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More On Hermeneutics

If I try to respond to David Weinberger’s notes to me about the hermeneutics post, I may find myself coming round to a more satisfactory way of addressing Tom’s enigma. He pokes me about the extent to which revelation, the divine illumination by which biblical writings bespeak truths that reach beyond run-of-the-mill human knowledge, affects my account of hermeneutics. After all, he points out, one wouldn’t necessarily treat the authorial intention that shaped the menu at a California restaurant the same way one might treat the authorial intention that shaped Genesis.

Terrific point, and (actually) one of my strongest impulses toward differential rather than integral hermeneutics. Why? After all, some of my integral-hermeneutics colleagues argue that the unity of God’s will and its realization in the composition of Scripture require the ascription of a unitary meaning in Scripture (and the concomitant integral hermeneutics). Moreover, they suggest that the idea of God offering an ambiguous or plurivalent revelation contradicts the idea of revelation itself.

Sed contra (as my Dominican teacher used to say), experience teaches us that the Bible has indeed provoked a panoply of divergent interpretations among unquestionably earnest, diligent, intelligent, devout interpreters. On the account of integral hermeneutics, we are obliged to reckon that one among these scholars has been right, the others incorrect—but without an manifest way of determining which. If we subscribe to integral hermeneutics, we find ourselves taking a crapshoot on which spokesperson truly divined what was to be revealed in the Bible. Especially where interpreters divide diametrically, as interpreters have from time to time in Christian history, integral heremeneutics simply fails to give an adequate account of how we might ascertain to whom we ought to listen.

Differential hermeneutics, however, can locate revelation not in the text by itself, such that we’re left to assay the content of an unambiguous revelation that we can’t get at. Instead, differential hermeneutics can locate revelation in the shared practice of interpreting the Bible under the social, liturgical, communal, ethical conditions of participating in life under the Law, or under the Cross. Judaism (as David has pointed out) already demonstrates the theological cogency of a tradition that recognizes plurality of insight within a shared commitment to a very specific Torah. Christianity offers too many examples of “our way or the highway” interpretations of Scripture—but araen’t those schismatic gestures warranted, if not outright required, by a rigorous application of integral hermeneutics?

By contrast, the pre-Reformation Western tradition, and many aspects of the Orthodox traditions to this day, preserve an appreciation for the extent to which the Bible may engender divergent harmonious interpretations.

One last thing before I crash for the night. David’s question about a difference between sacred and secular hermeneutics favors a differential approach in another way, too. Although English departments may shelter some of the most erudite, persistent, articulate practitioners of integral hermeneutics, few if any would ground their practice on theological premises. But that’s just what certain sorts of integral hermeneutics suggest that they ought to do. If one does not believe in a Triune God, for instance, why should one be especially moved by the trinitarian resonances of the author-text-audience triad? (And what if one adhere’s to Kenneth Burke’s schema for interpretation; would that oblige one to proliferate divine Persons?) Differential heremeneutics offers both an account of why people read the Bible differently from their dinner menu (because they do so under different conditions, with a different stake in what they’re interpreting, and different goals in taking on the interpretation) and a (unitary?) general account of why people interpret texts as they do.

More tomorrow; this felt good, and I think I’m getting at some of what I’d been hoping to say to Tom.

DRMA: “Mothership Connection,” Parliament; “You Are My Sunshine,” Norman Blake; “Christiana,” Prince Nico Mbarga and the Rocafil Jazz; “Desert Blues,” Leon Redbone; “Immigrant Song,” Led Zeppelin; “I’ll Never Be Your Maggie Mae,” Suzanne Vega; “Shake It Up,” the Cars; “Don’t Keep Me Wondering,” the Allman Brothers (a propos in several ways); “Shhh/Peaceful,” Miles Davis. Permalink -Main Page-
      ( 10:07 PM )  

Intermezzo

Dave Rogers (no, not that one, the other one) enjoys seeing what’s playing from my hard drive as I blog. Glad to note it, Dave, though I think I’ll ite a new, smaller-type style into my stylesheet when I get around to incorporating the Pilgrim relative-size strictures. I’m not using the BlogAmp tool ’cause I play from SoundJam and iTunes mostly. What Dave may not realize is that this playlist saturates my sermons (and “scholarly” writing as well), running indeed as a sort of soundtrack album to my life. A big, long soundtrack album.

Gary Turner thinks I’m sincere. Oh, yeah, surrrre.

DRMA: “He’s Got Better Things For You,” Memphis Sanctified Singers; “Whenever,” Shakira; “Weapon of Choice,” Fatboy Slim (at Nate’s urging—if you can, check out the video with Christopher Walken!); “Turn Around,” They Might Be Giants; “Love At First Sight,” XTC (glad that came around); “Dreamer In My Dreams,” Wilco; “To Sir With Love,” Trash Can Sinatras. Permalink -Main Page-

Hermeneutics Follow-Up

I actually started writing this response while sitting at the airport in Indianapolis, prospecting for a wifi signal (found one, but it wasn’t open). So at that point I couldn’t respond to comments from Juliet on the hermeneutics article, nor can I call back the specifics of the Tutor’s challenge to connect my advocacy of differential hermeneutics to his urgent question, “What shall I do to be saved?” (I want to check that article he cites on donor-centered philanthropy, too, as I have corresponded with Phil Cubeta and have a certain respect for him.) What I opted to do was blog back to email messages from my generous correspondents, as follows, and now that I’m home I hope to finish up the blog with my responses to Juliet and the Tutor.

To start with, friend Tom Matrullo (in an email, now posted in extenso here) suggests that I move “quickly” to the assumption that texts are unintelligible, from which he identifies two contrasting sets of failures endemic to the two currents of interpretation I described: “endless failures to agree on a meaning, or endless efforts to elucidate individual interpreters’ errors.”

First response, then: I don’t assume texts are “unintelligible,” but that they aren’t finally intelligible. That is, I don’t think that we ever come to the end of interpretation. That seems unsatisfactory, so far as I can tell, only if we suppose at the outset that there must be an end to interpretation to which we could come. I don’t share that assumption—at least, I don’t assume that interpretation comes to an end under the sublunary conditions of mortal life. In my experience, people don’t so much come to the end of interpretation, as they come to the end of their patience for interpreting. At that point, they satisfy themselves that their own interpretation, or the interpretation their favorite teacher propounded, or the interpretation that the Bishop of Rome mandated, or the interpretation upheld by most of the interpreters they respect, some chosen bulwark marks the end of the interpretations for which they will sit still.

All of these are more-or-less sensible grounds for winding down one’s interpretive process; one has to stop somewhere, and each of these criteria can with some seriousness claim finality. The question then becomes, “To which criterion do you adhere?” and here again we meet with differential responses.

If I don’t begin by positing a unitary meaning to the text, I needn’t believe that every interpreter errs.

He then picks up my suggestion that the most pertinent “unity” resides in the Body of Christ, within which we may see differentiation as well as integrity. Tom asks whether he understands me to affirm that the “unity” to interpretation lies in the practice of the interpreters (yes, so far) and thus

one turns to interpret the Church, or the community of interpreters, in hopes of gaining some sense of the complexity, tension, dissonance, alterity, inscrutability which might be attributable to the text, since those attributes appear to reasonably describe the evidently un-unified community—the very “meaning” unleashed by the text.

That is to say, the Church as metaphor of the meaning of the text becomes its own subject, and in seeking to read itself, is subject to the aporia between integral and differential hermeneutics. The practice of the community is the hermeneutic pursuit of the meaning of the text, but that meaning, it turns out, is the various incompatible practices of its reading.

This seems a conundrum.

Indeed it does, and it’s a beautiful, subtle point. I would try to disspell the conundrum by resisting the phrase “Church as metaphor of the meaning of the text” (because I don’t assume that there is a meaning in texts) and the phrase “attributable to the text,” (because I don’t ascribe those qualities to the text). Were I to begin ascribing qualities of “complexity, tension, dissonance, alterity, inscrutability” to the text itself (in any but a conventional, colloquial sense) I’d have tilted the table in the direction of integral hermeneutics.

Where Tom suggests that the Church provides a metaphor for the meaning of a the text, I would propose that the Church provides a metaphor for the text. Both are underdetermined as to their identity, but both stand for a fictive unity (whose posited unity begins to dissolve when examined closely). Any given account of the unity of the text/Church will persuade some, but not all, of the concerned parties—and that mixed success itself testifies to the weakness of the proposed unity.

Just who is included in the unity of the Church (Mormons? Unitarians? Catholics? even Episcopalians?)? Who do we trust to decide?

Just what counts as the unity of the text (An unseen but implicit authorial intention? The text itself, apart from an alleged intention, as the American New Critics taught?)? Who do we trust to decide?

One of my concerns relative to integral hermeneutics concerns figuring out who gets to tell me the meaning of the text, and whom they banish from legitimate understanding of the text. As I asked in my initial foray, how do I know which prominent authority to rely on?

I’ll continue this topic next blog, but I want to wrap this one up for now.

DRMA: “New Man In Town,” Mighty Sam McClain; “Gospel Medley,” Destiny’s Child (see, Halley, I was listening); “Armando’s Rhumba,” Chick Corea/Jean-Luc Ponty; “You Can’t Make Me Doubt Him,” Abyssinian Baptist Gospel Choir; “I Ain’t Got You,” the Yardbirds; “Christ for President,” Wilco; “Alabama Getaway,” Grateful Dead; “You and Me and the Bottle Makes Three,” Big Bad Voodoo Daddy; “Waiting on my Wings,” The Word; “Fool in the Rain,” Led Zeppelin; “Party Out of Bounds,” the B-52s; “Forty Days and Forty Nights,” Muddy Waters; “A Change Is Gonna Come,” Mighty Sam McClain. (By the way, I bought the Allman Brothers’ “Beginnings” CD, a replacement of my vinyl copy, this afternoon after remembering from some MP3 downloads how strong both those first two albums were.)
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      ( 10:00 PM )  

Service Error

The Seabury server was down all night and part of the morning, so far as I can tell. But that didn’t slow down my blogging—no, sirree! I was stuck in the mud all by myself.

Gary Turner isn’t blocked, though; he added two covers to his series of tabloid bloggers, including (last and surely least) me. Time to take Fiona at her word, Gary; in a few months, you won’t be having too many of these evenings alone together any more.

DRMA (that is, “Dave Rogers Music Alert”): “Dear Old Stockholm,” Miles Davis; “Working Class Hero,” Plastic Ono Band.
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Thursday, July 18, 2002
      ( 10:10 PM )  

$99 a Year

I’m not saying anything about Apple’s new policy of charging for the “free” (in the sense of, “Take one, faithful Mac user, it’s free—for now”) mac.com email addresses, because I’d so much rather say something positive.
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Wednesday, July 17, 2002
      ( 11:02 PM )  

Give a Spy a Break

It can be a real challenge to ascertain just which of your neighbors or customers are likely to threaten the stability of the Bush Administration and thereby lend aid and comfort to the Forces of Evil. Help your local tipster with this sticker, carefully designed to indicate that you’re dubious about Dubya—hence, a threat to the American way of life.

Dave Rogers Music Alert: “Circulo de Amor,” El Gran Silencio; “Book I Haven’t Read,” Lambchop; “Blues Stay Away From Me,” Louvin Brothers.

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      ( 11:34 AM )  

Make-Un-Work

I’ve lots of other things to do, but I’ve just got to try to implement Mark Pilgrim’s relative font size fix. It’s important, in a way that’s hard to explain.
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      ( 10:07 AM )  

Scots For Aye

Whoops! Forgot to blog Frank Paynter’s interview with Gary Turner, eloquent spokesGlaswegian for Scottish blogging causes and ingenious deviser of Blogstickers, Chalkchalking, blogtank, Dropdown USA, and other online sensations.

And Dave: I’m listening tothe Carter Family, “Lonesome Homesick Blues”; Stevie Wonder, “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)”; the Rolling Stones, “Hang Fire.”

And Blogchalk : English, USA, Chicago, Evanston, priest, writer, professor. That all sounds dumb, but I suppose I see the usefulness. Permalink -Main Page-
      ( 9:22 AM )  

Superfluous Redundancy Department

Does it bother anyone else when people say (as an NPR commentator just did) “mass exodus”? Isn’t an “exodus” necessarily a mass behavior? If Tom Matrullo walks out of a restaurant, does that count as an exodus?

(Parenthetically, I”m asking about colloquial English usage. In Greek—sorry, I just spent a week on this—an individual can certainly make an εξοδος, a “departure.” Jesus does just this at Luke 9:31, though there I think we should hear a Lukan echo of the “exodus of the children of Israel” that the Old Testament narrates. I’m not so sure that the same applies in 2 Peter 1:15, where the same word appears.)

By the way, Dave, this means that I’m listening to Morning Edition as I blog now—but pretty soon I’ll open SoundJam and fire up the giant playlist on my external hard drive, from which I’ll be sure to blog for you the tunes that play as I type.
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      ( 9:11 AM )  

If Anyone Can Be Sympathetic. . . .

Mike Golby eloquently undresses Dave Winer in a series of recent blogs, in connection with Dave’s slagging of Rebecca Blood’s books on blogging, and then Dave’s conceptually muddy remarks on journalism and blogging. Dave’s a Big Wig, very much more so than I or even Mike himself, but he really ought to attend to Mike’s critique.

Elaine observes, in Mike’s comments, that of course “if the blogger applies the standards and techniques of professional journalism to the researching and writing,” then the blog can be journalism—but that’s a far cry from what seems to be Dave’s claim that blogging simply is a form of journalism. “Can be,” certainly. “is,“ no. It certainly looks as though Dave has his argument all muddled. Dave's confident tone and his success as a software entreprenuer sometimes enable him to pass off jumbled ideas as common sense; I recall a number of times Dave has delivered a lofty pronouncement, then needed to backtrack or clarify or (as the expression “do a Dave” memorializes) simply drop the problematic claim.

Of course, almost all of us write our blogs casually enough that we need to watch out about throwing stones. Perhaps Dave’s readers, if not Dave himself, may take this as an occasion to check ourselves and our pomposity quotient. Whoops! Mine just peaked out too high. . . .

Then look at this bit about quitting smoking. Three cheers to Dave for quitting—that’s something really tremendous, even if it did take heart surgery and a week in the hospital to usher him off the habit. But “If I can, anyone can”? How on earth can any sensible human being make that kind of claim? If we didn’t have reason to think otherwise, we’d have to conclude that Dave is heartlessly oblivious to the pain of others’ addiction. I’ll never be in a position to judge your (or her, or his) capacity to overcome an addiction or a mental illness or some other hitch. I never smoked a cigarette, but I dread to think what an addict I’d be if I had. I have shaken off some bad habits, but that’s no proof that someone else can (or that I’m a hero of self-discipline—just ask the editors who are waiting for my writing projects!).
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Tuesday, July 16, 2002
      ( 9:10 PM )  

Home Cooking

After an embarrassing departure from Crawfordsville—I left my backpack (including the PowerBook on which I’m now typing and my Visor) in the Wabash Center shuttle, heartfelt thanks to Derek for doubling back to drop them off at the airport—and a plane flight seated spent seated next to a mountainous airplane mechanic whose mammoth shoulders and arms left me no space, I arrived home and found that I had spammed myself (twice!). I apologize to anyone who got this promise of instant wealth (or whatever) and didn't filter it out because it seemed to be from me; if it’s any consolation, I seem to be this pseudo-me’s target as well as you.
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      ( 8:59 PM )  

Au Revoir, Crawfordsville

This morning the Greek consultation ended, everyone quite exhausted at the considerable effort they’d put into constructing the skeleton of a website. It was an impressive push, especially given that most of the team knew relatively little about the insides of web construction. At the same time, everyone was frustrated at how task-oriented the consultation had become. (The Wabash Center, our host for the consultation, has a reputation for making sure that its consultations and conferences aren’t over-scheduled.) We got a lot of good work done, though, and I suspect everyone learned at least a little about what a serious effort it takes to get a substantial site online.

Even better than the week’s work, though, was the conversation surrounding appropriate uses of technology in theological education, both in preparation for the conference coming up in August and as a sidebar among the various Greek scholars. We have some prospects for enticing some theological educators onto the cluetrain. Hey, they’re reading David Weinberger’s book; who knows where that will lead them?
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      ( 8:39 AM )  

Turn Me In First

I may be late for the good-bye session of the Teaching Greek Consultation, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to link to Steve Himmer’s take on the current civil-liberties climate in the land of the free (thanks for the tip, Tom). (I think you’re cool, Steve; I just have a peculiar name.)

I want to save citizen-spies the trouble and tell the Bush administration that I’m out of step with the boosterist chauvinism of the present administration. If you’ve got a blacklist, I want to be on it.
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Monday, July 15, 2002
      ( 8:02 PM )  

Holding Action

A number of correspondents, a number of complebloggers have sent thoughtful volleys my way, while I’ve been sitting around hanging with the Greek geeks. I hope that tomorrow, maybe on the plane flight, I'll be able to respond to your blogged ideas, and answer some emails. Not “answer emails” in flight; Doc Searls’s fantasy has yet to come true. But I'll read and get answers ready, deo volente.
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      ( 1:37 PM )  

Weinberger Award-Winner

Thanks to David Weinberger, I have a new accomplishment and the pixellated trophy (modified for greater specificity) to show for it.

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      ( 1:30 PM )  

Preach at all Times

Really, I don’t try to solve every problem by throwing a weblog at it; but in a meeting of a subgroup of the Teaching Greek consultation, people were trying to describe an online device for collecting feedback. At first, I threw them to Quicktopic, but they wanted more flexibility. I showed them a Blogger group blog, but they wanted to be able to categorize posts (so that they could look for advice on exams without sifting through all the advice on teaching what “deponency” means). So I showed them Movable Type, and they ate it up. I don’t know whether Wabash College (which will be hosting the web site eventually) will install MT, but my colleagues were captivated by the categories and the local-server option.
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Sunday, July 14, 2002
      ( 12:15 PM )  

Mark-Up Confession

Dorothea and my more rigorous online mark-up friends will be disappointed in me, but really in this situation there’s little I can do. On the site the Greek Consultation is constructing now, in a rush with very little regard for decent mark-up, the Greek text depends on users having a particular typeface. Unicode would be nice, but we’re pressed for time and it’s not clear that either our users or (especially) those of my colleagues typing in the Greek text are Unicode-literate. But checking the Greek type display (across platforms and browsers) will drive me batty. Moreover, the variety of file formats in which my colleagues are sending me data adds complications; copying and pasting from all sorts of file formats means including bunches of invisible gunk that screws up the text display (so I then have to go back to re-type material that others had already laboriously entered). If my friends here were a client and I their contractor, I could explain better why we oughtn’t approach our task this way; the group process hasn’t been determined by sensible mark-up and construction goals (since few members of the group have a rich understanding about how site construction should work). As it is, I’m just doing what they ask me to, and letting the mark-up fall where it may. Forgive me, Dorothea, Jonathon, Mark, et al.
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      ( 12:10 PM )  

Learning More About Teaching Greek

Presentation morning at the Teaching Biblical Greek Consultation. Susan Garrett started the morning by showing us the Contexticon (that’s right, you can’t get access), a hyperlinked reference work for studying the Greek New Testament. Scholars and (especially) grad students from the University of Chicago, Yale, UNC, and Baylor are putting together a marvelous resource for study of the New Testament in its linguistic, historical, cultural context. They’ve assembled lots of commentary, parallels, lexical resources, visual information, and the project as a whole looks terrific (page design is too busy for my taste, but that’s a quibble). They’re using hypermedia beautifully, and it should be a tremendous accomplishment when they complete it—years and years from now.

What are they doing wrong? They’re going to make it available by subscription. I wish them luck, and I wish that someone gets the clue that restricting access to hyperlinked information counteracts the greatest strengths of hypermedia.

Clayton Croy followed up with a presentation on the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, which contains virtually everything written in Greek between Homer and 600 CE, and many texts from the subsequent 800 years. The TLG people have been at it for thirty years, and their database of texts boggles the mind. But the terms of distribution depend for their intelligibility on the normative pricing structure that print media publishing has established (just as the cost of CDs depends on a pricing structure derived from the vinyl-record publishing industry).

But that world doesn’t exist any more. I’d love to have access to the TLG, but at $300 for a five-year license I’ll just rely on Perseus (tortured as the interface may be; see Jorn Barger on that: “The Perseus website was created by academics who seem incapable of communicating simply and directly.” Someday I’m going to make a Perseus entry page that fits my own habits and interests).
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All times are local.
Local times may vary.
Minutes do not expire.

A. K. M. Adam
That which we have not yet bothered to imagine is not therefore impossible.