(Some of
the “Theory of Hermeneutics” behind three sermons preached August 20th,
27th and Sept. 3rd 2006). Some Virtues
for Interpretation: Humility and Compassion
“Jesus wished to introduce a community
shaped not by the ethos and politics of purity, but by the ethos and
politics of compassion." --Marcus Borg
One of the
things that would seem common sense is that to understand anything or
anyone we need to grasp the feel, landscape and texture of their place
in the world. How many times have meanings been misconstrued and
violence done when we attempt to speak and act across cultural,
historical and social contexts? Even after nearly 30 years of
marriage, Loretta and I can misconstrue meanings, because we come from
slightly differing contexts. Her experience and lived context as
a woman of analytical thought and experience from a rural community
differs from my own as a man of intuitive and fuzzy thinking from the
suburb of a big city. The shared context of our life together has
made certain communications easy; we can finish each other's sentences
from time to time. At the best of times, meaning is found in the
depth of our silence, as we reside in the mystery of each other's
being. At other times, when we are not attending carefully to the
differences between us and of what we are saying to each other, one of
us can end up on Mars, and the other in downtown Squamish.
Without a
doubt, meaning is a tricky business. Philosophers have disagreed,
deconstructed, reconstructed, reduced and abandoned meaning for signs
and signals. From Plato to Derrida (the founder of
deconstruction), meaning has suffered from analysis and vivisection. It
has been reduced to the literal dictionary definitions of the
materialist and the fundamentalist. It has been said to be
nothing but an arbitrary attachment of emotional content to a set of
marks on a page, or sounds and grunts. Equally, it has been
reduced to an exchange of information, something two computers may in
fact do with greater efficiency than any human being.
Despite the
wide and various ways of epistemology (making “meaning of
meaning.” or of explaining how we know what we know) --meanings
of depth and weight still get carried from person to person, even if
imperfectly. However, in every case where meaning is carried
across any divide with integrity and depth, there has been an attention
to the context and relation of one human person to the other.
Meanings come because we are in relationship to the one carrying the
meaning, and have understood or share their context. This is to
say that nothing has meaning by and for itself. Meaning is always
about a social or a relational whole, and is never a static
thing. Meaning vibrates with life and touches upon our shared
humanity, or else it is little or no importance, a mere trivial bit of
information. Theologically, meaning is the living conversation
between God, human selves, community and creation. Meaning is the
Logos taking human flesh and “dwelling amongst us.”
“The machine-like behaviour of people
chained to electronic devices—[as their model of meaning and
communication]— constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of
their dignity which, for most people in the long run, becomes
intolerable. Observations of the sickening effect of programmed
environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent,
narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because
people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed.”
--Illlich,
“Silence is a Commons,” In the Mirror of the Past,
Illich makes
these comments aware that the Gospel is perverted by attempts to reduce
its function to a mechanical device, a technical process, that can
guarantee salvation if applied. Illich looks around and sees the
modern landscape as one dominated by devices and technical
processes—whether this is the economy, or the global information
highway—just as Jesus saw his own religious commun, we face the corruption of
human community by the programmed environment of technology, and a
religion of technique and management.
The point that
needs to be made in the discussion of scripture, tradition and meaning
is that “context” and “relationship” are not secondary elements, but
constitute the living and incarnate body, the words on the page as they
point towards and incarnate the Christ. To read scripture with
eyes and minds seeking revelation is to attend to its place and the
human voices and community that brought it to the page. The
technical and managerial attempt to discern meaning via a technical
arithmetic called literalism makes the word a tyrannical manager of
souls, rather than the bearer of life, the Logos in flesh.
Literalism cuts off the reader from the incarnate presence of God in
the flesh and bones of the other as Christ. Literalism, like bad
science, isolates the self from the living community of faith Paul
called "the body of Christ," substituting technical manipulation for
the needed human engagement of mind, body and soul.
The literalist
technique emerged in Christianity with the technology of the printing
press, and the emergence of the shadow side of the modern world:
reductive and mechanical thinking, social processes and
institutions. The pre-modern period had its own sins and
problems, but literalism was not one of them. Literalism isolates
words and language from human experience, arguing that meaning can be
found by the mechanical application of a dictionary. Every word
has a single definition, every sentence a single purpose. One
simply needs to read the text with the proper dictionary meanings, and
God speaks. Of course, in most literalist and inerrantist
theologies, the reader must be informed by the Holy Spirit, or clearly
a member of the spiritual elite. However, there is no necessity
to be aware of the human context, history, language and experience of
the community that produced scripture, because scripture is not the
Logos Incarnate, but the Logos without any of the impurity of
“incarnation.” Scripture is not a spiritual revelation of Divine
meaning incarnate, but is the technical device that communicates like
all other devices by repeating a message from elsewhere. It is a
sacred tool.
Archbishop
Lazar Puhalo has called this treatment of scripture as a “technical
device,” a heresy unique to the western church. Because tradition
and the whole culture of Christianity no longer informs a reading of
scripture, we end up with interpretations that make no sense of the
mystery of Incarnation, and cannot speak to the spiritual emptiness of
modernity. Where Lazar and I differ, is that I would claim that
the Incarnation works in the contingencies of history, human culture,
language, social structure and reason. To read scripture as if it
carried meaning and holy revelation totally independent of these
realities of human contingency is, I think, a mistake. It is
equally wrong to say that scripture only requires tradition and the
spiritual authority of the Church to bring it forth as
revelation. The use of reason is equally necessary, reason that can
discern the wide differences in linguistic form, cultural understanding
and social milieu both within scripture and between the cultural world
scripture was written in and our present time. For me to respect
and read scripture in the community of the church requires an attention
and awareness of tradition, human experience and reason.
This is not to
say that scripture does not carry meaning in itself. The inner
meaning is one that comes from a sacred dialogue that internalizes and
positions the experience of the community of faith in a larger whole
(God’s sacred story); it intends to engage our minds, bodies and souls,
bringing us to “orthodoxy,” “fitting praise”. Its meaning is both
doxological and intellectual. It requires both the ratio—the analytical and
scholarly—and the intellectus—the
contemplative and the prayerful. While Lazar and the orthodox can
remind us that bare literalism and narrow scholarly analysis—both
reductive techniques—do not bring us to revelation, neither can
tradition alone serve. Here I am a Protestant heretic who insists
that human reason must accompany tradition and the authority of the
Church to interpret scripture.
Meaning is
about identifying who one is in relationship to others, and making
sense of the reality in which we and our community live. To use
the insight of the Talmudic philosopher Levinas, I know my own meaning
as a gift from the others. These others constitute reality as
relational webbing that weaves together my outer experience and my
inner experience. I have meaning as a relational action of
holding certain threads of reality as centrally important, and others
as less important. God is the one who gives meaning its
possibilities, providing a loom (but one that itself can respond to the
threads and is not static) and some possible patterns for the weaving.
Tradition can
give us some sense of the work of the divine loom by passing the
spiritual wisdom, sacraments, liturgy and practices of the community
through time. Tradition is not static—again Lazar and I
differ—but itself moves with the community through time and
experience. It is a great continuity of celebrative awareness,
but it is also a living thing; thereby, it is transformed and
transforms itself. Tradition, while transcending every historical
moment of the church’s life, is itself flawed. There again, my
protestant heresy claims that God transcends tradition, reason,
scripture, and experience—and can thereby transform and offer critique
of all of them—and is incarnate in them. We know and receive
grace and revelation (meaning) only in a living relationship with God
that is incarnate in Christ—the Word made flesh, particularly (but not
exclusively) in Jesus. Revelation
as sacred meaning is found in the life of an ongoing relationship and
conversation with God through tradition, reason, experience and
scripture.
What I am
suggesting both for faith and for all meaning, is that we have meaning
and know meaning only through and in relationship to others and with
the Holy Other. Meaning and knowledge are relationships, ways of
holding various strands of reality together. We have meaning for,
with and in an ongoing weaving of things into a whole, the creative
work of God. The weaver that holds and embraces all, that
responds to every thread and tenderly holds all things and the memory
of all things, is the Holy One. This is not to say that the webbing
cannot be broken or damaged. Again, all things, including
tradition and scripture, can be used to wound.
Sydney Carter writes, “The Devil wore
a crucifix.” The Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky
portrays how the Church and its traditions can betray the Christ, for “Christ hasn't the right to add anything
to what He has said of old.” The Threads of tradition and
scripture, just as meaning, can be perverted by power, and broken loose
from the golden thread of God’s compassion. It is important to say that
the writing on this page, and its metaphor of weaving, has its
limits. The point I am making is that meaning is a relational
action, and is imbedded in lived contexts. God is incarnate and
yet is more than any one incarnation. Revelation requires an
ongoing human journey with and into God’s eternal presence. As
Archbishop Lazar once put it in a conversation with me, “there is no way to the true God but
through our true humanity.”
Therefore, when
dealing with scripture, it is puzzling to me why there is an assumption
that we may read scripture as if it could have meaning disincarnate
from our humanity. The Gospel of John, for example, suggests that
“Logos
en sarx” (Logos en sarx): the Divine
Word becomes flesh and bones. The “ensarxosis” or incarnation of
the word means it is embedded in human relationality and the human
context. Oddly, some view scripture as if the flesh and bone
“word” was a mere illusion. The words of scripture are viewed as
if they had no necessary root in human bodies and contexts, or worse,
that their particular embodiment in time and history can simply be ignored. I
would call this the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. The scandal of the
particularity of those Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic words that come to us
from a time and culture not our own most not be dropped for a false
“universalism.” To assume its language is simply equivalent to
our language is not to take the incarnation seriously.
The incarnation
of the Logos (Logos) means that we must take
seriously human contingency, culture, history, and language. Put
it this way: that which is really real is relational and known in our
human selves, or it has and can have no real meaning for us. The
need to attend to the differences in cultural and historical contexts
and languages is inescapable. To experience the Biblical text as
revelation, we must unavoidably deal with context and
language. There is never merely a literal meaning for the
text, if it is truly an Incarnate Word; it is embodied, and carries
meaning beyond the literal. To use an example from French and
English, l’amour is not just love by another name. Neither
is it the case that there is no relationship between words and other
words, or words and human experience. The relational reality of
revelation and of the Incarnation means that to experience a text as
revelation, we must know something of its context, and how it is woven
into the fabric of the whole of reality. This is an endless task,
for just when we have come to know something of its context and place,
reality itself has woven a new pattern. Just when we experience
God’s voice, we become aware that this Holy relationship is more than
what we can ever understand or articulate.
This is not to
say we can never come to hear scripture as revelation, and have
confidence about what we are called to do and be. Confidence is
not certainty, however. Rather, it is a journey that trusts there
is more yet to be revealed if we have the courage to receive the truth
as it lives, even in possibilities yet to be incarnate. This is
to say that to hear and see what God reveals through scripture, we must
always work at trying to see its context and place and allowing that
context and place to reveal the truth about our own context and
place. To do so, we must be aware of the difference between the
context of scripture and our own, as well as the relationships between
them. While we seek a spiritual simplicity--that is, a clarity of
vision about who we are and what we are called to do and be--it is not
a simple thing to receive revelation. There are so many
contextual, cultural, personal and even political blocks to the
simplicity and clarity of revelation. As Wendell Berry once
wrote, “there is nothing
simple-minded about simplicity.”
This is not to
say that there are not moments of spiritual enlightenment that occur
when a particular word, phrase or image in scripture acts as a
catalyst for a mystical insight and a time of Divine Clarity. St.
Francis, Julian of Norwich and Elkhart had such insights, but were not
immediately embraced as having received a Holy Insight. Jim Jones
of the People’s Temple, Warren Jeffs of Bountiful and many others have
made claim to Divine revelation. The difference between madness
and Mystical insight is not always easy to discern. Perhaps it is
by “the fruits” the insight can best be judged. Even more,
tradition, reason and scripture can be brought to bear when
“experience” is said to have revealed the meaning of scripture.
However these
insights may be judged, they need to be themselves placed in the
context of the whole of human experience, tradition, reason and
scripture. Again, by themselves the insights may make little
sense. In context, historical, cultural and social, they can
reveal truth, or be revealed as false or even a corruption of the
good. In any case, Divine revelation is most often a challenge to
conventional and normative understandings. Revelation more often
than not brings a hard truth about us that requires a transformation of
our vision and way of life. Support for slavery, apartheid, colonialism
and domestic violence have all been built upon quotations of
scripture. The fact is that all texts can be manipulated,
and used for purposes that obscure rather than reveal the painful
realities of injustice and violence. Scripture, whatever else it
is, is a text, and it comes to us through the contextual realities of
language. Moving from text to life, moving across languages
involves reading across worlds of meaning. Moving from ancient
languages and texts—texts that themselves are shaped by human
experience, tradition, reason and other scriptures—to living meaning
and revelation requires an integrity and discipline informed by the
best of our reason, tradition and experience.
If scripture is
a living word, it has meaning not because it is a device that merely
carries meaning. Text, as Derrida points out, has meaning not
because it captures all meaning in linguistic structures, but because
it acts as a doorway or a threshold to meaning that is never exhausted
or captured in the words and language of the text. No other,
Divine or Human, is imprisoned by a text. The Holy Text reveals
precisely when its readers refuse to allow any closure by reason,
tradition, religious system or interpretation. Scripture becomes
the Living Word when we are forced to let go of our hold on it by
reason, and come to experience wonder and awe at the Holy that it
reveals. Humility, not self righteousness, compassion and not a
politics or religion of purity or personal ownership of salvation, are
the consequence of coming into the fullness of scripture. We come
to see with clarity our own limitations and humanity in relationship to
the whole of humanity, and finally in relationship to the Sacred.
The work of
interpretation informed by context and human contingency in humility
recognizes that its greatest achievement and expression is the
celebration of the community of Christ, knowing the Joy of the presence
of God in sacrament and word, in tradition and creation. Its
greatest achievement is compassion to all, and praise of the Sacred One
who gives the gift of meaning in conversation with all creation.