A Hermeneutic of Wisdom

Recovering the Formative Agency of Scripture

de Waal Dryden, J.

• Verlag: Baker Academic
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781493414406
• Thema: Theologie & Religion
• Thema: Biblische Studien

This book develops an integrated hermeneutic that connects the Bible to spiritual formation and the development of Christian virtues. The author shows how the whole Bible can be understood as a wisdom text that directs its readers morally, shapes them in their deepest affections and convictions, and impacts how they look at the world and live in it. Offering an innovative hermeneutical approach, it will serve as an ideal supplement to standard hermeneutics textbooks.

Part 1: Tilling the Soil

1
Knowing and Reading

A hermeneutic of wisdom has to begin with the foundational questions that define hermeneutics itself. Hermeneutics refers to the self-reflective study of the various processes entailed in acts of communicative agency. As readers of the Bible we enter into a communicative process aimed at “understanding.”1 Hermeneutics attends to that process of understanding by observing it phenomenologically and by formulating guides to best practices and theories that undergird and serve those practices. It defines and promotes certain skills, dispositions, and contexts that foster the process of understanding.

This chapter aims to explore the connection between knowing and reading, or more precisely, epistemology and hermeneutics. Simply put, hermeneutics is a form of applied epistemology because it applies a theory of knowledge to a particular process of arriving at understanding.2 Every theory of knowledge begins with a picture of the knower and the known—how a person engaged in knowing (the subject) is related to a field of study (the object).3 In the same way, every hermeneutic assumes some picture of the relationship between the reader and the text. So in working toward a hermeneutic of wisdom our first foundational question will define the reader’s stance or “comportment”4 toward the text. To answer that question, though, we have to ask some basic questions about knowing.

Modern Knowing and Reading

The modern period gave us two pictures of knowing. The first is represented in Rodin’s famous bronze The Thinker, in which all of reality is circumscribed in the individual’s straining attempt to understand the meaning of human existence. This image is often associated with the philosophical movements of rationalism and subjectivism because it focuses on reason constituted in the subject as the path to understanding. The second modern picture, more prosaic and consequently not commemorated in bronze, is that of the scientist in the white lab coat. This image of empiricism embodies the virtues of objective observation and the submission of theories to evidentiary proofs. While these two images are hard to reconcile,5 they share a similar stance toward reality—that of a subject that stands in a self-referential relationship to its object. The subject is in no way defined by its relation to the object; rather, the subject observes, interprets, and (from a distance) defines what of value is to be found in the object. As Mark Taylor describes it, the “sovereign subject relates only to what it constructs and is, therefore, unaffected by anything other than itself.”6 From this second picture arose a strong tendency in modern thought and practice for knowing to become an act of mastery and overcoming, which also gave rise to technologically driven hopes for social reform.

What has this meant for our reading of the Bible? Primarily, it has meant that the Bible is not something that determines our existence, but instead we as “sovereign subjects” determine the boundaries of its meaning and significance. The Bible is an object to be studied and subdued to fit within our understanding. Extreme, and therefore obvious, examples of this include Thomas Jefferson’s cut-and-paste project of editing the Gospels7 and the plebeian rationalism of Heinrich Paulus.8 But we misunderstand modern interpretive practices if we only associate them with methods that “critically” question the content of the Bible. The real essence of modern comportment to the text is found in the act of objectifying it and determining what in it is valuable according to criteria congenial to modern prerogatives. The normative image for the modern exegete is the prospector, who sifts through the silt of the text for nuggets of gold. This prospecting stance equally describes “historical-critical” approaches as well as their (more conservative) “grammatical-historical” cousins. Whenever we read the Bible to extract nuggets, we are reading in a modern mode, relating to the text as “sovereign subjects.” The three most common “prospecting” modes of reading are reading theologically, reading historically, and reading ethically.

In reading theologically we come to a text looking to extract theological nuggets.9 Our questions are: What is the theology here? What does this text teach me about God? What does this text teach concerning the doctrine of __________ (fill in the blank: Christology, ecclesiology, etc.)? Similarly, reading historically sifts biblical texts for historical data. What does this tell me about when, where, and why someone did something? Where did this theological doctrine come from? Does this text give me data to help me in understanding the development of early Christianity or ancient Israelite religion? Likewise, reading ethically means sifting texts for ethical principles. What is the ethical principle taught, commanded, or implied in this text? How does this text supply foundations for the construction of a Christian ethic?

In the history of NT criticism this resulted in approaching texts as instrumental for unlocking a historical-theological puzzle. The chief questions of this puzzle concentrate on the origins of early Christianity, the genealogical relationships between texts, and the social contexts from which they came. So again the fundamental questions are: What is the doctrine here? Where did it come from? What historical data can be extracted from this text? The most obvious methodology to associate with this project is form criticism, which characterizes small pieces of tradition in terms of their value for historical reconstruction.

To be careful, labeling these modes of reading as modern does not strip them of their value in fostering close observation of the text and yielding fruitful understanding. What is important for our study is recognizing that our questions are embodiments and expressions of our comportment toward the text. These questions constitute an act of objectifying the text, treating it as an inert object from which data can be extracted. Some would gladly endorse this approach, while others might resist its implications. In the end, though, regardless of what doctrine of Scripture we might bring to the Bible, when we objectify and propositionalize10 the text we are taking the stance of a prospector; the text becomes objectified and does not infringe on our sovereign selfhood.

So if we wanted to apply the text, this would require an additional task in our reading of the text. It is in no way tied by necessity to a reading of the text, nor is it demanded by the nature of the text. In fact, if we are committed to a modern approach, application is a violation of a “neutral” methodology because it creates a disturbance in the relationship between the text, as an inert object, and the reader, as a disinterested observer.

So while these modes of reading (theologically, historically, ethically) can bear important fruit, they embody a modern comportment to the text (that incidentally would have been unintelligible to anyone living prior to the eighteenth century). These hermeneutical practices view the text as a repository of knowledge, but one that takes some work to sift through to yield its treasure. As we will see later, this is the reason why, historically, as modern exegetes we have been very poor readers of narratives such as the Gospels and have been happier reading propositional theological material such as the letters of Paul. In Paul there are more nuggets lying on the surface, so it is easier (though not easy) work. Again, all of this is only intelligible in a context dominated by a modern picture of the world, where the attributes that define serious human reflection are objectivity and a reliance on reason as the arbiter of truth. Of course, if those sureties were to shift, our reading practices would necessarily have to shift as well.

Postmodern Knowing and Reading

And, of course, both have shifted. The move from modernism to postmodernism begins with the realization that the subject is not a neutral suprahuman observer but what Kierkegaard called an “existing person,”11 a finite human person with desires, intentions, perspectives, and prejudices that shape their understanding. In the act of knowing the knower introduces herself and all her history into a relationship with the object of knowledge. The modern conceptions of knowledge as something objective, indubitable, and universal now strike our postmodern sensibilities as hopelessly naive and maybe even arrogant. Postmodernism recognizes that all knowing is conditioned by, and to some degree determined by, our history, gender, race, and nationality.

This also means that “knowledge” is most often seen as a construal of reality that reveals more about the subject’s vantage point in knowing than it does the object of knowledge, and, therefore, knowledge is only interpretation. In this context all systems of thought come under suspicion as ideological constructs that serve to advance personal and political power. Also, because knowledge is shaped by sociological factors (such as race or gender), it becomes particular to a social class, formative for its own self-identity. Each social group has its own interpretation of reality that reinforces that group’s cohesion and furthers its agendas.12

What does all this mean for reading the Bible? First, the old idea of the wissenschaftlich13 observer reading the text neutrally is already a distant memory.14 In contrast, it means that the reader is an active agent who comes to the text with intentions and expectations of what the text will say. From this many have emphasized the “openness” of the text and the reader’s role in creating meaning (e.g., reader-response criticism).15 In terms of our comportment to the text, this means that we are not neutral observers but bring our whole selves into the c...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Tilling the Soil
• Part 2: Planting the Seeds
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Wisdom and “Wisdom Literature”
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Author Index
• Back Cover