The Bible and Lay People

An Empirical Approach to Ordinary Hermeneutics

Andrew Village

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317040477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

There are many books about how people ought to interpret the Bible. This book is about how people in churches actually interpret the Bible, and why they interpret it in the way that they do. Based on a study of Anglicans in the Church of England, it explores the interaction of belief, personality, experience and context and sheds new light on the way that texts interact with readers. The author shows how the results of such study can begin to shape an empirically-based theology of scripture. This unique study approaches reader-centred criticism and the theology of scripture from a completely new angle, and will be of interest to both scholars and those who use the Bible in churches.

Chapter 1

Introduction

This book is about ordinary churchgoers and their relationship to the Bible. ‘The person in the pew’ might be one way of describing ordinary churchgoers, though as someone who has worked hard to update the interior of at least one historic church, I like to think that pews are not the only form of church seating. Keeping pews out of the definition reminds us just how varied churchgoing can be. Many people no longer sit on pews, if they ever did, and indeed some do not go to churches or chapels at all. Instead they may meet in homes, village halls, schools and community centres. Churchgoers in the widest sense denotes Christians who gather together to worship, and I use it to distinguish such people from those who either have another or no religious affiliation, or who might see themselves as Christian, but who never attend worship. Most of what follows is applicable to Christians who attend church, rather than to the public at large. This is an important caveat, as we shall see, because the way in which you might go about studying how the general public relates to the Bible is quite different from the way you study churchgoers.

By ‘ordinary’ Bible readers I have in mind those who have not been trained in academic biblical scholarship. More specifically, I am distinguishing between those in churches who are called to preach or teach from the Bible and those who are recipients of that teaching and preaching. The division is not that neat, of course, because familiarity with academic biblical scholarship is not always a prerequisite for a Bible-based ministry and because those receiving such ministry may themselves be highly trained biblical scholars. Nonetheless, in general, those who are selected for ministry in churches will have been trained in the methods and insights of biblical scholarship and those to whom they minister will have not.

For some ministers, exposure to academia is like exposing the back of a duck to water: they emerge virtually unscathed and return to minister as if nothing had happened. Others are changed beyond recognition, emerging with new insights and new jargon that may forever separate them from their roots. Some indeed never make it back into churches because they are drawn into the world of the academics, circulating entirely within it and rarely, if ever, having to communicate their knowledge to ordinary people. For most ministers, however, training expands and shapes the way they understand the Bible, so that preaching is an exercise in reading with trained insight and then trying to convey a message to those without that insight.

What of the background of people who receive ministry? It is important to recognize at the outset that ‘ordinary’ does not mean ‘ignorant’, any more than ‘trained’ means ‘knowledgeable’. Ordinary churchgoers may include those with postgraduate degrees and professional qualifications that far exceed those of the person in the pulpit. What distinguishes the ordinary from the trained in this context is primarily exposure to a particular way of reading the Bible: the way of the academy. That still leaves scope for enormous variation among people who attend church. They vary in gender, age and educational background. There will be different personalities and each person will have had his or her own unique experiences. They will not be randomly dispersed across congregations because some will choose to attend churches of a particular style or denomination. All of these factors, and others, might affect how ordinary churchgoers encounter and interpret the Bible.

The reason why I embarked on the study of ordinary Bible readers is that the academy, for all its sophisticated developments in biblical scholarship in the last fifty years, remains largely ignorant of what other people do with the Bible. Only in the last few years has academic scholarship begun to be aware of the peculiarities of its own approach to the Bible and the fact that ‘ordinary’ readers exist at all. If the academy is to understand this alien group of readers, it has to do so in its own terms. As we shall see, postmodernism has permitted academics a great deal of licence in what can now legitimately be called ‘academic readings’. But no matter how much they may want to personalize or contextualize their readings, they are still academics reading the Bible. They share information using a style that is conventional and particular to a given discourse. Even when they seek to make their findings or insights more widely available, they are instantly identified as belonging to the community of scholars.

It seems to me that the only honest way for the academy to try and understand ordinary readers is to use its own tools to observe and reflect on this phenomenon. If some biblical scholars abandon any sense of rational, objective enquiry under the banner of postmodernity, then what they might gain in opening dialogue with non-scholarly communities they will lose by stepping out of the academic discourse. The academy cannot pretend to be what it is not, but that does not mean that biblical studies must be wholly secular or wholly confined to traditional methods of literary study. Practical or empirical theology offers a way for the academy to look beyond its own concerns in ways that it can understand. That, as I see it, is what practical theology is about: looking objectively with whatever empirical methods seem appropriate to a given field, and bringing that knowledge as datum into the field of theology. For this particular enquiry the datum is what ordinary churchgoing Christians do with the Bible, and what shapes the way they read it. The theological areas affected by this are those that revolve around the status and role of the Bible in faith communities and how this might relate to other ways in which God communicates with people.

Empirical approaches to Bible reading are rare. The reason for this seems to be that approaching the subject from this angle is both difficult and dangerous. I want to argue that neither of these is a sufficient reason for avoiding the subject. The difficulties will be all too apparent to anyone who has experience of trying to measure human religious attitudes, beliefs or behaviours. Human beings are complex entities, and the apparently simple task of describing human religion is daunting enough, let alone trying to measure or explain it. The temptation is either to oversimplify, and thereby create artificiality, or to under-simplify and thereby create confusion. One response to such difficulties is to write off the field of enquiry as being an impossible area to study. I encountered that response from some people who warned me not even to think of embarking on this project, and I suspect some before me who had toyed with this subject decided that this was the wisest course of action. Yet every discipline has to start somewhere, and experience in the natural sciences shows over and again that what seemed impossible a few years ago has become an everyday reality. For example, until quite recently it would have seemed absurd that we could tell anything about the composition of the earth’s atmosphere millions or billions of years ago. Scientists could speculate on what might have been going on, but empirical measurement was out of the question. Until, that is, someone worked out how to measure the oxygen isotopes in microscopic bubbles in rocks nearly four billion years old. The chain of discovery that allows any such measurement must be vastly complicated: it relies on understanding what isotopes are, the particular isotopes of oxygen, the behaviour of different isotopes in different atmospheres and the ability to extract and analyse unimaginably small amounts of material trapped in vast quantities of rock. So the ability to understand this particular phenomenon, the evolution of the earth’s atmosphere, has itself evolved over a long period in which increasingly complex measurements had to be made. As techniques and understanding improved, so did the complexity of the questions that could be asked. Understanding has developed through a circular process of asking questions, finding techniques to measure what was needed to answer those questions, and using the results to shape new questions. These questions in turn could be answered only by developing more sophisticated techniques and methods.

Empirical study of Bible reading is in its infancy, and the sorts of questions we might want ask seem impossible to answer at the moment. Those questions that we can answer often give such obvious results that there seems little reason for bothering in the first place. That does not mean that it is pointless even trying, because complex questions cannot be answered until the simple questions have firm answers. Firm answers to simple questions usually raise other questions that were not even thought of initially. Those who first identified oxygen as an element1 could not even have begun to conceive of measuring the earth’s atmosphere billions of years ago, but without their crude experiments the journey of discovery would not even have started.

One of the aims of this book is to ask questions that might simulate ways of finding answers. Research in this field requires an ability to transform general ideas into specific questions and specific questions into instruments that will give useful answers. This is difficult work and there will doubtless be wrong answers and blind alleys along the way. But difficulty is not a reason for dismissing the enterprise; it is the challenge that makes the enterprise worthwhile in the first place.

The second reason why empirical approaches to Bible reading are scarce is that they enter dangerous territory. For those for whom the Bible is sacred scripture (and I count myself among them), asking ‘ordinary’ people how they interpret the Bible might seem to carry the implication that popular practice should overrule sound doctrine. Perhaps if we give credence to what ordinary people do with the Bible we risk being enslaved by bad practice: will the lunatics indeed take over the asylum? The Christian faith is built upon centuries of biblical and theological study that have shaped the way that theology is taught, ministers are formed and congregations are led. Even in churches that trace their roots back to the Reformation, the Bible has not always been wrestled from the grip of the institutional church. Even when it was, some might argue, it fell into the hands of academic theologians who did an even better job of keeping it away from ordinary people.

Asking what people do is not the same as approving what is done, but I can imagine that some ministers might find any examination of Bible reading in their congregations a threatening exercise. Simply posing a question can be a dangerously liberating experience in some contexts. But there is also a wider danger if the results of such study show how infrequently the Bible is read or how ‘unsound’ interpretative practice is among lay people. Theologically and theoretically the Bible has a key, if not central, place in most Christian denominations. Where illiteracy is widespread there may be some justification for little direct engagement of ordinary churchgoers with the biblical text. But if this continues to be widespread even when people could read the Bible, what does this say about role of scripture in Christian life? Are those who choose to not read the Bible for themselves doing ‘wrong’? Are they less able to understand or communicate with God? Is biblical knowledge essential, or merely helpful, for ordinary Christians? These are dangerous questions to ask, especially if empirical data give us answers we would rather not have known.

If empirical approaches to Bible reading are dangerous for the church, they may be no less so for the academy. It may be true that some areas of academic biblical study are largely immune from worries about what ordinary people make of the Bible. Historical-critical approaches have deliberately drawn a line between what the text meant and what it might mean today, and the latter has never really entered into discussion. Literary critics who search the text for the ‘implied’ reader are not pretending that such a reader has any connection with ‘real’ readers. For some such critics, finding out that lay people have no knowledge or interest in such scholarship would come as no surprise and would make little difference to how they went about their study. Those who work from faith-based positions might find it depressing that truths revealed by scholarly study have not penetrated very far into the church, but that might be a problem of communication rather than fundamental approach. However, the growing legions of reader-response critics might be more worried if none of their work seemed at all relevant to ordinary churchgoers. After all, the whole notion of privileging the reader over author or text has led to varieties of scholarship that are meant to relate to the concerns of ‘real flesh and blood readers’. Such intent leads inexorably to the kinds of questions that empirical study is best placed to answer: what do ordinary readers make of the Bible? However, few reader-response critics have ventured to ask those questions or to seek objective answers. Most are content to examine their own interpretations more self-consciously or to indulge in some armchair speculation on what may happen with ordinary readers. This might be partly due to the difficulties of collecting data, but perhaps it is also because the answers revealed by such data could prove threatening. On the one hand, if academic readers have preoccupations that are wholly different from those of ordinary readers, it raises doubts as to whether they have begun to understand the meaning of reader response at all. If, on the other hand, scholars have spent the last two centuries or so refining their method simply to end up interpreting the Bible as ordinary people always have done, the worth of the whole scholarly enterprise is called into question. Perhaps it would be best to leave ordinary readers well alone.

Another reason for the lack of empirical studies of Bible reading might be that they require a cross-disciplinary approach. The increasingly scientific nature of psychology and sociology takes these disciplines further away from the more philosophical and theological concerns of modern academic biblical exegetes. The world of behavioural studies, attitude measurement and statistical analysis is as far away from the world of philosophical hermeneutics as that world is from the concerns of ordinary Bible readers. There are several different worlds to bring together in this sort of exercise and they have varying histories of interaction.

First, there are the two worlds of traditional theology and philosophical hermeneutics. These have a long history of association, and indeed biblical hermeneutics has been a driving force in the discipline of general hermeneutics. After all, for some at least, a great deal hangs on what exactly the Bible means because they believe it to be the source of ultimate meaning. Anthony Thiselton (1980; 1992) has probably done more than anyone else to show how the philosophies that shaped general hermeneutical thinking have constantly challenged and engaged with Christian understandings of scripture. Developments in secular hermeneutics have inevitably influenced the way that theologians have understood the Bible. In some cases the interaction has been long and mutual; in others the secular approach has proved to be incompatible with the fundamental philosophical stance of Christianity.2 Whatever the view taken about this interaction, it is a well-established one that has found a legitimate place in the academy and, to some extent, in church circles. The relationship of theology and hermeneutics has relevance for a study such as this because these discourses create the theoretical frameworks that might shape an empirical enquiry. They indicate some areas that might be relevant to how ordinary readers interpret the Bible. In addition, the wider philosophical currents of secular society may impinge directly on how churchgoers view the Bible and its place in the world. Postmodernity, for example, is more than a theoretical way of thinking about the world; it is also a description of how some people in society actually relate to the world.

A second cross-disciplinary requirement for this study is to link the worlds of academic theology and empirical science. Traditionally these worlds live separate lives within the academy: the one often located in the hallowed halls of the older buildings that were part of the university’s foundation, the other at the more recent ‘science site’, constantly growing and building new laboratories. For theologians, the task is to build on the mountain of theological tradition, working by deduction from established principles and weighing the evidence of text and reason. For those schooled in empirical study, the task is to observe, manipulate and draw conclusions on what is, rather than what ought to be. For many people, these seem to be two separate worlds, and some have tried very hard to keep them so. But the difference is perhaps not as great as it might at first appear. For both co-exist in the same academic world where they rely on a discourse that weighs ideas against evidence and probability. Both, though they may believe otherwise, are shaped by the prevailing dogma (or paradigms) of their disciplines; dogma that governs what can and cannot be done under the name of theology or science.

There are several areas where science and theology engage with each other. One involves theologians engaging on their terms with what it means to maintain faith in, or alongside, the world revealed by science rather than scripture. This is familiar ground to theologians, even if the scope and nature of the task is changing rapidly as science invades the sacred spaces once thought to be solely the domain of the spiritual. There is also ground that is unfamiliar to both disciplines, involving as it does philosophical musings on the incomprehensible frontiers that currently lie beyond the reach of conventional science: the parallel universes, multiple dimensions of space or time and the incongruities of the physical world that defy rational explanation (Hodgson 2005). And then there is the field of empirical or practical theology, where theologians are pretty much the away team, playing on the other team’s familiar turf. Empirical approaches to religion can be quite varied. Some are essentially scientific and confine themselves to observing, hypothesizing and testing ideas about the phenomenon of religion, much as any other behavioural science. Others are more firmly rooted in theology, and see empirical data as something that guides and shapes our understanding of how God operates in the world. The tension between those who see the engagement as essentially scientific or essentially theological is a sign of the difficulty of trying to reconcile these two worlds of discourse....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Biblical Studies in Academy and Church
• 3 The Bible and Ordinary Readers
• 4 Biblical Literalism and Ordinary Readers
• 5 Biblical Interpretative Horizons
• 6 Personality and Scripture
• 7 Interpretative Communities and Scripture
• 8 The Holy Spirit and Biblical Interpretation
• 9 Towards an Empirical Theology of Scripture
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index