Potential Meaning…
March 2, 2005
I’m taking Cultural Hermeneutics this semester with Mark Taylor (one of my favorite professors here) and Brian Blount. We’ve been reading some Gadamer and Bultmann, getting some good background before we jump into the various cultural groups we’ll be reading interpretations from (African-American, Feminist, Womanist, Latin American, Latina/o, Asian, Asian-American, Gay/Bi-/Lesbian and Disabled communities). It’s a fascinating class; we’ve just been covering some basic stuff to hermeneutics right now, talking about how everyone comes to the text with their contextual background (their preunderstanding) and they all have some relation (life relation) to the text to begin with. People come to the text with certain questions, and even those questions will determine what meaning they will be getting out of the text. We’re reading Taylor’s Remembering Esperanza and Blount’s Cultural Interpretation as two of our main texts for the course.
Here are some quotes I really enjoy from Cultural Interpretation.
“No final, complete, comprehensive text interpretation can result from this process because changes in sociolinguistic circumstance are perpetually inviting new ways of approaching and therefore evaluating the text. A text can therefore never be interpreted completely; it can only be more comprehensively appreciated once it is understood that what is determined to be its meaning is dependent on a variety of sociolinguistic factors. A text can be envisioned as a rainbow of potential meaning whose individual colors, while visible to one interpreter or community, are invisible to many others.”
Potential meaning…that’s scary I’m guessing for some. We want THE MEANING. The text was written for a reason, to communicate a specific meaning, so what is it? But what if that’s not the case. We all come to the text with vastly different life-experiences that must be taken into account.
“Coming to terms with such a recognition teaches us that there can never be one final text interpretation…Because we also know that the human circumstance is constantly changing, we can conclude that text interpretation will remain fluid. This does not mean the text changes. It obviously remains the same. But we have found that the text is multivalent. There is no single meaning.”
But the text doesn’t change. No worries on that one. The text was written, and we must respect the text and acknowledge what is there. But it is not even possible to say that "it is our job to find the one, true, single meaning." It’s not there. The same text can have very different meanings in very different settings and cultural situations. Is that bad? Is it bad that one text can speak to many different people in many different ways…?
“Traditional approaches cannot continue without taking note of micro-interpersonally oriented interpretations; conversely, micro-interpersonally oriented interpretations cannot affirm themselves against traditional interpretations, but have to engage with them. Through such recognitions we can move toward a fuller interpretation, one that we must concede will always remain incomplete.”
A humility is required here that while we share our interpretations, our thoughts on the "potential" meaning of a text, we must always acknowledge that ours is not a full interpretation - it could always be fuller by taking into account the variety and diversity of other possible meanings that are there in the text. It is a dialogue, it is a dialectic…it is a process.
Can we be okay with that? If we say that Scripture has more than one meaning, are we dis-respecting scripture? The authors? Or are we in fact taking Scripture more seriously, being open to interpretations that we may have totally and completely missed. Thoughts?
Tags: Theology
Posted in Theology
Adam Walker Cleaveland: 
March 2nd, 2005 at 8:24 am
wow. talk about stacking the deck…anytime you start off talking hermeneutics by talking about oppressed communities, you’re going to look like a jerk coming the other direction. however, as one who lives in one of the poorest parts of waco, and has worked with kids with special needs, i’ll say that theology has to be much more than hermeneutics.
the problem with beginning the hermeneutic with only an experience outside that of the cross and resurrection is that that experience, for better or worse, becomes the focal point of theologizing, and thus is apt to either a) ultimately dismiss the cross or b) find no center when coming into contact with other experience. the first churches were constituted not around only common texts or even practices, but around the experience of the risen Christ, so experience definitely has a strong hermeneutical role, but not the one that can be definitive–”experience” in general cannot be the definer of interpretation, but rather Experience, coming into contact with the cross first, and then reading our culture in response.
March 2nd, 2005 at 8:44 am
Good post. I especially liked the portion of the quote you highlighted: “A text can be envisioned as a rainbow of potential meaning…”.
pax et bonum
March 2nd, 2005 at 9:11 am
As one who is totally open to the Spirit bringing illumination in many ways, to many people, through many parts of the text, I struggle with the obviousness that most people write or speak to communicate something in particular. Doesn’t this have to have a role somewhere? I don’t adhere to a particular viewpoint on this, but am in process of asking these questions. My wife teaches Communication Applications at the high school level, and it would seem to me that based on the communication model (acknowledging that language leaves much to be desired) that our biggest obstacle is that we don’t have the message senders around to offer feedback to us on how we interpret the message they have sent.
Here’s where I struggle further, when I speak and write, I am trying to communicate something. Based on my own experience with communicating, I have some difficulty making the leap that the author’s didn’t know their own meaning - isn’t this something important to be considered when trying to understand any text, not just the Bible?
This is a great discussion Adam, and I am earnestly interested in hearing what other people have to say on this and hopefully learning from them. Blessings on you all!
March 2nd, 2005 at 10:15 am
But while “most people write or speak to communicate something in particular,” as Shane says, surely some do not. Does the poet? Does the philosopher necessarily? The artist communicating in paint or clay?
Or how about the preacher? I have quite frequently sought to communicate something in particular but found that the people in my church heard something else in what I said. And I have been convinced that this is precisely what the Holy Spirit intended them to hear, despite my preacherly intentions. Might not the Spirit work in a similar way in the reading and hearing of Scripture?
March 2nd, 2005 at 10:44 am
I wouldn’t consider that an intention toward the text of deriving one or more particular “meanings” out of a great multitude of possibilities is any more valid than trying to get the “one true meaning” over and against various interpretations.
Both are “preunderstandings,” I think.
When I think of meaning, I think, “intention of the author in writing this bit.” I know that I can hear all kinds of other things based on my own cultural context and life experience and only think that’s the author’s plain meaning, and so see the need to deconstruct my own perspective, as well as the author’s.
I don’t think the question is, “can or should the text speak to different people in different ways”; it simply does. Each text as a “rainbow of meaning” seems like an overstatement to me (what does “meaning” mean?) but I think I understand the grounds for dialoguing with various “micro-interpersonal interpretations”: theology must belong to the whole people of God.
March 2nd, 2005 at 11:38 am
Does that kind of view of interpretation apply only to the Bible or can that be applied to language in general? For example, human writers (on Cleave’s blog, for instance) expect that their readers have a reasonable shot at grasping their intended meaning. While human language can have different layers of meaning, writers and speakers normally do not communicate mutually contradictory things if they expect to be taken seriously. We expect this of our peers. Why do we not expect this of the Bible?
Thoughts anyone?
March 2nd, 2005 at 11:44 am
Oops. Somehow I missed the preceding discussion. Sorry for redundancy!
March 2nd, 2005 at 2:46 pm
In refrerence to what Brian said, I agree the Holy Spirit illuminates people in spite of what we intended to communicate. And although I think the artist, poet, philosopher may be okay with their creations being interpreted in different ways, wasn’t there something they were communicating or thinking about during their endeavor? Surely this must matter at least some in the picture of understanding. I think that the last quote in Adam’s post points to this.
I also agree with Kyle that the text simply does speak to people in different ways - there is no way around that (I think that people who deny this aren’t being honest with themselves). But should this take precedence over looking at the author’s intent or even at the same level? Do we think the Holy Spirit wasn’t working when the text itself was written? Isn’t that important to remember?
I am also not sure if being open to new interpretations shows that we take the text more seriously. Instead, I think it shows that we are willing to engage and learn from others experiences with the text outside our own - I think it says more about how we value people and at the same time acknowledge our own limitations and subjective viewpoints.
And then, how does this effect those of us who approach the Scriptures with a bit more whimsy, handle our fundamentalist brothers and sisters who seek to serve Jesus, but whom we think miss the point? I think that if we look at Myles’ comment we can find a good place to begin.
Thanks to all who have commented and kept this discussion on a dialogical level. Blessings!
March 2nd, 2005 at 6:04 pm
One of my brother’s profs at Vanderbilt recently published the Global Bible Commentary with Abingdon, which is quite interesting. Definitely worth a look. I recommend in particular the chapter on the Western Jesus by N. Duran.
March 2nd, 2005 at 6:16 pm
I’m thankful for this discussion, and I wish it was one that was intrinsically built into the nature of the Cultural Hermeneutics course. I took this course two years ago at PTS and found it as stimulating as Cleve apparently is. But I want to offer a strong caution regarding the conclusions that Taylor and Blount ultimately propound, and appeal to you, Cleve, and everyone else in the class, to be carefully discerning about the sort of presuppositions that are under-girding the methodology that is set forth.
The best thing about this class is that so many things about it are good and true- the principle thing, of course, being the recognition that all of us come to the text with our own cultural and experiential lenses that shape and perhaps even determine our interpretation of Scripture. Even the central question of theology, which I take to be “What is the gospel?”, must be asked in culturally particular ways. Our understanding of the gospel is always formed by the particular epistemological, social and even political assumptions that we have inherited implicitly in our contexts. Any attempt to deny this fact, and to seek instead a context-independent repository of eternal theological principles that give shape to the gospel, is a recipe for cultural accommodation, theological reductionism, and even oppression.
That being said, however, I want to go on and challenge Taylor and Blount to recognize the most serious omission of their method. They are ultimately advocating a form of radical contextualization whereby each local situation and finally each individual becomes sovereign in itself. The fact of our cultural embededdness does not entail the assertion that none of those human histories makes contact with a reality beyond the human context. I believe that this class is built upon the assumption that my last comment is not true. It does not take the possibility that God is able to reveal Godself in and through the contextual nature of all reality with half the degree of seriousness as it takes the contexts themselves.
Ultimately our understanding of the gospel must rest not on its context-dependency per se, but on the fact that it is an event in a particular context (this is where I would want to push Miles to go beyond the category of experience to event, although I think he basically means the same thing). Because the gospel is not a collection of abstract religious truths, but is rather the event of Jesus Christ in his life, death and resurrection, God has revealed in and through Christ a way of understanding the whole polyphonic story of human existence that is determined by no other starting point but its own. As Christians, we must take it as our most foundational belief that God has acted in Jesus Christ to breach the multifarious contextual complexities of human existence and made God’s sovereign reality known to us by acting as the supreme Subject who ultimately remains in control of revelation and shapes the employment of our language. This is true liberation- because God has done this in a particularly cultural way, every person of every human culture is able to know God and be reconciled to God through God’s own infinitely costly act of redemption.
This, I believe, is how we put forth a true contextual theology and hermeneutics. The story of God’s action as centered in the life, death and resurrection of Christ must be allowed the freedom to flourish in every cultural story of the earth, creating distinct communities that witness to the gospel’s reality in the particular forms the Spirit creates. But because this story is centered in the cross, the story of God’s redeeming action will bring both affirmation and judgment of the cultures, thoroughly indigenizing the gospel on the one hand by producing culturally appropriate expressions in the particular context of each community, while on the other hand “universalizing” the gospel by transforming each community and rupturing, indeed bringing into judgment, previously unchallenged forms of life and thought. Taylor and Blount ultimately cannot accept this latter point. By now, if you know Lesslie Newbigin, you will certainly recognize that I borrow much of these thoughts from him, so I’ll leave him with the last words. The story of the gospel as centered in Jesus Christ “is the enduring bulwark against the arrogance of every culture to be itself the criterion by which others are judged.” And of course, it is also the story in which every culture finds its fulfillment.
I apologize for the length of this comment, but I do feel strongly about this stuff and I really hope that students taking this class will be thoughtful about what they are learning. While I took the class I compiled an “alternative reading list” that I felt complemented the assigned reading, so if anyone would like to see it just email me (corey.widmer@ptsem.edu).
March 2nd, 2005 at 9:07 pm
Brian, I’ve been thinking about the phenomenon you mentioned: “I have quite frequently sought to communicate something in particular but found that the people in my church heard something else in what I said.”
I wonder if that might give us cause to look at our presentation of biblical narratives more as a storyteller than a “preacher” (or as Doug Pagitt would say, “speech-maker”). I guess what I’m saying is that if people are going to come away with their own interpretations anyway, maybe what we (meaning preacher/teacher types) should be be doing is just telling the story and letting the Spirit work from there.
I don’t mean that we don’t expound upon it at all, by the way. I just mean that we should do less of “these are my three points that you must come away with when I’m done giving my speech.”
One of the things I’ve started to do in my teaching times is to invite the group to reflect on a simple question: “How can we respond to God in prayer based on what we’ve read (and discussed).” In other words, I’m not enforcing my view of what we should get out of the text. I’m asking the community to do their own reflection.
Sorry if I’ve veered off topic a bit, Adam.
March 2nd, 2005 at 9:19 pm
Bill…I can’t BELIEVE you veered off-topic bro! I’m starting to question your eternal destiny…! Anyone else?
March 2nd, 2005 at 11:07 pm
Adam,
Thanks for the thought-provoking post.
I think part of the difficulty here is bound up with the nature of Scripture. Scripture, for Christians, is canon–which means it speaks to us, today, as God’s Word, authoritatively and inspiredly. We can all rattle off experiences of what that’s like–of reading Psalm 23 or Ephesians 6:10 and thinking, “Yeah–this speaks to me/convicts me/encourages me” even though it was written thousands of years ago.
But by the same token, Christian Scripture was also written thousands of years ago by people who had definite purposes in why they wrote and what they wanted to communicate. (i.e., Paul’s letters have a different context than Matthew’s Gospel, which has a different context than Isaiah). Sometimes, of course, these people didn’t even know what they were writing would turn out to be holy writ!
So basically, when we Christian hear Scripture today, we’re hearing one work read which has two identities: first as our canonical works, and second as whatever poetry or pastoral instructions or story about Jesus it started out as. Most of the time Christians harmonize these in there head, so we don’t notice the disconnect, but it’s usually there if you look. There are some classic examples of this, too–as Christians, we can read Song of Solomon as an allegory for Christ and the church if we want–but if we read it that way in OT Exegesis, without being able to explain what the author’s intended context was, we get an F on our paper. We’re used to hearing Romans 3.23 quoted in talks about human sinfulness, but not to hearing it in the larger context of Paul’s argument about the relationship of the Gentiles to the Jews. You get the gist.
Anyway, this is getting long, I know, but here’s my point: how far can we stretch the text from the author’s intended meaning before our interpretation snaps? If the text says “black,” may our interpretation say “white”? I think Blount’s metaphor of a rainbow of meanings is useful–as long as he’s not implying that the text’s meaning is whatever we, the interpreting community, says it is. If that’s the case, then we have either a) post-moderned ourselves out of becoming Christian, or b) become Roman Catholic.
March 3rd, 2005 at 8:56 am
Why the snub against Roman Catholicism? What does that comment even mean?
March 3rd, 2005 at 1:45 pm
Bill,
Sorry. I should have been more careful about what I wrote; I don’t by any means equate being Roman Catholic with saying black is white or pomoing oneself out of being Christian.
What I was trying to get at is: I’ve had some Protestant friends tell me that Scripture has *no* meaning at all until the community interprets it. Now, I disagree, but I think this is at least an intellgible move–but if you want to make it, you belong in the Catholic church. Not that the Catholic view is that Scripture has no meaning until the church gets its hands on it, but Catholicism seems to jibe a little bit better with that point of view than Protestantism. Protestants are still (at least in theory) trying to take Scripture as their norm, and if Scripture has ‘no meaning’ on its own, then where does the authority for Christian proclamation have to come from? The church itself.
March 3rd, 2005 at 2:40 pm
I took a very similar class at Denver Seminary with Dr. Danny Carroll called Reading the Bible from the 2/3rds world.
Dr. Carroll was uniquely qualified to teach such a class because he is half Guatemalan and spent many years teaching in Latin America. His emphasis is on liberation theology and the study of the book of Amos.
It is great fun and extremely difficult work to remove the lens we read Scripture through. That is where classes like these are very profitable. They expose our chronocentrism, ethnocentrism, and a whole lot of other isms!
Yet questions remain: are some interpretations more correct, likely, probable, valid or authoritative then others? How do we decide? Can diametrically opposed interpretations of the same text both be correct? In essence, when someone says we are unbiblical in our interpretation this is what they mean. They mean this is not the authoritative/valid interpretation of a particular text. Often issues around interpretation are issues of power.
March 5th, 2005 at 12:56 pm
Corey,
I appreciate your lengthy comments and your commitment to understanding hermeneutics more fully (aren’t you writing a thesis on this now?). Anyway I want to challenge your perception of the Cultural Hermeneutics class. I have the course now so I cannot comment on your experience with it two years ago. Nevertheless, I see Professor Blount’s task in the course differently than you. You write,
“I want to go on and challenge Taylor and Blount to recognize the most serious omission of their method. They are ultimately advocating a form of radical contextualization whereby each local situation and finally each individual becomes sovereign in itself.”
I think you have let yourself fall down the slippery-slope of relativism and it scares your Newbiginian understanding of the Gospel in a pluralist society. I tend to look at Blount and Taylor’s aim from a different angle. Its not that “each individual becomes sovereign in [herself]” as you suggest…quite the opposite in fact. The point of wrestling with cultural hermeneutics is done in the service of dialogue and community; i.e. it is done so that we DON’T become sovereign unto ourselves! The problem Blount and Taylor seek to remedy is that white males (such as you, Cleave and I) have controlled the interpretation of the Gospel. We have ignored the fact that we are beholden to our OWN cultural situation and that we read the Text through those lenses. The Gospel does relate the Truth of Jesus Christ to us. It is a living word that meets each of us in our uniqueness and in our connectedness with our own communities. Cultural Hermeneutics strives to dispell the myth that there is only one mode of interpreting the Bible “correctly”. That does not mean that we cannot speak concretely about the texts meaning or meaningfulness. What it does mean is that when the living word meets you, Cleave and I (as North American white males) it encounters us in a different place than it does the Latin American migrant worker or the African orange-vendor in Cameroon. Cultural Hermeneutics respects a point to which you have already conceaded above:
You write, “The best thing about this class is that so many things about it are good and true- the principle thing, of course, being the recognition that all of us come to the text with our own cultural and experiential lenses that shape and perhaps even determine our interpretation of Scripture. Even the central question of theology, which I take to be ‚ÄúWhat is the gospel?‚Äù, must be asked in culturally particular ways. Our understanding of the gospel is always formed by the particular epistemological, social and even political assumptions that we have inherited implicitly in our contexts. Any attempt to deny this fact, and to seek instead a context-independent repository of eternal theological principles that give shape to the gospel, is a recipe for cultural accommodation, theological reductionism, and even oppression.”)
Another point of contention I have with your assessment resides in your understanding of the ontological divide and God’s self-disclosure via cultural mediums. You write:
“It does not take the possibility that God is able to reveal Godself in and through the contextual nature of all reality with half the degree of seriousness as it takes the contexts themselves.”
You seem to be so scared that by openning up the channels of dialogue across cultures (’making room at the table’ so to say) your own androcentric, white dogmatic insistance that your interpretation is the right one, damnit, might be challenged. I want to rephrase, in my own words, the last statement I just quoted from your comments and maybe this will show you another way of viewing this course’s purpose:
Jake thinks, “[Cultural Hermeneutics] takes the possibility that God is able to reveal Godself in and through the contextual nature of all reality seriously and appreciates that we are called to live in community and dialogue with our neighbors. We need each other and we need to truly hear the other’s interpretations, respecting that the same Spirit is at work in their communities as the Spirit is in our own. Cultural Hermeneutics appreciates God’s ontic otherness compared with humanity and respects the fact that God, in God’s amazing love and grace, has chosen to reveal Godself to us. Yet this Divine self disclosure is limited to the extent that we are limited, finite beings who are incapable of understanding apart from language. Since languages are culturally bound we must respect the fact that other people’s interpretations will necessarily differ from ours. These socio-linguistic fetters are actually the keys to liberation, for they enable us to respect one another’s perception of that one great Truth via dialogue. I can think of few things that are more exquisite in God’s creative design than to limit us socio-linguistically so that we are forced to listen, respect and love one another. What a sneaky and beautiful ploy!”
Corey, please don’t kick against your socio-linguistic goads! Don’t fight to protect your hermeneutic so that you do injustice to other interpretations. But at the same time, don’t feel that your own culturally conditioned perception of the Truth is worthless… it’s not, it’s just not totalistic and universal.
This seems to be the tendancy for my white brothers involved with cultural interpretation. They either 1) pucker their assholes up so tight that they even go so far as to dismiss culture as a factor of interpretation altogether or 2) they abandon their own culture en toto and pretend that they are actually a marginalized latina or that they truly identify with the transgendered paraplegic. Both of these miss the mark. The purpose is to recognize that we too have a cultural identity that we bring to our task of interpreting the biblical witness. It involves an acknowledgment of the history of domination and oppression done to other intepreting communities over the years. It calls us to repent of this methodological dogmatism and to enter into true dialogue with other marginalized interpretations that threaten both our own sacred understandings of Truth and our status as dominant power-players that still participate in subjugation of minorities.
If you or anyone else would like to continue this discussion we can do this here or on my own blog that I am posting today about this (www.theofragen.com). Peace!
March 8th, 2005 at 3:09 pm
Your two approaches are not antithetical.
March 9th, 2005 at 12:27 am
Jake,
Thanks so much for taking the time to respond to my comments. I appreciate the attention you’ve given to my concerns.
I’m glad for the chance to respond, especially because I felt that you did not respond to what I intended to express. I am assuming that this occurred partly because I did not articulate myself clearly, and partly because you were reacting to a broad collection of views regarding culture that you felt I represented, as you explained on your blog. I would have hoped that my comments would not have deposited me in the camp of those who dismiss culture altogether as a factor of interpretation, nor among those who are so fixated on their collection of androcentric, white dogmas that they react ferociously to any challenge. However, I am indeed white and male and therefore a member of that population which has historically held extensive and sometimes oppressive power over the interpretation of the Bible. For that reason I am thankful for your comments, because no matter how convinced I am that I am free from such oppressive tendencies, the natural propensity of my conditioning and nature would be to drift in that direction. So oblique accusations are helpful to re-evaluate my own position every now and then, and I think there were elements of truth to your concerns about my comments.
That being said, I do want to clarify further what I hoped to communicate in my first post. I do not feel that I need to address fully your comments, because I agreed with most of things you said, a position I tried to make clear in my original comments. I especially appreciated your rebuke of my accusation that Blount and Taylor are advocating a form of hermeneutics wherein each individual becomes sovereign in him or herself, which really was not an accurate statement on my part. You are right- their real purpose is to demonstrate that cultural hermeneutics works toward the end of rupturing the cultural individuality in which hermeneutics has historically been carried out, and to foster dialogue, community and mutual understanding. And I agree with you that one of the most beautiful dimensions of the Christian gospel is that no single culture or language has ultimate interpretive power over it, and that its fullness can only ever be conceived in the context of the multiplicity of cultures in which the Spirit gives it root.
What I do not think you addressed in your comments was my concern to give priority to God as the Subject of revelation. You seem to be adopting Blount’s position on revelation, which he described succinctly in his Inaugural Address that is published in the most recent Princeton Seminary Bulletin: “Culture plays a key role in the revelatory process” (287). I interpret this comment, as well as several of your comments (“These socio-linguistic fetters…enable us to respect one another’s perception of the one great Truth via dialogue”), to mean not that God’s revelation took place in a particular cultural form, which I would affirm, but that culture itself serves as the plane of revelation. In this sense Blount’s view is essentially phenomenological, in that its epistemological starting point is not any confession about God’s action to reveal God’s self in human culture, but rather is the experience of cultural plurality itself. In this view, the realm of human culture is not only the sphere in which the socio-linguistic human response to God takes place, but is also the locus of God’s revelation to humanity. In other words, no distinction is made between the human cultural response to God and God’s own action in human history.
This view requires the concomitant affirmation that “the Divine self disclosure is limited to the extent that we are limited, finite human beings who are incapable of understanding apart from language,” in your own words. The dogma on which this statement rests, that being that the most authentic form of ultimate reality is ultimately unknowable, can be and is often used to disqualify the possibility of affirming any truth altogether. Of course we must affirm that no human mind can ever comprehend God- but that fact in itself is no grounds for denying the possibility that God may make the divine known to human beings in a way that enables them to legitimately bear witness to what has been revealed. This is the possibility on which I am continuing to found my argument- that God is able to make Godself known in history, and in doing so has provided humanity a basis for beginning to understand truth’s reality.
The reason why this is so important to me is the same reason you expressed in your own comments: to find a basis for true unity in plurality, for true mutuality and dialogue. Cultural Hermeneutics rightly rejects the idea that unity can be found in any one particular cultural narrative, because to do so would be to impose an imperialistic agenda upon the others. But it is not clear why the proposed basis for unity, the bringing together of multiple perspectives and various responses to the gospel, is not itself an imperialistic agenda. A project for human unity that admits to basing its commitment not on a theological understanding of ultimate reality, but rather on the phenomenological dimensions of human experience, is frighteningly near to a shift from a consideration of objective reality to the self and its needs. If such a position is extended to its fullest length, it nears rejecting the idea that reality may be a personal God involved in history who demands from the self witness and transformation.
Personally, I cannot imagine how I can presume as a white male to dialogue with others without beginning with the acknowledgment that I am judged by this God who is active in history. The only basis for truly engaging with the multiplicity of cultural plurality is Jesus Christ—because in beginning with him, his life and death and resurrection, engagement is carried out at the place where every human participant is judged and challenged. This means that we move into dialogue with others not by assessing their proximate distance from our own perspective, nor do we come with the intention of converting them to our own interpretive frame. It means that we enter into dialogue at the foot of the cross, abandoning our self-righteousness which would compel us to conceive our culture as normative, putting ourselves at risk to face the judgment of the cross all over again, accepting that our most profound commitments may be brought into reconsideration, even that God may use our dialogue partners to expose our own duplicity. Throughout, we remain committed to Jesus Christ as Lord as the basis for authentic human unity.
Alright, I must now sign off my ramblings. Again, Jake, I really appreciate this dialogue and really value your perspective.
I don’t know how you guys keep up these blogs- where in the world do you find the time?
March 9th, 2005 at 7:38 am
One more thing that I woke up with on my mind this morning. My whole point in responding was ultimately to agree with Milliner that our positions are ultimately not antithetical. As evidence of such, Milliner posted on his blog a lengthy quote from Lindbeck, a portion of which reads as followed:
“[my position] most emphatically does not imply that the realities which faith affirms and trusts are in the slightest degree intrasystematic. They are not dependent on the performative faith of believers (as if, for example, Christ rose from the dead only in the faith of the Church), but are objectively independent.”
We may insist that all interpretation is culturally limited and linguistically constrained without making the accompanying claim that reality is only really phenomenological; we may insist that reality has made itself known even while affirming that the human response to that reality (and therefore our only access to it) is culturally determined and beautifully diverse.
March 9th, 2005 at 1:12 pm
Corey, from my cultural perspective as an equally white and equally male person, I agree with what you’ve said. I’m joining the epistemology discussion from the entry-point of theology, as I presume you are, so theology’s questions are primary as I try to define truth and history and faith and reason.
If you can find any more blogging time, I’d be interested to hear your answer to the one question that has stuck in my mind since my last foray into pomomusings comment-land. In addition, I have another question/pointer.
1) I admit I find this difficult, and slightly off topic, but maybe it will generate some good thoughts from you: Who gets to say which statements are clear and which are not? I’m not going to mention homosexuality or women in ministry or atonement theories or the relationship of Scripture and tradition… But I’ll let you do it if you want! =)
2) Ok, it’s a pointer, not a question =): I think that in order to make any ground after what you’ve just said, you’ve got to bring up specific Scripture passages. How exactly does your self-critical and humble (critical realist?–see Bock’s Purpose-Directed Theology, ch. 1 I think) approach to Scripture’s truth end up making you differ from the allegedly relativistic perspective you critique? (I know it does, I’m just lobbing you that question.)