and culturally situated in a such a way that is hardly impartial, disinterested, or purely objective. Each person, whether they are completely conscious of it or not possesses what Heidegger calls a “hermeneutic pre-understanding,” which is inextricably woven into the fabric of that person’s subjectivity and serves as a sort of “implicit fore-structure [guiding] all interpretation in advance, upon which all interpretation draws, [and] by which every inquiry which is anything more than an ‘unphenomenological construction’ is nourished.”⁵   Even if there is such a thing as “objectivity” no human being would be able interpret it purely and without bias or prejudice. In other words, we are human, all too human. A white, American male from the rural south will read the bible very differently than a woman in sub-Saharan Africa. The question is whether Christians are making room in their theology for the bible to become the word of God for both persons, perhaps with different meanings, purposes, and ramifications.

Second, such illusions of objectivity inevitably lead to violence and domination. Too often the Western interpretation of Scripture has hid “behind an unchallenged belief that it is the Word of God”⁶  which has justified and legitimized not only the subjugation and oppression of the other but of the other’s interpretation of the text as well. When viewed from the perspective of those on the underside of history and the underbelly of power the history of Christianity is quite a sobering story. However, if Christians can begin to admit and own their own hermeneutical presuppositions and come to terms with the fact that the meaning of texts, especially biblical texts, look very different depending upon context, then perhaps Scripture will cease to be a foil for cultural imperialism and instead a tool for liberation. As Kwok Pui-Lan writes, “biblical truth cannot be pre-packaged…it must be found in the actual interaction between text and context in the concrete historical situation.”⁷

Finally, the myth of objectivity supposes that both text and author⁸ are static, fixed and motionless. Here the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer (as well as Paul Ricoeur) is particularly helpful. If Scripture is indeed a living text as many Christians claim, its meaning cannot be static nor can it be limited to the mind of the author alone. As Gadamer writes, “the hermeneutical reduction to the author’s meaning is just as inappropriate as the reduction of historical events to the intentions of their protagonists.”⁹ Interpreters in the church seeking to embody and apply the text in their lives will always be confronted with the “world in front of the text,”¹⁰ a world which simply isn’t the same as the world of the text nor the world of the author. Yet the text is ours as it was the author’s and past interpreters:

Every age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way, for the text belongs to the whole tradition whose content interests the age and in which it seeks to understand itself. The real meaning of the text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience. It certainly is not identical with them, for it is always co-determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter and hence by the totality of the objective course of history.¹¹

There is thus an irreducible plurality of potential meaning and polyvalency residing in any text and Scripture is no exception — this is the work of the Spirit. It is the job of the Christian, indeed the job of the church to be, under the inspiration and guidance of the Spirit, about the business of wrestling with the tensions of these various worlds by responsibly interpreting and performing the texts of Scripture always with the life, death, and resurrection of Christ in mind. Through this process the text is “assigned meaning by the community while at the same time overflowing into the community, often displacing and dislocating prior meaning.”¹²  Such is the work and dynamism of the Spirit.

Now, the obvious and most common objection to such a position is that it lends itself to nihilistic “anything goes” type relativism. Such is not the case¹³ and more often than not it seems that such caricatures serve the purpose not of substantive and meaningful engagement with the reality of plurality, but of shallow rhetorical dismissal and a refusal to come to terms with the end of the illusion of objectivity. Acceptance of the inherent plurality of meaning and polyvalence in the text does not, on the contrary, mean “anything goes.” One is not given the freedom to do what one wills with the text, indeed such an act would be to do violence to the text itself (and likely to others as well). Here it is important to underscore the importance of responsible communal interpretation of the text. One of the greatest strengths and most crippling weaknesses of the Protestant Reformation is that individuals were afforded the right and ability to read the Scriptures in isolation. Since then, too many faith communities have failed to responsibility live with the tension of individual interpretation, on the one hand, and communal interpretation on the other. Maintaining a proper balance will go a long way toward defending this so-called relativism. It is also important to note that there are bad, indeed, wrong, interpretations and manipulations of the text. Admitting the end of objectivity should not be equated with the end of interpretative judgment making. While there are numerous valid and meaningful interpretations of a given text, not every reading is valid. Recall Wittgenstein’s famous duck-rabbit illustration.¹⁴  Depending upon one’s perspective or hermeneutical pre-understanding one may see either a duck or rabbit; indeed, it is possible that one might see both. Neither answer is more right than the other; both simply are. However, one would be wrong to say the illustration is a depiction of an elephant or a giraffe. When speaking of biblical texts the same principal applies though it is not as clear as a simple drawing. Indeed, there are likely more than two interpretations of a single text and discerning which interpretations are destructive is much more nuanced. Some who prefer objectivity will still eschew such an approach because it does not posit a simple, cut and dry methodology. For those who have long been silence by the “authority of objectivity” will find this affirmation of the plurality of meaning very liberative, and indeed salvific.

Perhaps then, in light of this shift away from objectivity and fixed meaning, a more dialogical hermeneutical model¹⁵ is the best approach toward Scripture. That is, a model in which the church is always in prayerful conversation with itself (in the past and the present) and with the other over what interpretation is the most responsible for its current context, its current historical situation. As Jürgen Moltmann writes, “humanly speaking, truth is to be found in unhindered dialogue […] for it is only in free dialogue that truth can be accepted for the only right and proper reason — namely, that is illuminates and convinces as truth.”¹⁶ This transformational conversation, which in the process of interpretative discernment is always guided by Jesus’ axiomatic love for God and neighbor, would not only involve room for the Spirit, but a special place for those voices that have long been marginalized and silenced in the process of interpretation. Indeed, it is by allowing space for those voices that we allow the Spirit to breath new life into the text for such dialogue is not “a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.”¹⁷

1. Robert C. Neville, A Theology Primer (New York, New York:  State University of New York Press, 1991), 13. [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩]
3. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, edited and translated by Thomas Forsyth Torrance and Geoffrey W. Bromiley (New York, New York:  T&T Clark, 2004). [↩]
4. There are many more reasons which draw upon the insight of 20^th century continental thought, but this is not the place to explore them in depth. [↩]
5. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God:  A Theology of the Event (Bloomington, Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 2006), 113. [↩]
6. Kwok Pui Lan, Discovering the Bible in the Non-Biblical World (New York, New York: Orbis Books, 1995), 12. [↩]
7. Ibid., 11. [↩]
8. If there even is an author.  See Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” The Essential Foucault, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York, New York:  New Press, 2003), 377-91. [↩]
9. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2^nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York, New York:  Continuum Books, 2004), 366 [↩]
10. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences:  Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. John B. Thompson (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), passim. [↩]
11. Gadamer, 296. Emphasis mine. [↩]
12. Bryan P. Stone, Evangelism After Christendom:  The Theology and Practice of Christian Witness (Grand Rapids, Michigan:  Brazos Press, 2007), 172. [↩]
13. Rigorous defense of this position has been undertaken elsewhere and lies outside our immediate purposes.  See, for example, Merold Westphal, Whose Community?  Which Interpretation?:  Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (Grand Rapids, Michigan:  Baker Academic, 2009) and John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics:  Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington, Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 1988). [↩]
14. This illustration which Wittgenstein borrowed from Jastrow is originally found in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 193-94.  It is also discussed in Westphal, 24-26. [↩]
15. Cf. Pui-Lan, 33-43. [↩]
16. Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God:  The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 1993), xiii. [↩]
17. Gadamer, 371. Emphasis mine. [↩]