Meaning: The Thin or Thick of It

In teaching freshman about the Bible, I am constantly made aware of how odd Scripture is to them. This is true not only of the high number of students who have little experience with the Bible, but also with the "Sunday School" kids. The distance, in many cases, between their world and the world of Scripture, makes it difficult for them to make sense of what they are reading. This "gap" might be characterized many ways. The sheer size of the historical gap between text and reader means negotiating significant cultural, cosmological, literary, and theological differences--not to mention spiritual ones.

Readers of the Bible have tried many strategies to overcome these differences. Most recent "critical" strategies for interpreting Scripture have emphasized the historical gap. How do we understand a document written thousands of years ago? This is a fair question. The answer given by the majority of biblical scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries began with limiting the amount of light shed on the text from our side of the historical divide. We needed, through the use of an objective, "scientific" method, to free our readings from our own prejudices. These prejudices came not only from our own personal biases, but also from the tradition-laden readings we inherited along the way. Alexander Campbell captured this commitment when he wrote that he hoped to read Scripture as if no one else had read it before.

Now, there are all kinds of ways to critique this reading impulse. I want to note here only one. It collapses the encounter of the text with the contemporary reader. The question, what is the text saying to me, is postponed in favor of the question, what was the author saying to the original audience. Now, this business of an author and original audience has its place. I am interested in that question and the answers revealed can be revolutionary in producing understanding. It is not a question we should abandon.

Still, there are problems inherent in the question. We have no direct access either to the intention of the author or the original audience. This move to focus on the world that produced the text, the world of author-original audience, was hoped to provide a foundation--an objective place-- for assessing the enduring meaning of a text (usually expressed as an idea). The irony is that it threw us into a largely hypothetical world of historical reconstruction. For some issues of interpretation, this is a fairly productive preoccupation. But for others, not so much.

I have been reading a draft of my friend, Sara Barton's, forthcoming book (which is very good) on her struggle as a woman to find a place for certain public gifts she believes are given to her by God. She has to contend with texts that seem on their face to speak against her being able to exercise those gifts. Often in the book, she has taken up issues related to the world that produced the text. And while her readings find support in the world of historical-critical scholarship, the fact is a dozen other equally plausible readings could be offered. We know a fair amount about the world of Corinth (not nearly as much as we do with more literate cultures, however), for instance, but not enough it seems to reconstruct with exact certainty the situations being addressed. We are left with a seemingly endless set of hypotheticals. Helpful, but falling short of the standard of objective or foundational.

And as Paul Ricouer and others have pointed out, this business of authorial intention is extremely problematic, and at several levels. What we have once the ink is dry is a text and not an author. And while our best clues about the author's intentions, especially one dead for 2000 years, is the text itself, what we have is the text, not the author.

Again, I want to be careful here. I think its important to ask what the author is up to, even if we can't know for sure. And I also think that the text is the best place to get after that, rather than through elaborate historical reconstructions. (See Richard Hays on this point).

So, what's my problem? Good question. Here's how I want to say it now. This business of isolating meaning in relation to the original intention of the author possesses a strong view of the author, a weak view of the text, and a weak view of the reader. It places the weight bearing load of interpretation on the beam least capable of supporting such a load--the hypothetical world of authorial intention. I don't want to jettison this line of pursuit. I want to mitigate its headlock on our understandings of how meaning is created in this mosh-pit of author-text-reader. (Sorry about the metaphor overload). I want the mosh-pit.

To switch the image, this way of understanding interpretation is a thin strategy. It reduces the world of significance making by at least half, locating it in the world that produced the text rather than in the world being created in front of the text. And the biggest thing here from my point of view is that this is simply a naive way of understanding understanding. Making meaning is a thick enterprise--always. And especially when it happens between persons or perspectives without shared cultural perspectives.

Finally, I think this thin strategy fails precisely at the place it matters most--saying how it is that a text, in all of its textiness, could be connected to a living God. And when I figure out how to say this part well, we'll have another blog post.

Reflections on Preaching, Ministry, and the Five Finger Exercise

This week I start a new sermon series. I'm ususally a "let the text pick me" kind of preacher, either sticking to the lectionary or preaching through a block of texts related to some sense of a balanced, biblical diet. So, it usually takes a pretty good reason to bounce me off of this. Sunday's sermon is the start of a series on what people in Churches of Christ, if they've been around awhile know as the five finger exercise, or the five steps to salvation.

This might come as a surprise to many. I'm not exactly known as a straight down the line Church of Christ preacher. I once had a member tell me that I would make a good BAPTIST preacher. He didn't see that as a compliment (and neither did I, but for very different reasons). I have from time to time made what sound like strange sounds to Church of Christ orthodoxy. Some of my friends might suppose that this is a series thrust opon me by a group of nervous elders. Not, so. This was my idea, and I think I was fully present and in charge of my mental faculties.

For those of you not of CoC pedigree, or of a more recent vintage, the five finger exercise has a large place in CoC lore. Walter Scott, a 19th century evangelist and colleague of Alexander Campbell, is said to have travelled the Western Reserve in Ohio and Pennsylvania preaching a rather Arminian form of the gospel. When he would ride into a town, he would gather school children and teach them the five steps to salvation--one for each finger. It is often said that if humans had six fingers per had, there would have been six steps. Children would go home, tell their parents, many of whom were not sure if they showed the requisite marks of regeneration to be counted among the elect, who would in turn receive with gratitude (on occasion) a simple message of assurance related to salvation.

By the time the steps to salvation reached my generation, they had morphed a bit from Scott's original list. I learned them as hear, believe, confess, repent, and be baptized. Any Church of Christ member worth their salt could reproduce this list along with the requisite prooftexts. The list provided me and countless others what it provided Calvinists on the Westerm Reserve--assurance. And that's no small thing.

The power of the five steps lies in its simplicity, and this is increasingly an important goal to me in preaching and in life in general. Simplicity, however, is often the gateway to simplistic. And the five steps approach is certainly open  to that charge. I simply do not understand salvation in the way it is arranged and presented in this little exercise. So, why would I propose a series on this?

Let me say right up front that I am not doing this series as an exercise in deconstruction. I am not hoping to turn the five fingers into a fist with which to beat poor, unsuspecting members of the congregation. I happen to think that hearing, believing, confessing, repenting, and being baptized are pretty important things. I am doing this series, in part, because I believe that if these things could be lived into as more than just a list, we would be producing some health in our congregation. I am not looking to suspend these categories, but to enlarge them.

But there are other reasons as well, central to how I view ministry in general. Our congregation has gone through a series of pretty rapid shifts in the past few months, one of which was to invite me to preach 20 Sundays per year. I was not a member of this congregation at the time. I only within the last year moved to the area to teach ministry at a local Church of Christ college. This is my first gig east of the Mississippi River, which is a fairly significant boundary in Churches of Christ. I have preached in Texas and in Oregon, and these places are  not  Michigan. Things are simply different here. As one example, it is striking how much of church politics here relates to how Catholic the area is. These things are simply not issues in Gresham, Oregon and Arlington, Texas. So, they have taken as a congregation several significant risks in the past year, one of which was to invite a little-known foreigner  to stand in their pulpit for roughly half the Sundays a year.

I will say one  more thing about this. My sermons are an aquired taste. It's not obvious to listeners what exactly they are at first. When I first preached at for the congregation in Oregon, the first few weeks the notetakers eagerly pulled their spiral notebooks from their purses (yes, they were all women) and look at me expectantly for the first part of the sermon, only to put away their notebooks 10 minutes into the sermon with looks of clear disappointment. It wasn't until about two years later that the notebooks came out again. They has discovered some of the rhythm of my preaching and now knew where to anticipate the thumps and rim shots that make up the take-aways of many sermons. My current listeners are still in that bewildered state. Their faces are twisted in question marks. I am hoping they give me about two years.

So, I represent change in many ways whether I want to or not. I am not business as usual. And part of ministry is the capacity to interpret oneself in light of the congregation's narrative and expectations. I have symbolic value that is in surplus of my own self-understanding or intentions. And effective symbols do two things.They orient and disorient. They have to do both to have any kind of dynamic staying power, or for a congregation to utilize them for continuing life. Anderson and Foley, in their outstanding book, Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals, talk about the mythic and parabolic functions of symbols and rituals. The mythic provides orientation, the parabolic upsets equilibrium for the sake of new understandings.

My sense is that I am primarily now a parabolic symbol. That has positive value. It represents the possibility of growth and newness. But it also introduces a sense of instability and uncertainty. The positive aspects of parabolic function, I am convinced, can only be realized if people feel sufficiently oriented. Put another way, people are more willing to take the necessary risks associated with newness (discontinuity) if they feel adequately moored in what they already know (continuity). Good ministry knows how to manage or engage various moments of continuity and discontinuity.

So, in this large moment of discontinuity, I am hoping to find some rich places of continuity. I am hoping someone will accuse me of being a good Church of Christ preacher.This week--Hear!