Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon

Today, Gaunilo was writing on the topic of Evangelicalism, and raised an issue for me that has been rolling around in the back of my mind for a while. Looking back on his post I realised that what I had to say did not flow directly from what he said, but was related only tangentially. So rather than comment there, I decided to post here.

This issue is this: evangelical Christianity (in fact, American religion generally) is deeply suspicious of structure and authority. Deep dualisms abound, like spirituality versus religion, faith versus dogma, conscience versus creed, scripture versus tradition, internal versus external, and substance versus form, all in service to the anti-authoritarian axiom. (The latter term in each of these dualities flows out of a community, whereas the former is proper to the individual.)

And yet every movement, even one which is anti-authority and anti-structure, needs some cohesion, some authority, to continue existing. American evangelicalism is a fascinating mix of Reformed Orthodoxy and warm-hearted pietism, mixed with American pragmatism and (often) business and marketing sensibilities. But the thing that holds it all together is the Bible; it's the only authority they will acknowledge.

So what does it mean when a movement is suspicious of external authority and against visible structure and yet are united on ascribing authority to a sacred book?

It would seem a quandary, especially to the degree that one emphasizes individual conscience in interpreting Scripture. What sort of governor can be placed on the vagaries and idiosyncracies of 'individual interpretation'? And how can that governor, that structure (stricture?) of interpretation itself be acknowledged, without bringing in an external (non-textual) authority?

I'm not convinced it has been done successfully. But it has been tried in three steps, in an attempt to make authority proceed straightforwardly from the text. First, there is an insistence that the Scripture is perspicuous, that it is clear in all that it intends to say. Second, it is maintained that Scripture is not only clear, but univocal: it means one thing, and only one thing. Third, it locates that univocity in the mind and intention of the original writer. So therefore, to grasp and live under the authority of Scripture, one must hear the clear and univocal meaning of the text, which flows from the mind and intention of the author. Anything less is attempting to resist obeying God.

The problem is that these are theological claims masquerading as textual claims.

Texts -- at least the ones worth wrestling with -- are not perspicuous; they are multivocal, often embarrassingly so; and the author's intention, while important, never exhausts the meaning of the text, at least a Scriptural text. And it is notoriously, almost self-defeatingly* difficult to determine the intention of an author who is dead and gone and separated from us by centuries. Trying to approach the intention of such an author is like trying to walk to the horizon: you can make headway, but it remains far off.

(Excursus: This separation might not be so great with a more robust ecclesiology -- one which includes the communion of saints, for example. I heard for the first time this week a delightful anecdote about St. Thomas Aquinas, who when writing his Biblical commentaries, reached a section that tied him up in knots so that he couldn't make headway. A monk passed by Thomas' solitary cell one night to hear him conversing with three other voices! When the monk asked Thomas about it the next morning, he replied that he had reached the end of his rope trying to understand the text, and prayed for understanding. Whereupon who should appear to him but Saints Peter and Paul, and the Blessed Virgin Mary, who laid it all out for him!)

So these are not textual claims but theological claims, along the lines of "God speaks, God speaks clearly, God speaks univocally, God speaks through these people," and so forth. This is not necessarily a problem, except that the claims themselves do not flow perspicuously and univocally from the intention of the authors of Scripture. Or as my favourite Regius Professor of Divinity puts it, "these doctrines of Scripture are not themselves Scriptural."

In other words, you can hold these doctrines, but not purely on the basis of Scripture -- it has to come from somewhere else. When you admit that much, the jig is up, because it involves you in theories of the church's teaching authority, or the status of tradition, or the conclusions of reason, and so forth. Not a bad place to be, in my estimation, but one that many evangelicals would be chagrined to find themselves in. (Not, of course, that I would claim that any of these -- authority, tradition, reason -- are simple, clear or univocal either.)

If one doubts that the Scriptures are less than perspicuous and univocal, then witness the amazing profusion of Biblical commentary, (even the need for Biblical commentary in itself adverts to the need for explanation and elaboration) which only proliferates more today than ever, evangelicals being among the forefront. If the Scripture were univocal and perspicacious, then it would seem that the need would be for one person, once, to express the Bible's timeless meaning and then for it to be dusted and done. Rather like Peter Lombard's Sentences, we would just have one book that did it all.

Part of the problem is that American evangelicals -- like almost all of us, myelf included embarrassingly often -- have drunk deeply at the wells of Enlightenment epistemology. (Even if the phrase is unfamiliar to you, the habits of thought will not be.) And so thoughts about authorial intention and hermeneutics (interpretation of texts) are foremost in the minds of these Bible scholars; they exegete the text to find the grammatical and historical-contextual meaning of what the author meant, and nail down a meaning of the text.

But I wonder if this is truly the best method. If indeed we believe the Scripture to be the 'trysting place' (to use David Fagerberg's suggestive phrase about the liturgy) between God and humanity, then doesn't it seem that rather than using a tool to pull apart the text, we might be better to approach it with prayer, love, humility, openness -- in short, with an attitude of worship? I do not mean to create my own dualism here, repeating the anti-intellectualism that I was just critiquing; there is no disjunction between rigourous exegesis and prayerful, worshipful engagement with the Scripture: but why does exegesis come first? Why might not God come first? Again, if the Bible is the trysting place between God and humans, then why should we be surprised to find many, many meanings, perhaps infinite meanings there -- one of which is the historical?

Perhaps there is a different way of thinking of the word exegesis. It is a verb from Greek, made up of two parts, ex, and ago, meaning more or less "to lead out". {I have been told by someone who knows that this parsing is incorrect (see comments) -- but I stand by my portrayal of the usual practice of exegesis, and the alternative I suggest; the image of 'leading out' is still useful, if not philologically faithful. -ed.} So when one does exegesis, one leads out the meaning from the text, as if one were leading a flock of sheep or a herd of cows. Usually, when this is done, it is a matter of putting all of the animals in the right pens and making sure that they are closed in and controlled, and that none escape. It could be considered a form of domination, but it might also just be a fearful caring that the text doesn't get out and hurt itself. But maybe that's not the best way to think of 'leading out' a text. Perhaps we are meant instead to open the pens, and lead them out into the open. In doing so, we may let the text lead us out, down into paths that we have never taken, willing to follow it wherever it might go, as far as it might go, all the while waiting to be met by God.


* What I mean here is that the practice of trying to determine the author's intention of this sort of text is so incredibly contested -- sometimes the same arguments can be mustered in diametrically opposed cases ('this letter is a clear example of the apostle Paul's writing style, seen through comparison with his other writings,' versus 'the author of this letter followed Paul's writing conventions a little too closely in trying to make this letter sound authentically Pauline, and it doesn't convince.').