My blogging is so patchy at the moment that I’m well behind the curve. However, I’m grateful that James McGrath has drawn my attention to Steve Douglas’s post about Jamie Smith’s review of Pete Enns’ book. Not enough links yet? Try reading Daniel Kirk’s critique of the same review as well.
There are all sorts of views expressed intelligently and carefully between these contributors, which between them do more to identify the problem rather than offer a solution to the problem of what the writings canonised by one or another faith or denomination have to do with a (postulated) divine communicator.
On the one hand, the idea that there is an objective, historical meaning the author intended which is clearly accessible to the skilled interpreter is one I simply can’t own: the interpreter has a more active role. On the other hand, the idea that any interpretation of the text is equally valid seems to me as unsustainable as the idea that there is a single and unique exact interpretation. Interpreters are constrained by their texts.
An incarnational analogy (in this unique human expression there is a uniquely divine expression), a methodological atheism (this text only means whatever the human author intended it to mean) and a post-modern reading (this text is entirely open to the reader’s determination) are equally problematic. How can we hold historical realism and theological vision together in a way that gives “verbum dei” more than an optimistically imaginative and fideist reality?
I wonder if a sacramental model has something to offer here? In celebrating the sacraments, the church (the community gathered together in some historic continuity) meets around certain actions identifying the contemporary presence of the same deity as the historic texts name. The performance of the sacraments includes narrative, invocation and attentiveness, in bringing the temporal and physical world into conjunction with the eternal and spiritual world. The two are held in a mutually explanatory tension.
I wonder if that offers a model for scripture. Meaning cannot be collapsed into historical or authorial intent. Neither can it be about the explicatory virtuosity of the interpreter. God is heard in the communal practices of the group that meets in order to hear God. The word of God is discovered in those who prayerfully receive the story of how God has spoken to previous would-be listeners and followers.
The nature of scripture as something more than the words of its individual human story-tellers, editors and narrators depends on both the nature of texts freed from their historical authors, and on those who read scripture as a coherent and canonical whole in order to discern and hear a voice that comes from beyond the text.
Hearing the voice of God can’t be separated from the variety of practices that condition us to listen for and to the word of God. Sacrament requires scholarly historical rooting and prayerful present attentiveness, so “this” may be seen as “that”, and when someone proclaims “Verbum Domini”, “Deo gratias” is the most appropriate response.
Hi Doug,
I don’t know how many of the things you push back against you attribute to me (no doubt through some defect in my writing), but I want to clarify a couple of things.
Like you, I don’t expect to be able to recover authorial intent completely or even adequately; how would we be able to, since much of what we believe and do is not even based on intentions that we ourselves are conscious of, much less people seeking to understand us millennia down the road? However, the idea is that trying our darnedest to recover the original context is an indispensable part of the reading. If we believe God in some sense stands begins Scripture, we also should assume that He chose those particular authors in those particular circumstances to testify to Him and His ways, so why wouldn’t we expect to find that an integral aspect of the value of the text that is worth putting great pains into recovering?
Also, while I stand by my statement that the Bible is by nature and origin the work of humanity, I don’t think I fall under methodological atheism – or at least, if I do then this is a useless term; the same could be said of all Christian scientists who don’t posit the Holy Ghost in the machine mucking up their investigations. Based on the continuity of the community of faith from the time the Bible was being written through now and my trust that God has shepherded His Church, I expect that much of Scripture is humanity’s response to its encounters with God, so it’s not as though I find it by any means devoid of His influence. Rather, it is permeated with it, leading to my analogy of Scripture to a Festschrift comprised of essays written in honor of and in the spirit of God by those longest under His tutelage.
Lastly, I would like to thank you for (I think) clarifying Jamie Smith’s remarks about interpreting Scripture via “worship”, which were obscure to me when I read his review. I get the feeling that this is at least in part the same thing you are talking about with your sacramental model, although your point about the importance of “scholarly historical rooting” seems to distinguish you from him a bit. I can get behind most of your remarks there, because I don’t find them to be in conflict with my main point.
See, I think that the devotional, sacramental use of Scripture is separate from and subsequent to the practice of interpretation. This is where my difficulty with Smith’s divine Author thing comes in: it front loads the interpretation with application, i.e. it turns what we feel God wants for our context into what the text means, brashly steamrolling the context it was composed from within. It’s the “post-modern” problem you referred to. I think we owe more to the authors, and to God’s intent for Scripture, than to confuse the two. It sounds like you wish to get things in the proper order, by first interpreting as best we can and then listening to what that means for our community. But maybe I have misread you.
Steve
Hi Steve,
I don’t think I was attributing any of those things to you: they were more in the nature of generic observations. And, unfortunately, I hit publish instead of save to draft just before turning off the computer and going to bed! So I’m not claiming anything really.
I agree more with you and Daniel Kirk, I think, that Jamie Smith is using the “divine author” in ways which are problematic for the historical interpretation of the texts. And I think the (reconstructed and possibly inaccurate) historical meaning is important for what I was calling the “sacramental” meaning; the latter is not free-floating.
If I’d revised this as I intended before pressing “publish”, I probably wouldn’t have used the term methodological atheism, but since I have, I would assume it includes refusing to accept e.g. that the vision of Isaiah 6 is a real experience of God, but only a literary convention.
Doug