There are three types of umpires. The first type says: "I call balls and strikes as they are." The second says: "I call them as I see them." And the third says: "It ain't nothin' till I call it."
Hermeneutics - how we know what something means - is a subject that gave me a lot of frustration at Bible college, and continues to plague me. Hermeneutics classes generated far more heat than light; I came away at the end of the course not with answers but with a better class of questions. You go around and around in circles: How are we supposed to read the Bible, and who says? How do we determine the interpretation of a difficult verse, and who has the final say? Can interpretation of Scripture really be a matter of personal conscience - but equally can interpretation really be handed down by a monolithic and authoritarian church?
How do I interpret? Should I take the words literally? Should I take them figuratively? Should I do both, but how do I draw the line? Should I take the words at face value, or should I look for the original intent of the author, or should I take the Tradition, the sense of the reading community through the ages? Should I take the words to be speaking once and for all, or should I take the cultural context of the time into account? If so, how?
And who gets to decide the answer to all these question, anyway? Me? Why on earth should I trust me?
Catholics chide Protestants for "getting rid of the Pope and replacing him with a paper Pope", but my criticism of Protestantism is that actually it makes everyone into a Pope: I read the Bible, I interpret it, I do what I decide it says. If my reading of it says we can have women priests, say, or gay clergy, and yours doesn't, well, that's a shame, and we go our separate ways. We can all pull out our selective quotes, and the Bible is a big enough corpus, and theologians so skilled at sophistry, that you can build a theological position on just about anything you like and claim it as more biblical than anyone else's. Someone else may disagree, but what authority do they have over you if you're both claiming the authority of Scripture? And to make any such decision, you have to appeal to an authority other than Scripture, which exposes the whole "authority of Scripture" thing as a bit of a joke. Without a magisterium, the only authority I can appeal to is me, and I don't trust me. Some people think this means I don't respect Scripture. No. The problem is that I do respect Scripture, and so I want to know whether or not I'm reading it right!
My personal preferred understanding on hermeneutics is that interpretation is a job shared between the reader, the Bible and the community of the Church. This is, I think, quite close to the Orthodox position on the Bible. But we are back to my personal preferences again. No way to break out that cycle.
Anyway, I'm starting to see shades of this whole debate in another area, far away - although not too far - from Biblical hermeneutics: constitutional theory.
By the grace of God I was born in the United Kingdom, where the constitution is interpreted in a very Orthodox fashion. Yes, folks, we do actually have a constitution here, but it's not written in one single document; it's what they call an "uncodified" constitution. The British Constitution is the vast body of precedent, law, parliamentary convention and several significant documents which make up a collective and implicit sense of how the country works; what, in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, would be called Tradition. The advantage of not having a codified constitution is that we cannot have those endless language-lawyering disputes where you claim that your reading of "black" is "white", and so it must be; either "black" has the sense of Tradition, or "white" does.
Of course it's not as simple as that, and there are constitutional conundrums from time to time. But by and large, the tradition ensures that the British constitution is interpreted contextually and corporately, and so hermeneutic questions do not arise.
Where you have a codified constitution, however, you automatically have the question "What does it mean?", followed swiftly by "What does it mean to me?". And we are plunged once again into hermeneutics, only now it's called constitutional theory. Many of the questions that plague Protestant Biblical interpretation also come into play in constitutional theory - and for the same reasons.
For instance, there is the "textualist" position of interpretation. That is, it says what it says; all we have to go on is the text. What does it mean now? The Christian equivalent is called "biblicist". Then there is the "original meaning" position: what did it mean then? This one is common in Christian thought, and is called the historical-critical method. Another school of thought is "original intent": we have to go beyond the text to discover the original intent of the author. I don't know the technical name for that, but we've got that as well, and more besides.
There are many schools of thought, both in constitutional theory and in Protestant hermeneutics. But unlike in the Protestant tradition, in the case of constitutional law, we do have an authority to choose between them: whoever happens to be running the country at the time. There is something rather self-referential about this, because the constitution of a country generally gives rights to and places limits or obligations on the person running the country at the time. Generally there's some kind of "separation of powers" stuff in the constitution which stops this from getting too messy, but since the "separation of powers" stuff is in the constitution, it is open to interpretation by constitutional theory.
It sounds like what I'm saying is what's come to be called the unitary executive theory of the constitution: a written constitution has questions of interpretation, and so someone has to decide upon those questions. If they're in charge, then their interpretation wins. In simpler terms, might makes right. I don't espouse that worldview; I'm a Christian, after all, I'm on the side of the poor and the oppressed. (To put it another way, "Christian Right" is a contradiction in terms.) I think the might-is-right view of interpretation is wrong but hard to argue against, because there is no higher authority to take the argument to. It is the same problem as in Protestant hermeneutics: when the can of worms that is hermeneutics and interpretation gets opened, it is very, very hard to clean up in a sensible way. I may personally think that the unitary executive theory is bogus, and I personally do, but it's prima facie as valid as any other theory, and it currently happens to have all the guns behind it, which frankly is all that pragmatically matters.
The tyranny of interpretation. Thanks, Luther. I'm blaming this one on you.
The other day, a lawyer in the States said:
the Constitution doesn't say that every individual in the United States or every citizen has or is assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn't say that. It simply says that the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended.
That lawyer was technically correct! You can't suspend the right - but that doesn't explicitly say that the right exists. Those who subscribe to a textualist position will be nodding their heads in agreement. Those who subscribe to an original intent position will point out that this is pure sophistry, and the mention of a right implies the existence of the right. The lawyer is correct in that the text doesn't literally say that, but it's certainly strongly implied. They might go on to argue that the original intent position is common sense. I think it's common sense, too. But that doesn't help; the lawyer in question is the Attorney General of the United States, and he rather thinks that a textualist position is common sense. And as AG he gets to decide. And he and his team still have all the guns.
Those subscribing to an alternate view of constitutional theory will be mourning the death of the most basic protection in law, but they won't be able to fault the logic that lies behind its demise. The little-publicised use of signing statements are the same: to execute the law, you've got to interpret the law. And just like Newman's genius Tract 90, which reconciled Anglicanism with Catholicism, it's possible for a highly-skilled sophist to present an interpretation of the law in a completely opposite sense to its intended meaning.
And the separation of powers? Well, someone has to interpret what the Constitution means when it talks about that, too. It's going to be the guy with the guns again.
So in short: The Constitution? It's what you make of it. For very select values of "you". You with the guns. And the really scary thing is, you're going to use them, aren't you?
Is there anything that can be done about this? As another great American constitutional hermeneutist put it, "that depends what the meaning of 'is' is."
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