An online place for some friends to get together and argue about what they care most about.
The "b" is silent.
At the seminar table:
Stephen Webb
Trevor Bechtel
Margaret Adam
Phil Kenneson
A. K. M. Adam
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Saturday, February 09, 2002
posted by A K M Adam at 5:07 PM
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Trevor, Mercy sakes no, I assume with Augustine that the plenitude of interpretations is a sign of God's abundant generosity. I'm trying to follow the thread of Steve's persistence in treating the text as an active participant in the interpretive transaction.
I'm interested by the distinction you propose between "which understanding is obliged by the text" and "an understanding appropriate to the text," but the difficulty of ascertaining which interpretations are appropriate (and who decides which are appropriate) continues.
And I'm not sure that "understanding" helps. Who adjudicates which understandings are appropriate? And if Steve still wants to upohold the metaphorically-animate text, who determines whether I have correctly heard what the text is saying, or am willfully, ignorantly, perversely, or otherwise ignoring the text's obligation on me?
posted by Trevor Bechtel at 2:53 PM
AKMA, Aren't you assuming here that more than one understanding of a text is a bad thing. The problem isn't in discerning which understanding is obliged by the text but rather that the understanding proposed is appropriate to the text. It may be that one person is not adequately listening to the text (I think this is a problem for communities not people). By the way, isn't it better if we talk about understanding rather than meaning. AKMA has to be right that text's exist in our world and not Harry Potter's. Texts aren't agent like chemicals in a strict sense. But understandings are obliged in all the ways Steve suggests in his answers to AKMA's question. If we all forcused on what happens to people when they understand texts then all the surplus of meaning that are suggested to or obliged on our understanding become much more feasible. Or not?
posted by A K M Adam at 6:36 AM
I ought to be working on tomorrow morning's sermon, but instead I'm going to follow up the questions Steve answered for me yesterday (arguing with theologians is less a digression from sermon-writing than plenty of other tempting diversions). I agree that metaphors can be precious and illuminating; my (Wittgensteinian) worry begins, however, when people forget that they're deploying a metaphor and begin thinking that the metaphor is that to which it points. So: When people tell me "the text obliges me to say this" or "do this," they don't always agree on what they should be saying or doing. How do I know which person is actually listening to what the text says or does, and which person is not adequately listening to the text?
Friday, February 08, 2002
posted by Trevor Bechtel at 2:17 PM
Steve, I really liked the bridging message. But I didn't understand this last sentence, "Otherwise, I fear that the church becomes not only, as in Milbank, the co-agent of atonement, but also the co-agent of revelation, and thus the risk is run of reifying church practices." Why is this risk run?
posted by steve webb at 9:57 AM
Do texts ever do things without people? I guess I think this question is sort of like the old metaphysical query about whether a tree falling in the forest without anyone there to hear it makes a sound. I'm not sure how much I have invested in such questions, but I'm not a metaphysical idealist. Texts do things only if we speak metaphorically, but metaphors can be very informative. I guess I'm a realist of sorts in that I think there are real objects out there and that some such objects are cultural objects, which were created by people to send messages to other people, and that the way in which such objects, like texts, were created constrains and shapes the way other people read them.
Do texts ever do things that people don't want them to? Do they do things when
people aren't aware of their activity?
Yes, of course they do, especially the Bible. It is the revealed word of God, and so it tells me things that I don't want to listen to all the time. At this point I'd be curious to know what your doctrine of revelation and inspiration is. I'm not always sure what I mean by inspiration either, but I'm pretty clear in thinking that inspiration means the Bible is a witness to Jesus Christ, and that the Holy Spirit works through the Bible to convict me of sin and to offer me God's grace.
Does anyone mean by "the text" anything different from you (such that what you may
mean by "the text" doesn't permit my position, but
I don't see how you can mean anything at all by text, since you claim that the very notion of a text is determined by reading communities; so I am baffled by how you can even talk about texts in general terms, given your metaphysical idealism.
Thursday, February 07, 2002
posted by A K M Adam at 8:39 PM
Someone pass the M & M's....
posted by Margaret Adam at 7:25 PM
Margaret wrote two long posts and lost them when Blogger logged her out prematurely. I'm guessing there's a timeout mode, so that if you deliberate too long about a post, Blogger thinks you're asleep and logs you out. I would either post short bits, or compose in another application and paste your remarks into the Blogger window.
posted by A K M Adam at 5:24 PM
Steve, I suspect that we've reached a quick impasse at this point. I doubt it'll be productive for me to go any further, but I'll just ask a few questions to see whether they make a difference.
Do texts ever do things without people?
Do texts ever do things that people don't want them to? Do they do things when people aren't aware of their activity?
Does anyone mean by "the text" anything different from you (such that what you may mean by "the text" doesn't permit my position, but what I mean by "the text" does indeed allow for texts that aren't agents)?
I expect that you have responses that won't seem as unsatisfactory to you as they will to me, but perhaps you will articulate your answers in a way that helps me understand why you'd think this way.
After which, we might ought to change the subject, which will be easier when I compile the discussions of pacifism, vegetarianism, Stanley Hauerwas, and Reinhold Niebuhr.
posted by steve webb at 3:19 PM
Can I not agree that texts are a medium of communication, but then wonder whether that assent warrants ascribing autonomous agency to that medium? No, you cannot; if texts are a medium of communication, then there must be something to that medium, but you cannot account for anything in that medium since communities create the text which they then teach themselves to read. Now, nobody is talking about "autonomous agency." Your rhetoric always puts the most rationalistic spin on everything I say. Of course texts aren't autonomous; they stand in a complex set of relationships to the communities that write them and those that read them and those that try to destroy them. But they do have some agency, in that they become a source of an ongoing conversation and constrain that conversation by being rewritten by various communities. The rewriting of texts becomes their subtext, the commentaries that we add to them, and we read them only through those commentaries, those traditions of reading, so that the text accrues a whole series of readings that become part of it, readings that function between the lines of the text to direct our interpretations. When we read texts we read them alongside of other readers who come before us. All of that is not in the text as an "autonomous" agent but it is all a part of what we mean by the text. Paul Griffiths is good on this in his Religious Reading book.
posted by steve webb at 3:13 PM
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If texts are such because communities say so, then isn't this true with regard to all external objects? And isn't this true of such "texts" as rituals, moral practices, and spiritual realities? So that, at the end of this slippery slope, nothing has meaning unless a community grants it meaning. We end up not with an individual solipsism but with a communal one. This seems to me to seal the church off from all critique and to make the church itself the source of revelation. Christians, in the end, can't be idealists (Barth's essay on idealism and realism would be appropriate reading here).
posted by steve webb at 3:09 PM
I agree that the idea of a text can be used metaphorically to cover cases where we don't really read anything. We can say that we read a scene in nature, or learn to read human behavior, when there is no reading actually involved. Everything is textual, so say the postmodernists. The term stretches, but it is a term with some stability. To say that a text is such only to the extent that a community determines it to be so is to do away with the term text altogether. What one community defines as a text, another community might not. Moreover, to the extent that communities define the nature of an external object like a text, this, by extension, must be true of all external objects, so that you end up in with a metaphysical idealism. Some philosophers have wanted to hold to an idealism like that, but it is surely dangerous for a Christian theology that believes in a world created good and our access to that world through God's gift of reason.
posted by A K M Adam at 10:39 AM
Whoa, Steve, give us some breathing room! On point one, the "excess-of-meaning" versus "meaning-not-a-property" positions: Much of your post still rests on the premise that texts must have meanings, and that Steve Fowl and I are just coming up with fancy evasive ways for finagling it without then succumbing to the superior insight of the Univ. of Chicago alternative. So (for instance) I would argue that texts are not generative of meaning; people identify things as "texts" when they ascribe meaning to them. Texts don't "project" anything without readers (who have learned to read from communities, and whose interpretations will always be checked and sanctioned by communities). Texts don't make worlds. Scripture doesn't invite anyone anywhere. Neither Scripture nor "classics" acts like an agent in any way. Texts don't restrain interpretation. Texts don't offer. Texts don't open.
You acknowledge that "it is metaphorical to say that books can be agents," but then you endorse the metaphor because "texts are not just marks on the page but are forms of communication that make conversation possible." Can I not agree that texts are a medium of communication, but then wonder whether that assent warrants ascribing autonomous agency to that medium?
(I have more to say about your other blogs, but will hold back for now--I think that navigating the discussion may be easier if I/we take one point at a time.)
posted by steve webb at 9:18 AM
would you please refer to the postings I've made and show how my explicit avoidance of "transcending my own reading practices" still falls prey to the trap I'm trying to avoid? Any theory about reading must transcend its own practices in order to lay out the conditions that, according to the theory, make reading itself, in general and everywhere, possible. So you are not just reporting on your own practices; you are explaining how reading works and thus you are suggesting how others should think about their own reading practices. I'll give up on this argument if you can't see that a theory that argues that there can be no theories of reading since there are only incommensurable reading communities is, by definition, a self-contradictory theory. This is a pretty standard line of criticism against any and all skeptical or relativistic positions (logical puzzles like "All people are liars"--well, then, how can you say that if...etc). Frei rejected postion 5 (or even 4.5) for these very reasons, although he probably put it in more elegant terms than I am now doing.
posted by steve webb at 9:14 AM
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Note I made a change to my earlier posting: AKMA is trying to understand the conditions that make it possible for readers to find meaning in texts. Is that better? My point is still the same: you are developing a theory of reading, but your own theory does not account for itself.
posted by steve webb at 9:10 AM
Maybe there is some bridge building that can be done between the Tracy-Ricoeur position that texts have a surplus of meaning and the Fish-Hauerwas-AKMA position that texts have no meaning (or no more meaning that readers give them). That is, if texts do have a surplus of meaning, then their meaning must be determined by reading communities. The texts don't mean one simple thing: I think people coming out of the Tracy-Ricoeur school and people coming out of the F-H-A school agree on that. Neither "school" wants to reify texts, or grant them some sort of objective authority. On the other hand, texts are generative of meaning. They project meaning possibilities, or, to use Ricoeur's rhetoric, they make worlds--they have their meaning in front of them, not behind them. Scripture invites readers to become a part of its (polyvalent) world. Scripture, like all classics, thus does act like an agent to some degree. Of course, it is metaphorical to say that books can be agents, but it is a good metaphor, because texts are not just marks on a page but are forms of communication that make conversation possible. We are who we are because of the books we read, to a large extent. Both "sides" of this debate resist the pressures of rationalism or fundamentalist Protestantism (the same thing?) to remove the dangers of interpretation by imagining a self-interpretting text. Nonetheless, the text does constrain meaning making. The text offers up possible ways of being in the world, worlds within worlds that we can choose to inhabit. And the biblical text opens up a world that is based in realistic narrative, as Frei argued. Perhaps it could be argued that the very surplus of meaning in texts is the condition that makes it possible for communities of readers to determine that meaning, and in turn, the communal determination of the text's meaning, which puts that textual world into practice, shapes the possible worlds that the text projects, so there is a mutual dialectic here. Otherwise, I fear that the church becomes not only, as in Milbank, the co-agent of atonement, but also the co-agent of revelation, and thus the risk is run of reifying church practices.
posted by A K M Adam at 9:00 AM
Steve-- I don't see how Hauerwas can have both Yoder and Fish.... I like the challenge of this point; I'm not aware that it's been articulated with regard to these specific reference points (though I have the nagging feeling that Unleashing the Scriptures might do some of the work you're asking for. As for He is trying to understanding the conditions that make it possible for texts to have meaning, I just don't know what to say. Evidently because you, Steve, think that texts have meaning, you ascribe to me an explanation of that premise. What I've explicitly been saying (not as well as Steve Fowl, in Engaging Scripture and his other books, but at least persistently and explicitly, is that texts don't have meaning. There shouldn't be any need to cover this terrain again, but Steve F. and I and Margaret have been laying out the premises and consequences of a practice of biblical interpretation that doesn't depend on the misleading concealed metaphor that "meaning" is a property of texts as "mass" is of physical objects or "suave debonair sophistication" is of Steve Webb. So long as your engagement with us depends on a premise we reject, you'll keep presenting us with versions of our position that we can't work with. If you want to argue over whether texts have meaning, let's concentrate on that for a while; but don't ignore our premise and then argue with our conclusions!
With regard to, he thinks that because he has transcended his own reading practices and come up with a theory of how all reading practices can and should take place, , would you please refer to the postings I've made and show how my explicit avoidance of "transcending my own reading practices" still falls prey to the trap I'm trying to avoid?
posted by steve webb at 8:58 AM
Hauerwas insists he is a realist, by the way, in his foreword to the new book on Yoder by Carter.
posted by steve webb at 8:55 AM
h
posted by steve webb at 8:46 AM
Well, I just wrote a long note but it wasn't accepted because I wasn't properly signed in. Can't recreate what I said, but one of my inquiries is my interest in Hauerwas's claim to be, contrary to many of his critics, a theological realist (NOT in the Niebuhrian sense, but in an epistemological sense), when it seems so clear that, according to traditional philosophical terms, he is an idealist of a sort. But there is so much interest of late in theological realism, and Yoder was obviously a realist who was much more engaged in historical criticism and much more interested in making claims about the historical Jesus than Hauerwas is, and Hauerwas is so interested in connecting his project to Yoder, that I don't see how Hauerwas can have both Yoder and Fish, that is, be a realist and a postmodernist at the same time. There's a tension there that has to break at some point. As for AKMA's insistence that he is not developing a theory, I think he should get over it and admit that he has a pretty darned good theory about how interpretation takes place. He is trying to understand the conditions that make it possible for readers to find meaning in texts, and his conditions are an extension of reader-response theory, locating meaning not in the individual reader but in the community of readers, and he adds to this the idea that it is not only the community, but the practices of the community (those habits and rituals that sustain the community and generate meaning within the community) that determine how the community chooses texts to endow with authority and how the community interprets those texts. That is a pretty good theory, a Hauerwasian twist on reader-response theory, although it is too one-sided for me (though I agree that author's don't determine meaning, but I think texts can and do). Nevertheless, it is a theory; AKMA is not just reporting on how he reads texts, nor is he just describing, in an empirical manner, how other people read texts. He is developing the formal structures that make reading possible (an analysis of communal practices) and he is developing norms about how reading should be done (most significantly, communities shouldn't claim more authority for their reading practices than their limited practices allow, which especially applies to the academic community of historical-critical scholars). This is a meta-reading of reading. AKMA thinks the way I think reading takes place is wrong, and he thinks that because he has transcended his own reading practices and come up with a theory of how all reading practices can and should take place. Unfortunately, there is no foundation for the normative aspects of his theory, because his own theory suggests that all communities define on their own terms the formal and normative structures of reading. Therefore, his theory is self-contradictory. To put this another way, AKMA's theory is relativistic and yet it isn't; he is a relativist who nonetheless makes pronouncements about how other communities should think about their own reading practices. Moreover, he denies the idea that the academic community can transcend its own self-interests and limitations by rigorous methodological standards that ensure objectivity; yet his own theory, LIKE ALL THEORIES, depends upon AKMA's ability to transcend his own reading practices in order to objectively observe how all reading takes place in communities. AKMA's theory, of course, is a hypothesis, not a description, but like all hypotheses, it depends upon objectivity, which AKMA denies.
posted by A K M Adam at 8:37 AM
The first time you visit here, it'll look topsy-turvy; the history of the conversation runs both from the bottom up (by entries), but from top down (within entries). Sorry for the confusing structure, but I don't have the time to figure out a more intuitively-obvious way of beginning things.
posted by A K M Adam at 7:43 AM
In the next round of postings, Trevor observed: I think particularly Kenneson's book needs attention in terms of the religious community's obligation to state its concerns in a way that is intelligible to other groups and what happens when they don't or are not perceived to. I've just read ch. 3 and it comes screaming back into my head upon reading these emails. In response to Steve's original post, he adds: (If communal practices legitimate any kind of reading, then I don't see what justification there would be left for the Reformation in the first place. Certainly Anabaptist tradition understands itself as having first discovered the fullness of the Word and then developed new practices to correspond to that discovery--i.e., they didn't practice adult baptism first and then find that in the Bible, but the other way around.) Acts 2:42-47 and the story of Anabaptism are more indicative of how closely tied together community, practices and interpretation are than Steve's reading seems to allow. In Acts the practices shape the community but one of these practices seems to clearly be the teaching of the apostles. They go en masse to the temple but break bread together in their homes. Practices are both shaping a new community and challenging an established one.
In Anabaptism the literacy of even illiterate Anabaptists (C. Arnold Snyder details the importance of oral/aural traditions in "Orality, Literacy and Anabaptists", Mennonite Quarterly Review 65(1991) p.374) was important in founding what became an alternative community so I agree with Steve that the central importance of the text can not be understated. But this interpretation was almost always done in community. That is, it was proposed by individuals who claimed the spirit and then tested by the community who searched for the validity of the original claim. Following AKMA, there are no limits on the spirit's work but who will discern the truth of the spirit's prompting. Community is not a token for liberalism in this way of looking at things nor is it a kind of hidden individual. Isn't it like a group of actors getting ready to perform a play. They've got their text, their own inspired performances, but in order for the play to be anything worth watching they have to agree on how these performances will come together on this particular stage, tonight. Here you have an embodied interpretation and I can imagine how it could be very connected to other great performances. It need not be purely local. Universality ... I leave to Steve and AKMA.
Both of these examples are deeply pre-liberal (unless you buy into 16th century non-Anabaptist rhetoric about the Anabaptists) so I'm not at all sure that the community as loci of meaning is, "too tied into the liberal agenda, from my perspective, of denying objective truths and emphasis the human power of making truth happen, rather than receiving truth."(Steve) I do think that both the early church and the early Anabaptist were focused on making truth happen, but I think they did they by performatively receiving truth. The Reformation doesn't derive its justification by its success but rather by its failure. Protestant, Anabaptist, Orthodox and Episcopal churches exist not because of significant new insights or practices but because they stopped being able to talk to Romans just as Romans stopped being able to talk to them.
Steve, in turn, relayed some comments from Bill Placher: Most of Frei's stuff, he thought we should read the Gospels as realistic narratives because, damn it, they were realistic narratives. Late in life (in the essay on "The Literal Reading," for instance) he came to think that we should read the Gospels as realistic narratives because that was the way the church had consistently read them. This switch came partly from thinking about Lindbeck's "cultural linguistic method," I think, and partly from nervousness about lit crit attacks on the idea that the text has "a" meaning. A lot of the secondary literature on Frei celebrates this shift, but I, contrarian as usual, think it was a mistake. I think that the Gospels are realistic narratives whether the church has read them that way or not.
I take AKMA and others to be on the side of "later Frei" in contrast to my preference for "early Frei." As you describe it, AKMA's position also seems to be what Frei in Types of Christian Theology calls type 5--his example was D. Z. Phillips. Frei claimed that the paradox of this position is that it offers a philosophical argument for the complete rejection of philosophy in thinking about theology (as opposed to Type 4--Frei, Barth, etc.--where you continue to make connections with philosophy but only ad hoc.) Then Steve himself chimed in, AKMA, the list these messages are going out to keeps growing! I can't remember who has seen what. But I do want to say that of course I agree with you that the Spirit works through community and that communities endow texts with authority (the authority doesn't magically come from the text) and I don't think there is any one single universal objective hermeneutics out there, but I think that your position is self-contradictory in that you develop a meta-theory of reading that is made possible by a kind of transcendental reflection on the conditions of interpretation while at the same time you deny the possibility that the academic community can sufficiently transcend its own interests in order to do basically the same thing. (More bluntly stated, your own theory of reading is universal in scope, laying down the limits within which all reading occurs and the very preconditions that make the act of reading possible, while at the same time you deny that any approach to reading can have universal authority.)
Moreover, your own theory implies that no reading community is superior to another, and thus you cannot account for the ways in which the academic, as well as Christian, communities are evangelistic and mission oriented. I teach at a College that thinks what we do has relevance and worth for anyone and everyone; just give us the tuition check, and we'll change your lives. I don't know how this college could exist if all of us here were to take your hermeneutical program to heart; that is, we would have to think that our own reading practices were appropriate for only the like minded, and that would defeat the very energy that sustains us. (And maybe that would be a good thing, I'm not denying that!)
I myself have a view of biblical authority that is fairly Barthian, I guess, recognizing the Bible as the scripture of the church, granting historical criticism some merit (the Barth sessions at last fall's AAR were good on this topic), but also insisting on a doctrine of revelation and the Holy Spirit that recognizes the relative (though not absolute) priority of the Bible over all human intentions and plans, including those of the church. I'm not sure how important the question of which came first, the Bible or the Church, is, because I think it is usually stated in such a way as to assume that there must be an answer to it, and that the answer puts you in one of two estranged camps, while I want to say that both came into being together, as gifts of God and witnesses to Christ.
I don't know how I could have written my book on vegetarianism if I thought that church practices determine biblical meaning; maybe I just spent too much time listening to Tracy talk about the excess of the text and its surplus of meaning! Yes, the good book is only good to those who already think so, who are in the church, but no the good book is not good because of those people; it is good because its words point to the Word, and so it serves as a living sign of God's decision to be for us and with us. In that sense, it has ultimate authority over the church, just as the church gives the Bible life by putting it into practice. And AKMA responded [to Bill first, then Steve], Most of Frei's stuff, he thought we should read the Gospels as realistic narratives because, damn it, they were realistic narratives. Late in life (in the essay on "The Literal Reading," for instance) he came to think that we should read the Gospels as realistic narratives because that was the way the
church had consistently read them. This switch came partly from thinking about Lindbeck's "cultural linguistic method," I think, and partly from nervousness about lit crit attacks on the idea that the text has "a" meaning. A lot of the secondary literature on Frei celebrates this shift, but I, contrarian as usual, think it was a mistake. I think that the Gospels are
realistic narratives whether the church has read them that way or not.
I'm reluctant to face off against Bill Placher, and I do tend to read the Gospels as a certain kind of realistic narrative, but I don't know how I would be able to tell what the Gospels "are" except by way of my having been formed to find certain kinds of arguments and readings more persuasive than others (just as Hans Frei, Henri de Lubac, Francis of Assisi, Sojourner Truth, Augustine, and others discerned what was up with the Gospels based on their formation). I explicitly renounce the step Steve kept trying to paste onto me yesterday--that of giving a meta-account of legitimacy, or textuality, or whatever; but I don't know how to tell whether my sense that the Gospels "are" realistic narratives trumps another person's judgment that they're something else altogether. The claim to be able to tell that I'm right and you're misinformed, perverse, stupid, or mad entails the "theoretical" stance Steve ascribes to me; the claim to reckon that various smart people will come up with various divergent ways of reading arises from my observation of history-of-interpretation along with my reluctance to think that I'm the beginning and end of the line for interpretive wisdom.I take AKMA and others to be on the side of "later Frei" in contrast to my
preference for "early Frei." Not exactly--As you describe it, AKMA's position also seems
to be what Frei in Types of Christian Theology calls type 5--his example was D. Z. Phillips. Phillips and I are on whole different wavelengths, or at least we were when I last read Phillips. I'm resistant to typology, but if one must be typed, I think I'm closer to a 4.5 (again, last I remember looking at Types). Frei claimed that the paradox of this position is that it offers a philosophical
argument for the complete rejection of philosophy in thinking about theology
(as opposed to Type 4--Frei, Barth, etc.--where you continue to make
connections with philosophy but only ad hoc.) And I'm not "completely rejecting anything," though most of my readers seem to miss the sentences where I say that explicitly. (How is it that readers who want to advance a more author-and-text-centered case against me seem consistently not to accept my claims that I have nothing against authors, but only to the notion that seems misguided to me, that "an author's intention" or "a text" has an authority that transcends the social circumstances that foreground author-or-test-centricity.
I'm much more comfortable arm-wrestling Steve than Bill--but I just don't buy the "if you're not for the author (or "realistic narrative" or "biblical authority" or whatever), you're 'completely rejecting the author (etc.)' argument. As my M.Div students routinely laugh and quote back at me, "It's more complicated than that."
Now, as to Steve's objections, AKMA, the list these messages are going out to keeps growing! I can't remember who has seen what. But I do want to say that of course I agree with you that the Spirit works through community and that communities endow texts with authority (the authority doesn't magically come from the text) and I don't think there is any one single universal objective hermeneutics out there, but I think that your position is self-contradictory in that you develop a meta-theory of reading that is made possible by a kind of transcendental reflection on the conditions of interpretation while at the same time you deny the possibility that the academic community can sufficiently transcend its own interests in order to do basically the same thing. (More bluntly stated, your own theory of reading is universal in scope, laying down the limits within which all reading occurs and the very preconditions that make the act of reading possible, while at the same time you deny that any approach to reading can have universal authority.) Not a bit! I simply, repeatedly, say that I don't know how we would recognize a more-than-simply-local hermeneutic if I saw it. Is it one that absolutely everyone practices? If not one that everyone practices, how do I know which of the locally-observed hermeneutics is the transcendentally-validated one? No theory. No transcendence. Indeed, the very *opposite* of transcendence.Moreover, your own theory implies that no reading community is superior to another, Not so--just that I can always only make judgments about which is superior on local criteria, which (if that's all anyone has) is no impediment to the necessary work of formulating judgments. As smarter people than I have argued before me, the absence of a transcendent criterion creates problems only if a transcendent criterion was necessary in the first place. If I'm right, and we lack the tools for identifying transcendent criteria, then we've been getting along more or less well without them for millennia. and thus you cannot account for the ways in which the academic, as well as Christian, communities are evangelistic and mission oriented. I don't have time to supply all these accounts, so you are free just to assume I'm unable to do it--but I bet I could do a pretty fair job if you relieved me of all my other responsibilities for a few days. I teach at a College that thinks what we do has relevance and worth for anyone and everyone; just give us the tuition check, and we'll change your lives. I don't know how this college could exist if all of us here were to take your hermeneutical program to heart; that is, we would have to think that our own reading practices were appropriate for only the like minded, and that would defeat the very energy that sustains us. Why? Why not say, "I think this way of reading The City of God enriches your intellect, clarifies your understanding of God's way in the world, and if you don't accept it, at least you've become a wiser human being for having grappled with it?" Do you really tell your students, "My transcendentally-validated hermeneutic assures that I'm right about Barth, and if you don't like it you're flat-out wrong"?(And maybe that would be a good thing, I'm not denying that!) I doubt it--I rather liked Wabash when I was there last summer.I myself have a view of biblical authority that is fairly Barthian, I guess, recognizing the Bible as the scripture of the church, granting historical criticism some merit (the Barth sessions at last fall's AAR were good on this topic), but also insisting on a doctrine of revelation and the Holy Spirit that recognizes the relative (though not absolute) priority of the Bible over all human intentions and plans, including those of the church. Sure--but we don't have access to some Other way of discernment, interpretation, wisdom that itself trumps the Church, do we? If so, why go to church rather than worship at Swift Hall at Chicago (or the RSV Room at Yale or--I forget the names of any rooms at Duke, but one of them, to be even-handed)? Why llift up our voices in testimony of praise at a venue we know on other grounds to be less fundamentally sound in its understanding of God than the Better, More Reliable, Alternative? I'm not sure how important the question of which came first, the Bible or the Church, is, because I think it is usually stated in such a way as to assume that there must be an answer to it, and that the answer puts you in one of two estranged camps, while I want to say that both came into being together, as gifts of God and witnesses to Christ. Amen, and amen. If we were to say nothing else, we could finish the conversation in agreement.I don't know how I could have written my book on vegetarianism if I thought that church practices determine biblical meaning; maybe I just spent too much time listening to Tracy talk about the excess of the text and its surplus of meaning! A good part (the best part?) of your book argues that the church has always sustained a vegetarian current within its walls. If the church had never, ever even tolerated vegetarianism, I'd have a problem--but then again, I might not ever have been open to persuasion that vegetarianism was a compelling alternative.
Even on an issue in which the church's tradition is much less variegated, I can stand over against the church's tradition by reading the tradition in ways that the tradition hasn't thought to think itself before. Some of the best ideas come about that way, as I would hope a Protestant would allow. Yes, the good book is only good to those who already think so, who are in the church, No--it's good whether other folks do or don't recognize that. But there's no point in hammering someone with the Bible "because it's good" if that possibility isn't even on their horizon. but no the good book is not good because of those people; Of course not--though I doubt I would be able to recognize it as good without their testimony. it is good because its words point to the Word, and so it serves as a living sign of God's decision to be for us and with us. In that sense, it has ultimate authority over the church, just as the church gives the Bible life by putting it into practice. The Word of God is living and active--but only by way of interpretations.
An acquaintance of mine, James K. A. Smith, who used to read papers in the Southeast Region's American Biblical Hermeneutics Section, has a book coming out from IVP entitled The Fall of Interpretation, wherein (according to the blurb) he argues against the idea that there's something intrinsically belated or impure about "interpretations" of the Bible (as opposed to the odd notion that it's only the uninterpreted Bible, the Bible free from human interaction, that has authority). I want to read it, haven't yet, but it might be relevant here.
With that, we're mostly caught up, and the seminar table is open for participants to take up the conversation. I'll get to the former conversations shortly.
posted by A K M Adam at 3:31 AM
More recently, Steve followed up his inquiry about RN and SH with some questions and reflections about biblical interpretation (provoked at least in part by Margaret's suggestion that he read up on what we've already written on the topic. He responded as follows:
Spent the weekend hiding from my own work by reading AKMA's Making Sense of New Testament Theology, his essay "Twisting to Destruction," and Margaret's quite wonderful "This is MY Story, This is MY Song..." It really got me up to speed on the whole issue of ideology critique and various moves that Duke folk are making with regard to the communal interpretation of scripture. I would recommend the three works I just mentioned as not just cutting edge in a faddish sort of way but as representing the most serious, most philosophically informed, and most creative alternative to the dominance of historical criticism in biblical studies.
Having said all that, I do have some questions. And by the way, I've been asked to write the chapter on "Rhetoric and Religion" for the Cambridge Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, and I'm doing it in part on different rhetorical options in contemporary theology, with a focus on Hauerwas among others, so this is why I've been pushing you folks and tapping your brains to get my own juices flowing and to start figuring out where I stand on these issues.
I do worry first of all that shifting the meaning of the text from either the text or the individual interpreter to the community of readers reinforces the basic trend of individualism and pragmatism in American theology. That is, the community is the individual writ large, with the "power" to read the text in any way that corresponds to its own practices. This sociology of reading not only ties the hands of the Holy Spirit, so to speak, as the Spirit works through the Bible to speak to us, but it also perpetuates the liberal agenda of connecting meaning to experience, although in this case it is the experience of the community, rather than the individual. That is certainly an improvement, moving the loci of meaning to the community, but it is still too tied into the liberal agenda, from my perspective, of denying objective truths and emphasis the human power of making truth happen, rather than receiving truth. When Margaret writes that "the authority with which we interpret Scripture is the authority of our own positions as women created in God's image..." this seems to go to far, for me, in baptizing human experience, in this case feminist experience, as the judge of scriptural meaning. Of course, I agree that scripture does not interpret itself (although I do not think that idea can be quite so simply laid at the feet of the Reformation), but I think placing authority in the community is swinging to the other extreme. (If communal practices legitimate any kind of reading, then I don't see what justification there would be left for the Reformation in the first place. Certainly Anabaptist tradition understands itself as having first discovered the fullness of the Word and then developed new practices to correspond to that discovery--i.e., they didn't practice adult baptism first and then find that in the Bible, but the other way around.)
I want to indulge myself and risk overstaying my welcome in this conversation by laying out some of these points in a more systematic manner, especially regarding AKMA's position:
1. AKMA's theory, it seems to me, is a product of the very community that it rejects.
A) It is a meta-argument about theories of reading, which arises out of the practices of the academy, practices that include objective argument, logical rigor, self-scrutiny, trying to speak in such a way that you can win an argument with the widest audience possible, etc. etc.
B) I say that you reject the academic community because you do not accept its own self-description. That is, you do not think academic readings of the Bible have any relevance beyond that very community, which is certainly not how the academic community sees itself.
C) If the academic community's self-understanding is flawed (because it is relative to a particular set of interests and practices and has no relevance for communities that don't share those practices and interests), then the academic is self-contradictory and should not exist, because the academic community, like the church, is at heart an evangelical community with a missionary impulse to convert the ignorant into the ways rational inquiry.
2. If such a consequence were to occur:
A) Such a consequence would in itself contradict AKMA's position because, like Wittgenstein, he wants to leave everything as it is, that is, he does not think there is any meta-position that can provide a vantage point from which various reading communities can be criticized and transformed.
B) If such a consequence were to occur, then AKMA himself could not make the case for his postmodern community of readers since his case depends on that very community (academic) to be plausible and debatable.
3. Indeed, it is unclear if any community of readers would accept AKMA's position on hermeneutics, since it denies each community any authority beyond the limits of that community. This makes of AKMA's position a theoretical one and, moreover, a hermeneutics without a home (without a home community). If theories of reading emerge out of particular communities, and are only as coherent as the set of practice of that community permit, then AKMA's theory is all but groundless. (Another way of putting this: either AKMA's theory is a meta-theory, and thus entails the very kind of transcendental reflection and universal significance that he denies to the academy, or his theory is a reflection of a particular community of readers, but no such community can be shown to exist, and the community that seems to be the logical home for his theory, the academy, is itself negated by his theory).
4. In sum, if only local constraints are valid, then how can AKMA (or anyone) challenge academic norms, even when they claim universal import? That's the local language of those who are native to the sacred groves of academe, and should be left alone, perhaps given only anthropological interest, but not criticized. Certainly, if one were to try to be a part of that local culture, one should not try to change it by imparting reading habits from some other culture.
5. In point of fact, an empirical (as opposed to the logical arguments I have been making above) case can be made that the Church has never understood its reading practices in this way, which is all but admitted in AKMA's use of postmodern hermeneutical theory to explain himself, unless one were to argue that the Church was postmodern ahead of its time. I guess I find Frei's history of biblical hermeneutics to be persuasive, that tradition reading of the scriptures was half-way between historical realism and allegory, that people thought of themselves as being defined by the text, but didn't treat the text as an empirically factual handbook; rather, the narrative was taken as true in a common sense definition of truth, and people tried to become a part of it. AKMA's hermeneutics would seem to be just the opposite of this.
Well, dear friends, thanks for your patience! In this very busy time for me I desperately needed some theological conversation, and I needed some inspiration to get my Cambridge essay going, and I have learned a lot especially from you two, Margaret and AKMA.
I responded to Steve as follows: with regard to some specifics from Steve's note:
I do worry first of all that shifting the meaning of the text from either the text or the individual interpreter to the community of readers reinforces the basic trend of individualism and pragmatism in American theology... (see above) Some of this provides useful cautionary advice, but I'm not sure how you get from one point to another in the first couple of sentences. "The community is a collective individual, which theory limits the Spirit's working, and perpetuates the liberal agenda's investment in experience" (I'm condensing here). Hmmm. I suppose there is a way in which one may view a community as a collective individual, but aren't you rushing past some significant and effective differences? We-all in this discussion have been constituted as a particular (peculiar) community, but as a collective individual we're awfully dissociated. Part of Margaret's point and mine has to do with the extent to which our participation in distinguishable overlapping communities ("academy" and "church," for instance, or "women" and "Christians") undermines the exclusive authority of any one of those communities. Take for a careless example the extent to which American "fundamentalism" regards itself as an exemplar of Bible-only faith, which then assimilates and reproduces sundry imperatives that derive from nationalism, capitalism, and a mirror-reflection of enlightenment positivism. (I *said* it was a careless example.) Why can't the Spirit work as well through communities as through (in what I take to be your alternative) the text itself? Was the Spirit inactive before the general promulgation of transcriptions of the Bible? Or, lacking a written medium, does the Spirit work only through individuals *not* communities?
My own position would suggest that the Spirit works through all circumstances: through our interactions with various impersonal objects (texts, mountains and oceans, melodies, scents), our interactions with our neighbors (loved ones, correspondents, relatives, those in whom we have the opportunity to serve Christ), and in our individuality (though I'm not quite sure what that means). No limits to the Spirit's power or medium.
I want to indulge myself and risk overstaying my welcome in this conversation by laying out some of these points in a more systematic manner, especially regarding AKMA's position:
1. AKMA's theory, it seems to me, is a product of the very community that it rejects.
A) It is a meta-argument about theories of reading, which arises out of the practices of the academy, practices that include objective argument, logical rigor, self-scrutiny, trying to speak in such a way that you can win an argument with the widest audience possible, etc. etc.
B) I say that you reject the academic community because you do not accept its own self-description. That is, you do not think academic readings of the Bible have any relevance beyond that very community, which is certainly not how the academic community sees itself. Pardon, but I don't *reject* the academic community; I demur from its claims to authority over interpretations. The academic community certainly "has relevance" beyond its (permeable) boundaries, but it does not have, *can* not have the sort of magisterial authority it claims for itself. How could it (for instance) enforce such claims? And whose claims would be enforced?C) If the academic community's self-understanding is flawed (because it is relative to a particular set of interests and practices and has no (once again, *not* "no" relevance but attenuated relevance)relevance for communities that don't share those practices and interests), then the academic is self-contradictory and should not exist, because the academic community, like the church, is at heart an evangelical community with a missionary impulse to convert the ignorant into the ways rational inquiry. Golly, must I--as an academic--try to convert the ignorant to the ways of rational inquiry? I'd better turn in my union card. That's not my self-understanding.2. If such a consequence were to occur:
A) Such a consequence would in itself contradict AKMA's position because, like Wittgenstein, he wants to leave everything as it is, that is, he does not think there is any meta-position that can provide a vantage point from which various reading communities can be criticized and transformed. It's not so much that I want to leave things unchanged--I can think of a bunch of things I'd like to change. I just don't think I can or should try to change them by shouting that "people have to listen to me because I'm an expert, because I'm a biblical scholar and you're not."
Do you, in turn, mean that people have to abide by my dictates relative to biblical interpretation? If so, how far does my authority reach? How do they know that I'm right and Francis Watson is wrong? Or what if we're both wrong? how would anyone know? How would I know? B) If such a consequence were to occur, then AKMA himself could not make the case for his postmodern community of readers since his case depends on that very community (academic) to be plausible and debatable. Contrariwise, my case rests on the wisdom of the communion of saints--not an infallible or oracular wisdom, but an authority with much greater claim on my interpretive allegiance than, say, a particular issue of JBL or a session of the Pauline Theology Group.3. Indeed, it is unclear if any community of readers would accept AKMA's position on hermeneutics, since it denies each community any authority beyond the limits of that community. How many communities want authority that extends beyond their bounds? And ought they so desire?This makes of AKMA's position a theoretical one and, moreover, a hermeneutics without a home (without a home community). Granted that my arguments often seem scruffy and shabby if not outright homeless, I can say firmly and confidently that my observations on interpretation have a particular home, a small but occasionally-expanding home, among some of the correspondents on this list and various other students, readers, and gentle colleagues. This, Steve, is demonstrable; what seems merely theoretical to me is your claim that my hermeneutics *must not* have a home.If theories of reading emerge out of particular communities, and are only as coherent as the set of practice of that community permit, then AKMA's theory is all but groundless. (Another way of putting this: either AKMA's theory is a meta-theory, and thus entails the very kind of transcendental reflection and universal significance that he denies to the academy, or his theory is a reflection of a particular community of readers, but no such community can be shown to exist, and the community that seems to be the logical home for his theory, the academy, is itself negated by his theory). You lost me here. I can show you, in the flesh, various communities that embody (and sometimes even embrace) what I say about interpretation. Are you telling me that they don't exist?4. In sum, if only local constraints are valid, then how can AKMA (or anyone) challenge academic norms, even when they claim universal import? I'm not sure I'm challenging academic norms, though I will agree that I'm challenging academic claims to authority (if that's what you mean). How can I challenge them?
I can show ways in which claims to universality fail. I can say (as I once said to Max Stackhouse), "I'll believe in universal norms if you let me, a constituent of 'universality,' tell you what they are." But the advocates of "universal norms of ethics" or "universal norms of interpretation" always want to dictate what those norms are, and to excoriate (if not excommunicate) those who decline to recognize this now-mandatory universality. That's the local language of those who are native to the sacred groves of academe, and should be left alone, perhaps given only anthropological interest, but not criticized. Certainly, if one were to try to be a part of that local culture, one should not try to change it by imparting reading habits from some other culture. Why not? Whence come judgments about when one should try to change people's habits and when not?5. In point of fact, an empirical (as opposed to the logical arguments I have been making above) case can be made that the Church has never understood its reading practices in this way, which is all but admitted in AKMA's use of postmodern hermeneutical theory to explain himself, unless one were to argue that the Church was postmodern ahead of its time. I derive great delight from reading Augustine's de doctrina, from dwelling in the traditional of figural interpretation. I'm not advocating the "same" thing as they, but I reckon I'm closer to them than to my historico-postivist colleagues.I guess I find Frei's history of biblical hermeneutics to be persuasive, that tradition reading of the scriptures was half-way between historical realism and allegory, that people thought of themselves as being defined by the text, but didn't treat the text as an empirically factual handbook; rather, the narrative was taken as true in a common sense definition of truth, and people tried to become a part of it. AKMA's hermeneutics would seem to be just the opposite of this. I don't feel obliged to contradict Frei, but I think that his aversion to figurative interpretation weakens his approach--on which, see M. B. Adam's recent term paper on Frei and de Lubac.
In a separate message, Rodney Clapp added: On this matter of how change/persuasion comes about in a
"postmodern" view of hermeneutics, don't neglect Stanley Fish's essay
"Change" in Doing What Comes Naturally, and Dr. Philip Kenneson's little
book Beyond Sectarianism. . .
Wednesday, February 06, 2002
posted by A K M Adam at 7:49 PM
This entry is boiler plate for a link to the original discussion stemming from Steve's egregiously misguided emails, first " Veggie Paci" and then "RN and SH--who would've thought? Or am I crazy?" I'll build separate pages for these discussions, with links to this entry.
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