Why the Creation of Hermeneutics Interpretation is Doomed

[This post is a continuation of the Genesis 1 series. Last Friday’s post described the Genesis 1 conversation between God and the narrator as the creation of hermeneutics. Today I talk about why that interpretation is doomed to irrelevance in the emerging post-evangelical church. These are long posts, but I’m posting in real time, as I write. The faster I write, the sooner I finish.]

In our exegesis we tried to understand what the text means, to see the unfolding events from the narrator’s perspective, to understand what meaning he intended to convey. Paradoxically, we found the narrator doing the same thing: trying to understand elohim, to take his perspective, to grasp the meaning. If our interpretation is correct, then Genesis 1 describes the creation of hermeneutics itself.

The witness writes; we read; we interpret. In our exegesis we consciously allowed ourselves to be constrained by the text as if it was possible to discover its embedded truths. We tried to orient ourselves toward events as the witness might have experienced them. We tried to hear in elohim’s words the meaning he intended as he spoke them; we tried to read in the narrator’s words the meaning he intended as he wrote them. To propose that Genesis 1 describes the creation of natural science might not be a canonical reading in the Judeo-Christian interpretive community, but it’s not an unreasonable reading. More importantly, it’s supported by the text itself. The text exists, independent of its writer, independent also of its interpreter, as a fragment of written language. Language evolved as a means of communicating about and making sense of the world. In allowing our interpretation to be constrained by the text, we act as if we can see what the writer was pointing to, and with what conscious intent he was pointing, when he penned the words.

Still, our exegesis might be wrong. God created the heavens and the earth, the Bible says – not just a scientific description of the heavens and the earth. And the witness: the new interpretation assigns a mighty important role to someone who never makes an appearance in the story itself. Even if we follow the most conservative exegetical practice we can never arrive at a universally-accepted right interpretation. We can’t project ourselves into the mental shoes of the narrator, seeing the world through his eyes so we can understand what sense he makes of it all, because we don’t know who the narrator is. Did we infer from the text what the witness must have been like, or did we just imagine him? At least someone actually wrote the story down; elohim left no record engraved in his own hand. Was there really a witness to the creation, or did the writer have to infer from oral tradition and physical evidence what must have happened so long ago? Maybe the tale began as a campfire story, an island of reassurance surrounded by the nighttime void. The whole project begins drifting toward the indistinct borderland between nonfiction and fiction, between reality and fantasy.

And so we force ourselves to turn back: this is true and real, this is redemption and renewal; God inspired the writer and personally revealed to us what the text means. But… we can never demonstrate to independent observers that it was really God speaking, or that we understood him correctly, or that we’ve entirely set aside our own personal perspectives. We have to create an interpretation that fits the evidence, then wait to see whether anyone else can see what we see. What if they don’t see – are we delusional? What if they do see – have we propagated a collective delusion, or perhaps unwittingly anticipated the next inevitable collective insight of our interpretive community? Did these thoughts go through elohim’s mind, or that of the witness, as together they faced that first dawn?

How would we be able to recognize the “right” interpretation? Our exegesis was careful and detailed; we tried to set preconceptions aside; we arrived at an internally consistent reading. In traditional hermeneutics we would look for the message that the writer embedded in the text, also seeking spiritual enlightenment from God as to the meaning he intended to convey. But if we set aside the possibility of hearing directly from the author and try to extract meaning directly from the “raw” text, there’s no way of knowing how our interpretation corresponds to the truth of the message. The narrator isn’t around to confirm or to discredit our understanding; besides, he might not have understood everything he was reporting. A radical relativism would dismiss the truth idea altogether: if there’s no way of knowing what the truth is, why worry about it? Let hermeneutics be fruitful and multiply, without regard for which of the alternative readings is the “right” one:

Hermeneutics sees the relations between various discourses as those of strands in a possible conversation, a conversation which presupposes no disciplinary matrix which unites the speakers, but where the hope of agreement is never lost so long as the conversation lasts. This hope is not a hope for an antecedently existing common ground, but simply hope for agreement, or, at least, exciting and fruitful disagreement… united by civility rather than by a common goal, much less by a common ground. (Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 318)

Unconstrained by the need to discover any underlying truth, hermeneutics becomes a work of pure imagination, no more subject to independent verification than the spiritual interpretations of medieval scholars.

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What’s remarkable, and what might completely undermine the creation-versus-evolution dispute, is that some of the brighter lights in the evangelical firmament are moving out of the traditionally tight text-centered orbit into a more free-floating hermeneutic. The literal hermeneutic that reached its zenith among twentieth-century fundamentalists is increasingly discounted by some evangelicals as symptomatic of a broader rational empiricism that virtually defines modernism in its disregard for spirituality and tradition.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, a twentieth-century philosopher, argued that texts could never give up their “truths” either by treating them as empirical data or by trying to understand the writer’s intentions. What readers look for and find in any text is determined in large part by the culture and the historical moment in which they’re inextricably embedded. We can never free ourselves from our historical and cultural context, so our readings are inevitably biased in ways we cannot even recognize. We can never extract the objective meaning from texts; all we can do is interpret texts from within our own limited perspectives.

Postmodern evangelicals increasingly endorse Gadamer’s conclusions, acknowledging the impossibility of ever arriving at the definitive reading of any Biblical text. The closest we can come is to identify the normative reading of what Stanley Fish called the “interpretive community”: those people with whom we share a similar orientation to interpreting Biblical texts. For Christians the interpretive community is the church – not just the local church, not just the worldwide twenty-first century church, but the church universal throughout history, perhaps even extending back into the Jewish community before Christ. Postmodern exegetes in the Gadamer-Fish tradition try to identify the historically normative beliefs of the church universal, beliefs that not only shape hermeneutical decisions of the interpretive community but that also presumably influenced the canonical writers, themselves participants in this same community. The Biblical canon is itself a collective product of the interpretive community of its writers. No longer constituting imperfect renderings of the eternal Logos; now the Scriptures are artificially stable manifestations of a constantly changing tradition. To use a flagrantly anachronistic analogy, reading a Biblical text is like studying a single still shot extracted from a very long movie in which all the characters are at the same time the directors and the screenwriters.

As applied to Genesis 1, this postmodern evangelical hermeneutic asserts that the text was written within a culture that wanted to assert its belief in a single all-powerful God who created the material universe. The text shouldn’t be read empirically, as if it were a factual account of how and when the universe came into being. The text might be a poem, or a story, or even a polemic – a text not meant to be read literally, as if the author had intended to convey information. What’s important is to recognize the shared beliefs of the canonically interpretive community that gave rise to the text, then to arrive at an interpretation of the text that reflects those beliefs. A reading of the Genesis 1 narrative that questions the central premise of a single God creating the material world is to read out of context, even if that reading preserves a literal rather than an allegorical understanding of the text.

It’s not clear just how important the problematic creation narrative has been in causing the evangelical community to rethink strict Biblical inerrancy. We recall that Jesus’ treatment of Old Testament Scripture as authoritative became foundational to the inerrancy position. Now a revision is underway: Jesus and the New Testament writers regarded the Bible as an authoritative source of revelation to be sure, but they also extended, perhaps even distorted, the meaning of Biblical passages beyond what the writers probably had in mind, and also beyond how first-century Jewish readers were likely to read them. The evangelical community also seeks to reestablish greater continuity with the historical Christian tradition, a gesture that has led to the rehabilitation of the early Church Fathers, of Augustine, even of Aquinas, all of whom were practitioners of spiritual exegesis and who, as we have seen, rejected the strict literal reading of Genesis 1.

Ans so it is that “post-evangelicals” increasingly accept what would have been anathema a generation ago and what remains so among mainstream evangelicals: that Genesis ought to be read as a mythopoetic homage to the creator-God rather than as a source of propositional truth about how the universe was created. Seemingly overnight Biblical literalism has become expendable, whereas preserving the historical Judeo-Christian tradition of a God who created the material universe ex nihilo has become even more essential. We employed a literal empirical hermeneutic for reading of Genesis 1 and, incredibly, we arrived at an interpretation that described God’s creation of literal empirical hermeneutics itself. Ironically, we’ve achieved this interpretation just at the moment in history when evangelicals are moving toward contextual, subjective, even allegorical hermeneutics. The potential impact of our new literal reading of Genesis 1 is undermined from within the very constituency that might have had the most to gain.

There’s even a tendency for the post-evangelicals to question the importance of language as a source of revelation. Encounters with God are existential, mystical, impossible to capture in words. Language is a consequence of man’s separation from God. When perfect union with God is restored, the need for language and its interpretation can be done away with. The Genesis 1 narrative describes elohim using language right from the beginning, even before the Fall in the Garden of Eden which presumably separated man from God. But if the Genesis 1 story is no longer to be taken as literally, then the words of the text were imposed by fallen man long after the fact. God’s speaking becomes an anthropomorphism, a way of describing events in which language played no part. Again the irony is striking: God creates language and communication, but the Church decides that linguistic communication with God is irrelevant.

 

NEXT: The Creation of History