Congregational Hermeneutics

How Do We Read?

Andrew P. Rogers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134795154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Cristianesimo

Despite many churches claiming that the Bible is highly significant for their doctrine and practice, questions about how we read the Bible are rarely made explicit. Based on ethnographic research in English churches, Congregational Hermeneutics explores this dissonance and moves beyond descriptions to propose ways of enriching hermeneutical practices in congregations. Characterised as hermeneutical apprenticeship, this is not just a matter of learning certain skills, but of cultivating hermeneutical virtues such as faithfulness, community, humility, confidence and courage. These virtues are given substance through looking at four broad themes that emerge from the analysis of congregational hermeneutics - tradition, practices, epistemology and mediation. Concluding with what hermeneutical apprenticeship might look like in practice, this book is constructively theological about what churches actually do with the Bible, and will be of interest to scholars, students and practitioners.

Chapter 1
How Do We Read?

‘How do we read the Bible?’ is a deceptively simple question, yet it is really at least two questions in one.

The first question requires a broadly descriptive answer. How is the Bible shaping Christian communities? How are we actually making connections between the text and our context – what processes and starting points are involved? such a question points to the long overdue expansion of the ‘hermeneutics’ category towards the descriptive, that builds on the fledgling field of the variously termed congregational/ordinary/empirical hermeneutics.¹

The second question requires a prescriptive answer which tackles prescriptive hermeneutical matters, in other words, how should we read the Bible? This question is related to the first, since we need to know where we are in order to move towards where we want to go. A cursory Google search makes it clear that many church leaders and educators see this second question as primary, with numerous results listed under the heading of ‘How to read the Bible’.

Eugene Peterson, translator of The Message, considers Jesus’ use of the ‘how’ question in Lk 10:26 when being tested by a religion scholar. Of the law, Jesus asks: ‘How do you read it?’ Related to this exchange, Peterson warns:

Reading the Bible, if we do not do it rightly, can get us into a lot of trouble. The Christian community is as concerned with how we read the Bible as that we read it ...An enormous amount of damage is done in the name of Christian living by bad Bible reading (my italics 2006: 81–2).

Peterson is right to identify the importance of the ‘how’ question, but I am not persuaded that churches demonstrate such a concern for ‘how’ as he claims. Some have recognised this. The global research project from the worldwide Anglican Communion, ‘The Bible in the Life of the Church’, drew attention to ‘how’ in its core message as follows:

A major finding of these investigations is that how Anglicans engage with the Bible turns out to be just as important as its content. This perhaps unnerving claim does not contest the unique place and authority which the scriptures have in Anglican life, but it does point up the significance, perhaps thus far overlooked, of the contexts in which and processes by which they are heard and read (2012: 5).

Of an international Baptist colloquium in 2009, the authors of the resulting volume place a similar emphasis on ‘how’. So Simon Woodman and Helen Dare argue ‘it is crucial for Baptists to devote time to thinking together about how we read Scripture: the process is as important as any conclusions we may draw about particular passages’ (cited in Goodliff, 2011). ‘How do we read?’ are questions that deserve attention.

This book addresses both ‘How do we read?’ questions through paying attention to how Christians actually read the Bible in churches and how that mutually informs theological accounts of how we should read. This is done through drawing on a range of empirical research, from global to national to local, both quantitative and qualitative. The main focus, however, is on two ethnographic accounts of congregations and their biblical hermeneutics – so ‘congregational hermeneutics’.² Ethnographic accounts allow us to capture something of the everyday, ordinary ways in which the Bible is incorporated into the life of congregations, through personal Bible reading, small group Bible study, formal and informal liturgy, sermons, songs,³ architecture, and artefacts such as websites and study Bibles. The resonance and dissonance of the voices answering our two questions generates the argument for the book. The core argument, in summary, is that many congregations may need to develop a more intentional, corporate and virtuous hermeneutical apprenticeship as a necessary dimension of being church.

What is Not Being Done

Putting the Bible, church and hermeneutics together tends to bring out the contrarian in Christians. Although not normally recommended, in this case it seems worth making clear in advance what is not part of the congregational hermeneutics agenda.

I am not assuming nor arguing for a congregational system of church governance. ‘Congregational hermeneutics’ here has both descriptive and prescriptive senses, as highlighted above, in that it expands the domain of hermeneutics to the descriptive, but also looks at how churches ‘ought’ to read. Of the latter, my argument for a more intentional, corporate and virtuous hermeneutical apprenticeship will ask questions of any ecclesiology, but it is not limited to any particular type. Nor is this book aimed at a particular denomination and their hermeneutical characteristics; I would hope that those from all denominations and ‘none’ might be drawn into this exploration of ‘How do we read the Bible?’ Congregation(al), then, here has the sense of local church or of that which pertains to a local church.⁴

I am not suggesting that every aspect of the case studies has a direct correspondence to all other churches. Reflecting theologically on ethnographic accounts has become a common approach within the field of practical theology in recent decades, often with the purpose of having something useful to say to the church in its mission. Congregations have their own particularity, which, as Al Dowie comments, ‘in certain respects is like that of all others, like some others, and like no other congregation’ (2002: 65). Theologically speaking, as Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass argue, the ‘practices of all Christian congregations are intricately linked to one another’ through the unifying power of the Holy Spirit (2002: 27). The particularity of the accounts is held in tension with their capacity for generating theological models, analogies, and imaginative leaps, as well as funding constructive critique of idealised ecclesiologies and ecclesial practices (Fiddes, 2012).

I am not prescribing a narrow hermeneutical blueprint of How-to-Read-the-Bible in six easy steps. There are plenty of these already. Hermeneutics is not taken to be synonymous with interpretation, but rather thinking about how we are interpreting Scripture (cf. Thiselton, 2009: 1, 4). Consequently, the discussion here is more ‘How?’ than ‘What?’, more process than content, more about developing hermeneutical virtues and skills than specific turn-the-handle hermeneutical programmes. Having said that, I believe that theology, and practical theology in particular, should be transformative, and therefore have no reservations about offering careful proposals for hermeneutical apprenticeship that are drawn from long listening to ethnographic voices, amongst others.⁵

I am not trying to do everything in and with these accounts. They are a focussed study on the hermeneutical discourses, actions, artefacts and mediators within congregations. In other words, the saying, doing, making and learning of biblical hermeneutics in churches (cf. Stringer, 1999: 49f ).⁶ This is a complex enough task in itself. I was not able to consider those under the age of 18.⁷ I was not able to observe congregants in settings beyond church and home that might be indicative for hermeneutical choices (perhaps something for a future project). Despite these limitations, the accounts are of sufficient scope to speak to the question ‘How do we read?’

I am not wanting to overpower the voices of the churches with theory, yet neither do I want to play at being innocent of prior frames and categories. Indeed, there is an intentional intermingling of theological and ethnographic voices in this book. The discussion is interdisciplinary, drawing mainly on theology/biblical studies and anthropology/sociology of religion, held together within the field of practical theology. Concerns about ‘overly cognitive and orthodox definitions of Christian faithfulness’ and the theologian’s temptation to ‘map sense and order onto the worldly’ are rightly expressed by Mary McClintock Fulkerson in her own congregational study (2007: 6–7). However, many churches still retain an attachment to cognitive and orthodox definitions of faith alongside more implicit and embodied forms of theological conviction, as these accounts demonstrate, and so need to be engaged with on their own terms.⁸

I am not seeking to replace a theological account of the Bible in the church with a hermeneutical one, largely because I do not see these as mutually exclusive categories. John Webster, in particular, laments the ‘underfed theology’ that he perceives in accounts of the church’s reading of Scripture where hermeneutics is made foundational for theology (2006: esp. chapter 2). While recognising the danger here, it is certainly possible to make a critical appropriation of hermeneutical theory in order to aid a theological construal of the Bible in the church. As Francis Watson has argued, this does not imply a foundational status for hermeneutics, but rather a drawing upon the conceptual resources of hermeneutics, just as in other interdisciplinary theological enterprises.⁹ As Watson concludes, it is in this sense that the doctrine of Scripture and hermeneutics need each other (2010).

Defining Congregational Hermeneutics

It would seem appropriate at this point to be a little more precise about some of the concepts, terminology and debates surrounding congregational hermeneutics. The term ‘congregational hermeneutics’ was coined by the Anabaptist theologian, Stuart Murray, to describe one component of Anabaptist hermeneutics historically, as well as offering a hermeneutical paradigm for Anabaptists today. Murray sees Anabaptist hermeneutics as having a useful conversation partner role for other hermeneutical traditions (Murray, 2000: esp. chapters 7 and 10; Williams, 2008).¹⁰ By comparison, my usage is also both descriptive and prescriptive, but is concerned with all aspects of contemporary hermeneutics in congregations from potentially any tradition.¹¹

Two other related terms are sometimes used in the book, namely ‘ordinary hermeneutics’ and ‘empirical hermeneutics’. Ordinary hermeneutics was inspired by Jeff Astley’s work in ordinary theology, and through adapting his definition, I understand ordinary readers¹² of the Bible to be those who have limited or no Bible-related theological education ‘of a scholarly, academic or systematic kind’ (2002: 56; see also Astley and Francis, 2013). I used ordinary hermeneutics of this research in its earlier forms (Rogers, 2007; 2009) and I have found that people intuitively grasp what is meant. However, not all ordinary readers are in churches, and there is some significant leakage between the categories of ordinary and academic, as Astley acknowledges himself (2002: 57–8, 86).¹³ Since the stories here arise from within congregations, and I wanted to include all those engaging with the Bible (ordinary, academic, and those in-between), congregational hermeneutics seemed like an obvious change (Rogers, 2013b; c). Nevertheless, the term ‘ordinary’ is still useful and will be retained for occasional use. Empirical hermeneutics is a largely descriptive category, coined by Hans de Wit in the Netherlands, and usefully refers to all research based on empirical accounts of hermeneutics (2004: 41; 2012). A more general set of terms that have proved very useful to practical theology are the ‘four voices’ of the Action, Research, Church and Society (ARCS) project at Heythrop College in London. The espoused voice is what Christians say they believe; the operant voice is what their practices ‘disclose about our lived out theology’; the normative voice is the theology of their church tradition; and the formal voice is the theology of ‘professional’ theologians. The four voices intermingle and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 How Do We Read?
• 2 Exploring
• 3 Hermeneutics
• 4 Tradition
• 5 Practices
• 6 Epistemology
• 7 Mediation
• 8 Virtue
• 9 Community
• A: Public Bible Settings
• B: Small Group Bible Settings
• C: Holder and Fellowship Congregants
• D: Holder and Fellowship Songs
• E: Mediator Influence Rankings
• F: Bible Problems for Interviewees
• Bibliography
• Subject and Name Index
• Scripture Index