About a Book

Before you ask what scripture means you must first ask why we should care. And that is a political question.

The meaning of a text is important only in the context that describes what type of meaning it should have. Put another way, ecclesiology is the source of hermeneutical standards for the Bible, because the context in which the Bible has meaning for Christians is the church. 

Let’s take a simple example from outside the church: the United States Constitution. In the context of US Supreme Court deliberations the meaning of this text are extremely consequential. It is the primary authority around which deliberations of law take place. And so Americans concerned with Supreme Court decisions get pretty excited about hermeneutical arguments related to judicial restraint and judicial activism.

But what about my home for seven years, Austria? Well our American arguments about restraint and activism as hermeneutical principles don’t mean much to Austrians, because the US Constitution has no meaning in their context. Indeed in their political context the principles of “restraint” and “activism” don’t occur. 

Now we’ll find the same thing if we look at, say, the novels of Jane Austin. Arguments about the characters, author’s intent, and meaning rage in college English classes, literary solons, among TV producers, and elsewhere in the world that holds Jane Austin in esteem. Not, notably, down at the White Rock Boat Club. Get a bunch of guys together on the dock having a beer and you’ll find that bringing up whether Jane Austen was a proto-feminist empowering women through her characters is pretty much a buzz-kill. In that context hermeneutic disputes in relation to Jane Austin mean nothing. 

And that gets us to a second reality: the rules of interpretation, or disputes over the rules, are fixed by the social context in which the book is read. The US constitution is read in the particular political context of the United States, and it is through the political process of selecting judges that the hermeneutical debate between restraint and activism was shaped into its current form. 

It isn’t hard to imagine that a debate about the meaning of Jane Austen will be somewhat different in a college classroom than in a neighborhood reading circle. One might focus on the intent of the author, or how the books reflect and shape social standards, in the the other one might find personal responses to the characters quite divorced from the intent of the author. 

Again, methods of interpretation are determined by the social context within which the book is read. 

You see where I’m going with this. The Bible is a book that has authority only in the context of the Christian community, and disputes about interpretation are meaningful only in the context of that community. The Bible as a book worth reading and attending to really doesn’t even exist outside the Christian community. Beyond our boundaries its just a book of historical interest (if that), and possibly just a collection of words that people can take or leave as they will. And they do leave it. My own research on the distribution of scripture portions in late 19th century Malaya showed that almost all were used to line boxes, fill cracks, or start fires. Apparently its numinous, sacred quality wasn't recognized so easily. 

We, the church, are the context in which all disputes and decisions about interpretation of the Bible must be made. There is no outside authority to whom any side can appeal, no meta-standard of interpretation of texts against which our hermeneutics can be judged. The Bible doesn’t belong to literary critics, or post-colonial theorists, or anthropologists, or political scientists. Of course they can read it, analyze it, determine their own rules of interpretation, and offer what it means to them. But not to us.

Unless we choose to invite them into our conversation about hermeneutics. We can even choose to give them a relatively authoritative role in those discussions. But that is entirely our choice, based on our own internal understanding of the Bible and our own internal needs as a community that looks to it for authority. We should not appeal to them over and against ourselves. 

But we do! Perhaps the biggest problem with contemporary United Methodism is that in our effort to present the results of our hermeneutical inquiries as credible outside the church, primarily in the academy, we’ve granted that outside context not merely an authoritative voice, but a determinative voice in our internal Christian discussions over hermeneutics and meaning. 

Does a scholar of comparative religions and ancient texts categorize the gospel accounts of the resurrection as myths? Then many of us willingly abandon belief in the resurrection, or virgin birth, or miracles of Christ. We give up the witness of the church through the ages that Christ has risen in order to satisfy the ever-shifting demands of post-enlightenment rationality. We place our own experience and authority beneath that of a culture which has itself come almost to a place of collapse as the pretensions of the so-called Copernican Revolution are finally exposed.

In particularly United Methodist debate this willing surrender to the Enlightenment, trading the rich broth of Christian tradition and Christian experience for the thin gruel of Cartesian rationality, comes by an appeal to the so-called Wesleyan quadrilateral. No assertion of belief can pass muster in current UM debate unless the gatekeepers of epistemic authenticity in the secular academy give it the once over and declare it in accordance with “reason.” 

What makes this richly ironic is that the academy itself is recognizing (post-modern debate about meta narratives quite aside) that the so-called Copernican revolution that took humanity out of the center of the universe has led us to an epistemic shallows that is impossible to navigate. In cosmology we’ve seen the rise and return of the “anthropic” principle that wonders why it is that the universe happens to be so finely tuned that it allows for the kind of life that eventually discovers just how finally tuned it is, and how immensely improbable such a universe is. 

Outside the world of physics we find the near complete entanglement of subjectivity and objectivity in everything from sociological research to ethics. So while UM debaters appeal to “reason” and the results of scientific research to bolster their claims about the meaning of scripture we find increasing recognition among scientists that their descriptions of reality are inconclusive, particularly with regard to moral issues, outside a specifically human context of inquiry. There is no dis-engaged, objective, standpoint which represents “reason.” Descarte started in the graveyard of knowledge, not its womb. 

Not that this solves our hermeneutical problems. What it does, see my next blog, is properly locate them within ecclesiology, and particularly the politics of authority within the church.