Fallen Into Knowledge

(Reader beware: what follows is very abstract, and hangs loosely together, if at all. Which is to say – I may not make any sense at all. You’ve been warned.)

Here is a hermeneutical thought: if our hermeneutics requires us to de-particularize the text as a necessary precursor to appropriating (applying) it, then we are in trouble. This usually looks like “principlization:” we take a narrative, in all of its particularity, and attempt to distil from it the “universal truth” contained in it. This is a problem because the author, if s/he had wanted to tell us a universal truth, the narrative portion could have been dispensed with. When we, like husking an ear of corn, attempt to remove the narratives of the text to get to the principle, we are effectively saying that the form of the text is not a significant feature for us. But the form a text takes is significant.
Nonetheless we have the responsibility to respond to texts, and this need is felt most acutely with respect to the bible.
So this is the problem I have been mulling over for these last several years, the problem that has lead me from Multnomah to PSU to study Philosophy and Medieval Literature. How to respond appropriately to a text (esp. the bible) without having to make into something it is not first (ie. A collection of true statements about God)?

Some preliminary thought, after 5 years of thought:

we need to be able to describe the process of going from text to response. While the process need not be purely rationalistic, it’s rough ouline at least needs to be communicate-able.

As a corrolary to the above point: we need to be able to say of a response, “that is a poor / wrong / unethical response to the text. That is, we must be able to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate responses to the text.

Reading needs to be thought as an ethical activity; like a person, texts must be heard and our reading must be governed by the principle of charity. Even if we end up disagreeing with a text we must first give texts a fair hearing, as we ought give a person respect as a person, and not objectify them. This means that we ought not misuse a text – take an author’s words out of context or use a text in a direction that may be distasteful for the author – even if we find the author’s position distasteful.
The ethics of reading also governs how we respond to a text: reading is an imaginative activity to some extent – as readers we must bring (at the very least) our skill as readers and our understanding of the world (culture, history) to bear on the text as we make sense of it. To speak philosophically, our horizon is fused with the horizon of the text in the reading process. Responding is also an imaginative activity governed by ethical norms: as we reenact the text we must make sure that those (creative) enactments of it resonate with the sense of the text.

When we read texts we read them as members of an interpretive community. Always, like it or not. With respect to the bible, the appropriate, and most fruitful, interpretive community is the church. This implies a few things:
Our own readings of the text needs to be tested by and tempered within the church; our own horizon is limited and can be expanded and in some cases focused by the church. Although our reading of the text may begin alone it must not end alone; we bring our readings to the community.
Also the Bible is for, “teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16): that is the bible has a social function, primarily. The community of believers uses the bible amongst themselves toward the end that “everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:17). Reading the text is done by the church, for the church.

I don’t by any means think I have gotten all the problems figured out, or even that I have raised all the pertenant questions. What is above is not all my thoughts about the subject, either. But it does represent progress in thinking about some of my “existential itches”

My mother tells me often that when people ask her what I am up to, she doesn’t know how to answer. Well, here it is: I am pursuing the answers to some very theological questions by studying Medieval Literature at PSU. Very often I wish to be studying theology formally, but I still see this as a necessary step along the way.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 4th, 2006 at 9:50 pm and is filed under Theology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.