Relocating To Elfland

Last night I attended a book launch at Union Theological Seminary for a volume coauthored by my friend, Dr. David Innes: Left, Right & Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics. There’s a great deal I could say about the panel discussion, in which not only the authors but also Richard Land and Jim Wallis participated; but as a pastor and biblical exegete, I found one particular question from the audience especially striking. A young woman asked the three (apparently) white males on the panel: “How do you adjust for your whiteness and maleness when you read the Bible?” It was closely related to another question asked by the moderator to the authors: “If you are both Bible-believing Christians, how do you reach such fundamentally different conclusions about a biblical approach to politics?” At the heart of both questions is the problem of hermeneutical “lenses”: none of us reads the Bible “objectively” (we are always particular people in a particular cultural setting, ineradicably influenced in the way we perceive and understanding everything); so is anything we ever say about the Bible “objectively” true? Can it ever be?

I felt for the respondents. Tomes could be (and have been) written on these issues, and they had mere seconds to fire back an answer! Here are a few thoughts that came to me later as I thought about the questions.

First – and this isn’t intended saucily – one might just as well ask, “How do you adjust for your femaleness (or color, or whatever) when you read the Bible?” What this throws into relief is that there are multiple perspectives/lenses in reading the Bible. Why should we interrogate one, but not others?

Once this variety of perspectives has been identified, there are three possible approaches. One is a political approach, which seeks (or assumes) the preeminence of one lens (e.g., female, male, black, white, Latin American) over others. This is power hermeneutics; whether it proceeds from a culture of majority privilege or a culture of minority under-privilege, it is fundamentally about power; it is about imposing one lens on the interpretive community to the subjugation of others.

A second possible approach is the rationalist one, which assumes that we can (theoretically, at least) throw away all the lenses and just read the Bible “objectively.” This Cartesian notion has been shot to death so many times in the last fifty years that I won’t bother doing it again here.

But, of course, we must be careful of an opposite ditch. There is, thirdly, a relativist approach in which (contra rationalism) it is assumed that because none of us is objective, all of our readings of scripture are so biased that none of us can ever say, “Look, that’s absolutely and universally true.” In this approach, whatever objective truth may exist “out there somewhere,” we certainly have no access to it; we have only what we see through our lenses.

Two things, quickly, by way of analysis:

As some of Barth’s disciples (and others) have pointed out, each of these three approaches seems not to take adequate account of the God of the Bible in reading the Bible. God Himself speaks in scripture with divine authority, His Spirit bears witness to the Word, thus every time we come to the Bible we (and all of our lenses) come under divine judgment. The issue is not whether I can get hold of my lenses and, if necessary, throw them off; the simple fact is that God will! He is the key “player” in the hermeneutical process; and He speaks and acts as sovereign Judge. Anyone who does not come to scripture with a humble awareness that he or she is sinfully biased and that God will expose his or her biases and command repentance, is coming to scripture as its lord and judge; and the object of the interpreter’s judgment is no longer the Word of the Lord, but mere text.

Let it be said that this divine judgment on all human interpretation is decidedly applicable in the North American context. Much was made last night of how “American” our reading of the Bible ought to be. I would say that we Americans in particular should come to scripture ready to be judged: the Bible is a Middle Eastern book, the Word took flesh as a Middle Easterner, and we have no idea how much our comfortable lenses will be smashed by the thought-world in which God chose to enculturate His revelation to humankind. If the gospel was an offense to Jews, and foolishness to Greeks, how will it rock the applecart of post-Enlightenment Western culture?

There is a further point I would want to make. When it comes to our biases in reading scripture, we are immeasurably helped by the fact that we are part of a holy catholic church. I was actually amazed that this never came up last evening. I am not permitted to claim a personal monopoly on biblical interpretation, nor is any local church community permitted to claim a monopoly, for the simple reason that we are all part of a worldwide interpretive community that stretches from the days of Jesus right down to the present. If my lenses are judged by the Lord in my reading of His Word, they are also judged by the readings of my brethren, even as their readings are judged by mine. Even those who preach and teach the Word profit from the Berean “judgments” of those who hear them. None of us should ever shy away from the challenge to our reading of scripture that comes from other Christian communions. This is part of the glory of being members of the Body of Christ.