Clarity, Community, and Scripture 2

Texts have the power to challenge us, to confound us, or even to reform us. If textual meaning is mediated through a cultural hermeneutic, through a standpoint and tradition, it is neither the sole property of them. It can speak from without, acting as partner in the learning. Yet these textual meanings must be subject to a particular Christian practice of learning. That we are social beings; that our personhood is woven with others; that we are destined for a community of shalom; that we created for communion--all this suggests that at the heart of our textual, interpretive nature is a call to love. Interpretative learning should be works of Christian charity.

Reading any human work calls for discernment and skill. We have to learn what this work will offer us. Alan Jacobs observes that too often readers act as if practicing discernment equals going to a text with preconceived notions of what they will find:

A healthy suspicion, bounded by a commitment to the love of neighbor, is more properly discernment: not the discernment of Nietzsche's serpent, which can only suspect and therefore is not discernment at all--since its conclusions are preestablished--but the discernment that is prepared to find blessings and cultivate friendships; in short, to receive gifts.

In other words, true discernment is looking to learn. True learning requires hope for something good, as well as a sifting of what is deceptive. Isaiah tells us that we should be wary of calling the sweet bitter and the evil good. Most (if not all) texts are going to be a mixture of the two, and it is work of interpretive kindness to treat them with a modicum of humility and respect. I have as my responsibility providing resources, methods, and models for how to interpret and how to interpret wisely. Milton in his famous treatise against censorship, Areopagitica, argued that books are expressions of rationality and, therefore, of the imago dei:

[A]s good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

For Milton, to censor a book is akin to the murder of ideas. I admit that I am sometimes willing to practice something like censorship in my choice of texts, not to kill a book, but to save it. If a reader is not prepared for a text, the text will speak to her in a distorted way, seeming to offer a message other than what the author intended or even the text seems to allow.

We are not always prepared to receive the gifts before us. How, then, do we help ourselves and our students reach this place of epistemic charity and justice?