Interpretation and living

Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised

As I said in my last post, I’ve been reading First Theology by Kevin Vanhoozer (on and off). I’ve particularly enjoy the essay ‘The World Well Staged? Theology, Culture and Hermeneutics.’ He ends this with a section on hermeneutics (i.e. interpretation of the text) as something that must be lived out. I almost want to quote the whole thing, but here are some highlights:

The community of biblical interpreters is, of course, the church. The church is a hermeneutical community, a community of interpreters constituted by the Word and enlivened by the Spirit. Indeed the Spirit is the enabling power that ministers the Word and renders it effective.
…
The most important interpretation of the Bible is the way we live our lives. We appropriate the meaning of a text when we let its world into ours, when we put its pages into our practice. We apply a text’s meaning to our lives when we perform the text. Our response to a text constitutes its “lived meaning.”
…
Ricoeur speaks of living in the “world” of the text. if we dwell in a text’s world long enough, it will begin to shape our vision and our values. This is the function of culture – the world of meaning – too. It is by faith that the community of biblical interpreters believingly enters the text; it is the Spirit who enables the Word’s world to cultivate the image of God that we bear and that we are. The church’s aim should be to render a faithful interpretation of Scripture.

I love the idea of interpretation being how we live out the text, rather than just a intellectual exercise. Of course, the idea that we should live out what we read isn’t so radical (at least in theory!), but somehow characterising it as interpretation adds depth to it, for me at least. It’s more than a few bullet points that we should abide by. Our whole lives interpret God’s word for those around.

Also, it is not just something I do as an individual — the interpretation is done as a community. It is our shared life that expresses the meaning of ‘the text’. And, hopefully, people seeing the community at-life will experience ‘the text’ directly.

Vanhoozer’s discussion makes a number of connections for me…

First, when Paul write to some of the early churches he effectively says ‘You are the message’. (I fact this is Eugene Peterson’s translation.) It seems to me that this captures the same idea.

Second, in ‘Velvet Elvis’ Rob Bell (notoriously) suggests that our doctrines are like springs on a trampoline. What I took from this (I’m not sure this is quite what he said) is that they propel us into action. Connecting this to the quotes above: perhaps we can say that doctrine is there to enable us to interpret correctly, to act in a way that presents a faithful ‘lived meaning’.

Finally, I was reminded of Tom Wright’s essay ‘How can the Bible be authoritative?‘ Wright pictures the Biblical Story as a 5-act play. We are in the fifth act and our performance must be consistent with those before, and our knowledge of the ending. Vanhoozer uses very similar imagery (possibly not coincidentally):

The community of faith continues the story, sustained by memory and hope. it lives in the second act commemorating the first, holding its breath for the last. Christian interpreters perform not gospel but apocalyptic when they contemplate that glorious Finale, when the world will indeed be well staged and all manner of things shall be well.

All-in-all a really interesting essay. One last quote to finish up with:

The community of believers represents a prophetic counterculture that challenges the gods and myths of the day with regard to which world and life view best fulfills humanity. The church’s challenge will only be as strong as its expression of the biblical world and life view. Again, this is not only a matter of correct doctrine but also a matter of faithful biblical performance. The church must be the cultural incarnation of the story of God in Christ.

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Read more | Comments (0) | May 6th, 2007

Imagination & trust

Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised

I’ve been dipping into Kevin Vanhoozer’s book First Theology recently, which has been great. One comment triggered an old thought whihc I never got around to writing about (I don’t think?) The quote is this:

…the imagination, formed and guided by the canon may be an organ of truth. It may be that some of our perspectives – the biblical “world views,” to be exact – allow us to imagine reality rightly.

This connected, for me, with the process of making art as a Christian. We often seem tentaive about truly letting our imaginations go. Christian art often appears to be tied to images and metaphors taken directly from the Bible, as if only these images are allowed. Or it is tied to explicit expressions of Christian belief which can be imaginatively flat and almost border on propaganda in their lack of subtlety. (Probably being over dramatic here, but you get the drift.)

It’s struck me before that, rather than try to control the artistic output by making it conform to a restrict image/idea set, we need to allow our grasp of the Christian story to sink in deep, to affect our worldview, so that when we act creatively/imaginatively the output is saturated in that view whether or not this is explicit. Bouncing off Vanhoozer, we have to trust that our imaginations can produce images in line with reality.

Perhaps we are scared of our imagination and scared that imagining reality rightly cannot happen? Interestingly, Vanhoozer points out that this was Nietzsche’s problem:

Ironically, the self-proclaimed champion of creativity turns out to have a low view of the imagination: imaginative projections are fictive constructions an do not correspond to the way things are.

If our minds are truly ‘being renewed’, then we should expect that our imaginations and artistic output will be increasingly conformed to God’s story without us constantly trying to exert control. (This reminds me of someone who told me that the longer he was a Christian the more morally he acted in his dreams.)

The observations from Tom Wright, Brian Walsh and others that Paul used Empire/Cesear images in his letters when talking about Jesus should allow us to see that we can use other metaphors and images in our communication without inherent compromise. In fact, if we aren’t able to use the images of our surrounding culture — appropriately transformed via a transformed imagination — then we may alienate with our audience – either because they don’t understand the symbols we used or because they conciously reject them. Alternatively, if we can use and transform these images then the challenge to the culture may be heard more loudly and more acutely.

[I think this fits obliquely with a post from a long time ago...]

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Read more | Comments (0) | May 2nd, 2007

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