Servantship

Sixteen Servants on the Four Movements of Radical Servantship

Graham Joseph Hill

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781620328248, 9781498266406
• eBook ISBN: 9781630870119
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Servantship is essentially about following our Lord Jesus Christ, the servant Lord, and his mission--it is a life of discipleship to him, patterned after his self-emptying, humility, sacrifice, love, values, and mission. Servantship is humbly valuing others more than yourself, and looking out for the interests and wellbeing of others. Servantship is the cultivation of the same attitude of mind Christ Jesus had: making yourself nothing, being a servant, humbling yourself, and submitting yourself to the will and purposes of the triune God. Since servantship is the imitation of Christ, it involves an unreserved participation in the missio Dei--the Trinitarian mission of God. In this pioneering work, sixteen servants describe the four movements of radical servantship. Servantship is the movement 1.from leadership to radical servantship; 2.from shallowness to dynamic theological reflection; 3.from theories to courageous practices; and 4.from forgetfulness to transforming memory. Servantship recognizes, in word, thought, and deed, that "whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave--just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

2

The Conundrum and Paradox

A Way Forward

Part 1: The Issues of Audience, Text, and Language

Introduction

The conundrum of Scripture, since it relates to the extension of the author’s speaking to that of the speaking of God, immediately raises the issue of the concept of authorial intent in relationship to a text as an author’s communication. This occurs because the issue of authorial intent is foundational to any assertion of the speaking of the author and therefore is an inherent assumption of the conundrum of Scripture. The paradox, which is that the text is at the same time both a human and divine communication, raises the issue of the nature of the text in this communication. It also raises the subsequent issue of the interpreter’s meaning in engaging the text and its relationship, if any, to the author’s meaning. This overall debate has traditionally related primarily to the two ends of the issue—that is, the author’s meaning and the interpreter’s meaning.

The very words intention and meaning appear to be so closely associated that they seem to be almost capable of being used interchangeably. The concept of an author’s intention, in Romanticist hermeneutics, therefore became closely associated with the concept of the author’s meaning and subsequently to the issue of “knowing” the author’s meaning, and hence an issue of epistemology. The issue of authorial intent pursued in this way becomes that which is related to the psyche of the author. However, what was not considered is that in the act of parole51 there is a transformation of authorial intention, as related to the psyche—hence, being—of the author, into authorial intent, as related to the being of the composition.

The authorial intent is associated with the psyche of the author at inception, but is operational within the composition due to association with the text. The use of the term authorial intent in hermeneutics should be concerned with its operational effects in the composition, not its association with the psyche of the author, from which it is detached. As a result, the debate within modernism subsquently focused incorrectly on establishing the validity of sameness of meaning. The true focus should be that of sameness of understanding of author and interpreter, not that of meaning. This approach focuses on the issue of the disclosure of the text not that of the knowing of the interpreter.

There are five issues that have bearing on these concepts of the author’s intention, the nature of the text, and the issue of interpretive meaning. (Three of these issues are covered in this chapter and two are covered in chapter 3.) The basic format of discourse is that someone said something to someone. However, in interpretation of texts the interpreter begins, not with the someone who said something but instead with the something that is said. Consequently, the entrance to the discourse regarding the written text is as an audience in an encounter with what was said. In this chapter the first three of these issues are dealt with, starting with the audience and then the text of what was said.

A Changing Audience

Marshall has suggested that authoritative meaning can undergo change and is consequently a relative value to some degree. He states that the “closing of the canon is not incompatible with the non-closing of the interpretation of that canon.”52 Stanley Grenz notes that the intent of a biblical text begins in the original human author’s intention but “is not exhausted by it.”53 The efforts of any interpreter cannot “exhaust the Spirit’s speaking to us through the text.”54 An authoritative meaning in one setting may have a different authoritative meaning in a different setting.55 This raises the question of what is changing and to what it is relative. The author, the historical context of the work, and the historical particularity of the intended audience do not undergo change in the case of historic texts.56

It has become generally recognized and accepted that interpreters are also conditioned by their historical context; subsequently each brings his or her resultant presuppositions to the task of hermeneutics, which impacts the hermeneutical task.57 Though interpreters may seek to accommodate their prejudices with respect to the text, they must recognize that a “completely detached unbiased stance is impossible.”58 The contemporary interpreters, in any era, contribute something of themselves in pursuit of a hermeneutical task.59 Marshall observes that this problem should not be overemphasized and that, although absolute objectivity is not possible, a significant relative objectivity is possible.60

The presuppositions of both the author and the intended audience are not undergoing change with respect to historic texts. In Ricoeur’s thought the act of composition of a written text fixes the temporal instance of discourse, and the event of an author communicating by creation of a text appears and then disappears.61 However, the values of the presuppositions of the author and intended audience are fixed in the creation of the text at that time of its creation.

The presuppositions of any unintended audience, which includes a contemporary interpreter with historic texts, will involve differences, especially since they are historically distanced from the text. The unintended audience is changing and this is what results in interpreted meaning undergoing change. In such a scenario, the concept of authorial meaning can appear to undergo change due to the impact of the contemporary context and yet still be authoritative in its setting, as Marshall observed (e.g., morality may be the aim of the author but what acts are moral or immoral may vary with, and even within, a culture).

Consequently, in the hermeneutical task, an interpreter, who is not part of the intended audience, will impact meaning, which results in some degree of change of what the interpreter observes by the very process of observing it. Hermeneutics is generally understood to be the science and art of interpretation. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, as one of science in general, thus appears to be paralleled in hermeneutics as science.62 If this principle (the impact of the observer results in some change, no matter how minimal) is accepted, then the equation what it meant equals what it means is not valid for the interpretation of meaning beyond the intended audience.

Furthermore, if recovery of the human authorial meaning as a pure absolute value is impossible, as Marshall has contended,63 then it follows that the value what it meant concerning individual texts within the composition, as an absolute value, is also unrecoverable. The only authoritative voice that could eliminate uncertainty on the relationship of an interpreter’s observed value of what it meant to the absolute value would be that of the author.64

The interpreter, from within the community of faith, may desire to raise the assertion that, since the text is the word of God and the Spiri...

Table of contents

• 00_Sutcliffe_Frontmatter
• 01_Sutcliffe_Chapters
• 01_Sutcliffe_Chapters-1
• 01_Sutcliffe_Chapters-2
• 01_Sutcliffe_Chapters-3
• 01_Sutcliffe_Chapters-4
• 01_Sutcliffe_Chapters-5
• 01_Sutcliffe_Chapters-6
• 01_Sutcliffe_Chapters-7
• 01_Sutcliffe_Chapters-8
• 01_Sutcliffe_Chapters-9
• 01_Sutcliffe_Chapters-10
• 01_Sutcliffe_Chapters-11
• 01_Sutcliffe_Chapters-12
• 99_Sutcliffe_Bibliography
• 99_Sutcliffe_Name Index
• 99_Sutcliffe_Index