Postmodernism [Caputo, 2006]

[Source: John D. Caputo, chapter 5 of Philosophy and Theology (Abingdon Press, 2006)]

Summary

Postmodernism isn’t relativism or skepticism. Rather it’s a sense that:

• Our perspectives, vocabularies, and paradigms necessarily shape our thought. We get somewhere in thinking not by ridding ourselves of those things, but by developing and reconfiguring them.
• Because of the world’s vast complexity, we are incredulous at totalising metanarratives (theories that claim to be the final word). We need to attend closely to the details, for it’s the details—like anomalies in science—that challenge our paradigms, languages and perspectives, and push us to develop new ones.
• Pure reason isn't the only way to understand the world. Intuition, grace, faith and art shed light on it too.

The Postmodern Turn.

1. The hermeneutical turn. We’re not objective, neutral observers, but are steeped in presuppositions. We get somewhere not by ridding ourselves of presuppositions, but by using our intuitions to help us reform our present ones.
• Heidegger, influenced by Kierkegaard, argued that when we look at something we must always see it in the light of the presuppositions we inherit, because it is we who are looking at it. We can’t look from a ‘neutral’ standpoint, because we can’t look through anyone’s eyes but our own.
• These presuppositions don’t blind us, but give us access to the world. They give shape to the stimuli and data of the world we encounter, and so give us an angle into it. From a ‘neutral’ perspective the world, a perspective without presuppositions, the world is an incomprehensible swirling mess. We get somewhere not by ridding ourselves of presuppositions, but by developing and transforming them.
2. The linguistic turn. We need language to think, but all language is steeped in prejudices. We get somewhere not by trying to reject language, but by finding ways of saying things better.
• Descartes attempted in his Meditations to presume nothing, but missed that the words he was using were ones he’d inherited from others, and therefore inherently came with presumptions. As Wittgenstein said, there’s no private language: all language is public, and is loaded with public presuppositions, prejudices, and tendencies—ingrained grooves that carry you in certain directions.
• Wittgenstein argued that the best way to deal with language’s prejudices is not to rid ourselves of language, since without language we can’t think. Instead, we get somewhere by coming up with new, more complex, more nuanced vocabularies—like Heidegger, who coined a new vocabulary to express his new ideas, and deliberately avoided words like ‘consciousness’ that had too much freight.
3. The revolutionary turn. Under settled paradigms we can be objective and dispassionate, but when paradigms are in flux we get somewhere by employing our intuition and feelings.
• Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) claimed that scientists do not merely passively record information but also actively project a framework or paradigm onto the data. ‘Paradigms’ are overarching frameworks that constitute our best way of making sense of all the data we have, and dictate what sorts of data should be collected and how.
• Khun also claimed that scientists not are pure, unimpassioned observers but flesh-and-blood people with hunches, intuitions, and feelings. His talk of intuition and hunches did not mean he was against reason but that he understood ‘reason’ to mean ‘having good reasons’, not having pure and incontrovertible Reason or a piece of eternity in your pocket. This suggested that one could understand the world not only by pure reason, but also by faith, grace, and art. Neither did the presence of intuitions mean that scientists couldn’t be objective, but rather that objectivity is the sort of thing you get only when science is being practiced under a settled paradigm.
• New paradigms unsettle old ones when scientists discover an anomaly so intractable that they have to totally rethink their framework. This revolution mostly proceeds seemingly against the ‘evidence’, and by the spark of hunch and intuition. One joins the revolution when one ‘gets’ the new paradigm or ‘sees it’—i.e. intuits that it’s right. Often the last to get the new paradigm are the old and tenured. They have been with the old paradigm for such a long time that they can’t separate the data from the old interpretation of it, and as far as they’re concerned all the ‘evidence’ points to the old paradigm. The new paradigm only takes over when they are shouted down, retire, or join the revolution—a revolution as full of feelings and instinct as an artistic or political revolution.

Incredulity at Meta-Narratives

• The Postmodern Condition (1977) Lyotard defined the postmodern as ‘incredulity to meta-narratives’ (grands récits, ‘big stories’)—totalising, overarching stories which say that life is ‘nothing but’ displaced love for your mum (Freud), or that history is ‘nothing but’ the unfolding of the absolute spirit (Hegel). Enough of these ‘nothing buts’, said Lyotard: our interpretations of the world will always be too simplistic to fully account for our world’s vast complexity.

• Lyotard didn’t say ‘refutation of meta-narratives’, because that would have implied that he had an even bigger story. He simply said these big stories had become incredible, and we’d grown incredulous.

Theological Implications

• Postmodernism need not lead to relativism or skepticism. Nevertheless, from a religious perspective, postmodernism does imply that God’s point of view is reserved for God, while the human standpoint is immersed in a multiplicity of angles.

"Interpret the Bible like any other book?" Requiem for an axiom [Moberly, 2012]

[Source: Moberly, R. W. L., '"Interpret the Bible like Any Other Book"? Requiem for an Axiom', Journal of Theological Interpretation, 4.1, 2010, 91-110]

Summary

• The axiom ‘interpret the Bible like any other book’ upholds some good exegetical values, but it should be abandoned because the axiom (1) is dated and does not help us face contemporary challenges, (2) has a crude view of reading and books, and (3) is rooted in dubious ideology that unreasonably excludes religious commitments.

Observations about the axiom

The axiom’s history.

• Spinoza articulated this sort of principle as early as 1670, but Jowett’s statement of the axiom is the most famous (in Essays and Reviews, 1860). Jowett was concerned that his Christian contemporaries were obscuring the Bible’s true character through fanciful and undisciplined interpretation. He sought to prevent such skewed interpretations by bracketing out theological commitments with the axiom, ‘interpret the Scripture like any other book’ (1860: 458). Interpreting the Bible by ‘the same rules of evidence and the same canons of criticism’ alone (1860: 455) would allow its character to be seen afresh.
• Few scholars mention the axiom today, but this is probably because it’s so entered the scholarly bloodstream. Nevertheless, with the paradigms of biblical study in something of a flux at present, some are deliberately reaffirming the old axiom (e.g. Barton 2007, The Nature of Biblical Criticism).

The axiom is more complicated to implement consistently than Jowett and others have probably appreciated.

• E.g. scholars who support the axiom have nevertheless referred to Israel/the Church’s deity as ‘God’, unlike other deities whom they refer to as ‘god[s]’.

The axiom is ideological.

• Enlightenment ideological dichotomies—state and church, scholarship/science and religion, public and private—exclude any personal commitments, including religious ones, from the academy. The axiom lines up perfectly with the ideology of the Enlightenment: it is not merely a helpful piece of received wisdom, even if it's sometimes presented so.
• Christians need to simultaneously study the Bible both academically and religiously. This is because Christians believe that the Bible contains definitive truth, and that this truth must be rearticulated/’applied’ in every generation. Religiously engaged interpretation seeks to do just that. To best articulate the Bible’s truth, it needs to employ both the resources of Christian theology, tradition and history and also modes of academic reading. Hence Christians must to seek to study the Bible academically, and to employ their religious commitments in the academy. The axiom debars this, stopping Christians bringing religious commitments into their academic study.
• In practice, the axiom’s ideology is cited polemically to to distance biblical study in the academy specifically from theological commitments, but not other commitment (e.g. marxist, feminist). This is because religious commitments are thought to particularly distort interpretation.

Too few have thought seriously (if at all) about the axiom, its implications or an alternative to it.

The value of the axiom.

It is valuable because it ensures the use of general hermeneutics, and precludes special hermeneutics or special pleading of any kind. For example:

• The Biblical languages should be understood by the standard rules of philology and grammar. The NT was not written in ‘Holy Ghost Greek’.
• The Biblical writers expressed themselves in the literary genres of their time, and these genres can be illuminated by comparisons with nonbiblical literature. ‘Holy Scripture’ is not itself a literary genre.

Reasons the axiom should be abandoned.

The axiom is old, and not relevant for contemporary challenges.

• Theological thinking has radically changed since then. Brevard Childs, for instance, thinks theological commitments should not even affect exegesis, but be affected by it, which would have sounded strange to 19th c. conservative ears.
• Social and ecclesial contexts have radically changed too, from Enlightenment Christendom to a post-Christian secular and pluralist context. The axiom really has nothing helpful to say about the relationship between biblical study and religious perspectives in this new context.

The axiom’s ideology claims that it is necessary that Christians leave aside religious commitments in academic biblical study. It is not.

• For someone to suppress their commitments, as the Enlightenment requires, is to suppress their identity and lose their personal integrity.
• The Bible has a privileged place in academic study—it receives vastly more attention than, say, other ancient Near Eastern texts. This is because of the belief that the Bible’s truth needs rearticulating in a way that those other texts don’t, and that to do that one needs the aid of academic tools. However, because the axiom obviates rearticulating the Bible’s truth, one is left with no reason to study the Bible in the academy any more than other ANE texts.
• It is wrongheaded to use the axiom to eliminate religious commitments exclusively for fear that they particularly skew interpretation. It has not been shown that religiously-minded interpretation is inherently skewing; neither has it been shown that other perspectives have any less potential to skew interpretation.

The axiom has a crude view of reading, of books, and of the Bible’s differences from other books.

• The axiom implies that acts of reading books are all the same, but they’re not.

• Books vary endlessly in every way.
• One may read for numerous different purposes: pleasure, moral improvement, sociological research.
• One can read in different ways: once skim-reading, or many times with careful diligence; for a transfer of information, or to savour and drink deeply of the text.
• It is unhelpful for the axiom to suggest we read the Bible like other books, because Bible is unlike other books.
• Even when Jews and Christians are in historical-critical mode they have vast differences of opinion on the interpretation of the OT, differences of opinion which are much bigger than with most other books.
• A number of books within the OT (e.g. Isaiah, the Pentateuch) comprise materials which have diverse authorship, provenance, and outlook. These larger wholes are unlike other books or anthologies because they are other than the sum of their parts.
• Christians use the Bible differently to other books. They read the Bible for their identity, ethics, worldview, and final hope. It is the essential ingredient in worship and liturgy, and everything is measured against it. There are few other books in which readers find their identity in such a full-orbed manner.

Abandoning the axiom.

• The axiom is valuable on a purely philological level, but is otherwise so flawed that we should not use it to make any substantial claim. Thus while we should uphold the positive aspects of the axiom, we should do that on grounds other than those of the axiom.
• Moberly does not intend to divorce religious and secular approaches, to prejudge the interrelationship between their approaches to the Bible, or to dictate how the Bible ought to be studied outside confessional contexts. Rather, he hopes that if we abandon the axiom, we will be free to find better ways to think about the study of the Bible within the humanities.

What might martyrdom mean? [Nicholas Lash, 1981]

Source: N. Lash, "What Might Martyrdom Mean?" in W. Horbury, B. McNeill (ed.), Suffering and Martyrdom in the New Testament (CUP: 1981), 183-98; reprinted in his Theology on the Way to Emmaus (SCM: 1986), 75-92.

Summary.

• Stendahl tries to resolve the hermeneutical gap by distinguishing between what the Biblical text ‘meant’ and what it ‘means’. The biblical scholar as a historian recovers what it ‘meant’, and the systematic theologian performs the separate task of translating that into what it ‘means’ for us today. This framework is defective for many reasons, the two foremost of which are that it neglects questions of whether the Bible’s claims are true, and that it fails to see that the poles of the hermeneutical gap are not meanings but patterns of action/practice. In this alternative framework, biblical scholarship is not separate from Christian practice, but a subset of it.

The hermeneutical problem/the problem of the hermeneutical gap.

• The Bible was written c. 2000 years ago, in different times to ours. What do Christians do with it today?

The problem of the relationship between the different practitioners.

• What should be the relationship between the biblical scholar/exegete/historian, the systematic theologian/hermeneut, and Christian practice?

Krister Stendahl’s framework for resolving these two problems.

• There is a gap between what the biblical text ‘meant’, and what it ‘means’. At one side of the chasm is the biblical scholar whose job is merely to recover and ‘describe’ what the text originally meant—what it said back then. The systematic theologian’s job is to get us across the chasm. He ‘translates’ the original meaning, through hermeneutics, and tell us what the text means now—what might be appropriately said today.

The value in Stendahl’s solution.

• Standahl’s framework guards against anachronism, which Christians tend towards. Historians seek to understand and exhibit the past in its pastness; yet because Christians think the words spoken and deeds enacted in the past are enduringly significant, they’re liable to muddle past and present.

Problems with Stendahl’s terminology.

• ‘Description’ is already interpretation. Anything the exegete does beyond simply copying out the Greek text is mediated by his judgement; and his judgement and language are to some extent mediated by the culture he belongs to.
• ‘Original meaning’ is extremely vague. Does it refer to authorial intention, or what the original audience understood, or something else? How might those things be defined?
• His ‘translation’ metaphor/analogy is inappropriate because:
• It overlooks that the historian’s task has already involved some degree of interpretation/translation. Stendahl actually makes this mistake a second time simply by using the word ‘translation’. It implies a neutral methodology, obscuring the fact that any ‘translation’ will be rooted in theological decisions about the nature of revelation.
• It stretches the concept of ‘translation’ into unintelligibility.
• It obscures the possibility of conceptual discontinuity between the text and contemporary theological proposals.

Five problems with Stendahl’s framework.

• The framework wrongly assumes that understanding what a text originally meant must precede understanding what it means today. These enterprises are actually interdependent and dialectical. Of course the past illuminates the present, but the present illuminates the past too, and there’s even a sense in which understanding what a text might mean today is a precondition of understanding what it originally meant. Here’s why. Ancient writers responded to questions of the human predicament (such as hope, death, suffering, love) in terms available to them within their culture. If we are to sensitively or deeply understand what their responses originally meant, we must already have some grasp of the human predicament; and that grasp must necessarily be articulated in terms available to us within our culture.
• Caveats. (1) It’s not straightforward to make sense of the past or the present: certain features of either may be opaque to us. (2) Lash isn’t suggesting that there is no irreducible distinction between present attempts to understand the past on its own terms, and present attempts to articulate who we are and how we should live.
• The framework is thus also wrong that a historian’s skills are adequate for understanding a text’s original meaning. We don’t need any existential self-awareness to decide whether Paul left a cloak or overcoat at Troas, but most of the Bible is concerned with weightier, existential matters. (Though this is not to say that the historian’s skills are at all dispensable though.)

• Stendahl mistakenly assumes that texts have or embody meaning in the same way that objects have mass--consistently, intrinsically, and objectively. Literary, theatrical and musical works, however, are not objects but notations which have meaning only insofar as people are producing, using, or interpreting them.
• The framework focuses on questions of meaning, to the neglect of questions of truth. One question of truth might be: was Jesus right that his death would do for mankind what no one else could do? The biblical scholar demurs that this questions is beyond his competence as a historian: the truth-conditions of the question are hidden in the mystery of divine action, which do not lie open for historical scrutiny.  They’re right that their historical skills aren’t up to the task. But the question applies to them nonetheless because it’s really for everyone personally. Will we give the kind of trust—to the man Jesus, not to a ‘meaning’—which the NT authors gave? To refuse to answer is to refuse to trust Jesus.
• Stendahl’s framework mistakenly assumes the poles of the hermeneutical gap are expressions of meaning: instead, the poles are patterns of action/practice. The past-pole is ‘the testimony of Jesus’ [≈ the practice of faith; cf. Revelation 19.10] in his own time and in the time of those who first sought to share that testimony. Thus Christian interpretation is fundamentally a matter of being faithful to the patterns of action to which the texts witness, not of understanding the meaning an ancient text. (Once again, this doesn’t make exegesis unnecessary. It's indispensable—but we need to situate it in the context of interpretative practice.) The present-pole is the continued sharing in ‘the testimony of Jesus’ as may be demanded of us today. Thus being faithful to the patterns of action to which the texts witness is fundamentally a matter of Christian practice, not of ‘translating’ meanings. Two factors suggest this alternative framework.
• For NT authors, maintaining the testimony of Jesus was part of putting their trust in Jesus and his truth. Issues of truth, trust, and the practice of faith are thus bound together. The interpretative process’ concern with truth suggests that the hermeneutical problem ultimately lies in the relationship between biblical scholarship and the practice of faith.
• Divine speech is performative. God’s self-witness in Christ involved transforming the human condition, not merely giving information about it. Similarly, the Christian’s primary concern is to to exercise transformative power by witnessing to ‘the testimony of Jesus’, not to ‘make sense’ of anything (e.g. suffering, or a meaning).

The hermeneutical problem restated in terms of Lash’s alternative framework.

• The Bible attests to certain patterns of witnessing to “the testimony of Jesus”, but those actions occurred c. 2000 years ago in different times to ours. How might Christians witness to the ‘testimony of Jesus’ today?
• The question ‘What might “witness” or “martyrdom” mean today?’ should really be ‘How might we today exercise faithfulness to “the testimony of Jesus”?’ Answering that will require us to employ full integrity and discernment. It will also require all the biblical scholar’s tools.

The problem of the practitioners’ relationship resolved by Lash’s framework

• We can now see that the biblical scholar’s work is only an aspect of the broader task of Christian interpretative practice. That broader task is to attempt to bear witness faithfully and effectively to God’s transformative purpose and meaning for mankind. It is for individual biblical scholars to decide how they should change their practice in light of that.