From the Covenant
Network Conference
Brueggemann calls for use of imagination,
and awareness of the personal pain out of which we all all interpret
scripture
by Doug King
11-6-00
The
first address of the conference was given by Dr. Walter Brueggemann,
Professor of OT at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia,
and author of many books that have been very important to legions of
Presbyterian preachers and others.
Speaking under the title, "Biblical Authority: A
Personal Reflection," Brueggemann did indeed engage in some
personal reflection on the authority of the Bible in his own life. That
began with his father, a pastor in the Evangelical and Reformed Church,
who was "my first and best teacher." His confirmation training
gave him the basic principle from which he considers the authority of
scripture: his church's motto from the time of the Reformation: "In
essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things
charity." He offered this from his own background, as something
that could be helpful to us Presbyterians in our struggles as well.
Out of the long line of Biblical scholars from who he
has learned, Brueggemann concludes that how we read the Bible is shaped
partly by the family and friends that have shaped us, and partly by
"God-given accident and all kinds of circumstances" that form
the questions and interests (and biases) we bring to the process of
reading and interpreting.
This led him to propose six principles for
interpreting scripture:
Inherency is the first. (And don't
miss the "h" in the word!) The Bible, he explained, is
inherently authoritative for our life and faith in the church -- not
because it can be "proven" by some external standard, but
because it provides the evangelical core of the church's life, the Good
News of divine grace. This means that we must distinguish between the
Good News and lesser claims within the scripture. It also means that all
of us who claim that evangelical foundation are bound together, whatever
our differences, and "nobody has high ground morally."
This inherent Word of God is refracted through many
authors, who all reflect their own times and circumstances. So the Bible
is in Karl Barth's phrase "always a surprise," and its meaning
is never fixed. So our readings of the text, whether we're liberal or
conservative, must always be provisional and modest.
The second principle is interpretation,
by which Brueggemann means that our human interpreting of the Bible is
always "subjective, provisional, and disputatious." So
interpretation goes on through dialogue and argument; it should never be
a monologue. In such a process, as we see it carried on by Jewish
scholars, we must each make our distinctive claims and argue them with
passion. Then at last we must fall back, along with out opponents, into
a "profound, calm yielding" to the Good News that undergirds
the Bible and the church.
As an example of the multiple "truths" in
the Bible, Brueggemann cited the way in which Isaiah 57 overturns
Deuteronomy 24. The moral codes of Israel prohibited a man's taking back
a wife who had been unfaithful. But according to Isaiah proclaims a
readiness to take back Israel, God's "wife" who had been so
unfaithful.
Brueggemann began to explain the third principle with
a bit of apology: "I understand that imagination
makes serious Calvinists nervous," because they know it can
degenerate into irresponsible fantasy. But we do imagining all the time,
he added, and good preaching must invite us into responsible imagination
-- which is interpretation. The best example he finds in Jesus'
parables, which are "extraordinary acts of imagination" -- not
just as stories, but as flying in the face of so many accepted
understandings of God and human life.
Imagination involves a leap. And "what a leap it
is to imagine that Isaiah's Jubilee is about canceling Third World debt.
What a leap it is to imagine that the Levitical code is about the
ordination of gay and lesbian people." We do it all the time, and
we won't stop. But imaginative interpretation is always subjective and
debatable. It is, he concluded, "subjective interpretation that
will not carry the weight of absoluteness. And after all the creative
work of our subjective interpretations, "we must fall back on the
central evangelical claims" of God's love and grace.
The fourth principle, he went on, is the recognition
that ideology is always involved in our interpreting of
scripture. All our interpretation is shaped by the passions and
convictions of the interpreter, and ideology arises as the
self-deceptive claim that we are free from those influences, and that
our interpretations are thus uniquely absolute. Scholarly historical
criticism is not free of this ideological taint, he added, for the
scholars have often been concerned to fend off the threats of
ecclesiastical authoritarianism.
Breuggemann dug deeper at this point, to explore the
ideological roots of what he called "high moralism." In
disputes over scripture, he suggested, "every interpretive voice
will have vested interests," that shape the interpretation
itself without being acknowledged. And our vested interests reflect our
own anxieties, which grow out of our fears. And our
fears are rooted, ultimately, in our own pain. So very often,
our pain is the "hidden hermeneutical principle" behind our
absolutist interpretations.
So, for example, much of the writing in Deuteronomy is
very patriarchal, seeming to reflect the pain of the Hebrew authors.
Speaking personally again, Brueggemann said that his
own "hermeneutical passion" is rooted in his own pastor father
had been "economically abused" for so long by his
congregation, largely as a means of control. "That wound is deep in
me and it shapes how I read the Bible, and whom I trust."
In presenting his fifth principle, inspiration,
Brueggemann acknowledged that "there are lots of unhelpful
formulations of this!" Its real significance, though, is that
"the Spirit will not be controlled," and so in all sorts of
situations we will be led into new understandings. We must always be
open to the possibility that new insights may emerge for old texts, and
we end up saying "I don't know what happened," because we have
been moved by the unexpected wind of the Spirit.
The final principle set forth by Brueggemann was importance.
Biblical interpretation done with imagination and the Spirit is
important not just for the sake of the church's own life, but even more
"for the sake of the missional testimony of the church for the
world." This is all the more urgent today, he added, because our
society is so tempted to reduce all of life to money and technique,
which aims to achieve control in ways that will fence out death, and
gift, and humanness. The Word, he went on, "is the prime antidote
to the trivialization of human life." In this cultural climate our
own temptation is to do the same thing to the Bible -- reducing its
depth and complexity to one-dimensional "truth," and so
trivializing it.
"What if," he asked, "liberals and
conservatives put their energies together against the main
threat of our dehumanizing culture?"
