A View from the Rooftop
After my fall semester, I wrote a blog post about how seminary was going for me. Now that I have finished my spring semester, I thought I would do it again.
After my fall semester, I wrote about totally 'getting into' the Bible, since I had been taught what to do with it. Here's the original post: http://www.christensenshare.blogspot.com/2011/12/so-how-is-seminary-going.html My big "take-away" from the fall: I learned the technique of Biblical exegesis--knowing history, using literary analysis techniques, utilizing word/language studies and grammatical criticism, etc, etc, etc. But now onto the spring semester....
My big "take-away" from the spring: Scripture is always interpreted. ALWAYS. And usually through a filter of religious doctrine/dogma/tradition.
Much of what I thought was in the Bible was actually tradition (a.k.a. religious dogma). My Bible professor from this semester forced me to release that dogma, harshly getting on my case a few times. Ouch, yes, it was painful. I had to read what was actually in the text, not filtering it through my own context and tradition, but within the context in which the authors wrote. This was really hard! I got hung up on words, like "Christ," "Son of God," and "Lord" or "lord." I realized that these words came to me already interpreted, and I had naturally folded them into my dogma. This dogma/tradition then became a filter for everything read. The process of removing your tradition/dogma filter requires entering an ancient, eastern culture.
Okay, so back to interpretation. Guess what the Newer Testament is. It is an interpretation of the Older Testament. Yep, the Newer Testament writers did not know they were writing Scripture. They were writing for their own times, and making arguments, debating, and interpreting Hebrew Scripture. They were writing about what it meant to be a good Jew in the first 150 years after Jesus' death. And they didn't always agree.
So now, even though these fellows didn't intend to write Scripture, their documents (a.k.a their interpretation of Hebrew Scripture) got canonized. And we have them as the Newer Testament, and guess what we do with them. We interpret them! We blog and preach and write articles and develop curriculum. We interpret them all the time. And just like the early Jewish Christians, we don't always agree.
Well, I got thinking one day... What if someone were to take some of our interpretations--blogs, letters, preaching notes, etc--and canonized them? Crazy thought! Speculating ahead, what would readers 2000 years from now be reading into them? Would they really understand what was happening now or the various perspectives on the issues? Could they apply it to their 'current' situation with so little shared knowledge between the reader and author? What techniques and tools would they need in order to do that?
Imagine being on the sidewalk in a big city. It is busy; people and cars are hustling and bustling about. You can only see so far ahead of yourself, just because of the buildings and people and activity. Now imagine yourself standing on top the tallest building in that same city, looking down on all the activity. You can now see traffic and movement patterns from above.
When it comes to the Bible, I feel like I've learned some techniques in order to stand on the rooftop. I used to always be at the street level, limited to a small space and only one or two specific interpretation methods. But now, when I chose to, I can take an elevator to a rooftop, look down, and realize that their are different patterns, different modalities and ways that people approach things. And then, I ride that elevator back down and get back involved at the street level again, interpretting away.
One last point that I think needs to be said: When it comes to interpretation of Scripture, we need to realize that the process is not static. For example, many Christians used to interpret the Bible as saying slavery was okay, but most Christians now would never interpret Scripture that way. Many Christians used to interpret the Bible as saying that woman shouldn't be pastors, but most Christians would never say that now. You see, through time, culturally, we pick out different passages to put our faith into. People who claim to be literalists have a hard time with the idea that they actually "interpret" Scripture, but unless someone has vowed to never eat shrimp (Leviticus 11:12), they probably need to recognize they do it, just like the rest of us.
After my fall semester, I wrote about totally 'getting into' the Bible, since I had been taught what to do with it. Here's the original post: http://www.christensenshare.blogspot.com/2011/12/so-how-is-seminary-going.html My big "take-away" from the fall: I learned the technique of Biblical exegesis--knowing history, using literary analysis techniques, utilizing word/language studies and grammatical criticism, etc, etc, etc. But now onto the spring semester....
My big "take-away" from the spring: Scripture is always interpreted. ALWAYS. And usually through a filter of religious doctrine/dogma/tradition.
Much of what I thought was in the Bible was actually tradition (a.k.a. religious dogma). My Bible professor from this semester forced me to release that dogma, harshly getting on my case a few times. Ouch, yes, it was painful. I had to read what was actually in the text, not filtering it through my own context and tradition, but within the context in which the authors wrote. This was really hard! I got hung up on words, like "Christ," "Son of God," and "Lord" or "lord." I realized that these words came to me already interpreted, and I had naturally folded them into my dogma. This dogma/tradition then became a filter for everything read. The process of removing your tradition/dogma filter requires entering an ancient, eastern culture.
Okay, so back to interpretation. Guess what the Newer Testament is. It is an interpretation of the Older Testament. Yep, the Newer Testament writers did not know they were writing Scripture. They were writing for their own times, and making arguments, debating, and interpreting Hebrew Scripture. They were writing about what it meant to be a good Jew in the first 150 years after Jesus' death. And they didn't always agree.
So now, even though these fellows didn't intend to write Scripture, their documents (a.k.a their interpretation of Hebrew Scripture) got canonized. And we have them as the Newer Testament, and guess what we do with them. We interpret them! We blog and preach and write articles and develop curriculum. We interpret them all the time. And just like the early Jewish Christians, we don't always agree.
Well, I got thinking one day... What if someone were to take some of our interpretations--blogs, letters, preaching notes, etc--and canonized them? Crazy thought! Speculating ahead, what would readers 2000 years from now be reading into them? Would they really understand what was happening now or the various perspectives on the issues? Could they apply it to their 'current' situation with so little shared knowledge between the reader and author? What techniques and tools would they need in order to do that?
Imagine being on the sidewalk in a big city. It is busy; people and cars are hustling and bustling about. You can only see so far ahead of yourself, just because of the buildings and people and activity. Now imagine yourself standing on top the tallest building in that same city, looking down on all the activity. You can now see traffic and movement patterns from above.
When it comes to the Bible, I feel like I've learned some techniques in order to stand on the rooftop. I used to always be at the street level, limited to a small space and only one or two specific interpretation methods. But now, when I chose to, I can take an elevator to a rooftop, look down, and realize that their are different patterns, different modalities and ways that people approach things. And then, I ride that elevator back down and get back involved at the street level again, interpretting away.
One last point that I think needs to be said: When it comes to interpretation of Scripture, we need to realize that the process is not static. For example, many Christians used to interpret the Bible as saying slavery was okay, but most Christians now would never interpret Scripture that way. Many Christians used to interpret the Bible as saying that woman shouldn't be pastors, but most Christians would never say that now. You see, through time, culturally, we pick out different passages to put our faith into. People who claim to be literalists have a hard time with the idea that they actually "interpret" Scripture, but unless someone has vowed to never eat shrimp (Leviticus 11:12), they probably need to recognize they do it, just like the rest of us.
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