Listen! A sower went out to sow… Some seed fell on critical ground, where it grew quickly – but before it could bear fruit, it was dug up and dissected by botanists in white coats curious to know what species of plant it was. Some seed fell on pre-critical soil, but gardeners came and built a high wall around the patch of ground and tended it according to their esoteric traditions. Rumours spread about genetically-modified crops and strange mutated fruit. And some seed fell on post-critical soil, but gusting winds of suspicion blew the seed around so that it could never take root, and the ground remained barren. He who has ears to hear, let him hear…
At this point, as you might expect, an interpretation is required. These areas of ground are three hermeneutical environments in which the Bible may be read. The schema is, of course, grossly simplified as is usually the way with allegory; more importantly, each approach is presented in negative terms.
1. Modernism is commonly understood as the product of a rationalist reductionism, and the modernist hermeneutic, derived from this larger worldview, consists of an historical-critical reductionism.
2. If for the purposes of this analysis we may label the traditional evangelical approach to scripture as an uncritical ‘biblicism’, it may be characterized as the implementation of a theological reductionism. It tends to remove scripture from the sphere of history and ordinary human experience, emphasizing instead the divine origins of the text, its theologically guaranteed integrity, and its immediate personal relevance to the reader. Despite being in many ways at odds with modernism, this position has made selective, and often inconsistent, use of modernist forms of argumentation, principally for apologetic reasons.
3. Just as modernism questioned traditional religious and philosophical accounts of the world, postmodernism has in its turn pulled the rug out from under the feet of the rationalists by questioning the very possibility of knowing anything at all – at least with any measure of certainty. This amounts to an extreme form of epistemological reductionism – in the sense that meaning and truth are never allowed to take root; everything is kept up in the air by an almost obsessive suspicion of socially constructed knowledge.
An integrated hermeneutic
The question that we are faced with is: where is the good soil in which to grow a productive postmodern-evangelical reading of scripture? My view is that our hermeneutic will relate in a rather complex and ambiguous way to each of these positions. We are not looking for a piece of clear and pristine ground apart from them in which to sow the seeds of a ‘postmodern-evangelical’ mode of reading the Bible. We are looking for an area of overlap that is in creative and critical tension with its hermeneutical surroundings.
1. We will need to engage seriously with the historical-critical programme – probably now with the expectation that we have rather more to gain than lose by doing so.
2. We will agree with the biblicist conviction that the Bible must be regarded as the primary and normative means by which we remain in continuity with the faith and commitments of the people of God.
3. We will share something of postmodernism’s sensitivity to the universalizing and controlling influence of meta-narratives. We will learn to be more hesitant about the semantic and referential functions of texts; we will be less certain about the power of language to fix truth for general consumption. We will accept that reading and responding to the Bible are not straightforward activities.
An expansive hermeneutic
This attempt to define a hermeneutic in relation to historical criticism, biblicism and postmodernism is arguably itself a reductionist procedure insofar as it subordinates these three programmes to the task of synthesizing a substructure for a postmodern-evangelical reading of the Bible. I think this is probably unavoidable; but I would also suggest that each position remains the starting point for exploration out from the hermeneutical centre. A postmodern-evangelical reading of the Bible should be expansive, inquisitive, communicative, busily trading with its intellectual hinterland.
1. A postmodern-evangelical hermeneutic that has engaged properly with historical-criticism should not be narrowly selective in its use of the historical-critical methodology. On the one hand, there will be a candid recognition of the difficulties that this engagement – even in its most benign forms – continues to pose to conventional readings of scripture; on the other, there will be a willingness to venture out into the unfamiliar landscape that has been constructed by historical research in search of a more authentic understanding of the story about Israel and YHWH.
2. Our commitment to the Bible as ‘Word of God’ should not be so constrained by its openness to historical-critical and postmodern readings that we cannot allow the text to motivate worship and mission or have an direct, transformative impact people’s lives. We will need to find new ways of articulating trust in scripture.
3. Nor should the ‘modernist’ practices of historical-criticism and biblicism inhibit the postmodern instinct to exploit the ambiguities of the text, the elusiveness of meaning, the potential for multiple readings, and so on.
Distinctives of a postmodern-evangelical reading of scripture
It seems to me that we are moving towards a fundamental realignment of the evangelical hermeneutic, by which I mean not just the way the Bible is interpreted by scholars but how it is read by ordinary believers – how it is studied, preached, taught, discussed, blogged on, meditated upon, used in worship and prayer, packaged by publishers, retold publicly, and so on. It would be difficult to guess in every respect what this realigned hermeneutic will look like, but I would emphasize three main distinctives.
A community-driven reading
The reading of scripture will be conversational and community-driven – a creative engagement of different perspectives and interests, not the autocratic dissemination of an official orthodoxy. There will be a high level of community-ownership of the process of reading, interpreting and responding to scripture. The conversation will include groups that have been marginalized by modern evangelicalism – not least the academics.
If this is perceived to jeopardize the integrity of Christian truth, the response will be to learn, on the one hand, to recognize authoritative voices within the conversation, and on the other, to develop a methodology (perhaps an implicit methodology) that will maintain and manage the different commitments that we have as the people of God. With the pluralism will come a heightened self-awareness and humility: those who join in the conversation – being good postmoderns – will be conscious of the presuppositions that have shaped their perspective, of the problematic nature of discourse, and of their capacity to get things wrong.
An alienating reading
Evangelicalism has always sought to modernize the Bible – through translation, paraphrase, packaging – in search of relevance. I would suggest that an engagement with both historical-criticism and postmodernism will have the welcome effect of making the Bible appear strange again. On the one hand, by returning the Bible to the flow of history, we will regain a sense of distance from the texts. On the other, postmodernism continually exposes the accommodating, harmonizing power of extrinsic interpretive structures such as canon, creed, statements of faith, and so on. We will find ourselves confronted with the particularity and vulnerability of the biblical stories.
A narrative reading
Texts will be located within, and interpretation will take its bearings from, a narrative rather than a systematic framework. This is not a merely formal or inconsequential shift of emphasis: the retelling of the narrative is likely to force a significant reorganization of our systematic theology. At the moment the task of reconstructing the narrative is strongly under the control of an historical-critical methodology. At a later stage we may find that a more characteristically postmodern interest in narrative as a literary form may displace the historical-critical agenda.
The interpretive framework that is usually brought to the evangelical reading of the Bible consists of a dogmatic-experiential grid. Along one side is a set of beliefs that makes up the underlying argument of Christian faith. There is certainly a narrative component to these beliefs but I would argue that the story that is told functions much more like myth than history: God sent his Son to die for the sins of the world so that those who believe in him might go to heaven. The story is readily schematized and easily adapted to systematic forms of theology. Along the other side of the grid are a set of categories drawn from our experience of the Christian life, both personal and corporate. The grid, as a result, is essentially a-historical: it deals with the immediacy of the text and is subordinate to a mainly pragmatic spiritual and ecclesiological agenda.
A narrative hermeneutic, on the other hand, will place the text – or texts – of scripture in an interpretive framework that has not been collapsed into an abstract, universalized, formulaic orthodoxy but stretched along a disjointed, fragmented, realistic historical axis.
This will have major implications for how we contextualize what we read: we will be more aware of the heterogeneity of the texts; we will learn to read the New Testament against the background of the Old Testament in a way that preserves their historical integrity and does not reduce the latter to a body of atomized proof texts and prophecies; we will need to understand how the Bible itself interprets history eschatologically.
At issue here, though, is not the question of whether we may arrive at something like an objective historical truth. Postmodernism has persuaded us that the most we can hope to do is dab away at the canvas with an impressionist’s brush from the limited vantage point of our prejudices. The issue is whether the way we read the Bible and draw conclusions from it is consistent with the way we read other texts (literary, historical, scientific, journalistic) and draw conclusions from them.
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