The Church as Hermeneutic Community 6: The Church as Interpretive Community

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.

[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.