Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Basic Hermeneutics
Often when we grab an Old testament text, we quickly seek its relevance to us. We read ""Sons I have reared and brought up, But they have revolted against Me. An ox knows its owner, And a donkey its master's manger, But ... My people do not understand" and then say--"look, we as the church are sinful and rebellious." We imagine that Isaiah was a late twentieth century american preacher. But that, obviously, is not the case. And Isaiah had nothing to say to late American churches. Better rather to imagine that we are 8th century (BC) Jews. We must imagine ourselves in their world, seeing through their eyes; smell what the smelled; fear what they feared. Or better yet, with prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah, we are to imagine ourselves as YHWH, the pain of his people's apostasy, the stench of their unfaithfulness. Before we ask what does it say?" we should ask "What did it say." The first time travel should be us to the past and from the self to the other, not the past to us.
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Nik -- I think you're only halfway right. If you let the discrepancy in cultures and times get away from you, you'll end up a useless historical critic before long, as I warned you: exhaustively familiar with what the text meant, and impotent to know what the heck it has to do with anyone's lives today. Unless you proceed by some analogies between our situations, as you want to do by focusing on GOD's character in the text, as opposed to the historical situation of the Jews: because you suppose that the God of the texts is more abstracted from the flux and hubbub and cultural/linguistic locality than the people? You will have to sell me on that one.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right, of course, on a historical level to point out that Isaiah had nothing to say to late modern American churches. But God did (and does) mean to say something to us through those texts. How does his intention interact with the intention of the human authors? I don't know. But I think as I have said before that the historical or authorial meaning of the text (as best we can establish) can only form a guardrail or parameter for our interpretation, a la Gadamer.