An Absolution Revolution blog

Classic texts found communities, are sustained by them, and in turn sustain them, and interpretation is like a communal dialogue (or better, multilogue) which takes place between individuals within a community and among community.[1] The Bible specifically is the “classic text” of the church, and the church in turn is the community of its interpretation. The Bible in some sense belongs to the identity of the church, and its interpretation is the conversation by which the church’s members and congregations seek to understand its subject: God, and our relation to God.[2]

Stanley Hauerwas notes that, in a like manner to how a Shakespearean play read by a high school class is quite different from the “same” play performed on a stage, so also Biblical texts can become “different” if read in different settings.[3] For example, it is one thing to read Paul’s letters to the Corinthians in the original setting, delivered to the congregation for the first time. It is quite another to read them as two among Paul’s many letters, collected into the canon of scripture as part of a yet larger collection of writings, and yet another to read them as scripture as a 21^st century American individual with the fruits of hundreds of years of scholarship informing how the text is approached.

Hauerwas argues that the text of scripture can be interpreted only within the context of the interpretive community of the church.[4] In particular, he quotes the Roman Catholic tradition that scripture can only be rightly interpreted within the practices of a people “constituted by the unity found in the Eucharist.”[5] While this may sound authoritarian and restrictive to ears conditioned by modern liberalism, the purpose of this dogma is precisely the opposite: because there is an office of unity more profound than the text itself, “Catholics can encourage many readings of Scripture.”[6] Diversity of interpretation when it is done as the church in France, or the church in Kenya, or the church anywhere else is not a problem, but rather necessary for creating the unity found in the practices of the whole church. It is not the absolute, objective “meaning of the text” that interests the church, but rather “how the Spirit that is found in the Eucharist is also to be seen in Scripture.”[7] Privileging the mythical individual interpreter, who is considered to be capable of reading the text apart from time and place, without the good of the community in mind, denies the necessarily communal, socially constructed, and political nature of interpretation.[8]

Anabaptist traditions have historically had a similar conception of the role of community in interpretation. John Driver notes that the role of scripture in community was not just one of objective authority, but also a matter of interpretation. “The Anabaptists insisted that the Christian congregation is an interpreting community.”[9] The “gathered community” is the primary place where scripture is to be interpreted, with little “special confidence” in democratic processes of majority rule or individuals’ right to private interpretation.[10] Perhaps similar to Hauerwas’ criticism of liberalism and the myth of individual interpretation, Anabaptist principles of a Spirit-guided congregational setting for interpreting the scriptures represented a refusal to go along with the individualism of the 16th century Spiritualists.[11] No less than the varying representations of the ideal of community of goods, Biblical interpretation was a communal responsibility. Of course, certain individuals had more prominent roles in interpreting than others, but even then reading the scriptures was seen as taking place within the community gathered by the Spirit.

In addition to interpreting scripture, Kevin Vanhoozer proposes a part of the church’s interpretive task as practicing “everyday theology,” faith seeking understanding of everyday life.[12] He likens the task of cultural interpretation to Jesus’ injunction to know the “signs of the times,”[13] noting the need to understand the Zeitgeist as “discerning the mode of the Spirit’s presence in the spirit of the age.”[14] In the same way interpreting scripture is best seen as a work of community, so also is practicing everyday theology. We interpret culture from within culture, politics from within a political body, and the nation from within the nation.

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[1] Westphal, 118.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Hauerwas, Unleashing the Scripture, 20.

[4] Ibid., 21.

[5] Ibid., 23.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 26.

[9] John Driver, Becoming God’s community (Brethren Press, 1981), 90.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Stuart Murray, Biblical Interpretation in the Anabaptist Tradition (Pandora Press, 2000), 157.

[12] Kevin Vanhoozer, “Introduction: What Is Everyday Theology?” in Kevin Vanhoozer, Charles Anderson, and Michael Sleasman, Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends, annotated edition. (Baker Academic, 2007), 16-7.

[13] Matthew 16:1-3.

[14] Vanhoozer, “Introduction,” 17.

“Interpretive community” is a key concept in Stanley Fish’s writings on interpretation and criticism of texts. The concept of interpretive community is a strategy to engage the dilemma of interpretation in which the roles of “text” and “reader” struggle for the power to determine meaning. Faced with the reality that there are often as many readings of a text as there are readers, Fish explores various reader-response methods, as well as their benefits and problems, and comes to the conclusion that interpretational competition is never between “objectivity” and “interpretation” of the text but between interpretations that are acknowledged as such, and those that are “unaware” of themselves as interpretations, masquerading as “real” readings.[1] Faced with the problem of a never-ending spiral of interpretation-upon-interpretation that leaves no room for the possibility of an actual text, Fish asks how we explain these two “facts” of reading:[2]

1) The same reader will perform differently when reading two “different” (the word is in quotation marks because its status[3] is precisely what is at issue) texts, and; 2) different readers will perform similarly when reading the “same” (in quotes for the same reason) text. That is to say, both the stability of interpretation among readers and the variety of interpretation in the career of a single reader would seem to argue for the existence of something independent of and prior to interpretive acts, something which produces them.

Fish seeks to solve the problem by asserting that “both the stability and the variety are functions of interpretive strategies rather than of texts.”[4] Fish argues that these interpretive strategies are based upon “pre-reading” decisions in which the reader is predisposed to “find,” by looking for, “certain themes” that “confer significances” upon the text.[5] Interpretive strategies are employed prior to and during the act of reading. Instead of being a response to reading, they are the shape of reading and give texts their meaning. This does not deny that there is ‘something’ there upon which reading strategies are practiced, but it does emphasize that there is no such thing as a non-interpretive encounter with a text – to encounter a text is necessarily an act of creation.[6]

Interpretive communities, relatively stable groups made up of “those who share interpretive strategies” for creating meaning in textual encounters, explain the existence of similar strategies and ways of reading at various times, in various places.[7] Interpretive communities are stable but not static, shifting as new ways of reading are learned and people enter and leave. Fish recognizes this approach does not solve all the problems of interpretation, because any evidence brought forth to “objectively” support his claim would itself be an interpretation. Therefore, the only “proof” of membership in such a community is the nod of agreement within it.[8]

Fish illustrates his point with a story from the summer of 1971, when he was teaching two courses through the English Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo. The first course was in literary stylistics and theory, the second in interpretation of English religious poetry from the 17^th century. During the first course, he had written a list of assigned authors on the board. For the second class, he left the names on the board, only adding a frame around it with the designation “p. 43.” When the students entered, he told them the list was a poem of the type they had been studying and asked them to interpret it. The students then proceeded to laboriously interpret the poem, successfully concluding it was a hieroglyphic poem posing an iconographic riddle, which they then answered.[9] It was not the objective presence of “poetic” qualities that led them to interpret the “poem,” but paying attention to the list in a poetic fashion.[10]

Merold Westphal proposes a related concept of interpretation he calls “relativist hermeneutics.”[11] Invoking Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur, he begins with the notion that “we are always somewhere (socially, culturally, historically, linguistically) and never nowhere when we interpret.” While we can seek to become aware of our presuppositions and critique them, we can never do it in a way that is ‘absolute’ or separated from yet another position that is “somewhere,” there is no God’s-eye view.[12] Therefore, we cannot escape the circular nature of interpretation in which we are already located. We can move from one circle to another, but can never arrive at nowhere.[13] Of the three, Heidegger particularly radicalizes hermeneutics because, for him, interpretation “is not something we sometimes do but rather something that becomes fundamental to who we are and is characteristic of all modes of knowing.” In other words, all of reality can be likened to a text to be interpreted.[14]

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[1] Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Harvard University Press, 1982), 148-67.

[2] Ibid., 167-8.

[3] Regarding whether or not it makes sense to speak of “different” texts if, in the end, one is left with only interpretations, never the texts themselves.

[4] Ibid., 168.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 170-1.

[7] Ibid., 171.

[8] Ibid., 173.

[9] Ibid., 322-5.

[10] Ibid., 326.

[11] Merold Westphal, Whose Community? Which Interpretation?: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (Baker Academic, 2009), 35.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 35-6.

[14] Ibid., 28n3.

Thanks so much to all of you who have responded to our needs after the fire, either in comments, emails, or other ways. As part of beginning to get back into the swing of some kind of normal life, I am now going to begin writing articles for the blog as I had been before. I will also continue to make updates as necessary regarding our process of recovery, but resuming my regular writing is itself part of the process of recovery. This is the next section of my paper, which begins to examine the imagination of the church in conversation with themes previously discussed from Anderson, Cavanaugh, and others.

If the church is to function as an alternative polis, the locus of a new politics regulated by the kingdom of God and the story of Jesus,[1] it is clear that a counter-imagination is necessary. The earliest church viewed itself as a “contrast society,”[2] pledging allegiance to Jesus, not Caesar, as Lord. However, in the “Constantinian turn” the distinctiveness of the church was collapsed into imperial power structures and effectively became a kind of chaplain to secular society.[3] “Constantinianism” names an orientation towards the meaning of history based on a mistaken concept of the relationship of Jesus to history, proceeding “as if what happened in the cross, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus had not profoundly altered history.”[4] Moreover, Constantinianism gives the church a way to act within history that is not determined by the lordship of Jesus.[5] In order to adequately be ‘decolonized’ from Constantinianism, the church must explore its own liturgies, traditional practices, scriptures, and history in ways that foster an alternative, prophetic imagination. Brueggemann calls prophetic ministry that which offers “an alternative perception of reality” that enables people to see their own history in the light of God’s story.[6]

It must be said that there are limits to what worship and ministry conceived as “anti-Constantinian” or “counter-cultural” can accomplish. If the goal is nothing less than the transformation of all creation, then the church’s mission cannot be entirely countercultural, if only for the simple reason that if over half of creation were to become included redemption would be the majority, not minority reality. More to the point, though, is that the church teaches that the work of Christ accomplishes God’s purposes for the cosmos, so any conception of the politics of the kingdom that limits itself to a strictly countercultural definition is necessarily inadequate. As John Howard Yoder said, “people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe.”[7] To conceive of the church primarily as a counter-polis against the modern state is to allow the state to define the church’s identity to such extent that the church is dependant on the state for its identity.[8] However, since the mythology of the state is itself derived from Christian theology in a sense, it is surely not an illegitimate exercise to bring the categories of imagination and imagined community to bear upon a political understanding of the church if this can in some way help re-conceive of the church as the earthly embodiment of the politics of God’s kingdom. Because of the important role interpreting scripture plays in this imaginative reconstruction, it will be helpful to examine the concept of the interpretive community before proceeding.

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[1] Rasmusson, The Church As Polis, 187.

[2] Driver, Images of the Church in Mission, 31-5.

[3] Ibid., 36-42.

[4] Nathan R. Kerr, Christ History And Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Cascade Books, 2008), 6-7.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd ed. (Fortress Press, 2001), 116-7.

[7] John Howard Yoder, “Armaments and Eschatology,” Studies in Christian Ethics 1, no. 1 (1988): 58.

[8] In Christ History And Apocalyptic, 117-8, Kerr accuses Hauerwas of doing precisely that, at least in form. Kerr describes what he sees as this tendency in Hauerwas as an “eschatological failure” (122, emphasis his).