The Bible Doesn't "Say" Anything
/On this week’s episode of the podcast I said, “The Bible doesn’t say anything. We say what the Bible says and somewhere in the middle of all our saying we can find value.” I wanted to follow up on that convoluted statement with a bit more explanation.
A number of people I greatly admire have written popular texts about biblical interpretation recently–Rachel Held Evans (Inspired), Pete Enns (The Bible Tells Me So, How the Bible Actually Works), and Rob Bell (What Is the Bible?). Clearly there is a desire to find new ways to think through biblical interpretation. I have one particular insight I would like to add to the pile, if it is in fact adding it, that comes through an engagement with postmodern philosophy.
In attempting to show language’s influence over our world-views, it was Jacques Derrida who suggested “There is no out-of-context,” or even more famously, “there is nothing outside textuality.”[1] Essentially, his assertion was that, due to a number of factors, meaning is not automatically transferred in written language. In other words, one cannot separate ‘the text’ from its context and still expect to find truth. Therefore, as soon as a text is read, it has undergone a “re-contextualization,” and has been given new meaning.
While Derrida’s critique seems worthwhile, it may lead to frustration for those of us who are attempting to extract meaning from the Bible. If we have no way of understanding the ‘true’ meaning of a text, why read it? It is here that we encounter Hans-Georg Gadamer, who accounted for Derrida’s critique in developing his concept of “horizons.”[2] This concepts works like this: Imagine the reader, in their context, as a horizon, and the text, along with what is available from its context, as a horizon. Although meaning is not directly transferred in the text, one can find meaning at the “fusion” of these “horizons.”
From the perspective of an individual reader, Gadamer offers the humility to admit that we cannot arrive at the full meaning of a text. This concept transfers to the community as well.
Hopefully, this diagram demonstrates why having multiple perspectives allows us to have a broader understanding of meaning in the text, while still falling short of the full or complete meaning.
“Doesn’t this cause us to descend into relativism,” you might ask. The answer is no.
We were already in a blind relativism, where one perspective dominated the landscape and ignored others. We are just admitting it now, and are therefore able to recognize, in humility, the shortcomings of static and singular forms of meaning-making.
Above all, my desire is not to prove anything wrong, but rather to do two things: 1. To offer this concept which has been life-giving to me and that has helped me to push back into Scripture. As one small example, this model has a way of making a ‘contradiction’ in scripture really lose its halting power. 2. To take power away from anyone who would seek to use ‘truth’ as a bludgeon. Alleged truths have a funny way of making meaning disappear.
To attempt to summarize simply, we all have a perspective/context which acts as a lens on our reading. That is what we can call our bias. Even if it is possible for text to inherently contain meaning, our biases would prevent us from seeing all of it. But, rather than giving up on meaning in scripture, I suggest we continue forward. Here’s how:
1. We explore our biases so we know what we are bringing to the text.
2. We learn as much as we can about the context these words were originally written in.
3. We open ourselves up to other perspectives; perspectives which, although they have blind spots in their lenses, don’t have the same blindspots as we have in ours.
4. Repeat this process endlessly.
