Where Everybody's Crazy

I don't want to underemphasise how messed up I've felt over the past couple of days by this whole hermeneutic nightmare. In fact, I've been despairing even of finding a solution, a way of reading the Bible, because any method you choose has the same problem: it's arbitrary, it's non-authoritative, and it has a tendency to reinforce the method rather than the Scripture.

Then this morning a few thoughts popped into my head. One was the parables of interpretation by Soren Kierkegaard. (I don't habitually read Kierkegaard, but he was quoted in "Is There A Meaning In This Text?", which I was scanning while going through my crisis.) He warns against looking at the mirror to see the mirror, not your reflection in the mirror. Another was the opening words of Waterbuffalo Theology: "I will read the Scriptures and theological works with your needs in mind". (I don't entirely agree with that, only partially, but we'll come back to that.) Another was the principle of the liberationists: we all have our prejudices of interpretation, and the most honest way to deal with this is to make your motivations explicit. Another was a thought I had when I first hit the crisis: who says there is only one meaning in a text?

These thoughts combined in the realisation that it matters why you're reading the Bible, and that determines how. You need to have a goal in mind. For personal devotions, we believe, and I believe, that the Holy Spirit leads the believer into all truth. But on the other hand, I don't believe this is the case for the church as a whole; 20,000 denominations later, am I expected to believe that the Holy Spirit has been sleeping on the job? Meanwhile, for academic theology, which basically has no goal in mind, maybe the historical-critical method is as good as any other. For mission, as Koyama said, the goal has to be the needs of the recipient, and that will affect how you read. Of course, as I argued in my critique of Koyama, missiological understanding of theology must start neither from man nor from God but at the interface of the two. But that's an entirely different rant.

And yeah, I realise this whole schema of reading the Bible based on the goal is another arbitrary system that can't be guaranteed to give me the meaning of the text. But hey, I'm being explicit about it, and who says there's only one meaning anyway? The whole point of exegesis and exposition is to reveal the meaning to the ecurrent situation. No, it's no perfect, but I'm comfortable about it.