Rendering the Word in Theological Hermeneutics

Mapping Divine and Human Agency

Mark Alan Bowald

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781577996811
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblische Studien

When interpreting Scripture, do we take an academic or a spiritual approach? Do we emphasize the human or the divine agency? Do we focus on man's authorship or God's inspiration?Mark Bowald argues that these are false dichotomies. We need to understand both the human qualities of Scripture and the divine, as an overemphasis on either will lead to distortions. In Rendering the Word in Theological Hermeneutics, Bowald surveys various schools of thought, explaining where they lose the balance between the two. He analyzes the hermeneutical methods of George Lindbeck, Hans Frei, Kevin Vanhoozer, Francis Watson, Stephen Fowl, David Kelsey, Werner Jeanrond, Karl Barth, James K. A. Smith, and Nicholas Wolterstorff.Bowald shows that we should view Scripture as equally human and divine in origin and character. And our reading of Scripture should involve both critical rigor and openness to the leading of God's Spirit.

1

The Eclipsing and Usurping of Divine Agency in Enlightenment Epistemology and Their Influence on Scriptural Hermeneutics

The typology we will present in the next chapter is designed to bring greater clarity to the full character of divine and human agencies involved in reading Scripture. This suggestion implies the need for clarity. This chapter will describe this need. It will be argued that certain developments in Enlightenment epistemology contributed to create an obscurity in the perception of the ideal act of discerning knowledge, of which reading books, including Scripture, has been treated as a subset.

The epistemological development we are concerned with involves the nature of the agency of the knowing person, particularly in the limitation of the investigation of knowledge to immanent spheres and actions. This resulted in the ideal situation being envisioned as that in which both the knower and the object are immediately and immanently present to each other. Further, that the action of the knower is, ideally, performed independent of the influence of other agents. The object is, likewise, limited to that which can be perceived via instruments of immanent human perception.

With respect to the reading of Scripture, both the moratorium on the influence of another agent on the knower and the limit of the object to that which can be perceived by human perception effectively combine to restrict any appropriate or constructive role for God’s activity. In the wake of these limitations the task of interpreting Scripture came to be defined in terms of two arenas of agency, both competing with one another. These are the “text” and the “reader(s).” The tension between text and reader(s), as such, limits the range of activity responsible for determining the “meaning.” As these epistemological limits gained purchase the result is that both the “text” and the “reader(s)” of Scripture are increasingly defined strictly by immanent parameters. The “text” reflects this in that it is perceived initially or primarily as being a container possessing the literary production or action of deceased and “distanciated” human beings. The reader(s) reflected these limits insofar as it is the perception that they should be “objective” and, as far as possible, set aside any prior judgments or be influenced by other agents.

The obscurity produced here is that these developments combine to exclude God’s agency from the picture, with the result that the ideal post-Enlightenment reading of Scripture arises against what is effectively a deistic or atheistic horizon or “worldview.” Against this it is asserted that it is a highly specious notion for the agency comprising the reading of Scripture to be defined initially, primarily, or exclusively in these terms. Limiting the fields of agency to human agency in the text and human agency in the reading of Holy Scripture is an imposing reductionism.

To the contrary: Properly construed, the activity of reading Scripture must also give an accounting of the concurrent divine agency that accompanies the “text” and the reader. In fact, the horizon of divine agency that frames the horizon of the interpreter is more fundamental and directive in how they negotiate hermeneutical problems than whatever they may hold regarding human agency. The approaches we will survey in chapters 3 through 5 will demonstrate how the interaction of divine and human agency is formative and ingredient to any and all proposals for reading Scripture, and how it shapes subsequent decisions made about “texts” and “readers,” “reading communities,” “contexts,” and so on. The time is right and ripe in biblical and theological hermeneutics for approaching the task intentionally focusing on divine agency, as the most revealing manner to both expose and redress the obscurity created in the course of following modernity’s epistemological strictures.

Having said this, the concern with agency per se is by no means absent from contemporary debates on hermeneutics. A survey of recent work quickly reveals that notions of agency associated with the act of the reader or reading community, as well as the human agency ingredient in the text, are used with great frequency and force. We hear and read about what the text “does,” “says,” or “effects” and as the corollary issue how the “reader” or “community” “reads” or “uses” the text. The problem with these is that their discussion attributes agency with clumsiness and offhandedness; obscuring the relationship of divine and human agency. So: When one makes an assertion about what the “text says” or “how the church uses” the Bible one is, at the same time, making an assertion (or a denial) about the relative presence (or absence) and pattern of divine action. “What Scripture says” or “how the community reads” is, then, awkward and shorthand language for a constellation of theological assertions which orbit around divine agency.

And here is the rub. Even as notions of divine agency accompany and underwrite these proposals the residual influence of the dominant epistemological tradition tells us that it is preferable to minimize, remove ourselves from, or ignore the dynamic influence of another agent or influence (including God) on our investigations. Thus with respect to reading Scripture, caught between modernity and postmodernity, we live under a cloud of tension between the assumptions we continue to believe in, use, and cannot escape from, accompanied by a nagging sense that we should not have them. Understanding and resolving this tension is necessary if we are to make any substantial progress in the debates over biblical hermeneutics.

This investigation follows in the long and fashionable tradition of attempting to describe “what went wrong.” That which I argue has gone wrong is the perception of how the Bible is ideally read and interpreted in its function as the speech action of God in the salvific1 economy and milieu of God’s active and personal willing, self-revealing, and self-interpreting.2 I will not seek to narrate the process which resulted in the immanentization of the hermeneutics of Scripture. That history has been well plumbed.3

To assist us in clarifying this errant aspect of the hermeneutical problem we will initially look to the work of Immanuel Kant and briefly discuss aspects of his epistemological framework and its implications for metaphysical knowledge, knowledge about God, and for reading Scripture. In doing so I am not setting Kant up as either the primary or sole cause of the problems. Other representatives could have just as easily been selected. Kant’s thought is a convenient point of entry for several reasons. His writings are a definitive expression of a great variance of streams of thought which preceded him and are acknowledged as a uniquely powerful influence on those who followed. He is of particular importance for our purposes in that he stands at a key crossroads for Empiricist and Rationalist (as well as Phenomenological) traditions. The influence of these on theological and biblical studies is profound and unquestioned. Further, the influence of the Enlightenment on Western theology and narrating how these had this detrimental effect on the Church, theology and interpretation of the Bible, continue to be a well worn path of discussion.4 The reader is, therefore, more likely to be familiar with the basic terms with which we will be engaging. Finally, Kant is selected because of the way in which he discusses the ideal knowing moment. His discussion is precise, and helpful in providing a vocabulary from which we will draw to illuminate our own analysis.5

Finally, there may be certain readers who, because of the somewhat technical nature of the discussion that immediately follows in the next session, might benefit by skipping to the summary below, and returning to this section later.

KANT’S PROSCRIPTIONS TO REASON’S ACTIVITY: DEFINING THE IDEAL KNOWING ACT

We begin by looking to some relevant passages in Kant’s corpus to see how he imposes immanent limits on both the knowing agent as well as the object in the epistemological action of creating or building knowledge. We will pay particular attention to his own qualitative judgments regarding the influence of other agents in the act of knowing and especially to comments he makes regarding the relationship of God’s agency to human agency.

In his Critique of Pure Reason he makes an important distinction between “having an opinion,” “believing,” and “knowing.”6 This results in a hierarchy. “Having an opinion” is at the bottom from the standpoint of pure reason because it is “objectively and subjectively insufficient.” It is insufficient in both of these ways insofar as there is no a priori or a posteriori way of validating it. “Beliefs” are higher on the ladder because they are subjectively sufficient (a priori) but are still objectively insufficient (a posteriori). The object of beliefs is beyond the pale of the senses of pure reason to discern rightly or wrongly, yet the very structure of reason (the categories) gives necessary rise to the belief. “Knowledge” proper is highest on the ladder and is superior to both beliefs and opinions in that it is both objectively and subjectively sufficient.

Notions about God, Kant says, can be no more than “beliefs” in that they proceed from a subjective a priori awareness of a “purposive unity” that is rooted both in the world and in one’s moral nature yet are lacking in any possible objective demonstration.7 Thus the belief in God is implicitly of a lesser quality than knowledge but greater than opinion. Beliefs about God solely originate from subjective grounds. Here, then, are two restrictions on the nature and origin of our notions of God which are imposed as a result: Firstly, they are objectively insufficient as the perception of God by human beings is impossible; and secondly, that they then exclusively arise from the subjective ground of the structure of the knower’s inherent awareness of the meaningful structure of the world which comports with the categories of experience.

Having sketched out Kant’s taxonomy of knowledge with respect to potential knowledge, we now go on to look at limitations he imposes on the very process by which one would then go ahead and attempt to obtain knowledge, and particularly, knowledge of God. In the appendix to Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Kant iterates the need for a thorough examination and critique of any metaphysical investigation undertaken by any person in seeking knowledge. He makes an initial distinction breaking the act of investigation down into two moments: He writes,

If the course of events is taken as it actually runs and not as it should run, then there are two kinds of judgments: a judgment that precedes the investigation … and then a different judgment that comes after the investigation, in which the reader is able to set aside for a while the consequences of the critical investigation … and first tests the ground from which these consequences may have been derived.8

He delineates two moments where judgments come into play; judgments which precede the investigation and judgments which come after the investigation. He suggests that the presence of both of these is characteristic of the way things often run but “not as it should run.” He continues, discussing “antecedent” judgments—those that precede the investigation:

If what ordinary metaphysics presents were undeniably certain (like geometry, for instance), the first way of judging would be valid … But if it is not the case that metaphysics has a supply of incontestably certain (synthetic) propositions, and it is perhaps the case that a good number of them … are, in their consequences, in conflict even among themselves, and that overall there is not to be found in metaphysics any secure criterion whatsoever of the truth of properly metaphysical (synthetic) propositions: then the antecedent kind of judging cannot be allowed, but rather the investigation of the principles of the Critique must precede all judgment of its worth or unworth.9

Here Kant denies any appropriate role for antecedent judgments in the investigation of metaphysical knowledge. When applied to the investigation of beliefs about God as potential knowledge we see this as another restriction over and above the limitation to subjective grounds as “beliefs” noted at the outset. So: If a person wanted to investigate the possibility of metaphysical knowledge of God (or God’s activity) on Kant’s terms, they would be required to set aside any antecedent judgments about God.

Kant describes this in What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? He returns to the subject of antecedent judgments and their relationship to the investigation of “supersensible objects” and explores the implications of these limitations of antecedent judgments for the investigation of beliefs about God as potential knowledge.

A pure rational faith is therefore the signpost or compass by means of which the speculative thinker orients himself in his rational excursions into the field of supersensible objects … and it is this rational faith which must also be taken as the ground of every other faith, and even of every revelation … The concept of God and even the conviction of his existence can be met with only in reason, and it cannot first come to us either through inspiration (Eingebung) or through tidings communicated to us (erteilte Nachricht), however great the authority behind them.10

Kant again affirms the necessity to remove the influence of antecedent judgments, in this case as they relate to our investigation of God’s revelation. He also makes another important distinction when he describes antecedent judgments as being comprised of two varieties, both of which need to be guarded against in the investigation of pure reason. For our purposes we will call these “operational” and “notional” judgments.

The first, operational, variety is “inspiration” which is offered as the translation of Eingebung. The word connotes a kind of influencing action of one person on another. The verb form eingeben can also be translated as “putting forward,” “administering to,” “suggest,” or “put into his or her head.” The word is used elsewhere by Kant in contexts where he is also considering the question of God’s revelation (Offenbarung), but it has a more precise meaning than “revelation” in that it connotes the influence of another personal agent in the process of the individual obtaining or making knowledge. His discussion of revelation takes up this issue and, again, proscribes the agency of the knower in such a way that any antecedent influence should be, as far as possible, set aside or nullified, including the influence of God: “inspiration.” Here, as in contexts where Kant discusses revelation, he focuses primarily on questions involving the influence, assistance, or help of God but is not as critically interested in the question of the form or content of notional beliefs we may acquire or inherit from others. There is a reason for this: Throughout his corpus operational judgments that assert any sort of assistance from God are considered a diminishment and a hindrance to the ethical powers fully resident within each and every person whereas notional judgments about God as a creating or judging agent are permitted insofar as they serve to prag...