Rewoven into the Fabric of Redemption
January 12, 2010
Section I – Being Absorbed by the Pluralist Impulse or Absorbing the Pluralist Impulse?
It is not an uncommon assumption in our time to suppose that the Scriptures of the Christian church cannot any longer be taken at face value – at least not in the way they were read for the first eighteen hundred years of the church’s life. It seems obvious to many that something about our contemporary experience no longer permits a straightforward reading of the Biblical text as a faithful and true witness to God’s actual redemptive plan and activity in history. It is not always obvious what is so obvious about our contemporary experience that prohibits taking the Bible in this fashion, but increasingly the fact that there are multiple communities of faith, all with diverse sacred texts is seen as a “defeater” for that earlier way of reading the Bible. And the further difficulty is that we are now aware that there are increasingly diverse ways of reading the Bible within the plurality of Christian churches themselves.
It is not so much pluralism I want to combat here, but the pluralist impulse: that taken-for-granted assumption that the Biblical text cannot be taken straightforwardly but must be read in countlessly diverse ways. I want to suggest a way of understanding and reading the text that both accounts for that pluralist impulse and goes some of the way towards explaining why it is not finally satisfying.
Modern consciousness has been profoundly reshaped by the structures of pluralism, seeing not simply diverse religions but religion as diverse. In practical terms, there is no such thing as a “consensus” of public opinion. In our body politic, public opinion must be manipulated in order to coax agreement. And even then most of us sense any consensus is fleeting and temporary, not deep and stable. In the church, public opinion is pluralized and polarizing as well. In single congregations it is difficult or impossible to discover or develop a common mind on what is or is not essential about the Bible. Accordingly there is precious little of substance that holds churches together.
Allied with the “pluralist impulse” been a noticeable decline in the cultural intuition that there is a world simply “out there” to be described. It is now more common to suppose that reality is not something that we bump into like a brick wall. It is more like a written text than a brick wall. No longer is language viewed as “hooking onto” the world (as if one word corresponded to one object in mathematical fashion) but rather language is an entire framework of understanding, within whose structure we perceive and understand. We may continue to use the language of “reality”, but now it is the name given to the interpretation of widest appeal. Inevitably then we are led to the conclusion that there are diverse realities for diverse interpretations. There are finally no interpretations which describe the world “as it really is”. The interaction of word and world cannot any longer be construed in axiomatic terms, but now is described in terms of the ambiguity of plural perspectives. And let’s face it – for most of us, our experience in the world is deeply complex and hard to understand.
In the present cultural environment, Scripture has become malleable under the pressure of diverse constituencies which “see” different realities in the text. Why after all do we need so many diverse “study” Bibles in the evangelical world? The answer is intuitive – because there are so many diverse perspectives brought to the Bible, and so many diverse perspectives which the Bible brings to different readers. This intuition drives much scholarly Biblical interpretation in our time as well. Whether liberal or conservative, the vantage point of the reader is often indicative of what will be “found” in the Biblical text. What appear as ships passing in the night (liberal vs. conservative readings) may actually rather be two ships sailing on the same wind – the wind that pushes all parties to suppose there is nothing beyond “our perspective” to which appeal could be made in staking out a particular interpretation. Different communities will find diverse claims supporting their self-identity depending upon which canon within the canon they read and how they read it.
In an earlier era of Biblical criticism, one often found the bald assertion that the writers of Scripture “just got their facts wrong”. That kind of criticism is much more rare today. The far more common conviction today is that the writers of Scripture represented peculiar socio-political perspectives and wrote their stories from their own unique vantage point. Biblical critics today are far less concerned with the search to discover the real “facts” behind the story. It is far more common today to search for the interpretive trajectories launched by the Bible because the facts were reported in the fashion they were. We read the Bible with our concerns supposing that we are writing/reading the final chapter in our own experience. This supposes that the Bible is not simply a collection of information about past episodes. It is rather a way of understanding one’s present existence in light of trajectories or trends that began in the Bible, but which do not find their fuller meaning till our own experience interprets them.
The “plain sense” of the text has become the “plain sense of the reader’s interpretative world”. The plain sense is, “what a participant in the community automatically or naturally takes a text to be saying on its face insofar as he or she has been socialized in a community’s conventions for reading the text of Scripture.” (Kathryn Tanner) The problem here is seeing the “plain sense” as residing outside of the text in the “world” of the reader, rather than in the text itself. The text has lost its authority over the reader, being now subsumed into the socialized world of the interpreter. And here again the door is opened into pluralized readings of the Scripture. Every socialized world brings a different “plain sense” to the Biblical text.
But suppose we find a way to affirm the plain sense” of the Bible resides in the Bible itself. How can we still avoid the problems of so many apparently different readings of the text, even the “plain sense” of the text? Ironically, the beginnings of an adequate response, may be to push yet further (not resisting) the notion that language is indeed a framework of meaning. Indeed even the Biblical narrative is itself a framework of meaning. The Bible is not merely a set of descriptions about a world “out there” but rather the Bible is itself a world to be inhabited, or to change the analogy, a story through which our lives are told. An initial way forward is to see that the Bible is not simply awaiting our interpretation but absorbs us into its reality. This is so because the Bible is a Living Word – uniquely written by human agents in time and authored by God across time. But before laying out this paradigm, two significant questions loom on the horizon – Can God speak/write and Can He speak/write in such a fashion that human writings are also His writings? We turn to these questions in the next section.
© 2010 The Center for Gospel Culture
