Thanks again to Philip for his helpful response to my post and for the conversation that we are having on these issues and ideas. I’m certainly finding it stimulating.
On changing the argument by moving from 'wrestling' to 'conversation' and 'dialogue', I did this because I had been asked to give my views on the issue. In my original post I was trying to summarise the arguments made by John Richardson and Peter Rollins in order to contrast them and show that an ‘open’ approach to theology was no less serious about scripture than a ‘conservative’ one.
When I was asked for my view on the issue of wrestling with God then I have to broaden the discussion because I think that conversation is the best descriptor we have for the form in which we have received the Bible and for the way in which that form works within the whole canon of scripture.
Wrestling with God is one element within this broader picture. It is by no means the whole, although it can be a useful entry point into the argument that I am making in these posts and have made previously in other posts and in my NTMTC essays. I think too that I am framing the argument in a way that I have not encountered in quite the same way in the writings of others.
My understanding of being in dialogue with the scriptures goes beyond seeking “to build the bridge between the context/contexts of the passages and our context/contexts today” and beyond those bits of the Bible that we might wrestle with and struggle to make sense of. As a result, I am arguing for making conversation the primary hermeneutic and this why the argument is about the broader form of scripture and not just about particular passages.
This is also why I referred to passages from John’s Gospel as they reveal that Jesus was part of an ongoing conversation within the God into which we too can be drawn. Sometimes this involves wrestling with God, as it did for Jesus in Gethsemene (and also for Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Job, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Jonah, Peter in the vision of non-halal foods, and Paul in his prayers over the ‘thorn in his flesh’), but it also involves conversation, dialogue, sharing and exchange which is not about wrestling and may well be about submission and love.
This is particularly apparent in John’s Gospel where we have particular verses that reveal the ongoing conversation between Jesus and the Father within the Godhead together with Jesus’ teaching being characterised in this Gospel by conversation e.g. the conversations with Nicodemus and the woman of Samaria. Even in the other Gospels, where by contrast narrative is the primary medium for Jesus’ teaching, the parables that Jesus tells often arise out of dialogue with those he encountered. A parable will often be told in response to a question and will be the means by which Jesus asks a question of his questioner.
My argument though is not solely based on the content of particular passages but also about the forms of particular passages/books and the form that the whole canon of scripture takes. Virtually all the Psalms, for example, are conversations where it is assumed that the hearer is either God or the people of Israel. Some of the Psalms are actually written as conversations e.g. Psalm 12. In verses 1-4 the Psalmist cries out to God for help, in verses 5-6 God answers and in verses 7-8 the Psalmist responds by expressing confidence in God. Psalm 77 is the record of a similar conversation with God. In verses 1-6 the Psalmist tells us how he cried out to God, in verses 7-9 he tells what he cried out, in verses 10-12 he tells us how God answered his cry, and in verses 13-20 he tells us of his response to God’s answer.
Similarly, all the Epistles are one side of a conversation in that they are either responses to the writers having been in particular churches and feeling the need to contribute to ongoing discussions within those churches when absent from them or specific responses to letters received from those churches. Revelation is also structured with a significant element of conversation with the writer being questioned by various characters in the vision and in turn asking questions of those same characters.
Conversation therefore features strongly in the content of passages/books and in the form of many passages/books. However, it has been strangely overlooked as a hermeneutic for theology and it is primarily postmodernism that is revealing it as an significant tool or lens for understanding scripture.
The argument does not stop there however because we have set to consider the overall shape or form in which we have received scripture. If we are going to be honest about that overall form in which we have received the Bible then we have to describe it as Mike Riddell, for example, does as “a collection of bits” assembled to form God’s home page or as Mark Oakley does when he uses a more poetic image to speak of the Bible as “the best example of a collage of God that we have”. Riddell and Oakley both develop their images of the Bible from the recognition that the whole Christian Bible contains, as Oakley says, “different views, experiences, beliefs and prayers” drawn “from disparate eras, cultures and authors” which are not systematic in their portrayal of God. As Riddell states: “The bits don’t fit together very well – sometimes they even seem to be contradictory. Stories, poems, teachings, records, events and miracles rub up against each other. They come from all over the place, and span at least 4,000 years of history.”
This is not surprising when there are four Gospels not one, when there are at least two different accounts of Paul’s conversion and ministry, and when the principal form of the New Testament – the letter – is the form of long-distance, written conversation.
The Bible, then, does not move forward in the smooth linear style of, for example, a nineteenth century novel, an academic thesis, a sermon or a systematic theology. Reading the Bible in terms of linearity or chronology is a stop-start process involving multiple perspectives on the same key events or characters and extensive wastelands where little or nothing of significance happens or is recorded. We can learn about the Church in Ephesus, for example, from Acts, Ephesians, 1 Timothy, Revelation and, possibly, the Johannine letters but nowhere do we find a full, chronological telling of the story of that Church. The same can be said of all the Churches which Paul founded, including the Church at Corinth. The founding of this Church is recorded in Acts and the story then jumps to Paul’s letters to this Church. These letters are a debate or conversation (not a story) between Paul and the members of the Corinthian Church about issues of concern to Paul and matters on which the Church had written to Paul for advice. We don’t have the letters which Church members wrote to Paul or all the letters which Paul wrote to the Corinthian Church so the conversation as we have it is a little one-sided and incomplete, although we can infer some of the points made by the Church members from Paul’s record of and response to them.
To ignore the disparate nature and form of the Christian Bible is to run significant risks as Riddell warns us: “ … let us be aware that the assembled parts of the Bible are collected in a somewhat haphazard fashion. To push them into chronological order requires a great deal of scholarship, and runs the danger of doing violence to the material.”
What we have in scripture is, as Gabriel Josipovici has pointed out, “a collection of miscellaneous ‘writings’ … laid alongside each other, the narrative being built up by slotting these together where necessary”. Josipovici describes this as “an extraordinarily simple and an extraordinarily flexible system, which can lead from what could almost be described as shorthand to rich elaboration … Each new element … helps to bring into focus prior elements which we would have overlooked had we not been alerted to them by what follows.” In other words, the texts are in conversation with each other within the overall canon of scripture.
I tried to highlight this in my second post by writing about the way, for example, that Jesus’ ministry, as Tom Wright has set out so well in his major writings, involves the retelling of the story of Israel in terms of himself and his ministry. This means that Jesus’ actions and teaching are, in full, a conversation with the narratives of the Jewish scriptures which involves a reinterpretation of those stories in terms of himself and his ministry. This dialogue with the Jewish scriptures and the retelling or reinterpretation of its narratives continues throughout the New Testament with Paul’s reworking of the Hagar and Sarah narrative, Hebrew’s reinterpretation of the sacrificial system, and Revelation’s reworking of apocalyptic narratives in terms of the politics of the day being some of the stand-out examples.
What holds this collection of miscellaneous writings and the conversation between them in the canon of scripture is the narrative thread which is weaved through them. As I have been saying above this is not a linear or chronological narrative. As I wrote before, I think that it is vital to be real about the non-linear, non-chronological, circuitous and fractured way in which the story in the Christian scriptures is actually told because that is where the openness in scripture is found. The story, the meta-narrative, is embedded in the conversation and can only be understood by taking part in the conversation.
When the story is extracted from the form in which it has been given to us in order to make it linear, chronological and consistent then “violence is done to the material” and it becomes something other than the narrative as God revealed it us. This is actually something that Wright and Richard Burridge have both written about in criticising our Christmas and Easter traditions of (through the Nine Lessons, Seven Last Words, Stations of the Cross/Resurrection etc.) taking bits of the different stories told in the Gospels and elsewhere and fitting them together using a chronology taken from only one of the Gospels to tell the birth, passion or resurrection narratives in ways that ultimately are not those in which those stories have been given to us. Creating systematic theologies by harmonisation or using historical criticism to create ‘the Historical Jesus’ does, I think, similar violence to the text and the key issue is that by doing so we are not reading the narrative in the form in which it was given.
The final move here is to set out in what way the form of scripture keeps the story open. In doing so, it may be helpful to use an analogy. 1408 is a film in which the grieving central character visits haunted hotel rooms in order to deconstruct the narratives that these hotels are using to sell rooms. His motivation for doing so is his unresolved grief over the death of his daughter. When he enters Room 1408 he encounters a room that uses his unresolved grief to terrify and overwhelm him. The way in which film tells the story deliberately operates on two simultaneous levels so that we are never sure whether the central character is fighting real demons or the demons of his own mind. The resolution of the story maintains this ambiguity in that the central character destroys Room 1408, and in doing so also destroys himself, but we are left unsure whether the torment he has faced dies with the physical destruction of the room or continues in the lives of those he has impacted. 1408 therefore combines a narrative which reaches resolution with dual levels of interpretation which leaves us questioning what we have seen and which send us out from the film continuing to reflect on the effect of bereavement in contrast to the sense of satisfaction that comes from a narrative with a resolution that ties up all the loose ends and answers all our questions.
My contention is that the Bible works in a somewhat similar way because its narrative is embedded in a similarly open form. What we have in the Bible, I think, is a both/and - a linear narrative thrust combined with the laying of fragments side by side so that each fragment adds to and challenges the others. We cannot understand one without the other because this is the form in which God has chosen to give us the scriptures.
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Stravinsky - Symphony of Psalms III.
2 comments:
Thanks Jon for a very clear and thorough explanation of your approach to engaging with scripture. You state that the central point you are seeking to make is :
'I think that conversation is the best descriptor we have for the form in which we have received the Bible and for the way in which that form works within the whole canon of scripture.'
I would want to agree that conversation is a helpful way of understanding some of the forms of scripture and I am in agreement with much of what you write but I would question whether it can be claimed to be the best descriptor for the form of scripture as a whole. To assert this is to ignore the many varied forms that scripture takes. For example, you cite Jesus’ parables and suggest that many of these are either a response to a question or a means by which Jesus raises questions for his hearers, he is therefore engaging them in conversation. But what of those parts of Jesus’ teaching which are not framed in terms of such dialogue e.g. the teaching discourse of Matthew 5:1-7:29. This passage concludes not with debate or discussion but with an astounded crowd.
You give some specific examples but there are many others that I can’t see fitting in the same way, unless you are simply using conversation as another way of saying communication, which clearly all scripture is. Obviously there is communication because scripture is written in order to communicate with the reader but I don’t think it can be argued that it is always in the form of conversation. Let us take for example your mention of the epistles as conversation. Well yes, in the sense that they are addressing situations or responding to questions. Except that is not all that they do. There are large parts of the epistles which seem to be explicitly concerned with reasoned argument and explaining theological ideas not just answering questions or dealing with difficult pastoral situations.
My concern is that you may be in danger of doing to the scriptures what you quite rightly criticise others for doing – not taking the diversity of scripture as it is given to us seriously by suggesting that we read passages as examples of conversation when they are not.
Later on in your post you state:
'This means that Jesus’ actions and teaching are, in full, a conversation with the narratives of the Jewish scriptures which involves a reinterpretation of those stories in terms of himself and his ministry. This dialogue with the Jewish scriptures and the retelling or reinterpretation of its narratives continues throughout the New Testament with Paul’s reworking of the Hagar and Sarah narrative, Hebrew’s reinterpretation of the sacrificial system, and Revelation’s reworking of apocalyptic narratives in terms of the politics of the day being some of the stand-out examples.'
I am struggling to understand in what sense these are conversations, conversation is not the same as re-interpretation. Conversation is a two way process in which both parties respond to what the other is saying. Yes, the examples you give show re-interpretation but they are not conversation in the sense that the word is generally used. In what way do the Jewish scriptures respond to the way in which they have been re-interpreted within the passage where the re-interpretation takes place?
The other thing that strikes me in reading your post is that your hermeneutic of conversation sounds very like the hermeneutical circle approach which has been around for many years, going back to the work of people like Heidegger and Gadamer.
You state:
'Conversation therefore features strongly in the content of passages/books and in the form of many passages/books. However, it has been strangely overlooked as a hermeneutic for theology and it is primarily postmodernism that is revealing it as an significant tool or lens for understanding scripture.'
There are two aspects to the hermeneutical circle. The first, identified by Scleiermacher and Heidegger for example, suggests that we can understand a whole only in the light of its parts and conversely we can understand the parts only in the light of the whole. Now it seems to me this is true of scripture and how we read and interpret. We have a canon of scripture not just a set of individual separate texts. So for example with the gospels we read them not just as four isolated documents but as texts which relate to each other in all sorts of ways. They are about Jesus, they use each others material etc. But they are also distinct documents each giving a different portrait of Jesus. I totally agree that we should resist the simplistic harmonisation which you rightly criticise (though I do not believe this is what many of the systematic theologians I have read are trying to do), but neither should we limit our understanding of who Jesus is to only one of the gospels, nor read one as if the others don’t exist. You could argue that what we are engaged in here is a conversation between the specific and the whole.
The second aspect of the circle, I prefer spiral, of the hermeneutical process starts with the reader asking preliminary questions of the text. The text in turn speaks back to the reader now hearer, shedding light on the hearers own situation and questions. The initial questions are revised in the light of the text and in response to more questioning the text itself speaks more clearly. The process continues as the interpreter gains a deeper understanding of the text. Now this is a conversation / dialogue between reader and text in which the reader asks questions and in turn is questioned. Is this what you are referring to in your hermeneutic of conversation and if not in what way is what you are proposing distinctive?
Anyway, I’ve really enjoyed reading your posts on this topic and my delay in commenting has been because I’ve been mulling over your ideas. As I hope I indicated I can see great value in your approach to hermeneutics and it does take seriously the conversational aspects of scripture, my concern is that I don’t see how it works as The Approach.
Thanks Philip for being willing to carry on our conversation and for setting out your concern about seeing ‘conversation’ as ‘the approach’ to scripture. I really appreciate your reflections on what I’ve posted and the way in which they rightly get me questioning the ideas I’ve tried to express.
You write that you don’t agree with my statement that “conversation is the best descriptor we have for the form in which we have received the Bible and for the way in which that form works within the whole canon of scripture” because conversation is not a feature of “the many varied forms that scripture takes.”
I agree with you that this is the case but don’t think that that invalidates my argument for two reasons. My main reason for thinking that is that my argument is that conversation is the best descriptor for “the form in which we have received the Bible” and for “the way in which that form works within the whole canon of scripture.” My argument, therefore, is about the form of the whole canon rather than the form of the parts (e.g. books/genres) that compose it.
Having said that I have been arguing that both the form of the parts and the content of those parts includes much more conversation than is generally acknowledged by Biblical scholars and theologians. Examples I have used included: the conversational aspects of the Psalms, Epistles and Revelation (form of the parts); and Jesus’ ongoing conversation within the Godhead, his conversational teaching method in John’s Gospel, the retelling of Israel’s story in terms of Jesus that we find throughout the NT, and the many conversations recorded between God and the most significant characters in both OT and NT (content of the parts). However, I certainly don’t want to suggest that all of the forms or all of the content of the parts are explained or informed by the motif of conversation.
I do think, however, that conversation is the best descriptor when it comes to describing the form in which we have received the whole canon of scripture. There is, as we both accept, an enormous diversity of texts in the canon of scripture which although they are set alongside each other within the frame of the canon also interact with, speak to, comment on and interpret each other. It is this interaction between the parts of the whole that I want to describe as conversation.
Once you have a frame (e.g. the canon) which includes a diverse collection of different texts, this interaction or conversation can occur in a huge diversity of different ways. These include: different telling of the same events in different ways and to different chronologies (i.e. Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, the four Gospels, or the accounts of the conversion of Saul); retellings of stories in ways that reinterpret the original story (e.g. Paul’s reworking of the Hagar and Sarah narrative, Hebrew’s reinterpretation of the sacrificial system, and Revelation’s reworking of apocalyptic narratives in terms of the politics of the day); passages being interpreted and being capable of interpretation at a number of different levels (i.e. historical and allegorical, as in the Hagar and Sarah narrative); the quoting or paraphrasing of material from one text in another text; and exploration of shared themes in different texts without specific reference one to the other, among others.
I find Josipovici very helpful in describing the way in which this conversational form works as he discusses the opening chapters of Genesis:
“… the chapter advances, by means of the basic pattern laid down in the opening: full repetition, partial repetition, innovation – or any combination of these three elements
… the Hebrew Bible is … concerned with repetition and return
… the Bible works by way of minimal units laid alongside each other, the narrative being built up by slotting these together where necessary. This is an extraordinarily simple and an extraordinarily flexible system, which can lead from what could almost be described as shorthand to rich elaboration. Naturally this is made possible or reinforced by the paratactic nature of Hebrew syntax and by the denial of dualism within the narrative. The three aspects intermesh and create a narrative which can spend nine chapters getting from the Creation to Noah and his descendents, or else cover the ground in just four verses, as in Chronicles: ‘Adam, Sheth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalaleel, Jered, Henoch, Methusalah, Lamech, Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth’ (1 Chron. 1: 1-4) …
Each new element in Genesis 1 helps to bring into focus prior elements which we would have overlooked had we not been alerted to them by what follows. In just the same way chapter 2 – 3 help bring into focus the theme of division in Chapter 1 …”
Later, Josipovici argues that a “pared-down, reticent style is … the style of the Bible” and that “what it implies is that we can read most episodes in any number of different ways, though always with the sense that other ways are possible.” The narrative, he suggests, always denies us “a point of view above the action” and therefore is not going to help us adjudicate between different readings: “When we think we have found at last a place from which to interpret we find that it too is subject to conflicting interpretations.” Alongside this style, we find that “the events are laid out alongside each other, without comment, and we are never allowed to know whether the pattern we see emerging at one point is the true pattern.”
Such points lead him to conclude that “the Hebrew Bible … chose not to stay with the fulfilment of man’s desires but with the reality of what happens to us in life. We all long in our daily lives for an end to uncertainty, to the need for decisions and choices, with the concomitant feeling that the choices we have made may have been the wrong ones. Yet we also know that life will not provide such an end, that we will always be enmeshed in uncertainty. What is extraordinary is that a sacred book should dramatize this, rather than be the one place where we are given what we desire. But that is precisely what the Hebrew Bible does …”
These approaches present us with an open conversation in which we can participate, as, for example, occurs in Judaism in the Gemarah.
I think this provides a partial answer to your question about the extent to which reinterpretation of stories is actually a conversation: “In what way do the Jewish scriptures respond to the way in which they have been re-interpreted within the passage where the re-interpretation takes place?” The layering of stories and interpretations across the canon of scripture continually brings us back to the question as to whether any one story or interpretation is definitive and closed or whether there is an open ongoing conversation about interpretation in which we can participate. The next part of my argument picks this up in more detail. Another part of an answer to your question is found in the responses of people in the Gospel/NT stories to the retelling of Israel’s story undertaken by Jesus and Paul. These make it clear that there are alternative perspectives and challenges to these retellings/reinterpretations. So, conversation within the text with the stories being reinterpreted occurs through those that challenge the reinterpretation. Again, this brings us back to the overall structural question of the canon of scripture as to the open or closed status of these stories/interpretations.
In the construction of the Christian Bible the open conversational form of the Hebrew Scriptures is combined with a sense of fulfilment through the forward drive of the story that it tells:
“It’s a magnificent conception, spread over thousands of pages and encompassing the entire history of the universe. There is both perfect correspondence between Old and New Testaments and a continuous forward drive from Creation to the end of time: ‘It begins where time begins, with the creation of the world; it ends where time ends, with the Apocalypse, and it surveys human history in between, or the aspect of history it is interested in, under the symbolic names of Adam and Israel’. Earlier ages had no difficulty in grasping this design, though our own, more bookish age, obsessed with both history and immediacy, has tended to lose sight of it. Neither theologians nor biblical scholars have stood back enough to see it as a whole. Yet it is a whole and quite unlike any other book.”
This then means that there is also a conversation/dialogue/dialectic between the open laying of texts alongside each other without comment and the closed forward thrust of the story. The Bible, as a whole, is a both/and: it is both open and closed; both structure legitimating and structure subverting (to use Brueggemann’s terms); both a unity and an arbitrary construct (Josipovici). As a result, there is also a see-saw movement or conversation in our response as readers:
“there is a constant see-saw movement at work in our relation to the books that matter to us: we are drawn to them because they seem to speak to our condition, and we seek to make them more and more our own; but we are also drawn to them because they seem to be other than us, because they guide us out of ourselves into what we feel to be a truer, more real world.”
This brings us nicely to the hermeneutic circle or spiral where, as you have pointed out, the conversation between whole and part and the conversation between reader and text are very much a part of what I am trying to describe. What I am seeking to do, however, is broaden our sense of the extent and variety of ways in which conversation occurs in and through scripture beyond the two conversations that you set out as part of the hermeneutical circle.
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