My friend Rob published two blog posts about something I’ve been interested in for a while, Progressive revelation. In Henry Virkler’s Herrmeneutics he discusses a theological model of bibliccal interpretation called the epigenetic (or organic) model. This model views the development of scripture as something akin to a tree, which is always complete and yet still growing. I think the approach that Rob has taken to interpreting and understanding scripture (though I don’t know that he would call it that anymore) in which culture is considered to be a vehicle for divine inspiration.
I’m sure that to some people this makes things impossible. Emphasizing, or even bringing up, the influence of human involvement is bad news for inerrancy. The input of fallible human culture completely undercuts the possibility of a perfectly factual scripture. In which case we have to go back to the drawing board and reexamine the things that we think because they just can’t be. I had to do that when I read William G Dever’s book about early Israel. In it he points out that the archaeological evidence throughout Israel points to a proto-Israel that emerged from the indigenous population of Canaan. This means that the facts of history do not comport with the narrative of scripture.
Before this point I was already interested in progressive revelation, and afterward I found it much easier to view the development of scripture as an organic process. It seems to me that the development of scripture over time was a glacially slow process that involved several different cults bringing their disparate theological views into the biblical cannon until eventually we end up with what we have today.
It is important to avoid ethnocentric understandings of scripture. This is especially the case when we deal with taking our interpretations and developing some product of theological significance. Rob refers to “nostalgia” being a roadblock to our properly understanding a divinely inspired and historically shaped document. I think this happens because when nostalgia replaces actually attempts to read scripture as an historical document that was produced over a period of time throughout several functioning cultures it serves as a kind of shell game in which the culture in which the nostalgic person lives forces out the culture that ought to be the subject. So the fundamentalist who thinks they’re staying true to the people who wrote the Bible is actually supplanting that culture for his or her own.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
At the moment I’m listening to an episode of This American Life, specifically the episode that aired on 28 February of this year. The theme of this episode is the change in the APA’s definition of homosexuality. At one point homosexuals were considered to be pathological by psychologists. At one point, during the setup for this piece a reference is made to the perception of homosexuality by the Christian tradition. This phrase made me think of the term Judeo-Christian tradition. Because if you want to attribute something to the Christian tradition, it’s almost inevitable that you must attribute it also to Judaism. At any rate, right now I find myself remember a particularly ridiculous conversation on contemporary American politics that I was involved in about two weeks ago.
The gentleman with whom I was speaking kept making reference to the changes happening in our country and how these changes are a diminution of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Naturally I had to ignore some of what he was saying to address, what I felt were, the fundamental aspects of what he was saying. In retrospect though, I wish I’d address his reference because he was leaning on a crutch he felt negated anything that I could say. The fact that I didn’t establish my credentials as a Christian, in his mind, gave him a win. What I was saying was not only wrong because it was liberal, it was wrong because it overlooked crucial elements of Christian history.
To be honest, I’ve lost no sleep over the prospect of having lost an argument with someone, as this happens all the time. What upsets me is the rigidity of some Christian hermeneutics compared to Jewish hermeneutics. Now, I don’t have much to back up what I’m saying. In fact, I’m really only trying to put my thoughts down now so I will have something to come back to later.
I remember once seeing an episode of the West Wing where an inmate on death row was about to be put to death, when one of his attorneys contacts the rabbi of one of the President’s advisors to intercede in some way. The rabbi delivers a sermon (forgive me if rabbis deliver something other than sermons) wherein he calls capital punishment un-Jewish. Later on a reference is made to the great lengths that the early rabbis went to in trying to condemn this particular form of punishment. The important point here is that the rabbis were creative with the interpretation of the text in a way that many Christians would feel is merely playing fast and loose. In fact most westerners have this problem. We talk about the plain meaning of a text all the time. Take for example the following:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
That is not nearly as clear as so-called supporters of the second amendment claim. In fact, if we actually centered the debate around the second amendment we would probably see a much different, more fruitful debate take place.
Okay, enough digression… Historically speaking Jews and Christians have both taken liberties with interpreting their holy texts. It seems that with the Reformation came a new, more scientific approach to exegesis take hold of academic study of the Christian Bible. This was a wonderful development in a lot of ways, it made study of scripture become a more public, accessible and reliable process. But it also undermined the imaginative nature of devotional readings of the Bible. But the imaginative nature of devotional readings had been undermined by the institutionalization of certain readings over others within the crystalized bureaucracy of the Papacy. So the thing that solved a problem wound up causing a new problem.
Once the public got hold of not only scripture, but the mantra sola scriptura they hit the ground running. Especially after Modernism emerged as an ideological factor in the United States. Christians were hardens against the methods of the Modernist opponents but forced to use them to combat the conclusions of their opponents. In part that’s where the “plain meaning of the text” comes from. The belief that we’re prepared to sit down and read a document from a time, place and culture foreign to us when we so easily misinterpret documents that can rightly be considered within our grasp, is laughable. The number of fringe groups that started, and still exist, based upon someone’s uneducated reading of the Bible is staggering. Off the top of my head I can think of two that are major players when it comes to numbers on the world stage of religions.
I think I’ll leave it there for now, as a post that was intended to be short has now reached roughly eight hundred words.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
Anglopressy 