Whose Community? Which Interpretation? (The Church and Postmodern Culture)

Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church

Westphal, Merold, Smith, James K. A.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781441206657
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religionsphilosophie

In this volume, renowned philosopher Merold Westphal introduces current philosophical thinking related to interpreting the Bible. Recognizing that no theology is completely free of philosophical "contamination, " he engages and mines contemporary hermeneutical theory in service of the church. After providing a historical overview of contemporary theories of interpretation, Westphal addresses postmodern hermeneutical theory, arguing that the relativity embraced there is not the same as the relativism in which "anything goes." Rather, Westphal encourages us to embrace the proliferation of interpretations based on different perspectives as a way to get at the richness of the biblical text.

1

Hermeneutics 101

No Interpretation Needed?

Interpretation or Intuition?

It may seem obvious that Christians interpret the Bible. Is not every devotional reading (silent), every sermon (spoken), and every commentary (written) an interpretation or a series of interpretations of a biblical text? Does not the history of Christian thought show that Christians in different times and places have interpreted and thus understood the Bible differently? Even at any given time and place, such as our own, is there not always a “conflict of interpretations”1 between, among, and within various denominational and nondenominational traditions? So it seems obvious that Christians would be interested in hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation that is sometimes normative (how we ought to go about interpreting) and sometimes descriptive (what actually happens whenever we interpret).

But often enough the hermeneutical theory, if we may call it that, of lay believers, pastors, and academic theologians consists simply in denying that interpretation is necessary and unavoidable. We encounter this general attitude when we offer a viewpoint about, say, some controversial moral or political question to someone who (1) doesn’t like it and (2) doesn’t know how to refute it (perhaps deep down knowing that it is all too much on target) and so replies, “That’s just your opinion.” Similarly, an unwelcome interpretation of some biblical text may be greeted by the response, “Well, that might be your interpretation, but my Bible clearly says . . .” In other words, “You interpret; I just see what is plainly there.” I am reminded of an ad for a new translation of the Bible billed as so accurate and so clear that the publishers could announce “NO INTERPRETATION NEEDED.”2 The ad promotes “the revolutionary translation that allows you to immediately understand exactly what the original writers meant.” But, of course, this “immediacy” is mediated by this particular translation, one among many, each of which interprets the original text3 a bit differently from the others.

This “no interpretation needed” doctrine says that interpretation is accidental and unfortunate, that it can and should be avoided whenever possible. Often unnoticed is that this theory is itself an interpretation of interpretation and that it belongs to a long-standing philosophical tradition that stretches from certain strands in Plato’s thought well into the twentieth century. This tradition is called “naive realism” in one of its forms. It is called naive both descriptively, because it is easily taken by a common-sense perspective without philosophical reflection, and normatively, because it is taken to be indefensible on careful philosophical reflection. Before looking into why this interpretation of interpretation might deserve to be called naive in this second sense, let us first try to be clear about what it asserts and why.

Realism begins as the claim that the world (the real) is “out there” and is what it is independent of whether or what we might think about it. But since, in spite of appearances, no one actually denies this, if realism is to be a claim worthy of defending or denying, it must say more, and it does. It is the further claim that we can (at least sometimes) know reality just as it is, independent of our judgments about it. In other words, our thoughts or judgments about the world correspond to it, perfectly mirror it.4 It is because Kant, who affirms the first claim, denies the second claim that he is the paradigmatic antirealist. He insists that we don’t know the “thing in itself,” the world as it truly is, but only the world as it appears to human—all too human—understanding. We don’t apprehend it directly but only as mediated through the forms and categories we bring with us to experience.5 In other words, the human mind is a kind of receiving apparatus, like a black and white TV set, that conditions the way in which what is “out there” appears. Thus the world as we see it is partly the result of the way the real gives itself to us (as passive, receptive) and partly the result of the way we take it (as active, spontaneous). Like the Gestalt psychologist, Kant does not suggest that we are aware of our contributing role, that our “taking” is conscious or voluntary, much less deliberate. It happens, so to speak, behind our backs.

Incidentally, although scholars usually ignore this fact, Kant regularly identifies appearances as the way we see the world and the “thing in itself” as the way God sees the world.6 Things really are the way the divine mind knows them to be. So theists, who have good reason not to identify our finite, creaturely understanding of reality with God’s infinite, creative knowledge, have a sound theological reason for being Kantian antirealists. Our thoughts are not God’s thoughts (divine wisdom) any more than our ways are God’s ways (divine holiness, mercy, and love).

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isa. 55:9)

Naive realists, including the “no interpretation needed” school, who may never have heard of Kant or of antirealism, deny, at least implicitly, the inevitability of such mediation. They affirm a direct seeing that simply mirrors what is there without in any way affecting what is seen as it is seen. Plato expresses this view in connection with the philosopher’s apprehension of the forms—the purely intelligible structures that are the highest, indeed the only, objects of genuine knowledge—when he speaks of contemplating “things by themselves with the soul by itself.”7

In speaking of this direct, unmediated rendezvous of subject and object (of whatever sort), philosophers view the object as immediately given or immediately present. The claim to immediacy is the claim that the object is given to the subject without any mediating (contaminating, distorting) input from the subject, be it the lens through which the object is seen, the perspective from which the object is seen, or the presupposition in terms of which the object is seen, all of which might vary from one observer to another or from one community of observers to another.

Common sense doesn’t talk about immediacy, presence, or givenness. But it does claim to “just see” its objects, free of bias, prejudice, and presuppositions (at least sometimes). We can call this “just seeing” intuition. When the naive-realist view of knowledge and understanding is applied to reading texts, such as the Bible, it becomes the claim that we can “just see” what the text means, that intuition can and should be all we need. In other words, “no interpretation needed.” The object, in this case the meaning of the text, presents itself clearly and directly to my reading. To interpret would be to interject some subjective bias or prejudice (pre-judgment) into the process. Thus the response, “Well, that might be your interpretation, but my Bible clearly says . . .” In other words, “You interpret (and thereby misunderstand), but I intuit, seeing directly, clearly, and without distortion.”

Why Seek to Avoid Interpretation?

Let us turn to the question of motivation. Why would anyone want to hold to the hermeneutical version of naive realism? Let us dismiss (but not too quickly) the suspicion that this view is attractive because it makes it so easy to say: “I am (we are) right, and all who disagree are wrong, and not merely wrong but wrong because of bias or prejudice.”8

There are more respectable reasons, two of which immediately come to the fore: the desire to preserve truth as correspondence and the desire to preserve objectivity, a closely related notion, in our reading, preaching, and commenting. So far as truth is concerned, the hermeneutical question is not whether what the text says corresponds to or perfectly mirrors the real; it is rather whether what the reader, preacher, or commentator says corresponds to what the text says. This is especially important if we take the Bible to be the Word of God that as such again and again becomes the Word of God for us as we read it for ourselves or pay attention to its exposition by the preacher or commentator. But if, according to the Kantian interpretation of interpretation, what we find in the text is a mixture of what is there and the (human, all too human) lens through which we read and by which the text is mediated to us, is the voice we hear divine or merely human? The hermeneutics of immediacy is not the only way to preserve correspondence between what the text says and what we take it to say, but it is probably the simplest.

Closely related to the notion of truth as correspondence is the notion of objectivity. For the sake of truth as opposed to mere opinion (“That’s just your opinion”), it may seem that the contingent and particular factors that make one knower or knowing community different from others should be filtered out as subjective and distorting. Since Plato, mathematics, which is highly immune to subjective interpretations, has been a paradigm—if not the paradigm—for truth as objectivity. We should all get the same answer to the question “What is the square root of sixteen?”9

If we ask what are the contingent and particular factors that need to be filtered out—the a prioris, the lenses, the presuppositions, the receiving apparatuses that might contaminate our readings and produce misunderstanding—one of the most conspicuous candidates would be the traditions within which the Bible is read and expounded. The rich diversity of readings of the Bible that make up Christian history are not, for the most part, the result of individual idiosyncrasy but of traditions that have developed and are passed on and shared by communities and generations. The desert fathers, the Geneva Calvinists, the American slaves, and today’s Amish belong to different traditions of interpretation, as do the two sides of the debate within the Episcopal Church (and others) over homosexuality.

This is precisely a powerful motivation to privilege intuition over interpretation, for the latter seems linked to the notion (or rather reality) of different traditions, and if interpretation is relative to the tradition in which it occurs, the specter of relativism haunts us. If the meaning derived is a product both of the text and of the tradition within which the text is read, we arrive at a familiar question: what happens to truth and to the voice of God if every understanding of the Bible is relative to some human, all too human, tradition of interpretation? Once again, the appeal to intuition, to “just seeing” what the Bible says, is not the only way to attempt to avoid relativism, but it is quick and clean, if it can be sustained.

Can Interpretation Be Avoided?

But can the appeal to intuition be sustained? The case for “just seeing” is not easy to make, and the naive realism inherent in the “no interpretation needed” viewpoint may prove to be naive in the second, pejorative sense given above. As we have just seen, however briefly, the whole idea that some construals are subjective interpretations while others are objective intuitions is itself a particular (contested) tradition within philosophy. It is ironic that proponents of theologies that like to think of themselves as innocent of (uncontaminated by) philosophical prejudices (pre-judgments, presuppositions) so easily make themselves heirs of this tradition. It looks as if this hermeneutics, this interpretat...