HERMENEUTICAL PRINCIPLES
To have a conversation people must decide who will participate in it and how the discussion will be conducted. In a “conversation” dealing with texts this means people must establish and agree on, as much as possible, sensible hermeneutical principles.
My older son was once asked to write an article with the working title “An Astrophysicist Looks at the Book of Genesis” (he being an astrophysicist) for a volume titled The Quaker Bible Reader (he being a Quaker). He had then, necessarily, to talk about principles of textual interpretation.
Early in the essay he writes, “What I cannot do is willfully insist that the author must have meant something completely beyond his or her cultural context in order to achieve agreement with a claim that I believe to be true. I cannot bend the author to fit my perspective. I feel compelled to read the author’s words as clearly and as thoroughly as I can, and then either agree or disagree. To force these words to fit my desires feels inconsistent with the intellectual and spiritual honesty that both Quakerism and science demand.”
Later he says, “I believe that the ancient authors were trying to express their own faith, within their own understanding and their cultural context, and this is the perspective from which I approach their writings. My goal as I approach Genesis is not to prove or disprove the correctness of the stories it tells. I do not want to stretch their message to fit my understanding; to claim we are really saying the same thing. I want to appreciate their stories and discover what they can say to me.”
Finally I’ll mention his assertion, relevant to the topic of this blog: “the Bible as we know it was not born from one single vision but encapsulates a sprawling and ongoing conversation [!] about the human race, God, creation, and our role in it.”
Much food for thought—and reply—here, especially for those of us interested in carrying on the Great Conversation wisely and well.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I really enjoyed Don's article on the book of Genesis, and found his hermeneutical principles quite reasonable.
ReplyDeleteThe phrase I find interesting is:
"something completely beyond his or her cultural context"
Just what is 'completely' beyond?
The Hostorical/critical approach tends to reduce textual meaning to only what is culturally available to an author.
The issue is innovation. Clearly an author has to be able to add to or innovate upon his or her culture's available ideas and understandings--otherwise authors wouldn't write and cultural ideas and understanding would never change or develop.
So even if we accept an author's culture as his/her starting point, s/he can still move beyond that. But what are the limits of such innovation? What is 'completely beyond'?
In the case of Genesis, would it be completely beyond for the author's to be talking about the Big Bang?
It would seem so--especially if we're talking about some technical understanding of 'big bang.' But to the extent that 'big bang' means simply the beginning of the physical universe, then there seems to be some degree in which they can be said to be talking about it.
While it's not possible for Genesis to to be talking about, for example, the universe as a 'machine'--since machines weren't around, could they still be talking about the universe as something causally interconnected?
Indeed are there any cultures so remote from each other that they don't share some things?
Metaphorical imagination would seem to allow for a wide scope of innovation.