Relevance as a mediating category in the reading of biblical texts: Venturing beyond the hermeneutical circle

RELEVANCE AS A MEDIATING CATEGORY IN THE READING OF BIBLICAL TEXTS: VENTURING BEYOND THE HERMENEUTICAL CIRCLE1

The most efficient way to introduce the problem which this article addresses is by means of a brief autobiographical reflection. In vocational terms I can be described as a teacher of biblical studies. In that capacity I am a reader of the biblical text. I ply my trade in two (occasionally uncomfortably) distinct contexts. I am an ordained Anglican, and I am employed at an interdenominational evangelical Bible college. When it comes to reading the biblical text, those two contexts typify the hermeneutical tension in which I live, the attempted resolution of which moulds a significant part of my working life. In one context, that of the evangelical Bible college, I often read with those concerned with such things as authority, objectivity, and authorial intent. The Bible is God's word, and the job of the Christian is simply to do what is says. The adjective that best describes my other context, the Anglican one, is pluralist. In that context I often read with those who are more focused on such things as subjectivity, interest, relationship, and ideology. What is most important is the Bible reader's experience of life, and any engagement with the Bible is subject to that experience and the reader's cultural context. This is, of course, a caricature of both contexts, and the diversity inherent in each of them. The fact is that the two are not mutually exclusive, and at an intuitive level I find a considerable amount of interplay. My desire is to understand that interplay better at a hermeneutical level, at the level of how I read, interpret, and use texts.

That I have described my activity in each of those contexts as "reading" is a response to the fact that questions about the position of the reader with respect to the text dominate the contemporary hermeneutical landscape. Literary theory, according to Anthony Thiselton, "constitutes one of the three most significant developments for biblical hermeneutics over the last quarter of a century." The second development Thiselton cites is the impact of post-Gadamerian hermeneutics," by which I assume he means Gadamer's rebellion against method and structure, and a turning towards language and context and particularity when it comes to understanding. Thiselton's third chosen development is "the emergence of socio-critical theory and related liberation movements."2 A consequence of this has been the privileging of the reader in the creation of meaning and the corresponding development of various ideological positions whose interests dictate how the text is to be read. The question of "reading," and the position of the reader with respect to the text, is raised by each of those hermeneutical developments. It is in "reading" that I struggle to come to terms with the conflicting imperatives of my contexts.

In each of the two distinct contexts that I have described there is irony at work in the activity of reading, and there are potential problems when that irony is missed. One of the ironies of the Bible college context is that it combines a commitment to the objective nature of the text and the importance of authorial intent as the locus of meaning, with an intensely subjective reading after the fashion of the pietist tradition. The biblical text is read in terms of "what the text means to me," and yet the assumption about the nature of the text is that it contains intentional, self-evident, and nonnegotiable communication from God. A subjective experience is combined with a thoroughly objective theory of what is being experienced. There is little awareness of how much of him or herself the reader brings to the text, as a result of which the reading experience can be given an unwarranted privilege. As Thiselton has expressed it,

Very often in religious groups an individual is encouraged to "frame" the biblical text with reference to the narrative history of personal testimony, and to "read" the text as "what the text means to me." If this is undertaken within a frame of corporate evaluation and testing, the life-experience in question may enhance pre-understanding and weave meaning and textual force with emotional warmth and practices in life. But without any principle of suspicion, in Gadamer's terminology a premature fusion of horizons will take place before readers have listened in openness with respect for the tension between the horizons of the text and the horizons of the reader.3

The potential for abuse inherent in such a position is obvious.

In my other context, the Anglican one, which I have characterized as pluralist, there occasionally arises an opposite irony to that of the Bible college context. There is much greater interest in what we might loosely term the more objective text-historical, what another age may have called scientific, approaches to reading the text, alongside a more untrammelled freedom granted to the reader in the creation of meaning. This time the encounter with the text is as the study of an artefact which one stands outside of rather than as a conversation partner with which one engages. The perception of meaning that emerges as a result of such study will be much more compatible with a community of interpretation, and much more aware of the "foreignness" of the text and the care with which conclusions arising from its reading must be treated. But there may be no corresponding commitment to personal appropriation of the text. Rather the text is then "critiqued" and "used" in the service of a predetermined ideological position.4 To call on Thiselton again, he asks of such approaches: