Reviews presented
at Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature Philadelphia, 2005
in the Consultation on Contextual Biblical Interpretation by
Randall
Charles Bailey,
“What Ever Happened to the Good Old White Boys?”
Review of Global
Bible Commentary, Daniel Patte, Gen. Ed., Abingdon, 2004
by
Randall C. Bailey
Interdenominational Theological Center
Atlanta, GA
What a formidable task to just
collect such an array of biblical scholars, from such a variety of
contexts. I am amazed, awed, and
thankful for the work of the editorial board of this most important project for
the work they did in gifting us with such a variety of scholars and
scholarship. Being able to read the
works of scholars from across the globe, many of whom I knew, and many of whom
I met in the course of reading this work, is a major contribution that this
volume presents to the guild of biblical scholars and to the ecclesiastical
structures who have nurtured them. No
longer can the guild say with integrity that they do not know of any biblical
scholars other than white men and a few white women. No longer can the guild say with integrity
that there is only one way of reading a text or that there is only one context
from which “REAL QUESTIONS” can arise.
No longer with integrity can the guild continue to practice intellectual
dishonesty by ignoring the works of those who come from outside the mainline
networks. Now, be clear, I am not saying
that they can no longer do these things.
Rather I am saying that no longer WITH INTEGRITY can they continue these
practices. And for this I am most
grateful to the editorial team of this volume.
One of the major contributions
of this work is giving to us dialogue partners from across the globe. It makes us aware of new works and writings
which we have missed. It makes us aware
of new writers whose careers we need to follow.
I know Amazon.com is happy with the acquisitions I’ve made over the past
few months as I came across works cited in this volume which help me in my own
research. The inclusion of biographical
materials and bibliographies by the writers as footers to the front of each
article in this book has made a significant contribution to my own library and
I’m sure to those of many of us in this room today.
The format of the volume, by
foregrounding the social context from which the writer speaks is most helpful
to readers and a revolutionary move on the part of the writers. While it is not new, since womanist, feminist, and other scholars have been trying to
teach us the importance of social location in the scholarly endeavor and the
importance of foregrounding this in our work, many of us trained in the “myth of
objectivity” also know of codification of Eurocentrism,
have resisted this way of speaking and writing.
Such materials in this volume help to broaden one’s understanding of the
Christian journey/trek across the globe and its impact. I would have to say Christian, since most of
the authors with the exception of Brenner and Cooper, in this volume profess
Christian beliefs, and also since the ordering of the chapters in the book
follow Luther’s Canon, thus giving a decided Christian flavor to even the Hebrew
Bible section of the book, to which I shall confine my remarks.
Learning of the ways in which
the biblical text was introduced into various parts of the world, was most
intriguing. To hear of the use of the
text as a counter-cultural force in places like pre-WWII Korea (Wong) and
current day India (Melanchthon) was most helpful in
seeing the power of this text. Learning
of the ways in which continental Africans have conformed themselves to the
text, sometimes to the exclusion of traditional religious elements (Kwasi), sometimes to the syncretism of the same (Adamo), has been challenging and eye-opening for me
personally as a biblical scholar and believer.
Uncovering the roles that class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality play in
the readings of the writers of this volume has been illuminating. It is to these dimensions of “contextuality”
that I would like to address my remarks.
As “contextuality” is used in
this book, there are two different main subcategories of the term. The second is the “context” in which the
biblical text is presumed to have been produced. For some authors this is primarily an
historical critical construct in line with source criticism, giving authorship
and date information for the writing of the biblical book to the reader. For others this is an opportunity to raise
ideological questions regarding the text, its production, and commitments in
ancient Israel. For others this endeavor
is to situate the biblical book within a social matrix which can intersect
positively with the social context of the writer. These ways of dealing with contextualizing of
the biblical texts is the first signal to what has happened to the good old
white boys. For while very few of the
writers in this volume fit into that category, without exception, it is to the
good old white boys, and in a few instances, the good old white girls, to whom
the writers in this volume turn to answer the contextual questions. The bibliographical listings at the end of
each chapter are dominated by the writings of the “good old white boys.” Their ways of dividing up the biblical book
generally predominate the ways in which the book gets treated by the authors in
this collection. Their arguments over
genres and which passages are significant still steer the discussion in the
commentaries. So, while they are not
listed in the “Table of Contents”, the good old white boys are alive and well
in their grip on the discipline and in our own contextual readings of the
biblical text. For many of the writers
in this volume these were their teachers.
For some the listing of these works becomes the stamp of academic
integrity. For others these ultimately
are the authorities by whom we must pay homage.
Interesting, there is little critiquing or taking these approaches to
dividing up the books to task, though there are some examples of this, such as
in Sampaio’s treatment of Hosea.
Let me hasten to state that the
writers of this volume often cite works by biblical scholars who are not white
and male. Most of the times, however,
these are references to scholars from their own geographical contexts or their
own racial/ethnic identities, a point to which we shall have to return later in
this review. The one place where there
is some crossover is among women scholars.
By the same token, though very
seldom is it acknowledged in the articles, the context of “being in the bible”
as the “authoritative Word of God” is most important to the writers of this
work. If there is a problem to be explored
regarding the oppressive use of the text, it is generally to the interpreters
that these writers turn for blame. It is
not the biblical text itself which is the culprit. Rather it is the ways in which the text has
been so called “misused.” Thus, the
deity as character is out of bounds for analysis in most instances by these
writers, either in regard to the ethics of this character or in regards to the
complexity of this character. While this
may be a result of the social context of the writer and the way the writer’s
community views the biblical text, it greatly impacts the “contextualization”
treatment of the biblical book itself in the works in this volume. As Adamo informs us
it is the potency of the words, which come from God, which prove efficacious in
the African context. Thus, the
contextuality of the biblical books is inscribed in canonization and its
meanings for the writers in this volume.
Again, though this is not spoken of directly, “being in the bible” a
major contextualizer in the readings that are given
to the commentaries in this volume.
While this may also be attributable to the desire that this book serve
both the academy and the church, it is deeply imbedded in the views of the
writers themselves. As Weems states these “texts are simultaneously to be
submitted to and struggled against (212).”
Thus, the Context of the biblical text is defined by what prevailing
biblical scholarship and ecclesiastical authorities have claimed it to be, and
to these altars many of these writers bow.
I am not pointing this out here to problematize this work, rather to be
descriptive of how it works in the volume.
The first and foremost way
“contextuality” works in this volume is the social location of the writer of
the article. The varieties of ways this
happens is most fascinating. For some,
such as Cooper and Scholz’s treatment in Leviticus,
religious affiliation and nationality predominate. For some the political situation in their
countries predominates in the definition of context, such as for Kwasi, Pixley, and Wong, in their
respective treatments of Judges, Exodus, and Esther. For some it is their racial and cultural
identities which predominate in their self-contextualizing, such as for Havea, Lee, and Weems in Numbers,
Lamentations and Jeremiah respectively.
For others it is gender concerns as they impact either themselves or
women and children in their contexts, such as for Sampaio,
Melanchthon, and Fewell in Hosea, Song, and
Ezra-Nehemiah respectively. For others
it is the geographical location in which they are located and its impact on
others, such as for Amos and West in Genesis and Samuel respectively. Still for others it is their religion which
defines their context, as with the dialogue of Cooper and Scholz. In
other words, the freedom of these writers to determine what they mean by
context and what context means to them is part of the genius of this book. The varieties in the ways in which
context gets defined, both from an historical to a contemporary construct,
helps us to see that not only for this writer, but for all writers,
contextuality functions in our writings.
The conscious attempt to explore this dimension of scholarship and to
foreground it in each article helps the reader to look not only at these
articles but articles in other books and
to deduce how contextualized all scholarship is. This learning in fact runs contrary to the notions which many writers in this collection
claim, namely that Eurocentric research is non-contextual. The questions which scholars raise grow out of
one’s context and one’s relation to that dimension of life. All scholarship is contextual. In my
reading Noth’s
argument for amphyctiony and Alt’s Stammes grow out
of their mythic understandings of the development of
Archie Lee, Adamo and Havea
raise an alternative ways of doing contextual readings, which seems to differ
from most of the writers in this volume.
While most of the writers take ancient Israel’s context and see how
it relates to their own, even to the point of using it as the norm by which to
judge their own contexts, the above mentioned use their context to filter the
biblical writings. In other words, these
writers use their own cultural understandings as the lens through which to read
the biblical text. They raise the
question of privileging one’s own context as reader. Adamo raises the
problem that the missionaries took so much away from African religious
expressions and expectations, but replaced it with nothing to address these
concerns. He then argues that the
African Independent churches place these religious understands back at the
center and read the Psalms as incantations within this framework. Thus, the number of times the name of the
deity is called in a Psalm speaks to the ways in which it will be seen as
addressing a problem of the reader.
Similarly, Havea and Lee take their peoples’
literature and proverbs and use them to assess the strengths and weakness of
ancient Israel’s literary attempts to address analogous situations.
It is intriguing that this method of contextualizing is such a minority
expression in this collection. Most
of the other writers see themselves and their people in the role of Israel in
the text, even when this is not the most appropriate analogy given historical
experiences. Thus, Mbuwayesango
can on the one hand say that the invasions and colonization in southern Africa
make Joshua 1-12 problematic, but she then turns around and advocates the
principles of division of the land proposed in Joshua 13-20 as applicable to
the context. How can the principles of the invader-colonizer be useful to the
actions of the indigenous people, I wonder? Similarly, Kwasi’s
claim that the problems in post-colonial Congo were attributable to the abandonment of the “God of the
Ancestors” caught me off guard. I first
thought he was stating that the abandonment of traditional African religion in
favor of Christianity was the problem, which made sense to me. In reading further, however, he calls YHWH
the God of the Ancestors. I was
taken aback. By the same token he is
oblivious to the misogyny in the book of Judges. While Wong sees the killing of the indigenous
people in the end of Esther as reason to question the usefulness of the book
for her people, Massenya in advocating both Ruth and Naomi as role
models for African Southern African women, must ignore totally the sexual
actions depicted in the book, and cannot center on Ruth as the convert. Similarly Pixley’s
concentration on Exodus 1-24 as the model and not the integral relation of the
26-40 on the liberation message is intriguing.
What makes this all the more intriguing is that Robert Allen Warrior’s
challenge to such readings seems to have gone unheeded. There
appears in this contextual approach a tendency to see our experiences as valid
only in so far as we can see them modeled by ancient Israel and their god or
gods, depending on one’s readings of the text.
As a person of African descent I
am intrigued by this collection and its implications for us on the continent
and in the Diaspora. What has happened
to us that we feel confined to pushing
our story and our understandings of deity into someone else’s story. What has happened to us that even when we see
the ideological problems in the text that we contort ourselves into reconciling
ourselves with such texts? In most of
the Latin American writers it appears that the tendency in dealing with such
texts is similar to the African and African Diasporan
readers, namely to protect the deity, or
should I say the depiction of the deity, as it appears in the text. Why is
it that some Asians are able to resist this tendency? What a happened in the process of
globalization of this religion and in the missionary efforts, which caused such
upheaval. Was there more respect among
the missionaries for the Asian religions and traditions, that their efforts
made way for differing readings? Was the
missionary dissing of African and so called
Aboriginal peoples and religions so vicious that we capitulated to their
demands in ways that resulted in our giving up our selves to the venture. And as Adamo asks,
to what purpose? And are the
psychological scars so devastating and deep for us, that we cannot recover and
will continue capitulating to these texts, to be submissive to them in the
service of what? In the African Diasporan traditions in the US there is evidence of our
rejecting the text, rewriting it in lines of our own religious experiences, as
presented in the Spirituals. In the
African continental context, there are traditions of rejection of the text and
now reclamation of constructs such as ancestral veneration as integral to the
religious experience of the people, but these are minority possibilities for
today. Why, I ask, do we submerge and subjugate our stories to these in the
text? And will that continue
forever? This collection has pushed
me to explore these questions more deeply than ever before, and for that I am
grateful.
Another side of the
contextualized scenario is seen in the works of the some of the Euro-descended
writers in this volume. It is most
interesting to me that West doesn’t read
Samuel from the standpoint of a descendant of the colonizers who felt God
had given them a Jerusalem royal theology to control the land forever,
subjugating the local Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites,
Sea Peoples, etc. Rather he shares the reading of the subjugated people. I often wonder, are there no ordinary white South African readers. Similarly Amos reads Genesis through the eyes
of the so-called “Middle Easterners” in Lebanon and Palestine, with whom she
lived and worked. What would happen to a
reading of Genesis from the standpoint of the Brits who saw God having given
them dominion over all and the imperative to subdue the whole land? I
guess I am wondering if this approach to contextuality is within the framework
that is only the darker people who are contextual? Is this colonization of knowledge? While it is clear by their commitments to
this project and inclusion in this volume, that this is not their intent. We have to ask, when will the “WHITE VOICE” become contextualized and put on the level
playing field with the other contextual voices?
Fewell attempts this in her opening statements, but follows through
primarily in terms of gender. It
appears to me, that in order for this project to go to the next level, such
contextualizing of Eurocentric approaches and exploring of this variable’s
impact on the reading will need to be placed in dialogue.
Finally, while this project has
most successfully put before us varieties of ways of reading and interpreting
the text, it also shows us some short falls which need to be addressed, three
of which will be mentioned here. First,
as noted above, the major dialogue partners for these writers is the canon of
Eurocentric male writers, with a smattering of writers from their own national
and or racial context. Given this
collection and its richness of authors and citations of their writings, the
next move is to see how these groups and individuals dialogue across their
boarders. In other words, at what point
will the Asians cite the Latin Americans? When will the Latin Americans cite the
Africans? And when will the Africans
cite the African-Diasporans? It is clear that the work that has been done
to open the subject of context now needs to be opened further to our dialoguing
also with each other and not just with the guild doorkeepers. With all the work that has been done on
African backgrounds for the Hebrew text, it is disappointing to see that not
even the African writers engage this material.
Writers are still talking about Mesopotamea as
the primary influence on ancient Israel and not ancient Africa.
Secondly, the men HAVE TO START
READING THE WOMEN. Engagement of and
resistance to misogyny in the text cannot be only the charge of women. When one writes from a context, if the
context is patriarchal, one must critique the context and the text. The same goes for class and sexuality. The heterosexual bias in this collection and
the non-engagement of queer theory shows that it is really only one part of the
guild that will be privileged. Again, in
speaking from our contexts, when there is theory which shows biases in our
contexts, we must in integrity engage the dilemma.
Thirdly, writing for the
ecclesial institutions does not mean that we in the academy do not have a
charge to push them on issues. Engaging
the ecclesial institutions means respecting their approaches and readings, but
also challenging them on their centrisms, which are
not necessarily liberatory for their followers nor
their communities.
Again, I thank the contributors
to this volume for the ways in which they have expanded my horizons for
biblical interpretation and for the honor to enter into dialogue with them
around these issues.
Latin American Biblical
Interpretations
in Global Bible Commentary
Mercedes L. García Bachmann
ISEDET,
Buenos Aires, Argentina
This is not an easy
task for me. There are blind spots in my vision, which have to do, precisely,
with where I do stand. Rather than speaking
about myself, I try to outline how do I see my own and my colleagues’ work as
Latin American biblical scholars. In this way, I try to acknowledge other
people who have treaded this path along with me and mostly ahead of me. I do
believe this hermeneutical contextual approach is a valid one. Through the
seven points of my first part (called “Main Issues”) and my conclusions, I try
to show why.
I scrutinized all GBC
articles written from the LA experience. They are nineteen.[1] Overall, I find two
key terms. The first one, “(economic) system,” is often mentioned explicitly;
the second one does not appear so often, but is nevertheless acknowledged with
names such as “conflict,” “death,” “injustice,” “poverty,” and others. Perhaps
an example will help. In his article on Matthew, Duarte states that
Jesus’ messianic
identity is defined by places of death: the cross where he dies and Bethlehem
where his people (the children of his people) die (2:16).
... In the
beginning of the gospel, the identity of the Messiah and his function
contradict each other; the hope of the poor is ‘fulfilled’ in the death of the
poor.[2]
From these nineteen
articles, the main issues I find significant (besides those specifically raised
by the biblical text discussed) are the following ones: 1.socio-economic
matters, including especially 2.imperialism; 3.concern for the weakest members
of society, 4.refusal to take every text as normative; 5.confidence in people’s
ability to read texts and reality; 6.a community-oriented, rather than
individual-oriented reading of the Bible, and 7.a sense of responsibility to
share hope despite everything.
1. Socio-Economic
Matters
One common trend I
perceive is that of correlating biblical concerns with socio-economic matters.
From its beginnings, Latin American liberation theology has made use of the
tools provided by Marxist analysis of social class and surplus appropriation of
goods. Class and economy are powerful components in everyone’s life; a fact
that usually goes unacknowledged until our interests are touched –or until life
puts us in contact with other realities, opening our eyes. Most of us writing
in the GBC are engaged in grassroots movements, where it is but
impossible to be blind to class issues.[3]
This awareness may be seen very clearly in Krüger’s article on Luke’s God and Mammon:
By telling the
story (or stories) of Jesus, this author addresses some very serious problems
in his communities: the increasing social and economic differences between the
rich and the poor, the total disregard and contempt of certain social groups by
others, the self-centeredness of some individuals. ... He shows the link
between Jesus and a group of people who were poor, disregarded, and sinners.
Simultaneously he shows Jesus’ opposition to the selfish rich, who disregard
others and imagine themselves to be self-sufficient people, and his call to
them for sincere repentance and a changed life.[4]
2. Imperialism
Analysis of these
death-dealing economic aspects of past-times and present-day life would not be
accurate without analysing imperialism. I find in my region’s scholarship a
harsh critique of imperial systems, which crush counter-economies and
counter-cultures. This can be seen very clearly in Míguez’s
article on Galatians:
The market is a
mechanism created by human beings as a place where both material and
nonmaterial goods are exchanged and work contracts circulate. ...because it is total,
it seeks to establish itself as the arbiter of all human activity, to occupy
every space of creation and exclude anything or anyone who does not submit to
its rules. ...
Paul wrote his
letters against the backdrop of the Pax Romana as an ideology, an enslaving economy, and
imperialistic politics. It is with the backdrop of the Pax
Americana, the neoliberal economy, and
imperialistic power that we read Pauline literature today.[5]
In the case of some
Roman Catholic scholars, there is also an especially harsh critique of the
instrumental role of the Church in its setting and continuation. I quote:
.. the proclamation
of Christian monotheism often became the mirror image and the legitimization of
the European monarchies and the carbon copy of a theocratic, imperialist
church. This church was more anxious to expand its frontiers and power than to
announce the gospel of life, grace, and liberty.[6]
3. Taking Sides With
The Weakest Members of Society
Although not all
writers surveyed identify themselves as “liberation theologians,” most writings
show first-hand awareness of social class tensions and people’s struggles to
ensure basic human rights. This awareness may come from work with landless
peasants, shantytowns, children and youth, women’s groups, Native American
communities, homeless city-dwellers, and others. When writers go to a biblical
text with those experiences on their shoulders, they discover in the text
insights and clues previously unnoticed. This preference for a reading from the
poor can be seen very clearly in da Silva’s article
on Nahum:
In this context,
the prophecy of Nahum represents a cry of freedom by people who suffer from
injustice, as they witness the destruction of their oppressors. ... “Nahum’s
prophecy is a forceful appeal to people and communities who live in situations
of oppression. It presents its readers with a challenge: remain a silent
accomplice of injustice, or cry our and tear down the tyrannical powers. Nahum
invites its readers to denounce injustice, to restore the usurped rights, and
to proclaim the just judgments of God.[7]
4. Refusal to Take
Every Text as Normative
Here we are getting
into the touchy field of biblical canon and authority, which is, certainly, a
very complicated matter. Yet, writers (I have the suspicion that this applies
especially to women) sometimes are bold in their refusal to take every text as
normative. This can be seen very clearly in Tamez’s
article on 1 Timothy:
We women must
understand the struggle for power and affirm the author’s rejection of any
authority that derives from social status. Yet, on the basis of this teaching,
we must also reject the other part of the author’s teaching according to which
women should be excluded from positions of authority because of their gender.[8]
Tamez’s refusal
comes from confronting a biblical text that coerces women into silence both
with other biblical texts and with reality. For poor women, used to being
single parents, the only financial providers for their homes and the ones
carrying on the neighbourhood’s activities, a text that calls them to silence
is not acceptable, even if put under Paul’s authority.[9]
I would add that,
not only is it not acceptable, but in some circumstances keeping silent might
be deadly, because speaking up in defence of their rights might be their only
way for women and others in a dangerous situation, to survive.
5.
Community-Oriented, Rather than Individual-Oriented Reading
Without going so
far as to compare Latin American scholars to Mediterranean societies –however
much we have inherited from those peoples– I notice in the writings by my
colleagues a perception of reality largely determined by community readings of
the Word, rather than individual readings. This means not only that their
experience with local communities determines their focus, but also that they
see in the texts more than individual heroes (the Hollywood type, winning alone
against the whole world, is not their favourite model). I quote:
The Magnificat begins with the individual and personal in the
choice of the virgin Mary as mother of Jesus (Luke
Or, speaking of the
Servant poems in Deutero-Isaiah,
“At the textual
level, the Servant can only be Israel ... The Servant is the symbol of a
community, not an individual. The ‘we-speech’ of 53:1-6 confirms this
statement.”[11]
Of course, this
community-orientation does not dilute personal responsibility; it is not a “we”
that hides a “me,” but it reminds that no reading is absolutely personal, for
there are always several communities and contacts behind each one of us.
6. Trust in the
Community’s Ability to Interpret the Word
This is an important point in most if not all scholars
researched. Sometimes it is explicitly stated; other times, it is more an
attitude on the part of the writer. Academic study of the Bible is accompanied
by its interpretation within a community of believers. In most cases, these communities
belong to the lower social classes living in shantytowns or very poor neighbourhoods. Its members are usually migrants,
Native-Americans, Afro-Americans; often, they are overworked or unemployed,
many are single mothers with several children, and many are illiterate.
Yet, they are wise!
They have learnt to read below smokescreens set up by politicians,
advertisement, and all kinds of sermons. I quote:
Behind the scholars
of the First World, there is a library. Behind the scholars of the Third World
there are continents of poor and marginalized peoples.[12]
This sentence makes
use of the rhetorical device of hyperbole! We use libraries as well, although
often ours are not so well provided. The point the author tries to make is,
rather, that we read our libraries set in our back as we sit in our desk, but
we take as many insights from people standing, sitting or walking on our side
in the communities we belong to. The following quotation is a little long, but
the last sentence may help see the point more clearly:
It does not take
much reflection to see that this kind of accumulation [i.e., the achievement of
profits as financial transactions, without further increase in the production
of goods] must take away from many in order for some to enrich themselves. This
is possible in large measure by a merciless extraction of wealth from
impoverished countries, an extraction that is only possible through a policing
network of financial organizations controlled by U.S. financial interests:
principally, the International Monetary Fund (IMF),
the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the World
Bank (WB). In our Bible study groups and church reflections, these mechanisms
are understood by ordinary people.[13]
7. Hope Despite
Everything!
Financial and
political crises, old and new, lighter or heavier, can be easily sensed when
perusing the LA writers of the GBC As I read, what called my attention
is the need to offer hope in the midst of those crises. Hope despite
everything! I perceive a sense of responsibility toward society; responsibility
that is more based on prophetic faith than on scholarship:
The church and the
people of God should have a message of hope to proclaim in the seemingly
hopeless situation of a lot of impoverished people in Uruguay. Such a message
–unlike the position of some charismatic churches –must not be perceived as
escapism that drives deprived people into a magic present realm and a purely
eschatological expectation.[14]
On the other hand,
I sense in the biblical scholars surveyed the joy and gratitude of having
learned lots from the people’s reading of the Bible; it is a circle in which
everybody teaches and everybody learns. I quote:
Hearing the
question of these women who are marked by the stigma of marginalization, we
addressed their questions by reading the Bible in dialogue with them. We paid
attention to certain texts that the mainline churches had stopped reading both
in community worship and in theological reflection.[15]
Perhaps a way to
envision this sensation is by the image of a mother mediating between two
quarrelling siblings. These two are the Bible and the people who read it. This
mediating figure would intercede defending the people from certain biblical
claims, for example, by refusing to take every text as normative (as already discussed),
but on the other hand “redeeming” the Bible, i.e., making it available and
meaningful for today’s crazy world.
All Argentineans
writing in this commentary are, to a major or lesser degree, Severino Croatto’s children -we
have been influenced by his teachings, writings and “table talk.” Duarte makes
this explicit in his article, when he states, “Severino
Croatto always taught us that biblical hermeneutics
is a reflection on the text within our own context and with those with whom we
share our reflections.”[16] Starting with this
presupposition, perhaps there is no way to answer questions such as “Is this a
hermeneutically possible interpretation?” but from within the same
hermeneutical conditions –or at least, being very familiar with them. This
standpoint raises, of course, the problem of how to assess other positions.
Perhaps the best way is in occasions like the present one, in which different
positions can introduce themselves and enter in dialogue with each other.
As I tried to
assess contributions from my region and the ethical and hermeneutical questions
they pose, this image came to my mind: when you break an ice cube with a
needle, the needle’s strength is not in its comparative size, but in its
capability of opening up a breach, of producing a weakness in the surface one
wants to break.
The image of the
needle and the ice cube applies in that these writers, aware of the conflicts
that afflict our personal lives, our communities, our churches, our schools,
our countries, and our region, look for conflict within the text, for internal
disagreements, breaches through which to recover suppressed or forgotten
liberating readings. (Of course, other people are doing so too, this is not
specifically Latin American). It derives from the need the oppressed feel to
counter-balance other readings presented as “the Word of God,” which have
adorned oppression with a sacred varnish.
Some writers make
this approach explicit. Gallazzi, for instance, would
(I quote) “use ‘conflict’ as the interpretive key to the text and read these
pages [Ezekiel 40-48] ‘from the margin,’ from the perspective of oppressed
peoples, in order to see how the text takes sides” and to “open our eyes to
recognize when and how power inside our churches follows the logic of
oppression and exclusion.”[17]
I try now to concentrate my conclusions around the
issues of contextuality, concerns, and methodology.
1. Contextuality
The more I reflect
on these issues, the more I remember the tale of three blind men who had never
seen an elephant and tried to describe one from what they touched. According to
their position in relation to the animal, an elephant would be all tooth, like
a wall or a long tail. We all read from our position, which might be broad or
narrow, diversified or not, in solidarity with, or blind to less privileged
positions.
There are at least
class, ethnic, gender, and age factors, which determine our context and which
should be considered when making it explicit. Thus, before we can discuss the
use of these contextual methodological approaches and their validation, we
should discuss whether there is a way of interpreting a text that is not
contextual. I don’t think there is -but perhaps this should also be discussed.
2. Concerns
As I read and read
those nineteen authors, I realized one characteristic is that of looking at
issues from a broader, a panoramic view, rather than an individual view;
systemic manoeuvrings rather than personal accidents. Let me give you an
example. One may look at poverty and even assess that someone is poor because
he or she does not want to work, prefers a more relaxed life, and so on. While
there might be people who think in this way (curiously those who want a more
relaxed life are the rich enough to afford not to work!), in our present-day
world it is no longer possible to make such a naïve analysis without
considering increasing unemployment rates even in the North-Atlantic countries,
drainage of resources from the underdeveloped nations to the developed ones,
financial speculation, high concentration of capitals in ever fewer hands,
exhaustion of natural resources in large areas, war, and so on.
I also notice that
those who have written in this commentary share in common an engagement with
non-academic communities, which determine our readings and also the concerns
with which we read.
3. Methodology
Regarding
methodologies, here I would like to state that, to my knowledge, Latin American
writers do not abjure de the historical-critical methods, which most of us have
diligently learned in our seminaries and schools. Sometimes I have the feeling
that our scholarship is second-class because it does not remain with those
purely academic questions, but it goes further into –and makes it explicitly–
those social, economic, political, and cultural issues that affect our
continent.
And because of this
feeling, I chose two quotations to end up.
It is important to
clarify that Galatians –or any other biblical text, for that matter– does not
directly refer to our present-day situation. Its language, questions, and
metaphors occurred in a specific historical situation. The validity of the
exegetical and hermeneutical task is in trying to find guiding principles from
the text that, in light of faith, will allow us to analyse the new issues of
our contemporary context and to assess how the text addresses these issues.[18]
And the second one,
My primary goal
as I read Matthew is to discover how to formulate the critical questions we
need to address to biblical texts in such multicultural, social, economic,
political, and religious situations.[19]
Both are
definitions of what is the hermeneutical task as envisioned by these writers.
The first one states clearly what the historical-critical methods have taught
as, namely, the gap between the biblical text and ours, and the specific
characteristics of the biblical world. Both state clearly why study these old
texts. One puts it in terms of “guiding principles” and the other, of critical
questions. Both seek answers for today’s world.
Global Bible Commentary: Wisdom Literature
Jim Crenshaw
Duke University
In forty-one years of teaching
the Hebrew Bible I have never thought it necessary to dwell on the particular
context within which my ideas are framed.
I have always believed that my words should be judged in the
international court of opinion on the basis of their logical cogency. In this respect, I have followed the lead of
an intellectual giant in the twentieth century, Gerhard von Rad,
who was content to fight national socialism with the potency of words rather
than opting for the more heralded “in your face” approach of Karl Barth. I am not sure which method, overt or covert,
is more effective. I do know, however,
that my personal psyche is more inclined toward the latter method, one that
demands quiet resolve rather than public display.
Reluctantly, therefore, I
concede that I am a white heterosexual male who was trained as a form critic in
a secular university; that I am most interested in the Bible as literature, but
that the injustices of human existence compel me to ask theological questions;
that I embody a hermeneutic of suspicion toward all texts; that the cultural
context of ancient Israel is the best commentary on the Bible; that I am
liberal in viewpoint, Western in cultural orientation; and that I do not
subscribe to the belief that we have experienced a shift in paradigm from the
historical to the literary, despite the widespread acknowledgment of the role
of readers in modern discourse. History
is still very much with us, as the several interpreters of the Global Bible Commentary painfully remind
us.
That statement rings true even
if one concentrates on the literature from below, the wisdom literature and
other texts like Psalms, Lamentations, and Song of Songs which begin with the
human situation rather than divine revelation.
In formulating the social contexts in which the writers of the
commentary find themselves, they isolate certain systemic evils that threaten
to overwhelm society itself. Two
authors, Brenner and Melanchthon, focus on the plight
of women and religion’s lamentable role in suppressing females and robbing them
of self-esteem. Two more, Adamo and Lee, accuse Western textual methods of devaluing
the special contributions of Asian scholars in a fruitless quest for
universals. Two additional interpreters,
Ntreh and Prior, emphasize the transforming negative
power of colonialism and corrupt bureaucracy that created a dependent populace
that is prone to resignation and dreamlike fantasy. In short, particular histories shape
theological discourse in every instance, contributing both pathos and
protest. Only Prior views the collapse
of civility as a catalyst for creative activity, but this hopeful sign is left
unexplored.
These probes into the different
writers’ social settings reveal astute self-awareness and admirable empathy,
over and above the abhorrence for corrupt regimes that have created a huge gulf
between rich and poor. In a few cases,
disdain for the oppressors has obscured the raw fact that things are rarely so
simple. Imputing greed and ulterior
motives to others even when they clearly possess benevolent intentions goes
hand in hand with a lack of self-criticism, particularly in Ntreh’s
remarks about the church’s practice of hiring Africans to work in timber and
farming and about the salvific potential of strategic investors and foreign
direct investors. One suspects that such
investment strategies, like the International Monetary Fund, will soon be rife
with corruption. Similarly, the charge
of laziness should be seen as a call for self-examination and perhaps a little
honesty that goes beyond pointing a finger at those who are responsible for the
situation.
From my perspective, the most
glaring omission in this section of the commentary is integration of the
present context with that of biblical authors.
The one exception is Brenner, whose brilliant analysis of the social
setting of Proverbs is nicely woven into the discussion of modern
understandings of the place of women in society. For her, the Bible cannot be normative, for
it deprives women of their dignity and turns them into useful items at the
disposal of men. To her credit, she
names the offensive features of the Bible for what they are and refuses to
accept their authority. To be sure, her
stance as a-religious gives her freedom to reject biblical authority, and her
predilection toward literary merit leaves a seriously truncated canon. If only two texts in Proverbs merit one’s
consideration--the imagery about the way of a man in a woman, that is, the mystery of sex, and an emended text
yielding a rejection of hypocrisy--I wonder why Brenner considers the task of
biblical elucidation worth her time.
This criticism aside, I find her treatment of Proverbs exemplary,
perhaps because I share so much with her hermeneutically.
Therefore, I admire the clarity
with which Brenner challenges the universality of wisdom literature by exposing
its class orientation, although I think she downplays the importance of the
family in formulating the oldest collections in Proverbs. Furthermore, I believe that she has
universalized the negative treatment of the other, or female, in Proverbs,
despite positive assessments of wives that do not always require an assumption of
a utilitarian criterion. Brenner’s view
in this regard lacks sufficient nuancing, as least as
I see things. An urban elite may well
have produced the books of Job and Qoheleth, and
without a doubt Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon, but
that assessment applies only to some parts of Proverbs (1-9;
The author whose perspective is
farthest from mine is in many ways the most akin to the popular culture
underlying the biblical books. I refer
to Adamo’s remarkable commentary on Psalms. He pleads for the therapeutic use of specific
psalms to cure stomach problems, gynecological difficulties, coughs, and other
physical diseases. Adamo
goes on to argue for the ritual use of psalms to ward off demons, to protect
travelers, men on military assignments, and hunters. He also promotes the use of charms and
amulets to assist in intellectual tasks as well as amorous ones. The obvious affinities between the Nigerian
cultures he represents and the biblical one make this defense of performative
linguistic acts especially compelling, while at the same time raising eyebrows
over the prominence of magic in such religion.
More than anyone else, Adamo exposes the
fundamental problem confronting Western interpreters--the vast chasm separating
biblical society and the modern industrialized post-Enlightenment one. Which hermeneutic best elucidates the
Bible? Adamo’s
magical/ritual or Brenner’s feminist apologia?
Both, it seems to me, address existential issues, and in that respect
fail to support Adamo’s judgment that Westerners seek
universals, unless Brenner’s Israeli ties place her at arms length from Western
critics.
What, then shall we say about Melanchthon? Her
experience in India where the caste system relegates women to an item to be
sold and demands obedience to a husband, even when the pleasure in sex is
wholly one-sided, has elicited a summons to women that they throw off caution
and act unconventionally. The
invitation, she assures us, is issued to female seminarians, who may rue the
consequences of such defiance of social rules.
The marriage of biblical text and Melanchthon’s
cry for assertive sexual agency could hardly be more harmonious. She is not blind to this potential within
Song of Songs, but she rightly wonders whether this book, like so much in the
Bible, represents male fantasy.
Moreover, she recognizes the important function of natural imagery in
the biblical book, which highlights the innate quality of sexual energy.
The subversive nature of Song of
Songs is undeniable, as is the counterbalance where males set norms for female
conduct and imbue it with divine sanction.
Melanchthon moves back and forth between two
oppressive societies, biblical and modern, ever alert to ironies such as the Kamasutra and
subjection of women from childhood. How
can one explain this utter freedom in a literary classic but diminished self
esteem by women in the society that produced the masterpiece? The ominous warning with which Melanchthon concludes her analysis of Song of Songs matches
that being voiced by gays and lesbians in the U.S. Consciousness is being raised, and societal
foment will inevitably follow, as well as considerable suffering by reformers
and conservative resistance by the masses.
The selection of Prior as
interpreter of Qoheleth was a stroke of genius, for
the social chaos in Indonesia has generated resignation comparable to the
biblical author’s futility. Three
decades of the Sohaerto regime have produced a
corrupt bureaucracy comparable to the Ptolemaic system under which the people
of Yehud chafed.
At the same time, economic opportunism abounds in an uncivil society,
where risk is encouraged and sometimes richly rewarded. The “me-first” mentality that characterizes
such societies is exposed for what it is, wholly meaningless in the face of
death. So also is divine silence in a
secular society. Prior sees the
correspondences between then and now, but he fails to acknowledge one important
difference. Whereas Qoheleth
adopts a resigned stance without more than a mild verbal protest, the people of
Indonesia are torn between passivity and outright fanaticism that easily
manifests itself in terrorist acts on behalf of ethnicity.
While admiring Prior’s
description of Qoheleth’s ideas, I confess that I
cannot fully grasp the import of his comments about the need for a prophetic
demarcation of boundaries, unless he refers to the gulf between rich and
poor. Similarly, his remark that Qoheleth invites modern readers to view reality without any
narrative is not self-evident. I cannot
imagine anyone trying to grasp reality devoid of narrative, even if it be the
minimal one attributed to Anatole
The West African context from
which Ntreh looks at the book of Job is rife with
disease, like Job. The devastating
HIV/AIDS virus has destroyed Africa’s children, just as God and nature combined
to take Job’s ten offspring from their parents.
Colonialists deprived a rich nation of its resources in the same way the
deity emptied Job of all his possessions.
Impoverished and sick Africans complain of Colonialism’s abuse of power,
and Job charged God with the same offense.
Inadequate knowledge about the nature and cause of the deadly virus,
plus suspicion that it is of Western origin for the sole purpose of eradicating
African people, leave a vulnerable populace at odds even with friends who wish
to help, especially the church and generous investors. Similarly, Job’s insufficient knowledge,
dictated by the plot, rendered him powerless and threatened his value system.
For the most part, Ntreh recognizes these analogies between West Africa and
first millennium Yehud. What he fails to see, I think, are the wider
similarities throughout industrialized countries. Farmers in the U.S.A. have also see the value
of their land and the cash profit plummet while the rich use their political
influence to obtain mineral rights and to gain control over the best land when
the cost of machinery rises to prices beyond the reach of ordinary
farmers. Economic exploitation, that is,
extends far beyond colonialists, in West Africa. The poor everywhere are forced to work for a
pittance and are frequently accused of laziness, Urbanization encourages sexual
laxity to the extent that family control is relaxed and access to multiple
partners is eased. Talented youth look
for greener pastures, whether they live in West Africa, in the farmlands of
North America, or in countless other places across the globe. For Ntreh, the book
of Job exonerates West African people and challenges them to come to their own
assistance. This self-help is necessary
because God will not provide any relief.
Ntreh’s refusal to rest his hope in a salvific
deity is both sobering and realistic, but it departs radically from the
biblical story where God restores Job in the end. Perhaps we have moved beyond the ancient myth
of divine solicitude, but the loss is profound indeed. “West Africans cannot hope for such an
appearance.” These sad words imply that Ntreh has given up on the God of biblical revelation. He is hardly alone in that sentiment.
The choice of the Tiananmen
Square Massacre as the privotal event for
comprehending the impact of Jerusalem’s destruction as recorded in Lamentations
enables Lee to demonstrate the utility of a cross-textual approach to the
Bible. His rich use of poetic responses
to the modern massacre serve as a permanent reminder that atrocities did not
cease with the closing of the canon. The
poetic imagination has always pondered the depth of human depravity, just as it
has explored the heights of human majesty.
Murder is murder, whether in
Lee’s complaint that western
hermeneutics is too heavy-handed in that it devalues alternative approaches
stands as a powerful incentive for self-examination on our part. To the extent that historical-critical methods
relegate others to a subordinate role devoid of substance, it has become
imperialistic and badly in need of correction.
I find Lee’s additional point intriguing. He writes that western hermeneutics gives
precedence to particular (or special) revelation whereas Asian approaches
emphasize general revelation. At issue,
too, is the biblical claim to constitute final revelation and the Asian
recognition of ongoing revelation.
Because I think the Bible also has a view of natural, or general
revelation, and that wisdom literature champions this broader understanding of
revelation, Lee’s remarks deserve wider dissemination. I also believe that his cross-textual
approach to the Bible has much to commend it, for the task of biblical analysis
is to bring together two cultures, the biblical and the modern. The latter is far from monolithic, as
illustrated by the authors whom I have discussed today.
I have always thought the
various exegetical approaches were complementary, the interpreter’s task being
to select the most compelling method for a given text. It follows that I do not believe that every
method throws light on all texts. I
therefore applaud the application of various approaches to the Bible. For this reason, I hesitate to pronounce
judgment on any method so long as it practices a hermeneutic of suspicion;
however, it follows that I cannot endorse a fundamentalist approach that
presupposes an inerrant text. In my
view, the approaches represented by the six authors under scrutiny are
legitimate, plausible, and valid to the extent that they harbor a concern to
link past and present in a productive manner.
Inter(con)textual
Interpretations of the Deuteronomistic History
in
the Global Bible Commentary
Uriah Kim
Hartford
Seminary
After examining the Global Bible
Commentary (henceforth GBC), I knew immediately that I wanted to use it in
the fall semester for my introduction to the Hebrew Bible at Hartford
Seminary. In my class my primary goal is
to have the students become informed and responsible interpreters of the Hebrew
Bible through critical engagement with the Hebrew Bible, biblical scholarship
and their contexts. I decided to use the
GBC for two simple reasons. One,
I was looking for a commentary that would help the students understand that
one’s context matters in one’s interpretation of the Bible. My second reason was a practical one. It was reasonably priced for a hefty book
that has a collection of commentators representing all corners of the
world. I thought it was a bargain.
The GBC proved to a better buy than
I thought. I want to mention just one
more important reason for using it at this point. The GBC forces the readers to think outside
of one’s own immediate context and engage with other contexts around the
globe. Issues and concerns we wouldn’t
have normally thought of become issues and concerns we need to think of
seriously. Interpretations based on
biblical texts and scholarship we have taken for granted from our own context
become problematic and provocative in other contexts. The readers are also exposed to different
contextual methodological approaches practiced around the world. The GBC exemplifies, describes and advocates
global contextual interpretation that is needed in our troubled and contentious
world.
The importance of contextual
interpretation needs to be recognized, and biblical scholars need to make a
conscious effort to embrace it as part of critical biblical studies. Contextual interpretation helps to connect
the world of biblical scholarship to the world at large and makes explicit the
connection between the interpretation and identity of the reader that has gone
unexamined in biblical studies for so long.
Without engaging in contextual interpretation, biblical scholars are in
danger of being caught up in their own world, debating over the text and the
world and history behind the text, albeit important, detached from the
complexity of the global community in front of the text.
In my contextual interpretation of
King Josiah and the Deuteronomistic History,
I have not only engaged
critically with the text and biblical scholarship but also with my context as
well. In my dissertation, now a book, I
interpret King Josiah and the Deuteronomistic History inter(con)textually with
the experience and history of Asian Americans in
A. Kyung Sook Lee’s
Contextual Interpretation of 1 & 2 Kings
Due to my interest in the
Deuteronomistic History I have chosen to comment on four readings in it. I will start with Kyung Sook
Lee’s contextual interpretation of 1 & 2 Kings. Lee is a native of South Korea, received her
doctorate in Germany, and currently teaches in South Korea. South Korea experienced a spectacular
economic success since gaining its independence from the imperial Japan in
1945, developing into the eleventh largest economy in the world. Korean churches also experienced a
spectacular growth in membership, wealth and power during the same period. However, Lee argues that Korean churches have
embraced the “gospel of prosperity,” which rewards those who have succeeded in
the free market economy, but turned their back on the “gospel of justice” for
the poor and the marginalized. In reading 1 & 2 Kings, she acknowledges
that the theology of the Deuteronomistic Historians—namely, the exclusivist
theology of “one nation, one God, one temple”—was appropriate to their context
when they needed to reformulate their group identity in a time of crisis, but
this same theology when appropriated uncritically reinforces the “gospel of
prosperity” and supports the authoritative and exclusivist attitudes that have
become prevalent in Korean churches and have exacerbated the conflicts between
classes, sexes, and religions in Korea.
To counter these tendencies in Korean Christianity Lee uplifts the
multiple voices of the sources incorporated in the Deuteronomistic History that
are potentially empowering to the poor and the marginalized, especially to the
women, but have been muted by the Deuteronomistic Historians in their effort to
formulate their exclusivist group identity.
In particular, Lee argues that the Deuteronomistic Historians have
undervalued the role of women and vilified powerful women, especially foreign
women, and this mirrors the way Korean churches have undervalued women and
vilified women of power. Lee does not
dismiss the contextual theology of the Deuteronomistic Historians, but she
takes the side of the poor and the marginalized and invites the readers to use
the theology of the Deuteronomistic Historians critically and develop a
contextual theology based on the voices of the sources and the experience of
the marginalized that will support the “gospel of justice.”
Lee’s reading is closer to the contextual methodological approach
emphasized in Latin American interpretations—namely, reading the Bible for
“liberation” and justice for the poor and the marginalized—than the
inter(con)textual approach often emphasized in Asian interpretations as I
already noted above. She is reading the
Bible for liberation within Korean Christian culture without putting the Bible
and Christian culture in conversation with Asian cultures and texts. This is not a critique but just an
observation explaining the difference between these two methodological
approaches.
The context of the next three
commentators is Africa where many nations still struggle to meet the basic
needs of their citizens since their independence from the European colonialism
and where Africans must deal with the colonial legacy that continues to
influence the way the Bible is read. The
fact that indigenous cultures and texts have been overwritten by Western Christianity
means that there are a limited number of indigenous texts available to compete
with the Christian text. The “inculturation” approach,
which is the contextual methodological approach often emphasized in African
interpretations, tries to read the Bible as Africa’s own book without accepting
the Christian culture that came with it.
This approach turns the Bible, the book of the colonizer, into “our own
book” and often emphasizes liberation as well.
Dora Mbuwayesango is a native of Zimbabwe and
currently teaches in the United States.
In light of the fact that the indigenous people of southern Africa
suffered greatly at the hand of white settlers who used the Bible to justify
the killing of the indigenous people and dispossession of their lands, Mbuwayesango asks, “What can the book of Joshua say to the
Canaanites, the dispossessed, and the exterminated? Can the God of the dispossessor be the God of
the Dispossessed?” (p. 64) The book of Joshua depicts God as God of
Israel and not of others, and the identity of
Fidele
Ugira Kwasi, however,
suggests a different response to the Deuteronomistic Historians’ call to
exclusivism. Kwasi
is a native of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, received his doctorate in
Belgium, and currently teaches in Congo.
Kwasi is frustrated with the economic and
political mismanagement of the leadership that has left the people of Congo
without basic individual and social needs.
So, he asks: “Can we find a dependable model of management and
leadership to help us recognize the actual needs of our people and to meet
those needs?” (p. 74) He embraces the
message of the book of Judges—namely, “all the people did what was right in
their own eyes because there was no king”—and blames
Kwasi’s
recommendation opposes Lee and Mbuwayesango’s
argument that a religious exclusivism is detrimental to a society in which
there are people of different ethnicities and/or religions. Kwasi follows the
theology of the Deuteronomistic Historians rather uncritically and ignores the
muted voices of the sources. His
solution to the problems of Congo seemed naïve in my opinion. However, is Kwasi’s
recommendation appropriate for his context just as one can argue that the
theology of the Deuteronomistic Historians was appropriate to their
context? And who decides?
The guild of biblical scholars has some responsibility of limiting
misuse and abuse of any interpretation of the Bible, including contextual
interpretation. A given contextual
interpretation needs to be in a critical dialogue with—that is, to challenge as
well as to be informed by—the text, the context of the readers, and biblical
scholarship. As trained interpreters of
the Bible, biblical scholars have a role that requires the responsibility of
evaluating and sometimes challenging a given contextual interpretation even
when an interpreter holds up a “context card”—which says “Your critique is
wrong or invalid because you don’t understand my context!”—to justify
sloppiness in one’s reading of the text, context, and biblical
scholarship. We need to acknowledge that
a call to read with us must entail the willingness to listen to others
(the willingness to listen to criticisms as well as praises) for a genuine
dialogue to take place among contextual interpretations.
Now I want to respond to Gerald
West’s contextual reading of 1 & 2 Samuel, which raises an important issue
I haven’t thought about until I read the GBC.
West teaches in South Africa and his reading includes what he has heard
when he read with groups of ordinary readers, including groups of African
women. He informs us that reading the
stories of abused women in 2 Samuel in a group was helpful to ordinary women,
who often find themselves doubly oppressed by Christianity and their indigenous
culture, when they were allowed to ask questions of interest to them rather
than questions of interest to biblical scholars. The contextual bible study process developed
by African biblical scholarship is committed “to read the Bible from the
perspective of the organized poor and marginalized, to read the Bible
communally, to read the Bible critically, and to read the Bible for social and
individual transformation.” (p. 101) Trained biblical scholars become part of the
contextual bible study process in which the questions, concerns and insights of
ordinary, untrained readers inform their interpretations and vice versa. This process exemplifies how biblical
scholars can connect their scholarship to the world in front of the text.
In my class I have repeatedly told my students that a critical introduction to the Hebrew Bible is not a course on bible study, but now I have my doubts. Biblical scholars in the West must think about how we are training the students in seminaries who will end up reading with untrained readers. Do we want the graduates to have some expertise in the world behind the text without any training in the contextual bible study process? Are we training readers who will impose questions and concerns of biblical scholarship while neglecting the world in front of the text?
Final Remark
Whether these contextual
interpretations matter to biblical studies—another way of phrasing the issues
we have been asked to address—is to a certain extent a moot point. Contextual interpretations are happening on
the ground level, around the world, whether biblical scholars accept them as
part of critical scholarship or not.
They are exegetically legitimate, hermeneutically plausible, and
ethically valid from their perspective regardless of whether they receive the
blessing from the Western biblical studies.
Biblical scholars need the courage to enter the world in front of the
text, which may look like a mess, chaos from the perspective of critical
biblical studies, in order to play vital roles in the process of interpretation
of the Bible. Practically speaking, in
order for contextual methodologies to become part of critical biblical
scholarship, there needs to be a critical mass of biblical scholars and institutional
sites in the West for doing contextual interpretation at the highest
level. The Global Bible Commentary is
a significant contribution to the legitimization
of contextual methodologies as part of critical biblical studies, and finally,
I would like to thank the editorial team for putting together this significant
volume.
Spiraling
Back and Forth from Context to Text
Global Bible
Commentary – Response
Elaine Wainwright
University of Aukland
At the outset, I
would like to acknowledge and thank Daniel, Nicole, Teresa and Archie [and
bring to mind Severino Croatto]
who have conceived of and brought into being this extraordinary volume – Global Bible Commentary. It allows no
excuse now for any of us as biblical readers and biblical teachers to exclude
interpretations from other places and other cultures than our own because of
inaccessibility. Just in this you have done a great service enabling us to listen with bible readers, bible
interpreters from around the globe. There will be other aspects which I will
acknowledge as this paper unfolds but I wanted my first words to be ones of
thanks to you, the editorial team.
My initial comment will be in relation to
the word global in the commentary's
title and the challenge I'm sure the editors must have faced in relation to
that word global. On opening the
volume, my first reaction was to run down the list of contributors and to be
amazed at the spread of contexts represented. I was very pleased to see Jione Havea's commentary on
Numbers and to read with him and the Tongan Kau pakipaki folofola with
whom he reads. Jione's work belongs, I think, at the
crest of a growing wave of contextual theologizing, contextual biblical
interpretations emerging from Oceania. He himself represents the diasporic or cross
cultural quality of the region which is spilling over into biblical
interpretations as islanders [from Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, Aotearoa
New Zealand, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and many other
islands of Oceania] cross oceans and cultures.[20]
Jione is Tongan living and interpreting in Sydney
Australia. I am Australian living and interpreting in a bi-cultural and
multi-cultural Auckland, New Zealand and we both work with students who live
and move between and across cultures, who indeed live in the hyphen.[21]
The richness of what is happening theologically and biblically in the region is
too great for Jione's work to represent and perhaps
the GBC demonstrates the still near
invisibility of Oceania, of the lands down
under on the global stage of biblical interpretation. The wave itself, is
however, turning toward the shore and will soon demand greater attention.
Perhaps in the next edition of the GBC biblical
interpreters from Oceania will not only be more numerous among contributors but
also will appear on the editorial board.
Let me turn now to the contributions,
especially in the New Testament section and to the issues we have been asked to
address. The first five articles on Jesus begin to raise some of the
significant challenges within contextual biblical interpretation. I immediately
wanted to bring Carlos Abesamis and Anne Nasimiyu Wasike into dialogue as
I heard Abesamis claim to be using "valid
exegetical methods of historical criticism and sociological analysis" thus
attempting to "avoid imposing any private, eisegetical
reading upon the text".[22]
Would he see Wasike's life context of interpretation
as shaping an "eisegetical reading" as she,
together with other African women, reads Jesus as nurturer of life or mother, a
metaphor not readily available through historical critical or sociological
exegesis. Both read Jesus as liberator of the poor but Wasike
makes the categories of the poor more explicit as women and children and
especially those suffering from HIV/AIDS. Does this become an eisegetical reading or does not a contextual reading enable
contemporary readers to read for liberation and justice for those categories of
'poor' that were either invisible in first century society or not present there
at all but are present in today's context into which the gospel speaks.
If contextual readings are truly
contextual, reading categories will emerge from those contexts that are not and
could not have been those of the context of the Jesus movement or of the
context of inception of the text. They challenge us to re-think the charge of eisegesis/eisegetical.
Pablo Richard's challenge to a Fourth Quest
for the historical Jesus from the perspective of the poor of the "Third
world" could be seen as exegetical in that the poor were a central
category of the Jesus movement and the historical apostolic churches. I have,
however, just read an essay of a Samoan PhD candidate who is bringing new
challenging questions to the historical Jesus quest from the perspective of a
Samoan understanding of history. Perhaps there are not three or even four but
many quests raising questions as to how history or historical is defined and
whose definition prevails: that of Western von Rankian
positivistic historians, the much more fluid new historicism or the multiple
contextual and cultural understandings. And who decides?
Contextual biblical interpretation is
challenging the paradigm of one valid and legitimate interpretation with the
prospect of multiple meanings, a position that can be supported by the changing
philosophical paradigms of interpretation, changing methodological approaches
that are postmodern and the recognition that ethical values are likewise not
single but complex and multiple as the voices of women and other dispossessed
marginal groups are demanding new ethical considerations.
Nicole Duran's radical contextual question,
can we imagine the possibility of Jesus the Roman prison being raped,
demonstrates how a starting point outside the text, from perspectives absent
from or invisible in the text, enable a reading of the text that allows new and
challenging meanings to emerge. Such readings may not be able to be established
historically or sociologically but they open up a world in front of the text
that is both ethically and hermeneutically valid and plausible.
Interestingly, in the opening group of articles on Jesus, I found myself
struggling most with Vasile Mihoc's
Orthodox perspective that seemed to be reading fourth century theological
perspectives back into the biblical text and claiming them historically,
collapsing, I would suggest, the historical and trans-historical in the
process.[23]
This raises significant questions too in terms of exegetically legitimate
interpretations and authorized or 'orthodox' theological claims.
As I turned to the commentaries on the
gospels, I found what seemed like two different contextual approaches or at
least two differently nuanced contextual approaches. While Alejandro Duarte
begins with the complexity of the multicultural and multireligious
situations of his life, he looks to the text of Matthew's gospel to help him to
"formulate the critical questions" needed to address the biblical texts in "multicultural
social, economic, political and religious situations".[24]
His overview of Matthew seemed to offer little that was shaped by his unique
context, and methodologically, his approach to the text was traditional using
the historical and literary tools with which biblical scholars would be
familiar. His reading of Matthew 2 in the literary context of Matthew's gospel
does, however, provide him with the "analytical tool/s" that he
sought to address violence. These tools turned him then to not only his but
also other contemporary societies with an "appropriate social critique"
which included questions about how our living on the planet might destroy the
future of innocent children as does violence and all forms of oppression and
marginalization. Such contextual reading needs, however, to spiral back from
context to the text of Matthew addressing further questions about violence to
the later parables of the gospel in which violence and burning of cities and
casting out into darkness seem to be condoned and even predicated of the
divine.
Hisako Kinukawa,
on the other hand brings questions of power relationships from her Japanese
context very explicitly to her reading of the Markan text. Questions arising from her Imperial
Japanese context lead to a socio-political reading of the gospel of Mark in the
socio-political and cultural context of occupied Palestine of the Roman Empire
of the First Century. Her reading spirals back onto her Japanese church context
with new questions. The dialogue between biblical text in its first century
context and contemporary context is much more explicit in her commentary than
in that of Duarte. I would suggest that it is this spiraling movement between
text-context-text or context-text-context which provides one of the most
significant challenges to the dominant perspective of Western critical biblical
studies with its still central claims to objectivity especially in the use of
historical and social scientific methodologies. Kinukawa's
category of 'power' does not provide us with an example of a new contemporary
cultural category but Nicole Duran's question of 'rape' does.[25]
The rape of women and men in contexts of wars, on streets and in homes in our
world make this an urgent category or question to bring to the biblical text
and the story of Jesus which over centuries have been displaced from their
context in the struggles of sexualized power in their worlds and replaced in
sanctuaries and churches where such words are not mentioned. Contextual
questions allow new possibilities to emerge in reading both the text and its
ancient context. They open up a new world in front of the text that can be
brought into dialogue ethically with varieties of contemporary contexts. Such
readings, however, while emerging from one context challenge other contexts
e.g. Ukpong's reading of Luke's perspective on
'gentiles' challenges many Western and non-Western contexts in relation to how
we construct the 'other' or the 'outsider'.[26]
While I have just affirmed the significance
of contemporary contextual lenses, issues or values being brought to the
interpretation of biblical texts because of the way in which they open up a new
world in front of the text for various contexts, it is this very strength which
can also be a weakness. This is not obvious in the GBC, at least in those sections that I read carefully but it is
hinted at by Jean Kim in her Korean interpretation of the Letter to Philemon.
She indicates that the mainstream Korean evangelical churches read the Bible
very differently to the Minjung theologians. We don't hear the voice of
those mainstream churches in the GBC
but Kim raises the question for me: are all contextual interpretations
ethically valid because they are contextual which can often mean not of the West or do we not need a key category like that
proposed by Krüger: what are the consequences
that the given system has for human life and….what does life become for the
weakest in the social body as a result of a particular interpretation. In other
words, does a proposed interpretation open up a world in front of the text that
impels social and cultural transformation on behalf of the most dispossessed?
This may mean in inculturation hermeneutics, in contextual hermeneutics, that
as well as affirming certain cultural values that have been historically
devalued, there may also need to be a critical engagement with culture. I found
this recently when I had two Samoan students from very different points in the
cultural hierarchy in a classroom. The one from the chiefly class was reading
through his cultural lens in a way that continued to affirm the social
structure while the other who was not from the chiefly class was bringing a
critical perspective to bear on similar cultural categories. Both are seeking
to develop a contextual hermeneutic in the context of Oceania. Culture and
context are not innocent as the biblical text and its history of interpretation
are not innocent.
Biblical interpretation captures us,
therefore, as biblical scholars in a hermeneutical circle or rather what I
would prefer to call a hermeneutical spiral. Contextual approaches are bringing
new categories of analysis from context to the text in a way which is opening
up a new world of meaning in front of the text so that society is shaped and
lived differently for the sake of the potential of life for all. As communities
of interpretation, however, biblical readers and biblical scholars need to
critically discern those values, historical, cultural and political or economic
categories that have potential to open up new biblical perspectives for their
context. We also need to test new interpretations for their potential to shape
new religious imaginations and new religious praxis that will bring
possibilities of hope and life for the most marginalized. This, however, needs
a community of ethical discernment that is contextual. Contextual hermeneutics
does not offer us a panacea.
Current biblical hermeneutics and biblical
methodological approaches provide paradigms and tools which can guide
contextual biblical interpretation so that it is exegetically legitimate,
hermeneutically plausible and ethically valid. As interpreters, from whatever
our context, we need to be open to the critique of others who will see some of
the deep-seated unethical perspectives that lurk in the religious consciousness of most of us: the patriarchy that has informed
most cultures, the anti-Judaism inherent in the history of Christianity and its
interpretation of the gospels in particular, the homophobia that creates 'the
other' as sexually deviant, the homocentrism which
fails to read with and for Earth and the Earth community; and the racism or
classism that besets many of us.
While the Global Bible Commentary is an achievement of which the editorial
team and their co-writers can be proud, the contextual hermeneutics which it
lays out before its readers and before biblical interpreters is a cause for
humility. None of us can offer the meaning
of the text which historical criticism promised. What we can do individually
and through reading with others, is to offer meanings which hopefully will
shape a better world for the human community and for the planet.
Thoughts on Global Bible Commentary
from the Belly of the Imperial Beast
Contextual Bible Interpretation Consultation, SBL 2005 Annual Meeting
University of Massachusetts Boston
We all want to express great
appreciation to the editors and the many contributors for this volume that is
brimming with distinctive and suggestive interpretations of Biblical books and
passages. The interface between the readers’ life-contexts and the texts that
structures the commentary is particularly important at this historical moment
as it dawns on both peoples of the two-thirds world and, perhaps more closely,
of western countries, that established scholarly biblical interpretation need
not remain dominant.
Following the pattern of the Commentary
I suppose we “commentators” should mention our own reading-contexts, including
pedagogical contexts. As a North American academic, of course, I live, learn,
and teach in the belly of the imperial beast. The students from whom I learn,
however, are a highly diverse mix of poor, working class, often immigrant,
self-supporting students who keep a critical distance from the policies and
practices of the US government and the corporations that to a considerable
degree control their lives. These students nourish my spirit as one who has
always identified with people who have been subordinated by the dominant forces
and institutions. And they regularly push me to question the standard
assumptions, approaches, and constructs into which I have been socialized by
established (theologically determined) training in biblical studies.
The Bible: Oral as well as Written; History as well as
Text
The focus of the volume is
largely on reading the written text of the canonical Biblical books, working on
assumptions of print-culture. That is the way we usually proceed in academia.
But there were and are other possibilities which we can at least note briefly.
First: Biblical material as
oral-aural messages (stories, prophecies, teachings) is surely the way biblical
material has functioned for most people in most times and places. Most of us
are familiar with the stories of African-American slaves who, when allowed to
hold a copy of the Bible, held it to their ear to hear what its messages might
be.
Second: We should note the
corresponding oral and popular origins of much of the material in many books.
The Hebrew biblical books as we have them were, produced by a scribal elite in
the interests of the
Third, biblical texts could also
be approached, not as texts to be interpreted and applied to our contexts, but
as sources for history, e.g., history of the people of God in wider historical
context. This is a principal way that earlier figures, events, prophecies, and
actions are appropriated in many of the later biblical books. In 1 Corinthians
10, for example, Paul calls attention to the wilderness generation’s lapses
from an exclusive loyalty to God’s purpose. So we today could take Paul’s
letters not as sacred texts but rather as ad hoc arguments that give us
one side of on-going communications, often very contentious; i.e., as sources
for or windows onto formative struggles to establish new communities in a long
history of a people that has special significance to us as their successors.
Nearly all the essays in the GBC
focus on a biblical book as a text to be interpreted and compared with or
applied to our own life-context, so my main line of comments will explore some
of the pedagogical implications of this approach. My exploration of the essays,
starting where they all start, with the sketches of the contributors respective
life-contexts, led to one implication after another. That the contemporary
life-contexts all fit together into a web of a global system in which local
contexts are integrally related led to the question of a corresponding global
system in the ancient context in which the biblical books originated. That
ancient system turns out to have been held together by the divinized civilizational forces that ancient peoples served with
tithes and labor, suggesting that there might be a corresponding divinized
Force in our contemporary reading contexts. And the correspondence of an
ancient and modern theologies or gods that hold together the respective global
systems set up broader contextual analogies in which contemporary readers can
critically evaluate biblical and contemporary options of resistance or accommodation
to global systems of domination and their gods.
Contemporary Life Contexts of Interpretation and How
they are Integrally Related:
The life-contexts sketched by
the contributors are remarkably interrelated, either implicitly or explicitly.
Some are primarily local:
- How victims,
families, and whole societies such as Botswana can deal with the pain and
devastation of AIDS;
- How impoverished
and abandoned women in the barrios of San Jose Costa Rica can find God as a
liberator who hears the cry of poor people who struggling to survive;
- How the small
Chinese minority can become more accepted and integrated into mainstream U S
society
- How land might
be re-distributed in Southern Africa after the British and Boer settlers took
it away with brutal violence
Yet even when
their focal concern is local, virtually all include the global dimension. Most
authors from both the two-thirds world and the first world emphasize earlier
colonial domination and/or the current power of political-economic globalization
that is impoverishing and dehumanizing peoples’ lives.
Even though the constraints of
the volume’s format did not allow the contributors to elaborate on the
complexities of how they focused their context, their respective contexts fit
together rather remarkably. In fact, the contexts and concerns are interrelated
like multiple dimensions -- some more local, others more global, some more
historical, other current -- of a complex global web of power-relations. Behind
the AIDS crisis in Africa in particular and the struggles of impoverished women
in Mesoamerica, for example, stands the breakdown of social and family fabric
under the impact of European colonialism and the systematic way that
globalization undermines local and regional economies and social cohesion
through the finance mechanisms managed by the World Bank, IMF
and WTO.
The Match between Contexts and Texts
The match between life-contexts
and the biblical books (which I assume were assigned) display some remarkable
analogies in a few cases. In other cases the analogies can be stretched a bit
and still be suggestive. And in some cases the contributors perhaps focused the
concern of their (group’s) context to match the text assigned as much as
possible.
The asymmetry between ancient
text and modern context is striking in at least one major respect. Most of the
Hebrew Bible scholars and some of the NT scholars recognize that religion was
not separate from political-economic life in the biblical text and the history
to which it refers, but many of them then draw the analogy or lesson with
regard only to the church understood as religion structurally differentiated
from capitalist economy and imperial politics, and not to the general
political-economic-religious situation today. And that also stands in an
interesting asymmetry with how most of the contributors define their context as
including the political-economic situation.
The Ancient “Global” Context in which Biblical Books
originated:
That most of the articles
proceed by looking for an analogy relevant to their life context today and that
the contexts they sketch seem to fit together in an interwoven web of western
imperialism and global capitalism make us wonder if there was a corresponding
web in the ancient contexts in which biblical books originated. Because of the
design of the volume, this is not explicitly addressed in most essays. Yet
there are some indications in some of the essays of just such an imperial
political-economic-religious system evident in some biblical books.
The most illuminating match-up
of contemporary life context and biblical book is Central Americans’ acute
awareness of U S imperialism and capitalist globalization with the book of
Exodus. In one of his three hermeneutical principles Pixley
carries out a structural analysis of what in the ancient context seems to
correspond to global capitalism. The story of the Hebrews’ struggle to escape
their bondage under Pharaoh in Egypt offers a number of indications of a
“tributary” system. In a tributary system the vast majority of the populace,
peasants in village communities, are required to “serve” the Pharaoh as the
divine symbol of the whole society by rendering up a percentage of their crops
and by supplying “forced labor” to build palaces, tombs, and other monuments
for the gods and the ruling class. Mesopotamia and Ugarit
and other ancient Near Eastern civilizations had a similar structure.
Had she had more space, Kyung Sook Lee, situated in Korea, which lived successively under
Chinese, Japanese, and US imperialism, could have explained how Deuteronomistic
narrative displays the imperial tributary structure of Solomon’s monarchy. If
we read the sustained narrative, it is quite clear that this increasingly
oppressive hierarchical system (patterned after the ancient NE religiously
authorized tributary political-economy) is what underlies the problematic
relationships between David, Bathsheba, and Solomon, or Solomon and the Queen
of Sheba, etc., that Lee focuses on. The narrative does not directly criticize
the system, but rather blames all those foreign women for turning Solomon’s
head. 1 Kings 4-10 lays out in vivid detail, for example, how Solomon
constructed huge military fortresses, lavish royal palaces, and a somewhat
smaller palace for Yahweh, my means of forced labor, the necessary material
basis of the Near Eastern theology that, as Archie Lee notes, Solomon adopted
as the official legitimating ideology of the tributary system he imposed on
Israel.
And Danna Nolan Fewell, if she
had more space and perhaps a conversation or two with Croatto
and Pixley, would not even have to “read between the
lines” to lay out how Ezra and Nehemiah were sent as officials of the Persian
imperial regime, with military escorts, to tighten the discipline of the Judean
elite that the Persians had restored to power in Judah, as the local rulers to
control the territory and generate the tributary revenues to support themselves
in the Temple and render tribute to “the Great King.” The order for the
colonists whom the Persians had returned from Babylon to put away their
indigenous wives and children in order to strengthen the colonists’ claim to
the land was a device designed to strengthen the imperial tributary system of
which Yehud was now merely a tiny province.
What was already an efficient
“tributary” system of extraction of surplus production beyond the subsistence
necessary for reproduction of the productive peasantry became heavily
oppressive in the advanced stage of its “development,” by systematic
exploitation of the debt mechanism – just as global capitalism has vastly
escalated extraction of resources from subject peoples and countries through
the modern-day equivalent, finance mechanisms that get countries in debt and
force reduction of resources devoted to public purposes. Had Pixley been assigned Genesis 41 and 47 he could have
provided an even more explicit description of how the tributary system
ratcheted up the extraction of peasant resources from the story of how Joseph,
that brilliant young resident alien intellectual who rose to become prime
minister, used Pharaoh’s dream of the seven fat cows and the seven lean cows to
show how the rulers of the tributary system could manipulate the peasantry into
surrendering ever greater percentages of their crops, becoming ever more
oppressed and impoverished themselves (similar to what Pixley,
Croatto, and the other Latin American contributors
see happening under global capitalism).
Some
of the essays on NT books also offer hints about the religiously legitimated
tributary political-economy that constituted the
With a fuller appreciation of
the overall tributary imperial system that provided the context for Jesus and
his followers and Paul and his assemblies, etc. we can better appreciate how
particular aspects fit into the overall picture. For example, Elsa Tamez (513) notes how the Roman imperial ideology extended down
to the level of the patriarchal family -- the slave-holding patriarchal family
-- which was understood as the basis of the whole imperial order.
What held the tributary system together: Service of
the Gods
The pedagogical implications of
the ancient global context in which biblical books originated are strongly
theological. What held the whole tributary system together, whether in the ANE or the
Presumably there is a
pedagogical role in these contextual studies of biblical books for academically
trained specialists. Those in the Hebrew Bible field can explain to the rest of
us that the gods of ancient Mesopotamia were natural-civilizational
forces such as River, Sea, Sky-Authority, Storm-Kingship, and Irrigation. The
people brought their tithes and offerings to the “houses” of these gods in
order to appease them, to ward off their dreadful wrath. The people did not just worship, but served,
with their produce and their labor, the fearsome natural and civilizational forces that determined their lives. The
critique of this in the Hebrew Bible is that they were ironically serving the
very forces that they themselves had in effect created through their previous
service in the form of labor on the irrigation dikes and houses of the gods.
Moreover, their payment of tithes and offerings supported in power the very
religious-political elite who ruled them with the threat of violent divine
anger.
This same service of the gods
continued into the Roman empire, as conquered people were compelled to render
tribute to the gods Roma and Caesar, and as the ruling elites of the Greek and
other cities built temples and shrines and festivals to honor Caesar as the
Savior and (son of) god who had become the central and most powerful force on
which they lives (and position in life) depended.
Service of the divine Force that Determines our lives
under Global Capitalism
This religious/theological
dimension of the system that constituted the context of biblical history and
literature, may have pedagogical implications for today’s reading contexts.
Perhaps we should not so easily assume the separation of religion and
political-economic life our own context, i.e., in the broader context of global
capitalist domination. That is, the separation of church and state may not mean
the separation of religion and political economy. We might explore a more
complete analogy to the political-economic-religious system that underlies the
Bible in our own contemporary situation.
The ancients were not just
worshipping but serving, with their labor and its produce, the powers
that determined their lives, the civilizational
forces that, so long as they were appeased with tithes and offerings, kept the
system productive so that people had at least a subsistence living and a
certain degree of security. Aren’t people today, under the global capitalist
system, doing something analogous, with some variation. Willingly or not, we
are all serving the Force that keeps the system producing, at least with
a subsistence living and stability for most, that is, Capital. The religious
dimension is inseparable from the economic. Indeed, Capital, with its demand to
be fed, its need to expand through profits is divine, private property is
sacred, hedged about by legal safeguards, to speak against which is tantamount
to blasphemy. Nut the global capitalist system is more complex than the ancient
tributary system. Whereas the ancients served the divinized forces and the
over-all system with their labor and its products, we today serve the system
with our consumption as well as with our labor and its products, such that we
are rendering profits to Capital, at both ends, production and consumption. So
isn’t this theological-religious dimension, this very concrete material service
of the great Power that determines our lives a preeminent factor in the
interwoven web of contexts from which we all read biblical books?
Biblical Opposition to Serving the Gods and Models of
an Alternative Society
As we explore still further, the
pedagogical implications become political. At least some biblical texts take a
stance diametrically opposed to the service of divinized civilizational
forces, or tell stories about people who resisted. The God who gives the
Covenant through Moses, who is not one of the divinized forces of ANE civilization, is identified again and again by what
s/he had done: “who brought you up out of slavery in
As noted by several
contributors, some texts in the Hebrew Bible and NT even go so far as to
advocate, or even offer a model for, an alternative society. As Pixley notes, the book of Exodus portrays not only the
origin of a people in a great escape from the dominant tributary system, but
the formation of a new political-economic-religious order in which God was the
exclusive king and which included mechanisms designed to prevent the rise of
people with inordinate power over other people that might lead to the
reestablishment of an exploitative monarchy. Kinukawa
notes in passing that a section of Mark’s narrative concerns a new
social-political-economic order. If we cut through standard western
middle-class Christian assumptions through which Mark has previously been read,
however, Mark’s story appears an even stronger challenge to the imperial
tributary system. Mark portrays Jesus as leading a movement of renewal of
Israel, including the Mosaic covenantal order, against the rulers, both the
Romans and their clients in Jerusalem. Duarte (351) suggests that Matthew
presents a way of constructing community that is alternative to the global and
totalizing reality of our present world. But that is because Matthew, following
Mark, is a charter of a community/ movement that formed an alternative society
in but not of the Roman imperial order. Nestor Oscar Miguez
(467) suggests that in Galatians Paul is advocating “a community of solidarity based
on justice.” So if we can just get out from under the standard old western
Protestant reading of Galatians merely as an argument against Judaizers, it suddenly appears that Paul, over against the
Roman imperial order, not over against Judaism, was trying to catalyze an international
alternative society based in local assemblies that could retain their own
distinctive cultural features.
Implications for Today’s Global Context
Such biblical books may have not
only pedagogical implications but political and ecclesial implication as well
in certain contexts today. It will surely seem utterly unrealistic today, under
the globalized capitalist system, to try to establish a completely independent
society, as early Israel purportedly accomplished before the technological
advance into iron weapons facilitated military invasion of the then wooded
uplands. But the Gospels of Mark and Matthew and some letters of Paul may be
suggestive to churches in some contexts today. If they refuse to accept the
modern western reduction/ confinement of the church to a mere religious
organization, some church communities might well re-envision themselves as more
of an alternative society in social-economic life and even somewhat aggressive
in political as well as economic and religious opposition to the ways that the
great divinized force global capital determined our personal and collective
lives.
(A minimal experimental step for
churches in the US might be to aggressively constitute themselves into an
alternative society at Christmas, which now extends from before Thanksgiving to
New Years Day and after. American consumer-capitalist Christmas, in which 40%
of annual retailing occurs, 40% of the retaining in which people in the US
consumer 75% of the world’s resources, has nothing to do with Christ. It is
more like the Bread and Circus in ancient Rome, in which grain grown by and
needed to feed peoples subjected by Rome was shipped to the imperial Metropolis
for the enjoyment of Roman citizens who already had a good living. American
Christmas is diametrically opposed to the stories of Jesus’ birth in the
Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Those stories vividly dramatize the opposition
between Caesar, who decrees that all the world be taxed to support the imperial
system, and his client king Herod who orders military massacres against any
potential threat to the system, and subject peoples, who still sing songs of
hope for a Savior who will lead the way toward a common life independent of
such domination.)
Realistic Accommodation and Compromise: A Range of
Biblical Options
The Bible, however, is a diverse
anthology of literature. Most biblical books express some sort of compromise
with (or even advocacy for) the tributary system under which they were
produced. Biblical texts thus offer a range of models and options for today’s
readers struggling to cope with the ways in which recent western imperialism
and now global capitalism have affected their lives in various contexts. And it
may be these texts from which contextual appropriation of the Bible will be
able to work more realistically in most contexts today. There is time to deal
with only a few examples, selected for their pedagogical implications.
In some contexts it may be
possible to hear the different voices in certain texts, especially texts where
earlier, perhaps oral, stories or prophecies have been overwritten and
incorporated into books by intellectuals working for the monarchy or the
temple-state. And that hearing of different voices might well involve the
interaction of ordinary readers or ordinary students and those with critical
academic learning. For example, as Dora Mbuwayesango
has laid out, the book of Joshua, particularly its editorial summary passages,
presents the Israelites taking control of land as a conquest in which the
Canaanites were virtually exterminated. Moreover, the dominant English
translations, beginning with the King James Version sponsored by the English
monarchy in the early 1600s, presents those Canaanites living in the fortified
cities as “the inhabitants.” And, as Mbuwayesango and
others speaking from colonized contexts have pointed out, this story of
conquest and slaughter ordered by God to enable the chosen people to take over
the land has been used by the Boers and British to take over southern Africa
and the English, Dutch, and European Americans to take over North America, in
every case displacing and killing the indigenous inhabitants.
Underneath the editorial
overwriting by Deuteronomic historians and the imperially-oriented translations
by early-modern and modern western intellectuals, however, other voices may be
heard in the component stories included in the book of Joshua. An interesting
thing happened in my Hebrew Bible classes at U Mass Boston where the students
are largely working class, minorities, and immigrants or the children of
immigrants after we did a little simple historical sociology about who lived in
fortified cities in traditional agrarian societies and walked through a little
analysis of the Hebrew word yashav, which means to sit, and its construct in connection
with a city, yosheve-X-city, i.e., “those-who-sit-in
Jericho, Jerusalem, Megiddo, etc.” And we looked at some prophetic poetry and
the early Israelite victory song of Miriam, in which yosheve of a given city stood in
parallelism with “rulers, kings, chieftans, nobles,
etc.” For example,
Pangs seized the yosheve-Philistia
Then the chiefs of Edom were dismayed;
Trembling seized the officers of Moab;
All the yosheve-Canaan melted away. (Exodus
15:14-15)
“Oh,” said the
suddenly suspicious U Mass students, in contrast to the Harvard Divinity
students with whom I went through the same process, “so why does the RSV and
the NRSV translate “those who sit” in a city as the
“rulers” in prophetic poetry but as “inhabitants” in the Song of Miriam and the
stories in Joshua?” Then they noticed that most of the stories in Joshua 3-12
concern battles against kings and are stories of clever guerrilla warfare
tactics by those with simple weapons against kings with war chariots (the tanks
of the day). And then they noticed that if they substituted “rulers” everywhere
they found “inhabitants” (behind which stands yosheve- in the Hebrew text, the stories suddenly made much more sense.
The Song of Deborah in Judges 5 and stories in the early chapters of Joshua are
not about genocide, the slaughter of all inhabitants, but about an apparent set
of local revolts by those peasant inhabitants against the kings, chariot
warriors, and others who lived in fortified cities precisely because they were
afraid of such attacks. The Deuteronomistic composers of Joshua and subsequent
books and especially the modern European translators have done their best to coopt stories of revolt against kings and their chariot
warriors into a grand narrative of conquest and elimination of the indigenous
inhabitants. But with little or no critical leverage on the text, subordinated
people/ students can discern other voices underneath that official editing and
translation. As Renita Weems
and others have been explaining, isn’t that what African-American slaves did
with the “talking book” and, more recently, what Basic Christian communities
among Central American campesinos did when they heard
biblical stories read.
In other contexts it may be
possible for readers to find their own ambivalent stance mirrored in the
ambivalence of certain biblical texts. Such might happen in a contextual
reading of the Gospel of Luke. This might involve some critical comparisons
with the Gospel of Mark or the letters of Paul. I have the impression that the
Gospel of Luke has become the most comfortable Gospel for readers in mainline U
S churches. This may be because Luke has clearly made certain adjustments
between the radical implications of Jesus’ speeches and his audience that seems
to involve some people who are relatively well-off. Justin Ukpong
has clearly exposed some of the inadequacies of Luke, brought to colonized
Africa by missionaries working hand in hand with European colonization, for
contemporary mission practice in
The book of Acts, more clearly
than Luke’s Gospel, has made significant accommodations to the Roman imperial
order. In a way that has been disastrous for subsequent generations of Jews,
Acts blames “the Jews” and not the Romans for persecuting the expanding
movement of Christ-believers, insists that the apostles spreading the movement
were not subversive to the Roman imperial order, portrays Roman magistrates as
relatively protective at times, and represents Paul as a Roman citizen who can
appeal directly to Caesar over the head of misguided local Roman and Judean
rulers. Acts presents an expanding movement with features that imitate features
of imperial life. As in Paul’s letters, however, the movement of Christ
believers is an alternative society, developed on the basis of history running
through Israel and now become international, over against Rome’s claim to be
the climax of previous world history (the successor of Troy via Aeneas). As the
movement had moved beyond Israel and become international, Acts deals with the
difficulties of the relations between the movement’s roots in Israel and its
spread primarily among other peoples, as explored by Benny Liew.
Insofar as its main agenda is bringing various subject peoples around the
eastern Mediterranean and even in the imperial metropolis Roma into an international
society that is loyal to an alternative king, Jesus Christ, contrary to the
decrees of Caesar (in the Thessalonica episode, Acts 17:7), the accommodation
to the Roman imperial order appears to be at least in part strategic, keeping
an unthreateningly low profile, so that the movement can spread all the more
effectively. Might that history be suggestive for those living under the Pax Americana or Global Capital, whether in the imperial
metropolis of the new Rome or among subject peoples who correspond to ancient
peoples of Ethiopia, Asia Minor, and Greece (the expansion of the movement “to
the ends of the earth,” Acts 1:8, was realized in the baptism of the Ethiopian,
Acts 8:26-38).
Like many of the contributors to
the GBC I find the biblical models of resistance to the tributary system
and its gods the most compelling and challenging. But, like most contributors,
I am deeply compromised by accommodation to that system. Because of that
accommodation, the “compromised” biblical books may provide the most
illuminating analogies to our own contexts of compromise. My students, however,
keep reminding me to listen for the multiple voices that may be submerged, but
not completly, under the editorial overwriting in
many of those compromised biblical books.
Addendum: A Different Way of Reading
Finally, let’s look at a match
between text and today’s context that involves a significant shift from the
assumptions and procedure of most essays in the volume and my response so far.
In accord with established academic biblical studies most of the essays in this
volume thus look for analogies from biblical text understood in their
historical context. But there are other
ways of appropriating biblical texts. One would be not to worry at all about
the historical or literary context of the text. That is what happens in the
group readings and discussion that
Another such example is from the
Rastafarian movement and the Reggae music rooted in it. Psalm 137 was, in the
context of its origins, sung by the Jerusalem ruling elite that had been
defeated and deported to Babylon. The descendants of enslaved Africans deported
to Jamaica who became Rastas, however, made this
psalm their own, whence it was adapted by Reggae singer Jimmy Cliff: “By the
rivers of Babylon, where we sat down; and we remembered there the song of Zion.
But the wicked carried us away, captivity required of us a song. How can we
sing King Alpha’s song in a strange land.” For those with an acute awareness of
the historical difference between original context and Rastafarian context,
here is the reverse of the usual cooptation in which the elite co-opt stories
or songs of the oppressed and marginalized.
Now unless I misunderstood
Archie Lee’s essay, I see him doing something similar, only now complexified by a suggestive intercultural reading. Aware
that the book of Lamentations presents lamentations of the exiled Jerusalem
elite over their devastated city, he refused to let that determine reading in
today’s context of Chinese mothers need to lament the loss of their children in
Tiananmen Square. These biblical laments have potential expressive significance
not dependent on or limited by their historical context, the potential of which
can be evoked in comparison and combination laments over those killed at
Tiananmen Square that are deeply rooted in the classical Chinese tradition of
laments. (I guess the only question I
have for Archie Lee is whether, if he had not been assigned the book of
Lamentations, he would have worked instead or in addition with laments or the
lament-like “confessions” in Jeremiah and other prophets where the focus falls
on fallen figures and/or the rulers’ violence more analogous to the Tiananmen
martyrs and/or the Chinese rulers who ordered the repressive violence.)
Consultation on
Contextual Biblical Interpretation
William C. Placher
Wabash College
It is a great honor for a mere
theologian to be invited to speak among biblical scholars concerning this
wonderful book, the Global Bible
Commentary. I want to reflect a bit
on the concrete realities of teaching the Bible in North American colleges and
seminaries today, and then on that basis draw some tentative conclusions about
how a superb book might be even better.
Those of us who took our first
academic work in Bible thirty or forty years ago, whether in college or
seminary, generally encountered a course whose primary purpose was to introduce
us to the critical historical method.
Most of us had grown up going to church and Sunday School, and we knew a
good many Bible stories. Some of us had
even won prizes for being able to recite the names of all the books in the
Bible, in order.
Our instructor took some such
basic knowledge for granted and then introduced us to a new method of Bible
study. In addition to Genesis, Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers, andDeuteronomy, we now learned
about J, E, P, and D. I was spared the
experience of one of my friends, who took a course where the required purchases
from the college bookstore were a Bible and a set of four colored pencils, so
that every passage could be appropriately underlined according to the source it
represented, but the spirit of that course pervaded much of the world of
biblical studies.
Many of these classes were
gracious in every sense of the word.
Instructors worked gently and liberated their students from narrow
literalism, giving them a richer and more complex biblical world to
inhabit. Other such courses were, to
tell the truth, kind of mean. Take those
fundamentalists and shake them up, leaving them with…well, sometimes it was
hard to say how seminary students were supposed to preach on the basis of what
they had learned in their Bible courses.
But whatever the tone, the basic strategy was clear enough—introduce
students to a new method of thinking about the Bible based on historical
criticism.
Both our own experience at
Wabash and conversation with the new faculty members who attend our workshops
at the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion
constantly remind me of how much has changed.
To start with, even in
seminaries, there’s a problem of biblical illiteracy. It’s easy to make fun of the teachers who
back in the day made some of us memorize the names of all the books in the
Bible. What did that feat of
memorization really provide by way of insight into biblical texts? And yet, confronted with a seminary student
who doesn’t know whether a given book is in the Hebrew Bible or the New
Testament, one could grow nostalgic.
Instructors in Bible at any level now have to decide how much just
information about the Bible needs to be part of their courses. How much time should be spent on just
learning stories, and names, and a rough chronology?
Then there’s the question of
methods—most definitely in the plural.
We can apply narrative criticism, or canonical criticism, or structuralist approaches, or deconstruction, or
reader-response theory—the list goes on, and it’s not a list I offer
ironically. Each of those methods seems
to me at least sometimes significantly illuminating, for the scholar and for
the preacher as well. But if they’re
truly to illumine, and not just become academic gimmicks—farmland, wilderness,
binary opposition—then each method deserves some time, time to explain its
theoretical foundations and to apply it with some care to at least a couple of
passages.
I think, moreover, that if we
have moved beyond the methodological hegemony (I figured I should use the word
“hegemony” at least once) of historical-critical method, that doesn’t mean
we’ve abandoned it. It remains indeed
the foundation for many other methodological approaches. And for many of our students the
historical-critical method still comes as a shock. Nobody told them until college or seminary
that Matthew didn’t write down what Jesus said to give us the Sermon on the
Mount. Or, even, maybe someone has told
them to mistrust college or seminary teachers who tell them that Matthew didn’t
write down what Jesus said. So if we are
not simply to impose this method—you should believe this because I’m the
authority, and I’m telling you—it will take time to help them see both the
reasons for applying such a method and the ways in which it can deepen
understanding rather than undercutting faith.
And then, of course, most
relevant to the reason we are gathered here, we have learned that we can’t talk
about what the Bible means because it means different things to different
readers, depending on their particular circumstances as to gender, race, class,
nationality, sexual orientation, and so on.
The Global Bible Commentary
gives us an immensely rich resource for helping to see how different
perspectives, different readings, can enrich understanding for all of us.
Still—fourteen week course on
the Hebrew Bible. Only course required
on it in the new curriculum. Three fifty
minute classes a week. Some of the
students are on tight budgets, and can’t afford to buy too many books. What is the poor teacher to do? We used to ask, “What do you cover in this
course?” but I think we need to free ourselves from the metaphor of “coverage,”
for down that road lies despair. But
merely getting rid of the metaphor doesn’t solve the problem.
I wanted the Global Bible Commentary to be the
perfect book, and in the pedagogical context I’ve described I’m not quite sure
that it is. Perhaps there’s already an
ambiguity in the title. “Global” might
mean “all-inclusive.” “The global AIDS
crisis,” or “the global shortage of flu vaccine,” doesn’t mean part of the
crisis or part of the shortage but the whole thing. So one might read the title as promising an
all-inclusive work. But the aims seem in
fact more limited. The scholars writing
here show, Daniel Patte says in his introduction, “the significance of aspects
of the biblical text that readers in other contexts have often taken for
granted or overlooked.” The offer to teachers and students seems to be, not
all-inclusiveness but one approach among others, namely an approach, or rather
a collection of approaches, that focus on reading the Bible in particular
contexts. For a lot of North American
readers—and one has to be realistic about the principal market for a $39.00
book published in English by a North American publisher—the implicit message
seems to be, “Here are ways in which people from other parts of the world,
especially the two-thirds world, read various biblical texts.”
Nothing wrong with that. Indeed, lots of things wonderfully right with
it. This marvelous volume really ought
to be on the shelves of every pastor and church educator, for instance. But when we focus our pedagogical questions
on the classroom, I worry that a book that so easily allows itself to be
defined as presenting one more approach—narrative readings, and feminist
readings, structuralist readings, and now global
readings—exacerbates the problem of that introductory course rather than
helping to move toward the sort of solution that we so desperately need. To put the matter bluntly, I couldn’t escape
a feeling that the Global Bible
Commentary assumed something like Harper’s
Bible Commentary there on the shelf first, to be supplemented and enriched
by the Global Bible Commentary. Maybe that’s realistic. But at worst I worry that implicit
self-categorization as supplemental risks unintentional
self-marginalization. I dream of a
slightly revised book that intends to be the student’s first commentary.
Suppose we start, as Daniel Patte’s introduction does, with the conviction that every interpretation is multiply
contextual. Then this book is not
introducing the practice of contextual interpretation but being more honest and
explicit about it, and drawing on authors from more diverse contexts. But if we Christians are one body of Christ,
then how can we not aspire, as readers of scripture, to be one interpretive
community (a community that can learn from our non-Christian neighbors as
well)? And therefore what could be more
natural than to be guided in our reading of scripture by the most diverse
group? And not as a supplement.
How would the commentary of
which I am dreaming differ from the one we hold in our hands? First, I think it would have a longer
introduction. Whatever their other
contexts, all of the authors seemed to me also the inheritors of that initially
Germanic scholarly historical approach, so could one explain it a bit to
students, right at the start, with a little reflection on what it means to be
somewhere else in the world yet still also a child of that scholarly
tradition? In his introduction to the Harper’s Bible Commentary, John Barton
summarizes various contemporary methods of biblical interpretation in a few
pages; I think Daniel Patte could do it better.
Second, one might provide
different sorts of maps for readings this book.
For instance, someone thinking about different ways of reading scripture
might learn from comparing Andre LaCocque’s literary
approach to Daniel to Dana Fewell’s more historical
approach to Ezra-Nehemiah and then to Daniel Patte’s
rhetorical approach to Romans and then to Teresa Okure’s
sociological approach to Hebrews, and so on.
But do students need a little help in seeing such patterns?
Third and finally, with great
hesitation, I’m in the odd position of wondering about the value of a few more
North American authors. This is
complicated, and I may be wrong. I
certainly don’t mean to say something stupid like, “White North Americans are
underrepresented.” We have enough books
of our own. But there’s always the
danger that the less intelligent white North American students will come away
with the lesson, “Gee isn’t it interesting that other people read the Bible contextually?” Do we need to give those who are likely to be
the book’s largest audience more examples of how people sociologically like
them also read the Bible
contextually?
William Shawn, the legendary
editor of the New Yorker magazine,
used to send articles back to authors for one more rewrite with the comment,
“This is too good not to be perfect.” It
is in that spirit that I have tried to comment on the Global Bible Commentary.
Context Matters: The Claim, Contribution, and
Challenges of
The Global Bible Commentary
by
Abraham Smith
Introduction
It is by now a given that
context matters in interpretation. As I
will note soon, this claim is a theme advanced by a variety of
scholars. It is in fact one of the
distinguishing features of what one might call the rise of Cultural Studies (aka
cultural criticism) within the evolution of biblical criticism. So, what is the contribution of the
Global Bible Commentary, especially with respect to the practices of contextual
interpretations and to the issue of pedagogy (i.e., the pedagogical
implications of these contextual interpretations)? And what are the challenges for
biblical scholars who are looking for future directions for their scholarship,
directions which seem to be intimated by the Global Bible Commentary, though
not always explicitly so. Before taking
up each of these matters (the claim, the contribution and challenges of the Global
Bible Commentary), let me first acknowledge my deep appreciation to the
general editor, Daniel Patte, the associate editors (J. Severino
Croatta, Nicole Wilkinson Duran, Teresa Okure, and Archie Chi Chung Lee), and all of the writers of
the Global Bible Commentary. This
work of scholarship is a singular work that will find broad appeal for
scholars, pastors, religious educators, and those who are simply curious about
the continuing effective history of biblical texts on human kind.
I. The Claim
The editors and writers of the
GBC are not only saying that biblical interpretation matters (xxvi), which is a
claim worthy of pressing itself because biblical interpretations
potentially can inspire or wreak havoc
on the peoples of the earth or on the earth itself). The editors and writers of the GBC are also
saying that context matters, or that biblical interpretation matters because
context matters. In some ways, this
claim is not new, though the GBC, as I will shortly mention, does represent a
shift.
Yet, others (and these editors
and writers themselves) have advanced the claim that context matters. That is, a number of scholars in feminist,
postmodernist and postcolonial circles have pressed for readings of texts that
avoid hiding the interpreter's identity behind the veil of the "general
critic," with little acknowledgment of the critic's social location.[27]
The present posture in many textual explorations then is to locate one's
positions within a variety of interpretive communities. As Elizabeth Schuessler
Fiorenza puts it: "If what one sees depends on
where one stands, social-ideological location and rhetorical context are as
decisive as text for how one reconstructs historical reality or interprets
biblical texts."[28] This emphasis on context, at least
within the context of this guild, moreover, reflects the changing dynamics of
the guild, in accordance with the evolution of the professional practice of
biblical criticism. In recent years, the
face of biblical criticism has changed.
Biblical studies is in a state of
“radical plurality”, with multiple voices and directions, largely
because of the growth of non-male and non-Western individuals in the biblical
studies profession.[29]
The GBC’s
claim that context matters, of course, moves us away from an observation of the
guild alone. It reminds us of everyday
people who read the bible (in all countries) and that most of the bible’s
readers/auditors hail from “Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania,” not from
either Europe or North America.[30]
The GBC’s claim that context matters also forces us
to think about the concept of context broadly. On the one hand, the commentary
acknowledges the need for and benefits of contextual interpretations (how such readings reveal the multiple entrance
points for biblical interpretation, how such readings expose the unwritten
intertexts or governing discourses that shape our readings, how such readings
give insight to various features seen by some readers and yet overlooked by
others). On the other hand, the various
practices of contextual readings suggest that the context of the text, writer
(or redactors) must also be explored.
Justin Ukpong, for example not only examines
the context of 19th and 20th century Christian
missionaries in Nigeria, but he also notes how Luke’s missiology,
like that of 19th and 20th
century Christian missionaries in Nigeria, failed directly to confront colonial
powers (385-393). Likewise, Benny Tat-siong Liew not only explores Acts
as informed by the context of Chinese
Americans [who must contend with this nation’s acceleration of economic
globalization on the one hand and its global “(inter)relation and
(inter)penetration on the other,” 419]. Benny also critiques the context of
Acts, which can be compared to other
ancient propagandist texts that supported imperialist (conquest) projects
(426).
II. The
Contribution
Yet, the GBC is not solely
interested in the claim that context matters.
The GBC, appears to make a contribution in three ways. First, it
offers a broad, accessible array of contextual interpretations, with an
accentuation on readers/auditors throughout the world, not (as in the past) on
those from the West. I found particularly helpful the four initial readings of Jesus
(from African, Asian, Latin American, and Orthodox perspectives) because they
were attempts to appreciate difference, though there are likely multiple
variations on what constitutes an Asian perspective. Various readings from a particular
geopolitical area also clarified the struggles of the peoples of that area, as
did all of the commentaries on Latin America (e.g., the commentaries by Duarte,
Richard and Míguez), commentaries which seemed
consistently to highlight the problems of (neo)liberalism, though these
commentaries highlighted as well the common plights that their countries share
with others affected by (neo)liberalism throughout the world. Second, given the various methods of
textual exploration employed by its writers, the GBC provides some categories
that might help us to see the distinctive (though not necessarily mutually
exclusive) goals of certain contextual practices.[31] Third, the GBC has valuable and
multiple pedagogical implications, implications about what is learned and
practiced in biblical criticism. Let me
mention just a few of these.
1. Shifting from Hero-Worship to People’s Histories
Pablo Richard’s reading of Jesus
moves beyond the hero-worship that gives short shrift to the whole Jesus
movement in a way similar to the shift in historical studies of the Civil
Rights movement beyond Martin Luther King, Jr. to the entire movement and the
struggles of ordinary people. What if a
commentary were produced that highlighted not a singular figure but whole
communities? What if our investigations of biblical texts gave a
hearing to suppressed or discordant voices (beyond historical criticism’s
exposure of a text’s sources), to the work of various communities, as some
scholars now are beginning to do? How
would that reshape biblical interpretation and empower ordinary biblical
interpreters?
2. Viewing Texts as Sites of Power
Hisako Kinukawa’s
reading of Mark in the light of her Japanese context both appreciates my
aforementioned emphasis on appreciating a type of “people’s history” and she
highlights the importance of investigating texts in order to understand the
attendant power dynamics they
invoke. This approach means though that
we may need to move from simply seeing these texts as Scripture toward seeing
them as sites of power struggles, which is not always easy to do if one is
influenced by a doctrine of biblical authority. Is it the case then that I
found so few deliberately resistant readings (a few exceptions being Ukpong
and Tat-siong Liew) because
of this stance?
3. Viewing Texts as Sites of Contextualization by the
Writers Themselves
Viewing texts as sites is not
only helpful for understanding power dynamics but for understanding how the
ancient writers themselves were influenced by their contextual interpretation
of what they regarded as Scripture. This
point is made clear in Duarte’s reading of Matthew.
III. The
Challenges
Finally, I think the GBC lays
the groundwork for some future directions in biblical interpretation in general
and within our guild in particular. Some
of these challenges, though implicit in
the GBC, are now lifted up for explicit exposure. First, as the GBC
seems to acknowledge, the practices of contextual interpretation compel us to
broaden our understanding of textuality. That seems to be the import of Musa Dube’s reading of the
healing accounts in Mark. Musa W. Dube’s reading with
others in
Second, even if it is necessary to highlight the
great value of contextual interpretations as manifested outside of
Third, as open as the GBC is to divergent
interpretations, it seems to make us think about the potential danger of
essentialism. As I have noted before, it
is difficult to speak of an “Asian perspective” that could be accepted by all.
I am particularly aware of this danger even as I reflect on what is sometimes
called African American biblical scholarship.
Not all African Americans are alike.[35] Thus, African American biblical
reception cannot be reduced to the
historical experiences of a single group of blacks. So, while it is possible to describe the
biblical hermeneutics that occurs in the black church, one of the principal venues for black biblical
reception, not all African Americans are a part of the black church.[36] Accordingly, even if one agrees with Peter
Paris that the black church has one key hermeneutic (“the universal parenthood
of God and kinship of humankind,” 135) but several possible social implications
emanating from that hermeneutic (a pastoral strand, a prophetic one, a
reformist strand and a nationalist one), black biblical interpretation extends
beyond the black church.[37] Nor can black biblical reception be reduced
to the perspective of a single, essentialist view of the self, a perspective
that naturalizes and identifies only with the self in the text that highlights
one aspect of one’s identity. In the
nineteenth century, as noted by Clarice Martin, an essentialist view of the
self led many African Americans to advance a spirited protest against the Haustafeln "slave" regulations (in, e.g.,
Colossians 3:18-4:1 and Ephesians 5:21-6:9), but paradoxically to fail to
protest the "wives" regulations,[38]
thus adopting "a socialization that tolerates and accepts the patriarchal
model of male control and supremacy."[39] The failure to protest the "wives"
regulation as an "outmoded social ethos" was possible because some
enslaved African Americans--though certainly not all--only viewed themselves
essentially as "black slaves."[40] Attention must be given then to the
particular and variegated historical experiences of any given interpretive
community in Afro-America—whether that community be composed of black women,
black gays or lesbians, or the black poor—in order to trace the regularizing
effects on biblical reception. Attention
must be given, moreover, to the “relations of power” that inhere in the “intragroup social relations” of these various interpretive
communities.[41]
Thus, there exists a tension
between giving voice to a perspective that has not yet been appreciated as it
ought and yet not reducing the people represented by that perspective to a reductionistic set of givens. I am not sure how to resolve
this tension but it is a dilemma no less.
Finally, I suspect that any reading (by whatever
name is called) has an implicit hermeneutics of human beings. How does one’s
reading of biblical texts reveal something about one’s view of the individual?
And what are the implications of a clash of views for biblical
interpretation? By way of example, let
me return to the matter of the intertext and explore how that intertext might
play itself out among interpreters influenced by American liberalism. As noted by Benjamin Valentin,
American liberalism has some value, for “this conception helped Western
societies to deal with the crisis of authority and the sectarian strife
engendered by the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”[42]
It also “has served invaluably to emancipate human and social thought from the
chains of uncritical submission to tradition.”[43]
What Valentin finds problematic, however, is that this conception “has also served to
generate a radical individualism, an enchantment with private life, and an ahistorical understanding of reason that has eventually
served to constrict the meaning of public life”[44] That is, if a human being is defined as
“ontologically prior to society” and construed as self-made, the need for
others becomes only a “matter of protecting and maximizing individual
interests.”[45]
Hence, this view “has served to weaken the sense of and desire for connection
between the self and the other. . .; it has encouraged a one-sided enchantment
with private life that values being in private—alone with ourselves, family,
and intimate friends—as an end in itself, and
. . . [it] has weakened the desire to value those bonds of association
in the respublica, where we must live in the
‘company of strangers’.”[46]
Dare I say that there are
competing views of the self and its relationship to society that must be tapped
if we are to see not only just that there are multiple and competing contextual
interpretations but if we are to wrestle with the larger goal of respecting
each other without imposing our “textual” values (as a sort of universal) on
others. To put the matter another way in
words that approximate Patte’s commentary on Romans
(cf. GBC, 437), is not it the height of arrogance to think that we in the U.S.
have the right to give “the gift of freedom and democracy to Afghanistan and
Iraq”? (GBC, 437).
Conclusion
In closing let me thank the
general editor, the associate editors and the writers for this timely
treasure-house of voices. The GBC says
more than just the claim that Context Matters.
It provides a valuable contribution in helping us as we practice
biblical criticism, and it leads us forth in seeing some important challenges
about biblical interpretation. He or she
that has hears to hear, let her or him hear.
The Global Bible
Commentary
Practices of Contextual Interpretations and
Their Pedagogical Implications
Gale A. Yee
Episcopal Divinity School
First of all, I wish to thank
Dr. Daniel Patte for this invitation to review The Global Bible Commentary, and how its contextual interpretations
have ramifications for our teaching. I was unable to contribute to the
commentary myself, and am glad for this opportunity to have some role in
promoting contextual interpretations of the bible. I foresee that The Global Bible Commentary will become
an important classroom resource in our biblical courses. It is already a
required text for the Introduction to Hebrew Bible course for my colleague,
My
review of The Global Bible Commentary
will be as a teacher, one who strives to make the bible come alive for her
students in three major ways. First, by helping them to understand the multiple
contexts in which the text itself was written, by opening my students’ eyes to
the multifaceted socio-cultural worlds of the biblical texts and the historical
periods in which they were produced.
Second, by making students aware of their own social locations and how
these locations affect their interpretation of the bible; that it matters
deeply that one is a gendered, raced person of a particular class who
interprets the bible. And third, by making them cognizant of the wider social
contexts in which they interpret the text, forcing them to answer the
questions, “Whom does my interpretation of the bible benefit? Whom does my
interpretation of the bible harm?
According to
post-colonial theorist, Gayatri Spivak,
“The practice of criticism begins with a historical critique of [one’s]
position as the investigating person.” Because I see my pedagogical task as
helping my students to interpret the Hebrew Bible critically, I have my
students begin, as Spivak enjoins, with an
exploration of themselves as interpreters of the text. I have every class
complete the “Self-Inventory on Biblical Hermeneutics” in Norman K. Gottwald’s "Framing Biblical Interpretation at New
York Theological Seminary: A Student Self-Inventory on Biblical
Hermeneutics."[47]
For many years this questionnaire has been given to all students at New York
Theological Seminary, a very diverse institution, having an ethnic mix of
African Americans, whites, Hispanics, and Asians who hail from over thirty
denominations. Even among the ethnic groups themselves there exists significant
diversity. Blacks of the diverse Caribbean nations join the African American
population. The Hispanics have different Latin American backgrounds, and the
international Korean students are quite culturally distinct from the various
American-born Asians.
The intent of the questionnaire
is to encourage student self-reflection on the ways they frame their biblical
interpretation, with the hope that once they realize the hermeneutical factors
at work in themselves, they can become more self-aware in their interpretation
of the biblical text. There
are the eighteen different categories in the “Self-Inventory” that students
reflect upon to determine how each affects their understanding of the biblical
text: gender, race/ethnicity, class background, working theology, explicit or
implicit political stance, and so forth. After each category are questions that
help to clarify each category. For example, under “Church History/Tradition”
(1) it asks “What is my denominational history and tradition regarding
interpretation of the Bible?” Under “Gender” (5) it asks “How do my gender
history, culture, and consciousness influence my interpretation of the Bible?
With the rise of feminist consciousness, this may be an easier question for
women to confront, but it is also an important question for men.” Under
“Education” (7) it asks “How does my level and type of education influence by
interpretation of the Bible?”
Reflecting upon eighteen different categories involves considerable
contemplation on the part of students. After the students complete the
inventory, they process and discuss it in small groups led by teaching
assistants. At the end of the scripture course, students return to the
self-inventory and describe any modification or transformations in their
hermeneutics that were generated by the course. Their learning experiences thus
do not simply consist of knowledge about the biblical text, but of themselves
as interpreters of that text.
The editors of The Global Bible
Commentary asked each of the contributors to respond to these open-ended
questions: “What is the teaching of the given biblical book for believers in
your specific social, economic, cultural, and religious context? What does this
given biblical book say regarding the relationship of the people of God to the
world” (p. xxi). The GBC singles out four of the eighteen categories the
Self-Inventory used at New York Theological Seminary. Such questions model what
we as teachers should ask our students, helping them turn away from the mere
words of the text and upon their own social location as they encounter the
text.
What I particularly found interesting in my survey of the Old Testament
contributors (I only read the OT entries J.) was how they interpreted “social”
context. Most were able to identify very successfully the external context in
which they were situated. This is one of the strengths of the commentary.
Students are able to see in capsule form the social, political, and economic
problems in various places in the globe where the bible is proclaimed. The commentary opens up a much wider,
international world in which biblical interpretation takes place.
Nevertheless, I noticed that the contributors were less explicit about
their own social locations as interpreters, particularly with respect to
gender. This blind spot regarding gender affected the interpretation of the
biblical book in certain cases. Predictably, the female scholars more easily
saw issues of gender at work in the biblical text and their own social
contexts. However, with some notable exceptions,[48]
male scholars, while keenly aware of the political and economic issues of their
contexts, often overlooked gender issues in their biblical books and in their social contexts. The most
glaring examples were the commentary on Judges, a book that is studded through
and through with stories about women, and the commentaries on Ecclesiastes and
Nahum. The commentary on Zechariah 5:5-11, where Wickedness is embodied as a
woman who pollutes Babylon, notes that the text links economic and religious
corruption, but fails to see where sexism interconnects with this
representation. The Editors of The Global
Bible Commentary had to insert a note: “Regarding the gender bias in this
text, see the commentaries on Jeremiah and on Hosea in this volume” (p. 322).
Not surprisingly, the excellent commentaries on Jeremiah and Hosea were penned
by women (Renita Weems and
Tania Sampaio).
I was thus acutely reminded of the debate Marxist feminists had with
male Marxist theorists, who argued that women’s issues were less important than
economic class conflicts, and that women’s issues divided the working classes.
Male Marxists failed to understand that men’s and women’s experiences under
capitalism differ qualitatively. Oftentimes, women under capitalism are
oppressed as women, not simply as workers. Male Marxists thus did not recognize
the vested social and economic
interests men had in women’s continued subordination.[49]
Similarly, economic issues were primarily foregrounded in many of the OT
entries, at the expense of gender issues in both the texts and contexts. While
I definitely acknowledge the horrendous economic hardships and inequities in
the different countries, women under capitalism and imperialism experience
poverty and destitution qualitatively differently than men, and these
differences must be reckoned with and negotiated in our interpretations of the
biblical text.
Each entry in The
Global Bible Commentary is structured in three parts. The first is the
“Life Context of the Interpretation.” Hailing from different parts of the globe
and belonging to different religious traditions, each contributor here in this
first part lays out the specific life situation, social location and concerns
from which he or she reads the bible. The second part of each entry involves
“The Contextual Comment.” What is intriguing about this second part is that
each contributor deliberately chooses the passages in their biblical book for
comment that were most pertinent to the context in which he or she lived. The
introduction to the volume asserts: “Picking and choosing what is particularly
relevant for our life context or what is most significant for us is what all interpreters do” (p. xxv). Just as
the contributors of the well-known Woman’s
Bible Commentary[50]
choose texts that particularly relate to women and their issues, the
contributors of The Global Bible
Commentary make deliberate choices from the biblical text that are most
important for their particular contexts. I should add that the religious right
also picks and chooses the biblical texts it thinks important, especially in
matter of (homo)sexuality. The Global
Bible Commentary is explicit about this choosing, while the religious right
is not. The third section of each entry involved the concluding remarks of each
commentary that anchor the interpretation in its specific context.
I approached each entry with great expectations to
learn more about the particular context of the interpreter and what biblical
passages he or she chose that related to this context. The most successful
entries in The Global Bible Commentary
were those who integrated their social context with their interpretations of
the specific texts of their choosing. These entries provide wonderful paradigms
of contextual exegesis for students.
But before I talk about these entries, let me
dwell on those entries that were not, in my opinion, successful. While practically
all the Old Testament entries were quite good in laying out for students the
specific social, political, and economic contexts from which he or she
construes the text, sometimes this context was not taken over into the
“Contextual Comment” itself. I would read an exceptionally fine analysis of
context, but would find in the “Contextual Comment” the “same old, same old”
standard exegesis that was no different from an ordinary Western commentary.
With all due respect to the memory of the deceased J. Severino
Croatto, to whom this volume is dedicated, I found
his commentaries on Second, Third, and Fourth Isaiah guilty in this regard. I
saw very little connection between his excellent socio-economic dissection of
Argentinean society and the elaborate chiasms and structural units that he lays
out for Isaiah. Croatto returns to the Argentinean
situation in his conclusion, as if a bracket around the “Contextual Comment”
makes the integration between his location and interpretation self-evident. It
does not.
I have the same complaint with the commentaries on
Obadiah and Zephaniah. These commentaries also find chiasms in their respective
works, but how these chiasms relate to their respective Argentinean and
Brazilian contexts are not particularly clear, except for vague references to
“the poor and humble.”[51]
I have nothing against chiasms per se,
but they seemed to be dropped into these commentaries for their own sake,
a-historically and a-contextually. The chiasms, in and of themselves, did not
address the significant questions, “So What?” and “How are they relevant to the
context?” They worked against the grain of the mission of The Global Bible Commentary and detracted from it.
Let us now turn to entries in the volume that, I
think, are successful in making this bridge between context and interpretation.
The first is Gerald West’s treatment of 1 & 2 Samuel. Acknowledging that
the Bible has played a significant role in colonization and apartheid in South
Africa, West also finds in 1 Samuel much that is empowering to South African
readers. West provides a model for bible study in his context with African
Christian women in particular. West guides us through workshops he has done
through the Institute for the Study of the Bible and Worker Ministry Project,
in which African women in small groups discuss the stories of Bathsheba, Tamar,
and Rizpah in 2 Samuel. For example, in discussing
Tamar, the African women deal with standard literary questions of the story,
e.g. who are the main characters and what role do they have in the rape of
Tamar? These women then deal with more contextual questions: Are there women
like Tamar in your church and/or community? Tell their stories. What is the
theology of women who have been raped? What resources are there in your area for
survivors of rape? The women are encouraged to report back to the plenary group
in creative ways through drama, poetry and song.
Working on behalf of the Amazonian peasant,
landless, and river folk, Alessandro Gallazzi’s
commentary uses “conflict” as the interpretive key for Ezekiel 40-48, to show
how this text sides with the elites, who wish to regain the leadership and the
land that they lost during the exile. Although filled with wonderful imagery of
restoration and healing, and the rebuilding of the temple, the text suppresses
the conflicts behind these chapters in order to restore a priestly caste, at
the expense of the “people of the land.” Reading against the grain, Gallazzi concludes that the teachings of Ezekiel 40-48
“are totally unacceptable in our (Amazonian)
context. A critical study that shows that the teaching of these chapters
reflect the interests of the privileged group that produced it helps us
recognize that it is precisely the kind of teaching that contributes to the
plight of the peoples in the Amazonian regions. This teaching is tragically
implemented in our lives through the powerful and oppressive role of the
transnational corporations.” (p. 251)
Gallazzi’s conclusions reveal that in his
context Ezekiel 40-48 contribute to the oppression of that context, rather than
for its healing and restoration. He sees parallel between the church of the
temple (found in Ezekiel which favors the elite, official, despotic, and static
institution) and the church of the house, the Brazilian base communities for
which he is an advocate.
Renita
Weems’ commentary on Jeremiah is a wonderful example
of how her multiple identities and shifting loyalties as a woman, descendant of
African slaves, a US southerner, Protestant minister, mother, wife, and professor
at a black women’s college inform her reading of Jeremiah as a text both to be
submitted to and struggled against (p. 212). Pinpointing Jeremiah as an example
of survival literature, Weems demonstrates how the
destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians was Israel’s 9/11. She compares
Jeremiah’s struggles with the authorities to modern African American “prophets”
for racial justice such a Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X (pp. 216-7).
Critical of the exploitation of women’s battered and raped bodies to make a
prophetic point, Weems, like Gallazzi,
reads the text “against the grain,” revealing that from her context she must
reject the patriarchy of the text:
“What does a loving God have in common with a
jealous, violent husband who stalks his wife and attacks her? These are the
kinds of questions that touch on the ethics of interpretation. We see here that
patriarchy makes connections between women’s bodies and men’s fantasies where
there are none intrinsically.” (p. 219)
The final commentary that models for me the
integration between context and text is Archie Lee’s commentary on
Lamentations. I do not single out Archie’s contribution simply because he is my
friend and is responsible for my spending a wonderful year teaching at his
institution in Hong Kong. Archie’s commentary integrates his Asian context with
the text of Lamentations on three noteworthy levels. First, Archie makes
connections between the lament or dirge form and Chinese laments
cross-culturally. He demonstrates that Lamentations and ancient Chinese laments
have much in common in trying to capture one’s responses to human tragedy and
suffering. Second, Archie relates Lamentations with the poems written on walls
and posters in Tiananmen Square after the 1989 massacre of young student protesters.
Thus besides connecting Lamentations with ancient lament literature, Archie
relates the book to contemporary poetic responses to tragic mourning and loss.
Third, just as Lamentations utilizes a female trope of daughter Zion to convey
the ruin of the nation, Archie lets us see this same female trope in the poetry
of Tiananmen Square. Daughter Zion finds her Asian counterpart in Mother China
shedding tears over the suffering of the nation. I appreciated Archie’s
sensitivity to gender in both the biblical and his own Asian context.
I was only able to single out four entries of this
commentary that I found noteworthy. However, there are many others entries that
will provide much fruit for thought for our students. During this intense time
of globalization and multinational organizations, our students need to become
cognizant of the different ways in which the biblical text is taught and
preached throughout the globe. They also need to become more ethically aware of
how their own biblical interpretation, formed within the imperialistic American
context of their intellectual training in our seminaries, colleges, and
universities, have important ramifications, for better or for worse, in the
wider global arena.
[1]There are altogether
19 writers from this continent. From these, 10 are from Argentina (9 are
related to ISEDET as professors or alumni); 6 are
from Brazil; 3 from Central America (Nicaragua and Costa Rica); 9 are Roman
Catholics and 10 are Evangelical; 6 are female and 13 male. This is the only
imbalance, which reflects society. While there is much in the Latin American
articles on class and ideologies, including something on ethnic issues, gender
is not a strong analytical tool in most articles. It should be, for it is not
the same to be a poor male worker or a poor female worker, to take just one
example. Vieira Sampaio’s analysis of Hosea’s imagery
starting with the questions posited by prostitutes is just one example of what
a gender analysis can bring forth.
[2]
[3]In 1992, in closing
his address to the SBL meeting, Gottwald
stated, “In the end, what is probably most exciting and disturbing about trying
to do a social class analysis of biblical texts is that to do so adequately we
have to acknowledge and take responsibility for our own social class location.”
Norman K. Gottwald, “Social Class as an Analytic and
Hermeneutical Category in Biblical Studies” JBL
112/1 (1993) 21 (3-22).
[4]René Krüger, “Luke’s God and Mammon, a Latin American
Perspective,” 395-396
[5]Néstor Míguez,
“Galatians,” 464-465.
[6]Sandro Gallazzi,
“Ezekiel 40-48,” 246
[7]Valmor da Silva, “Nahum,”
301-302.
[8]Elsa Tamez, “1 Timothy,”
514-515.
[9]Is this more a
female boldness than male?
[10]Krüger, 396
[11]Severino Croatto,
“Isaiah 40-55,” 198-199.
[12]Pablo Richard,
“Jesus: A Latin American Perspective,” 338.
[13]Jorge Pixley, “Exodus,” 17.
[14]Cristina Conti,
“James,” 544. Also Claudia Mendoza (“Malachi,” 325) shows this concern in her
question: “As God’s people, what should we do in this context of misery and
hunger, where respect is lacking and dignity is violated, and where horizons
are obstructed and threatened?” when realizing that the book of Malachi deals
with the right worship to God rather than the serious crisis in the midst of
which it utters its words.
[15]Tânia Mara Vieira
Sampaio, “Hosea,” 262.
[16]Alejandro Duarte,
“Matthew,” 350.
[17]Gallazzi, 247.
[18]Míguez, 465.
[19] Duarte, “Matthew,”
351.
[20] This is represented
and discussed in Faith in a Hyphen:
Cross-Cultural Theologies Down Under (ed. Clive Pearson with a Sub-Version
by Jione Havea; Adelaide:
Open Book, 2004).
[21] Ibid.
[22] Carlos H. Abesamis, "Jesus: an Asian Perspective," in Global Bible Commentary (ed. Daniel
Patte et al.; Nashville: Abingdon, 2004), 333.
[23] See Sandra M. Schneiders, The
Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture
(Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1999), 108-110.
[24] Alejandro Duarte,
"Matthew," in GBC, 350.
[25] Kinakawa's
perspective on 'power' or Ukpong's on 'the Gentiles'
allow such categories in the text to be read through new eyes with new questions.
[26] See Justin Ukpong, "Luke", GBC, 385-394.
[27] So important has
social location become that several recent collections of essays give
prominence to it. Two recent volumes
bear directly on the role of social location in biblical interpretation. See Reading from this Place: Volume 1:
Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States and Reading
from this Place: Volume 2: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in
Global Perspective. The collective group behind The Postmodern Bible
hardly begin their essays before acknowledging the importance of social
location: "Engaging in self-reflexive reading has meant a heightened sense
of our various social locations and speaker-positions, which cannot be reduced
to a facile litany of gender, race, class, and institutional locations"
(5).
[28] Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza, "The Rhetoricity of Historical Knowledge: Pauline Discourse and
its Contextualizations," in Religious
Propaganda and Missionary Competition in the New Testament World: Essays honoring
Dieter Georgi, ed. Lukas Bormann,
Kelly Del Tredici and Angela Standhartinger
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994), 456.
[31] Here I list only some representative
samples for each category.
A. Reading with Others
1. Pablo Richard’s
“Jesus: A Latin American Perspective” in part reads with others as he presents
the exegetical studies of several Latin American scholars engaged in historical
Jesus scholarship (what he calls a “fourth quest for the historical Jesus”).
That reading of Jesus is informed by: 1) a context of marginalization (the
conditions of poverty and marginalization experienced by “the peoples,
cultures, and religions of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania” (338); 2)
a focus on the larger movement of Jesus (not exclusively on Jesus himself,
especially as that quest can reveal the rich diversity of early Christianity
before christendom); and 3) the present need of
biblically-based movements for a re-formation that does not limit Jesus’
importance (as has some creeds) to his birth and death but to the whole of his
life and is movement.
2. R.S. Sugirtharajah reads the Sermon on the Mount with other
resistant readers, with Raja Rammohun Roy (1774-1833)
and Mahatma Ghandi (1869-1948), who read the Sermon
on the Mount as: 1) statements of orthopraxis, not orthodoxy; and 2) in the
light of their cultural hermeneutical interxtext
(e.g., the Bhagavad Gita) ,
thus finding in the Sermon on the Mount basic ethical practices find in other
religious traditions. They also note the
short shrift given to the Sermon on the Mount in India’s postcolonial period,
especially as India has faced such stages as nation-building, indigenization,
and the creation of liberation manifestos (361-365).
3. Musa W. Dube reads with others in
Botswana, to weigh the value of the Synoptic healing accounts in the light of
the pandemic of HIV/AIDS. Her reading
reminds us of the importance of reading the social text (i.e., the unwritten
social subtext that informs how any given culture understand and interacts with
this pandemic) along with the biblical text (379).
B. Reading as
Resistance
1. Nicole Wilkinson
Duran’s “Jesus: A Western Perspective” is a resistant reading if not of the
texts as least of the prevailing interpretations of the biblical texts. She reads Jesus as a criminal—arrested,
tortured, ridiculed criminal whose life thus radically departs from the “pure
and innocent” Jesus that the West likes.
2. Justin Ukpong’s reading of Luke, employing inculturation
hermeneutics, critiques both Luke and 19th and 20th
century Christian missionaries in Nigeria because both had a missiology that failed directly to confront colonial powers
(385-393).
3. Benny Liew’s reading of Acts produces an intercontextual
reading. That is, he is interested both
in the context of Chinese Americans (who
must contend with this nation’s acceleration of economic globalization on the
one hand and its global “(inter)relation and (inter)penetration on the other,”
419) and in the context of Acts
(“community integration, religious diversity, and colonialism”), as that
context (sometimes liberative and sometimes
oppressive, 426-427) is illumined by the work of three Chinese-American
scholars (Yeo Khiok-khng,
David W. Pao, and Timothy Tseng, 420).
C. Reading in
the light of the interactions between the contexts of texts and interpreters
1. Anne Nasimmiyu Wasike’s “Jesus: an
African Perspective” reads from a
post-Vatican II African perspective, with a focus on Jesus as a nurturer (like
a mother who nurtures life), a liberator
(a co-sufferer working to restore humanity and the whole of creation), and a
healer (whose healing was integral, involving the spiritual and the physical).
2. Carlos H. Abesamis’ “Jesus: An Asian Perspective” reads Jesus’
association with the poor in the light of the poor in the Philippines, as that
nation has moved from “four hundred years of Spanish colonization and an
ongoing neo-colonization by the United States and the transnational
corporations” (333). With that reading Abesamis sees two essentials: 1) the intimate connection
between Jesus and God, the source of Jesus’ ministry; and 2) the comprehensive
character of Jesus’ ministry—both in
terms of his total commitment to a ministry of good news and in terms of that
ministry being holistic (physical and spiritual and, with the “kingdom of God”
not simply focusing on heaven (a distant place or time) but on a new experience
of well-being form all forms of oppression.
3. Daniel Patte’s reading of Romans is in part a reading in the light
of the interactions between the contexts of texts and interpreters, as his
emphasis on cultural context (that of being both a “French Huguenot and a white male” makes
clear (429). But his reading also exposes the contextual character of three types of readings in Roman scholarship:
1) the forensic readings (which focus on the theological issue of guilt); 2)
the new covenant readings (which focuses on the rhetorical issue of how Paul seeks to change the attitudes of his
readers/auditors toward each other; and 3) the apocalyptic readings (which
features Paul’s convictions about God’s powerful interventions in the world
(432).
D. Reading to
expose the Contextual Character of Interpretations
1. Pablo Richard’s
“Jesus: A Latin American Perspective” in part exposes the contextual character
of exegetical readings of the historical Jesus, as he, e.g., concludes from
Schweitzer’s ruminations on “nineteenth century reconstructions of the
historical Jesus” (337), reconstructions that “were more reflections of the individual
exegete’s personal interest and culture that historical reconstructions” (337).
2. Nicole Wilkinson
Duran’s “Jesus: A Western Perspective”
exposes the character of the Quest for the historical Jesus (it is
largely a Western male quest), the predominant tension in the quest (whether
Jesus was simply religious or also radical),
and some of the factors shaping it (e.g., the western [American] ideal
self, which portrays Jesus as innocent,
and not as an arrested, beaten, powerless, and ridiculed criminal).
3. Daniel Patte’s reading of Romans is in part a reading in the light
of the interactions between the contexts of texts and interpreters, as his
emphasis on cultural context (that of being both a “French Huguenot and a white male” makes
clear (429). But his reading also exposes the contextual character of three types of readings in Roman scholarship:
1) the forensic readings (which focus on the theological issue of guilt); 2)
the new covenant readings (which focuses on the rhetorical issue of how Paul seeks to change the attitudes of his
readers/auditors toward each other; and 3) the apocalyptic readings (which
features Paul’s convictions about God’s powerful interventions in the world
(432).
[32] On the control of
reading strategies by "ruling interpretive communities," see Renita J. Weems, "Reading
Her Way through the Struggle: African American Women and the Bible," in Stony
the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope
Felder (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 67.
[33] On the rewards and
punishments for certain kinds of readings, see Martindale, Redeeming the
Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge:
University, 1993), 15.
[34] Notions of a
scientific or factual enterprise continue to confer on some works a cloak of
respectability with little thought about the competing claims for what counts
as factual or the extent to which "the concept of objective science is
itself a theoretical construct."
See Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza,
"The Rhetoricity of Historical Knowledge:
Pauline Discourse and its Contextualizations,"
in Religious Propaganda and Missionary Competition in the New Testament
World: Essays honoring Dieter Georgi, ed. Lukas Bormann, Kelly Del Tredici and
Angela Standhartinger (Leiden: E.J.
Brill, 1994), 456.
[35]
I seek here to avoid a rigid politics of identity. With Brad Braxton, I want to avoid the
extremist positions that view "race" exclusively either as
biologically determined or simplistically socially constructed. See Brad R. Braxton, No Longer Slaves:
Galatians and African American Experience (
[36] On biblical hermeneutics in the black
church, see, e.g., Stephen Breck Reid, Experience
and Tradition: A Primer in Black Biblical Hermeneutics (Nashville, TN:
Abingdon, 1990).
[37] According to Paris, these four strands
constitute the black Christian tradition and they are “more basic than the
Scriptures themselves because . . .” (152) black people find them meaningful.
For each strand, Paris gives a definition, a representative and illustrative
statements from the representative. The
Pastoral strand, best represented by J. H., Jackson, uses the bible to console
blacks. It takes an admonitory tone--advancing civic responsibility and racial
productiveness within a nation deemed to be basically in harmony with the
Christian Gospel. The Prophetic strand,
best represented by Martin Luther King Jr., strategically uses Scripture to support
political action in the eradication of contemporary problems (143). The Reform strand, best represented by Adam
Clayton Powell, recognizes the inherent imperfection of the church and of
America but uses scripture to determine the most effective means for redeeming
these institutions. The Nationalist
strand, best represented by Albert Cleage, creates a
canon within a canon of biblical texts supporting nation building. Then, it allegorizes these texts to suggest
that these texts actually address the nation building of black people which must
seek a separate existence geographically or ideologically because of the
history of racism in this country.
[38]Clarice J. Martin, “The Haustafeln
(Household Codes) in African American Biblical Interpretation: ‘Free Slaves’
and ‘Subordinate Women’,” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American
Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis: Fortress,
1991), 206-31. For a similar argument, see Demetrius K. Williams, An End to
This Strife: The Politics of Gender in African American Churches (
[39] Martin, 227.
[40]In support of women’s rights clearly stood
Frederick Douglass. See James H. Cone, For
My People: Black Theology and the Black Church (Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis, 1984), 123-25.
[41] The language of “intragroup
social relations” here is informed by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, African-
American’s Women’s History and the Metalanguage of
Race” Signs 17 (1992) 251-274, esp. 274.
[42] Benjamin Valentin, Mapping Public Theology : beyond culture,
identity, and difference (
[47] Norman K.Gottwald,
"Framing Biblical Interpretation At
[48] Cooper on
Leviticus, Havea on Numbers, West on 1 & 2
Samuel, Lee on Lamentations,
[49] Heidi Hartmann,. "The Unhappy Marriage
of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive
[50] Carol A. Newsom and
Sharon H. Ringe, eds. The Women's Bible Commentary.
Expanded ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998.