353 - Church and Biblical Scholarship in Dialogue

Church and Biblical Scholarship in Dialogue
By Sandra M. Schneiders

"The scholar attending to the objective distance between ancient text and the modern interpreter and the believer cherishing his or her subjective intimacy, with the text are both grounding their approaches in the reality of the text itself, for the text is both ancient artifact and religious classic."

THE often antagonistic relationship between biblical scholarship or the academy, on the one hand, and the believing community or church, on the other, is actually a particular case of the more general and ongoing conflict between science and faith which dates back to the Enlightenment. The tension between biblical scholarship and the believing church is based on a mutual misunderstanding that is surprisingly tenacious. Some members of the academy tend to regard an approach to the Bible in faith as unscientific, dogmatic, and credulous; many believers tend to regard the academy as a laboratory in which the sacred text is irreverently dissected and the Word of God mediated through the Scriptures is rendered sterile and irrelevant. Neither charge is entirely unfounded in fact, for there are anti-intellectual fundamentalists among believers and there are faithless technicians among scholars. What I want to argue in this essay is that, in principle, antagonism between scholars and believers in their approaches to biblical interpretation is not necessary or inevitable. On the contrary, the academy and the church need each other if the work of biblical interpretation is to be at once intellectually responsible and spiritually fruitful.

Perhaps no one has been more helpful in reformulating the problem of biblical interpretation and in suggesting new directions in which to search for answers to ancient dilemmas than have the post-Heideggerian hermeneutical philosophers. Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur are the foundational thinkers to whom I am most indebted in these reflections.¹ Relying on the thought of these two philosophers among

Sandra M. Schneiders is Associate Professor of New Testament Studies and Spirituality at the Jesuit School of Theology, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California. She is an Associate Editor of Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Biblical Theology Bulletin, and Horizons.

¹ Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury, 1975) and Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University, 1976) are the major works on which I am drawing in this article. See also P. Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. and introd. L.S. Mudge (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980).

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others,² I would like to contrast the approach of the historical critical biblical scholar with that of the informed believer (for example, the preacher or pastor) in order to demonstrate the legitimate differences, essential compatibility, and necessary mutuality of their respective approaches. For purposes of organization, I will group these reflections under four headings: understanding of the text; aim of study; approach to the task; and the role of tradition in interpretation.

I

Basically, the understanding of the biblical text underlying the procedures of the classical historical critic is that the biblical text, like any other ancient text, is an historical/cultural artifact. It was produced in a time and place far distant from us, was written in an ancient and foreign language, and is reflective of an alien culture. In other words, the primary characteristics of the text insofar as they determine the work of the scholar are its objectivity and the distance separating the reader from the text. The interpreter must bridge the gap but not suppress the distance. Indeed, preserving the distance is a major aspect of the critics task.

For the believer, who is reading the biblical text in order to encounter the revelation of God, the text is experienced much more as what Gadamer has called a "classic." A classic is not so much an object to be studied as a work of art to be appreciated. It is a text so true and so beautiful that it enjoys an immediate contemporaneity with all people of all times who can read it. Like the works of Homer, Teresa of Avila, Shakespeare, or Emily Dickinson, the Bible itself suppresses the distance between its own time and ours by virtue of its profound rootedness in our common humanity. What draws us to Scripture is precisely that in it the Word of God is very near to us, in our hearts and on our lips, as Deuteronomy tells us.³

Both scholar and believer are right in their assessment of the text. From different perspectives, the biblical text is both object and work, both distant and near. The scholar attending to the objective distance between the ancient text and the modern interpreter, and the believer cherishing subjective intimacy with the text, are both grounding their approaches in the reality of the text itself, for the text is both ancient artifact and religious classic. This is precisely why they need each other if the scholar is to avoid the temptation to imprison the Word in the past by reducing it to an object of merely antiquarian interest, and the believer is to avoid a simplistic naivete in presuming a familiarity with the text that is both irreverent and blind to the challenging complexity of this strange book.

² The most accessible introduction to modern hermeneutical theory is still R. E. Palmer, Hertneneutics: interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1969)
³ Cf. Deut. 30:14.

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II

Because of their different understandings of the text itself (both of which are accurate, though partial) the scholar and the nonprofessional believer⁴ will have different aims or purposes in their study of the text. The primary concern of the critical scholar is with what might be called the "original" meaning of the text, what the text meant (or probably meant) in its own historical/cultural setting and original language. The scholar wants to explain the text, how it came to be, what and who produced it, how it "makes sense" as a text, what it says.

The scholar's primary task is to maintain the distance between ancient text and modern reader. In this work, the exegete renders a very important service, not only to other scholars but to the church as well; for unless the text remains truly "other," in some sense strange and alien to us, it will not be able truly to speak to us, to be genuinely revelatory for us. Gadamer suggests that reading is actually a process of dialogue with a text.⁵ But as in ordinary conversation, unless we allow our dialogue partner to retain his or her otherness, we will find ourselves talking to ourselves through the other rather than engaging in dialogue: with the other. The same is true of our dialogue with the text. It is the distancing work of the biblical scholar which keeps the non-scientific reader from "gobbling up" the text, uncritically assimilating it into his or her own worldview and thus domesticating it rather than being confronted by it.

The primary concern of the non-professional believer in reading Scripture is quite different from that of the scholar although dependent on the latter, namely, what Gadamer calls the "fusion of horizons."⁶ The reader wants not so much to explain what the text originally meant, but to understand what the text means for the church community here and now.⁷ The concern is less with what produced the text and more with what the text can, should, and has produced. However, a genuine fusion of horizons is not an absorption of the biblical message into a closed and irreformable self and world understanding. To understand the text means to allow it, in all its strangeness and beauty, to challenge our self-understanding, to expand our horizon, to convert us finally to that new way of being in the world which we call discipleship.⁸

Unless the work of the scholar succeeds in keeping the text at least

⁴ I am using the term "non-professional believer" here. for want of a better term, to denote the person, for example, pastor or generally informed layperson, who is not a professional biblical scholar equipped with all the technical skills of the academician. Such non-professionals, however, if they are serious students of the Bible, are today much more adequately prepared to appreciate the results of biblical scholarship.
⁵ Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 325-341.
⁶ Ibid., pp. 267-274.
⁷ In Gadamers terms. this is the process of "application" in which interpretation culminates in genuine understanding: Truth and Method, pp. 295-305 and elsewhere). Ricoeurs term. "appropriation," is perhaps preferable (Interpretation Theory, pp. 43-44 and 91-94).
⁸ Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory. pp. 91-94.

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somewhat strange and unfamiliar, the believer will not be challenged and changed by its message. But conversely, unless, with the believer, the scholar finally enters into a genuine dialogue with the subject matter of the text, he or she will continue to contemplate an interesting but personally irrelevant record of ancient civilization. The ultimate aim of biblical study is interpretation, a process involving a dialectic between explanation and understanding,⁹ and culminating in the bringing close, through a distance that has enriched the text rather than imprisoned it, of an ever relevant and personally challenging message.

III

Because the immediate aims of their study are different (although ultimately they must coincide), the scholar and the non-professional believer will approach their reading of the biblical text in different though complementary ways. The scholar sees in the text first the problems raised by its historical/cultural remoteness, the ancient and foreign language in which it is written, the unfamiliar genres that govern it, and the often strange subject matter it reports. In the course of the last two centuries, the community of biblical scholars has developed an elaborate and refined methodology for dealing with these problems. The work of exegesis is the application of this methodology to the problems presented by the text for the purpose of solving those problems and thereby bringing to light, as fully as possible, the original meaning of the text.

The believer, reading Scripture for spiritual nourishment, sees the text less in terms of the exegetical problems it presents (although the intelligent non-professional will be aware of many such problems) and more as a mediation of mystery, ultimately the mystery of God's self-gift in revelation. Consequently, the readers concern is less with method and more with dialogue. The questions raised for the reader are less the questions about the text and more the questions with which the text is concerned. Once it is clear what the text says (a clarity sometimes largely dependent upon the work of the exegete), the real question for the believer is how to situate him or herself in relation to that message. In other words, the concern of the reader is less with exegesis and more with appropriation. Appropriation does not mean simply accepting at face value whatever the text says. There is much in Scripture that cannot be accepted uncritically, for example, the anti-semitic attitudes expressed in parts of the New Testament, the anti-woman bias in both Testaments, the acceptance of slavery as a legitimate social institution.¹⁰

⁹ Paul Ricoeur, "Explanation and Understanding: On Some Remarkable Connections Among the Theory of Text, Theory of Action, and Theory of History," The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, eds. C. E. Reagan and D. Stewart (Boston: Beacon, 1978), pp. 149-166.
¹⁰ For good examples of such a critical approach see Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983) and Janis E. Leibig, "John and The Jews: Theological Anti-Semitism in the Fourth Gospel," Journal of Ecumenical Studies 20 (1983), pp. 209-234.

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Appropriation is neither mere exegesis nor naive consumption. But it cannot proceed without the help of exegesis by which the reader is enabled to understand what the text says, nor without the light of faith that helps one to situate what individual texts say within the tradition as a whole, and thus to arrive at meaning that is both critical and salvific.

IV

This brings us to the final complementary difference between the approach to the biblical text of the scholar and that of the nonprofessional believer, namely, the diverse role they assign to tradition in the work of interpretation. Scholars tend to be cautious about the role of ecclesial tradition in biblical interpretation. Historically, ecclesiastical authorities have often invoked tradition to stifle research which did not seem to support church positions. Like any institution, the church can tend to divinize its ideological commitments and to regard any challenge to them as heretical. If scholarly investigation is to proceed with the necessary openness to new insights, it must be able to place previous interpretations, both scholarly and ecclesiastical, "on hold" while it looks anew at the evidence.

Biblical scholarship will probably always appear at least a bit irreverent to those whose appreciation of tradition is either unduly interested or uncritically devotional. Good scholarship, as all scholars know, cannot proceed in ignorance, much less contempt of tradition. As Bultmann and Gadamer following Heidegger have made us aware, without presuppositions (prejudices in the etymological sense of the term) we cannot understand anything. And Gadamer has helped us to understand tradition as the source of those presuppositions.¹¹ But, dependent as we are on our tradition as the context within which all understanding takes place, we must develop the capacity to criticize the tradition, to unmask its ideological perversions, if we are to hear the truth of the text despite its cultural limitations. Part of the work of the scholar is the criticism of the tradition in light of the text and subsequent ecclesial experience.

The believer, on the other hand, depends heavily on belonging to the tradition for the very possibility of understanding the biblical text. It is the reader's Christian commitment that directs attention to what, in the text, is of particular importance. It is knowledge of the tradition, immersion in it, that guides ones understanding, corrects ones naivete, challenges one's over-eager self-justification. Only in the context of the tradition as a whole can the non-scientific reader understand the meaning of the text as a whole, even when particular points might remain obscure.

Throughout this essay I have been referring to the believer who is not a biblical specialist as a kind of representative of the ecclesial community. But it is well to remember that no Christian reader of Scripture is a self-enclosed monad. Both our "non-professionaI believer" and our

¹¹ Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 245-274.

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"biblical scholar" are integral to the community we call church. It is the church community, whose book the Bible is, that supplies both the non-professional and the biblical scholar with the traditional context within which to read and understand. But as it is the privilege of the scholar to participate in the tradition, it is the duty of the scholar to criticize that tradition, for-however intimately it is guided by the Holy Spirit-it is nevertheless a human development, subject to honest error as well as ideological perversion.

The academy and the church need each other in the work of biblical interpretation. Their roles are different but not contradictory because their concerns with the text, though diverse, are complementary. The basic difference is that, whereas the scholar is largely absorbed by the problematic of distance between ancient text and present interpretive context, the believer is primarily concerned with the nearness, the intimacy with the self-revealing God, which the text mediates. If believers ignore the results of scholarly work, they are likely to succumb to an uncritical naivete which will terminate in fundamentalism or rootless fideism. If scholars fail to attend to the concerns of the believing community, their work is likely to terminate prematurely. Rather than carrying on the exegetical task in the context of a larger project of full interpretation, scholars will end their journey where, in fact, the real journey begins and, in the process, will render the text irrelevant, at least for them if not for the church community as well. All scholarly work on the biblical text, at least when carried out by the religiously committed Christian, must aim beyond its primary task of explanation toward genuine and transforming understanding. The final goal of biblical scholarship is the same as that of believing contemplation: that the text become, in and for our time, Word of God in the church of Jesus Christ.