"[Radical Postmodernists] insist that there is no 'text' external to the interpretive traditions and practices of particular reading communities.. . .this position--if rigorously and consistently articulated--is true neither to the actual function of Scripture in the theological discourse of classic Christianity nor to the general human conviction that texts have determinate ranges of meaning. It is, of course, true that all interpreters are embedded in cultural contexts and traditions, but to acknowledge that is very different from saying that there is no text or that the text itself has no power to generate or constrain interpretations. Historically the church has looked to Scripture as a word extra nos, a voice that can correct or even challenge tradition; such a view of Scripture was foundational to the Reformation. One may, of course, repudiate this construal of Scripture's role in the church, but not without far reaching theological consequences. At the same time, those who have immersed themselves deeply in Scripture repeatedly bear witness to the experience of hearing the text say things that they did not know or expect, things not borne to them in the ecclesiastical traditions in which they were raised, things that they perhaps did not want to hear. How are such experiences to be explained? Self-deception? The revelatory power of the Word of God? Or--more modestly--the commonsense acknowledgement that texts do have determinate ranges of semantic possibility and that a text's world of signification can be meaningfully distinguished from the tradition's construal of it?"
-----Richard B. Hays, "The Moral Vision of the New Testament"
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
"those who have immersed themselves deeply in Scripture repeatedly bear witness to the experience of hearing the text say things that they did not know or expect, things not borne to them in the ecclesiastical traditions in which they were raised"
A very slippery slope, I must say. One moment you have a novel interpretation of scripture, the next thing you're ripping pages out of your bible a la Luther and taking multiple wives.
or conversly, you might find yourself reading scripture and subsequently disavowing Pope's who sell indulgences or church traditions that endorse sins as anything but sin.
If the text has no power to correct and instruct based upon it's objective meaning, there is no faith which is common to us.
The author here is not arguing for more "novel interpretations" of scritpure, quite the contrary. The author is arguing for an objective view of scripture which has the potential to correct the very errors that you point out, and that I point out at the beginning of this comment.
Scripture has to have determinate ranges of meaning or there is no meaning except what individual groups bring to it.
I have a few friends that would take issue with this, and in fact, Hays is responding here to his friend/counterpart, Stanley Hauerwas, at Duke.
In short, I think you're missing the point of the piece and we're on the same side of the fence here.
Au contraire, mon frere. Extracting the practice of selling indulgences from scripture would be just as novel as using scripture to justify polygamy. The issue is deviation from the traditional interpretation of scripture (or maybe call it the "catholic" interpretation), handed to you by the Church simultaneously with its scripture.
I would also note that the canon of scripture really didn't take shape until the 4th century, yet there was still a common faith and a common Gospel (the end result of properly interpreting scripture) for hundreds of years preceeding.
The idea that scripture interprets itself, as it were, seems hopelessly muddled to me. How does it instruct and correct errors all on its own? Does the notion of scripture "on its own" even have meaning? Presumably its existence requires people around to read and acknowledge it and, therefore, to engage in interpretation. If I read a book, I automatically interpret it in one way or another. Either my interpretation is unique, or it's shared by others who've read the same book. Which is the "objective" interpretation? I don't think it's sufficient to just say the reasonable one. What if they're both reasonable? In the case of scripture, I would trust the one shared by thousands of years worth of other Christians. As Chesterton put it, the Chruch is a "democracy of the dead".
Maybe this is another issue of linguistic imprecision. I can't stand the way modern writers throw around words haphazardly, especially ones that I'm fond of, like "tradition". (If only we spoke Greek or Syriac, this exchange would probably never occur!) Here's a better writer, the patristics scholar G.L. Prestige, giving the Bampton lectures at Oxford (in 1940) on the same subject:
"Unfortunately, the Bible proved to be common hunting-ground between the follower of the Gospel and the wildest theosophist or the most perverse misbeliever. Heretics showed that they could be as painstaking in their use of scripture as the saints; their ingenuity sometimes far exceeded the ingenuity of any orthodox teacher in the surprising interpretations which they set upon it. The fact soon became obvious to any intelligent thinker that the principle of 'the Bible and the Bible only' provides no automatically secure basis for a religion that is to be genuinely Christian. It is both interesting and important to observe how the difficulty was met. First, the original doctrine of tradition by the apostles to the Church continued to be the ultimate basis of Christian thought. The Bible was reckoned a part, and the principle part, of the apostolic tradition. Secondly, it was insisted that although the tradition was enshrined in the Bible, a process of interpretation was required in order to extract it. Appeal was made, not to the Bible simply, but to the Bible rightly and rationally interpreted. It is worth observing that, as the practical authority of the Bible came to be more and more fully exploited, its text began to be more thoroughly and systematically expounded, and vast commentaries were published on separate books or series of books. Such immense labour could only have been expended on an object reckoned as of immense importance. But these commentaries did not treat the Bible simply as a collection of writings "designed to be read as litterature". Their substance was often taken down by short-hand writers from lectures or sermons orally delivered. As might therefore be expected, their purpose was not purely explanatory, but aimed at edification; frequently a commentary might be in reality a doctrinal or moral treatise, based on the text or a scriptural book, but dealing with current problems, than an exercise of academic research. In other words, while the great biblical teachers grounded their work on a singularly thorough knowledge of the Scriptures, they never forgot that the task on which they were engaged was the delivery of a Gospel and a faith; it was still a tradition, reproducing, illuminating, and reinforcing the substance of the tradition once for all delivered."
John, thanks for your lengthy comments. I agree with you that the Bible is to be interepreted with all the weight of those who came before us. I take minor issure with your comment that the canon didn't come together until the 4th Century. Clearly Pauls letters were circulated as early as the 50's, and clearly the church was using those texts in its common life well before the 4th Century's finalization against heresies. But I digress.
I don't think it's exactly fair to characterize the quotation from Hays as an anti-traditionalist stance. What he's advocating in this book is a four-pronged hermenuetic that stands over and against radical interpretations of scripture as having no meaning at all. If the text had no meaning, there would be no tradition. The text itself is a marker and chonical of the tradition at it's earliest phases.
Hays's project is an ethical one. In the quotation here he's not advocating a naive reformation viewpoint that slams it's hand down on the table while drinking large quantities of beer shouting "sola-scriptura!" ;)
Read the blurb again, and you'll see that the section I pulled out is responding to radical postmodernism while making the argument that the "church" never interpreted scripture in that way in the past, so there is no good argument to do so now. That's an appeal to tradition if I've ever heard one.
In short, Hays is not attacking what you're defending. From what I've read he would be in agreement with you. His point here was merely that the text does have a meaning that is objective and indentifiable, however imperfect and beholden to individual narratives, and that this meaning often serves as a corrective to individuals within the tradition writ large.
I don't think either of us would advocate a viewpoint that either said, "scripture has no meaning" or "scripture is all you need and hang tradition."
But what, in your view, if not scripture and the breadth of church tradition allows us to adjudicate between what is Orthodox and what is unorthdox? Certainly individual traditions,(think Henry and his wives-Anglican, think Indulgences-Roman, think latent antinomianism-Reformed, etc.) have all gone astray at various times. If you can't justifiable use scripture in conjunction with and as a corrective to tradition what have you got?
I think it would be nice to have a preliminary discussion on the notion of tradition itself. In the most important sense of the word, scripture is a kind of culmination of tradition. The Greek word "parodisis" (meaning a sort of delivery or handing-over) is apparently much more descriptive. A good reference for this stuff is Prestige's lecture I quoted above (in "Fathers and Heretics", SPCK, probably out of print). He takes you through not only the Fathers, but the Bible too, tracking tradition in its "traditional" understanding.
Of course, the best way to get to the bottom of this is to have another "drinks and theology night". Large quantities of beer, fists smashing on the table, shouting etc. is my favorite form of polemic. In vino veritas.
Here's more from Hays. I think he anticipated your objection, but leaves it aside as not germaine to his ethical study of the NT.
"A final possible objection to the methodology of this book is that it accords preeminent authority to the NT without ever giving a reasoned defense for ascribing such normative weight to this particular collection of documents. Indeed, this study proceeds on the working assumption that the canonical Scriptures constitute the norma normans for the church's life, whereas every other source of moral guidance (whether church tradition, philosophical reasoning, scientific investigation, or claims about contemporary religious experience) must be understood as norma normata. Thus normative Christian ethics is fundamentally a hermeneutical enterprise: it must begin and end in the interpretation and application of Scripture for the life of the community of faith. Such a pronouncement will prove controversial in some circles, but it represents the classic confessional position of catholic Christianity, particularly as sharpened in its Reformation traditions."
and yes, you're right, we need to have another beer and theology night!
Post a Comment