New Meanings for Ancient Texts

Recent Approaches to Biblical Criticisms and Their Applications

Steven L. McKenzie, John Kaltner

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781611643480
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Critique et interprétation bibliques

This book is a supplement and sequel to To Each Its Own Meaning, edited by Steven L. McKenzie and Stephen R. Haynes, which introduced the reader to the most important methods of biblical criticism and remains a widely used classroom textbook. This new volume explores recent developments in, and approaches to, biblical criticism since 1999. Leading contributors define and describe their approach for non-specialist readers, using examples from the Old and New Testament to help illustrate their discussion. Topics include cultural criticism, disability studies, queer criticism, postmodernism, ecological criticism, new historicism, popular culture, postcolonial criticism, and psychological criticism. Each section includes a list of key terms and definitions and suggestions for further reading.

Contributors: Timothy Beal, Warren Carter, Norman C. Habel, Gina Hens-Piazza, Nyasha Junior, D. Andrew Kille, Hugh S. Pyper, Linda S. Schearing, Jeremy Schipper, Ken Stone, and Valarie H. Ziegler.

Chapter 1

Cultural-Historical Criticism of Bible

TIMOTHY BEAL

Cultural-historical criticism of the Bible explores how biblical words, images, things, and even ideas of “the Bible” take particular meaningful forms in particular cultural contexts. It seeks not to interpret biblical texts but to interpret interpretations as productions of cultural meanings of the biblical, with the larger goal of elucidating and historicizing the biblical cultures in which these cultural productions live and move and have their being. Its aim, in other words, is not to understand the Bible but to understand the cultures in which the Bible takes on particular meanings and how those meanings are produced, reproduced, and transformed over time.

CULTURAL HISTORY

In academic discourse, cultural history refers generally to historical research that explores the ways meaning takes form within culture, often but not exclusively popular culture. Often drawing on anthropological approaches (some cultural historians prefer to be called historical anthropologists), it presumes that meaning is a matter of cultural production; it is produced and reproduced through our words, our actions, the things we make and use, and the media technologies by which we extend ourselves into our world. These words, actions, things, and media technologies are the ways a society expresses itself, revealing its more or less conscious desires, anxieties, sensations, memories, and so on. The cultural historian therefore treats these data as, to borrow Marjorie Garber’s phrase, “symptoms of culture.”¹ A symptom is a phenomenon that indicates a condition of some kind, a form of evidence, a sign. The cultural historian examines various cultural phenomena, be they “high” or “low,” as symptoms by which she may diagnose cultural meanings, which are not always, indeed not often, explicit.

Cultural history has emerged over the past few decades out of, and sometimes over against, previously dominant Marxist base-superstructure approaches (e.g., the French Annales school and British and American social history), which understood a society’s economic mode of production as the base, or cause, of all other aspects of social organization and culture.² Such social-historical approaches therefore treated cultural meanings as superstructural effects of the base economic system. Cultural history, on the other hand, takes such phenomena more seriously, on their own terms, as means of exploring how human beings, as cultural subjects, are both produced by culture and produce it.

The theoretical and methodological influences on recent cultural history are many and diverse. Several of the most influential anthropological approaches, moreover, are familiar to students of religion, including Mary Douglas’s study of purity, pollution, and taboo in Leviticus; Edward Evans-Pritchard’s work on magic and witchcraft; and Clifford Geertz’s work on religion as a cultural system. Beyond these, two non-religionist scholars are particularly helpful in developing a cultural-historical approach to Bible: Raymond Williams on culture and the structure of feeling and Michel Foucault on discursive practices and the archeology of knowledge.³

Rejecting the elitist idea of culture as “high culture,” the special possession of “cultivated people,” Raymond Williams developed a theory of culture that incorporated two key aspects: on the one hand, the ordinary, that is, the commonly held meanings of a society’s “whole way of life;” and on the other hand, the individual, innovative meanings that derive from arts and learning, and that can challenge the common and ordinary aspects of a culture.⁴ Whereas the former aspect of culture is what makes it common and familiar, the latter is what explains individual difference and allows for cultural transformation.

Another key concept in Williams’s understanding of culture that proves especially provocative vis-à-vis religion and biblical studies is what he calls the “structure of feeling,” by which he refers to the specific character and quality of common cultural sense and lived experience. This lived experience involves

… the interaction between “official” culture—laws, religious doctrine, and other formal aspects of culture—and the way that people live in their cultural context. The structure of feeling is what imbues a people with a specific “sense of life” and experience of community. It comprises the set of particular cultural commonalities shared by a culture despite the individual differences within it. Cultural analysis of structure of feeling aims at uncovering how these shared feelings and values operate to help people make sense of their lives and the different situations in which the structure of feeling arises.⁵

Of course, all people in a given context do not share such feelings; these are, rather, the common feelings of the dominant culture. This fact points to a central theme in Williams’s work: cultural struggle and resistance. How do power and dominance work within culture, and what dynamic relations make change and even revolution possible? Williams identifies three aspects, or dynamics, of any historical period within a culture: (1) dominant aspects of a culture, that is, the structures of feeling and common meaning that try to dictate and authorize certain behaviors and thoughts while discouraging or punishing others; (2) residual aspects, that is, older values and meanings from previously dominant cultural formations that have survived into new cultural contexts; and (3) emergent aspects, that is, new values and meanings that put pressure on dominant aspects of culture and indicate potential cultural shifts and changes. Culture, then, is never a monolithic whole but a system of dynamic relations in which different kinds of individual and collective power and knowledge are forming and re-forming.

The French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault has been especially influential in drawing attention to how such formations and re-formations of knowledge and power take place within a culture. He was especially interested in how our particular, individual thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors—indeed, our very selves and worlds—are constructed, largely unawares, by what he called discourses or discursive practices, that is, systems or “grids” of thought and meaning composed of shared worldviews, beliefs, values, ideas, and morals. This process of subjection to discourse is, paradoxically, the way we become thinking, acting subjects within society. Put simply, the ways we think and the truths we hold to be self-evident are cultural constructions, produced and perpetuated within discursive practices that are as familiar to us as the air we breathe.

The task of the cultural historian, then, is what Foucault describes as a kind of archeology of knowledge: to uncover these discursive practices, determine the structures and rules embedded within them that make them functional, and, in the process, to bring to light the fact that the various ideas, values, and practices that a culture takes for granted as self-evident and timeless have been produced and concretized through the “long baking process of history.”⁶ The things we take for granted as common sense—things we say we know, from medicine and madness to the state and religion—are not historical givens but are, rather, “discursive objects” that take form within the systems or grids of thought and meaning within which we exist. They are “truth-effects” produced within those systems through concrete, everyday human practices.

But how, then, does change happen? Where do new ideas and courses of action come from? What are the mechanisms by which the thinkable within a culture might alter and shift? How are new truth-effects produced? What particular, individual, concrete practices effectively disrupt currently operative grids of knowledge and power and produce new ways of thinking and acting? To address these questions calls for an approach that biblical scholars might describe as exegetical: eschewing generalizations and universal claims, one must attend very closely to the specific details of particular texts, objects, and practices within a cultural archive, treating them as individual discursive practices that produce or reproduce unique forms of knowledge within particular cultural-historical contexts.

CULTURAL HISTORY OF BIBLE

Recall our initial definition of cultural history in general from the beginning of the last section: it explores the ways meaning takes form within culture. The cultural history of Bible, then, explores the ways the meanings of biblical texts, images, and “the Bible” itself take form within culture. It, too, presumes that such meanings are matters of cultural production; they are produced and reproduced not only through spoken or written words but also through popular media, material objects, and embodied actions. These words, things, actions, and media technologies are the ways a culture expresses its conceptions of the Bible and the biblical. The cultural historian of Bible, therefore, treats these data as meaning-bearing signs, “symptoms” of biblical culture.

The absence of a definite article, “the,” in “cultural history of Bible” is not a typo. The proper focus of cultural-historical criticism in biblical studies is not the Bible, but Bible. We omit the definite article because “Bible” is, from the perspective of cultural history, indefinite. It is not a singular thing or a self-evident object of our intellectual analysis; it is not eternal; it has never been fixed or unchangeable; its form, content, and meaning change within different cultural networks of knowledge and power. Particular concepts of “the Bible” are produced through particular cultural practices, including collective and individual ritual, education, publishing, media technology, and so on. Such practices generate a sense of “Bibleness,” a discursive formation of the Bible and the biblical that is both an ideological object and, as Williams might put it, a structure of feeling.

A cultural-historical approach to Bible, therefore, presupposes that Bible is not a thing but an idea that is culturally produced and reproduced. What Foucault said of other subjects of historical research, such as medicine and the state, may also be said of the Bible and the biblical: they are not given or self-evident intellectual objects to be particularized or incarnated in various interpretations through time; they are, rather, formulations of discourse, constantly changing as they are made and remade in different cultural productions of meaning. “The Bible” that predominates American evangelical culture today, for example, is the product of a network of loosely related cultural products and practices, from teaching and preaching in churches, to group Bible studies for adults and youth, to personal devotionals, to Bibles and biblical curricula produced and marketed by large evangelical publishing houses, to name a few. All these, moreover, are embedded within larger cultural networks of power and knowledge, and all are susceptible to larger processes of cultural transformation. How, for example, will the current media revolution affect “the Bible” as discursive formulation in evangelical Christian culture? To what extent is its general concept of the biblical tied to print culture, especially to the idea of the print book, and how might it change vis-à-vis the rise of digital network media culture?

It follows, then, that a cultural-historical approach in biblical studies does not separate literary content from material form. There is no such thing as a disembodied Bible or biblical text. Bible is always material as well as symbolic, sensual as well as semantic. The cultural history of Bible is about things as much as ideas, forms as much as contents, performances as much as interpretations, media as much as message. One cannot separate contents, words, or message from material form and media technology. The first verse of Genesis in a handwritten Hebrew Torah scroll sung by a cantor in a Shabbat service is not the same as the first verse of Genesis in a contemporary English version “Biblezine” read alone during quiet time at a Baptist Bible camp retreat is not the same as a production of Jesus Christ Superstar at the local public high school.

The main precursor to cultural history of Bible is biblical reception history, which explores the history of the reception of biblical texts, images, stories, and characters through the centuries in the form of citation, interpretation, reading, revision, adaptation, and influence.⁷ Rooted in literary theorist Hans Robert Jauss’s “aesthetics of reception” and, behind Jauss, the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, biblical reception history finds the meaning of a text neither in the text itself nor in the experience of the reader, but in the relationship between the two.⁸ With Jauss, biblical reception history insists that biblical texts do not exist independent of the history of their reception by readers; their meaning is, rather, a dynamic, historically situated relationship between production and reception—in Gadamer’s terms, a “fusion of horizons” of the text and reader(s).⁹ As such, biblical reception history moves beyond earlier research into the history of biblical interpretation, insofar as it embraces a much broader definition of “interpretation,” including not only academic and theological readings but also biblical appearances in visual art, literature, music, politics, and other cultural works.

Yet, whereas reception history focuses on the impact or influence of biblical texts, the cultural history of Bible focuses more sharply on the cultural meaning of them, as well as of “the biblical” and “the Bible” itself, insofar as those too are cultural constructs whose meaning and value are culturally contextual. Indeed, a cultural-historical approach begins with the fact that there is no singular, fixed, original “the Bible” or “the biblical” to be received across history; rather, there are multiple, often competing, symbolic and material productions of them that are generated and generative in different scriptural cultures. In this light, the cultural history of Bible inverts traditional biblical interpretation, including reception history: it is less about interpreting the Bible via culture than it is about interpreting culture via Bible.

CULTURAL HISTORY OF BIBLE IN PRACTICE

The cultural history of Bible is a field, not a method. There is no single prescribed disciplinary procedure, but rather a range of approaches, drawing on different disciplines, all aimed at understanding how meanings of biblical texts, images, and values in particular, as well as meanings of the Bible and the biblical in general, are generated within particular cultural contexts through particular discursive practices. Within this range of cultural-historical biblical research and analysis, we may identify three general approaches. What follows are examples of each.

1. Ethnographic Approaches

First, there are anthropological approaches that analyze particular biblical practices, such as group Bible studies, worship services, and individual devotionals. These approaches usually involve extensive et...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1. Cultural-Historical Criticism of Bible
• 2. Disability Studies and the Bible
• 3. Ecological Criticism
• 4. New Historicism
• 5. The Bible and Popular Culture
• 6. Postcolonial Biblical Criticism
• 7. Postmodernism
• 8. Psychological Biblical Criticism
• 9. Queer Criticism
• Index