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?

Clarity, Community, and Scripture 1

Christians with their Bible in hand, in mouth and ear, on scroll, codex, leather-bond or scrolling again across the screen, have always been concerned with interpretation. Claritas Scripturae, the efficaciousness or sufficiency of scripture to communicate its message to the people of God via the Holy Spirit, was one of the clarion calls of the Protestant Reformation, but it need not nor should be a call to either a closed interpretation by one group or, worse, by one person. A Christian catholicity is always gathered at the communion table of ecumenism, trusting that the clarity of the Bible fully speaks and guides our differing tradition-shaped hermeneutics, but this promise never deifies our traditions or their shared, often troubled ecclesial history.

Reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin used the term claritas to argue that scripture was not the custody of only the church elite but could be read and understood by all Christians. This was a rich insight, for it freed up whole generations of Christians to more directly encounter God's Word. Before many had only received it in mediated forms through sermon, play, and visual art, and there is much to be said for this, but there is also a particular power in having access to the texts yourself, at least in translation. Unfortunately, this call for clarity was abused by some who used it to suggest that readers of scripture could safely ignore the gifts of scholarship, as well as the teaching of other Christians. Some went so far as to believe that a Christian's personal understanding of scripture was not open to any external test or gauge of its validity. This was a radical individualism that the Reformers were shocked by.

Luther and Calvin did not understand the clarity of scripture to suggest that it was not in need of interpretation but that it was sufficient for God's purposes and that scripture possessed the resources aided by the Spirit to test the fallible understanding of each generation of the church. Indeed, scripture as the instrument of the Spirit could act as a corrector and refiner of received understanding. This is why the public reading and preaching of scripture in corporate worship is so essential. That corrective is mediated via the community of interpreters, the church as the people of God, the Body of Christ, and the Temple of the Spirit. Scripture is not the sole trust of any one class of Christians, and as such, it is therefore best understood by bringing together the insights of the larger people of God. This claritas does not deny the need for tradition as the bed in which our readings lie nor does it mean to discount that Christo-typological reading which shapes and collects the Canon.

Scripture carries a certain authority and perfection that no other text has. It therefore has a uniqueness that sets it apart in vital ways from other works. God's Word is without fault, while human works always carry some fault line of error. God's speech is always the prophetic pouring forth of his divine love; Revelation is an act of divine beauty and grace. And the love that dwells in perichoresis is found in words and images. The Son is the eternal Logos of the Father, and the Holy Spirit continually teaches us that Word in the apostolic testimony.

Yet scripture also shares a human element with other words. The clarity of scripture reminds us that human texts are best understood in a community of interpreters with a tradition and a history of reception. We need multiple counsel to explicate meaning, and that counsel is more than our contemporary debates. We learn with the Christian dead, the communio sanctorum (“the communion of saints”), by subjecting our interpretation to the history of interpretation. Equally, scripture's clarity also reminds us that texts are partially independent of our understanding of them, even as they are taught in a history of professional and readerly reception.