Kant and Enlightenment Hermeneutics

For Kant practical reason provided the framework of categories for theology and also for christology. Anything "which is of no practical use" does not concern us. "Scripture texts which contain certain theoretical doctrines stated to be sacred, but surpassing every conception of reason (even of moral reason) may be expounded for the benefit of the practical reason, while those which conflict with practical reason must be so expounded." The doctrine of the Trinity "offers absolutely nothing of practical us...And the same is true of the doctrine of the incarnation of one divine person." Something similar can be said of the stories of the resurrection and the ascension. For "articles of faith do not mean what ought to be believed...but what for practical (moral) purposes it is practical and useful to accept, even though it may not be possible to prove it, but only to believe it." Thus the revelation of God can only be what is in agreement with what reason understands to be "appropriate to God." "In this way all expositions of scripture, in so far as they concern religion, must be made in accordance with the principle of morality intended in revelation, and without this are either in practice empty or even hindrances to good." For we understand only him who speaks with us through our own understanding and our own reason. Therefore "the God in us", i.e. the free conscience, is "himself the interpreter."

In Moltmann, The Crucified God (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 93-94.

Where bad science and hermeneutics intersect

If we believe that the same God who created asn evolving universe is revealed in an evolving Bible, we can derive some fascinating insights from contemporary studies of genetics. Today's chickens, it turns out, still have the genetic information in their DNA that was used to produce long tails, scales, and teeth in their ancestors the dinosaurs. During embryonic development, some of those primitive dinosaur characteristics still manifest themselves in chicken. (Human embryos similarly have stages where they sport gills and tails, so it is said that our ontogeny recapitulates our phylogeny.) We might say that the Bible similarly retains the record of its own evolution, and in our individual spiritual development we may personally recapitulate earlier stages.

Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions that are Transforming the Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 273.

It is tough to even know where to start with this quote. Do you start with the hopelessly outdated (Contemporary? Really?) and abandoned arguments for evolutation based on embryology? (I always knew that dinosaurs had something to do with my spiritual formation. I just could never figure out precisely what. Thanks!) Do you start with the retreaded developmental hypotheses of source criticism? I have not read the entire book in question, so I don't want to be unfair or uncharitable to McLaren, but I was under the impression that he was a prominant voice for the emerging movement. So why is he acting so modern by restating all of their old arguments?

Modernistic Homosexual Interpretations

The religious scriptures forbidding homosexuality were written in what was still a highly rustic milieu. Therefore they ought to have no hold on the present, at least as regards sexuality. When there is, in Bertrand Russell's famous words, "a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men," little in the way of moral progress can be achieved. Opposition to homosexuality, in whatever form it appears, indicates not so much a lower intelligence in the individual but participation in a consensus of opinion which represents a lower order of intelligence attained by civilized man. Let's hope a wiser, kinder, and more humane consensus will prevail.

John Zerilli, "Christians, Homosexuality, and the Same-Sex Marriage Question," The Humanist (May-June 2010), 32.

Morality of Literary Understanding

...With regard to the moralityof literary understanding, Augustine advocates what is for him the prime hermeneutical virtue, namely, charity. This is a far cry fromt eh typical modern appraoch that puts a premium on distrust and suspicion, a strategy best exemplified perhaps by an essay by W.K. Clifford entitled "The Ethics of Belief." Clifford argues that it is immoral to believe something unless you first have sufficient evidence or proof: "To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." In contrast, Augustine's treatise On the Usefulness of Belief states that "nothing would remain stable in human society if we determined to believe nothing that we could not scientifically establish." With regard to reading, it "is most honorable to believe that an author was a good man, whose writings were inteded to benefit the human race and posterity." The first hermeneutic reflex, therefore, should be charity towards the author. If we come to a text believing that there is nothing in it, we are likely to go away as empty as we come. Augustine encourages readers to approach texts, paricularly the classics and especially the Scriptures, in the expectation that they contain something valuable and true...

...There is something in the text that is not of the reader's own making. The believing reader must not violate but venerate this "other." For readers come not only to knoweldge but also to self-knowledge when they allow the text to have its say. The interpretive virtues that I will commend throughout this work also figure among the cardinal virtues of Christian theology: faith, hope, love, and humility. These are the same virtues that make society possible. Life together is largely interpretation; good hermeneutics makes good neighbors. The Golden Rule, for hermeneutics and ethics alike, is to treat significant others--texts, persons, God--with love and respect.

Kevin Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 32

Evolutionary Theology?

It is simply historically false to suggest that the intellectual boundaries of Christianity were not defined until well after the New Testament era. The evidence taht they already existed in the New Testament era is compelling. However, as offshoots and aberrations from the earlier and more apostolic faith arose in the second through fourth centuries, the church was forced to more clearly define Christological orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Then indeed the boundaries were more rigidly and firmly put in place. But this is not because before the fourth century what existed was a "free-range" Christianity that would have considered Gnosticism (or, for that matter, an inadequate Christology or polytheism or libertinism) a legitimate variant on a Christian theme. It is because the specific problems raised by such later deviations had not yet formed, or had not yet fully formed, in the New Testament era.

Ben Witherington III, What Have They Done with Jesus? (San Francisco: Harper, 2006) 224-225.

A Brief History of Interpretation

A very helpful summary of the history of biblical interpretation by Dr. Thomas Long...

http://community.tncc.edu/faculty/longt/REL200/intro-comp-interp.htm

Subjective Reading

Biblical scholars have been slow to awaken from the dream in which positivist science occupies a space apart from interests and values, to awaken to the realization that our representations of and discourse about what the text meant and how it means are inseparable from what we want it to mean, from how we will it to mean.

George Aichele in Grenz, Beyond Foundationalism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 85.

Making the Bible Relevant

If the Bible has grown strangely silent in the church, we might follow the pathway suggested by commentators such as Hans Frei and lay the blame for this tragedy at the feet of theologians and biblical scholars themselves Of course, Christian thinkers did not set out to silence scripture. Rather, the Bible's loss of voice came as an unintended result of well-intentioned persons who sought to recover the Bible and save theology in the wake of the Enlightenment. The irony of this situation is that in a sense scripture caught laryngitis from its would-be physicians.

Stanley Grenz and John Franke, Beyond Foundationalism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 58-59.

Rationalistic Hermeneutics

The strongly rationalist ethos of the enlightenment was often reflected in what might be styled as a spiritual embargo on any kind of emotional involvement with Scripture, or any use of the human faculty of imagination…The Enlightenment forced evangelicalism into adopting approaches to spirituality which have resulted in rather cool, detached and rational approaches to Scripture…As Martin Luther constantly insisted, Christianity is concerned with totus homo, the “entire human person,” not just the human mind.

McGrath in David L. Little, “Inductive Hermeneutics and the Early Restoration Movement” in Stone-Campbell Journal 3 (Spring, 2000): 16.

Emerging Church Hermeneutics

The coordinators of Emergent have often been asked (usually by their critics) to proffer a doctrinal statement that lays out clearly what they believe. I am merely a participant in the conversation who delights in the ongoing reformation that occurs as we bring the Gospel into engagement with culture in ever new ways. But I have been asked to respond to this ongoing demand for clarity and closure. I believe there are several reasons why Emergent should not have a "statement of faith" to which its members are asked (or required) to subscribe. Such a move would be unnecessary, inappropriate and disastrous. Why is such a move unnecessary? Jesus did not have a "statement of faith." He called others into faithful relation to God through life in the Spirit. As with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, he was not concerned primarily with whether individuals gave cognitive assent to abstract propositions but with calling persons into trustworthy community through embodied and concrete acts of faithfulness. The writers of the New Testament were not obsessed with finding a final set of propositions the assent to which marks off true believers. Paul, Luke and John all talked much more about the mission to which we should commit ourselves than they did about the propositions to which we should assent. The very idea of a "statement of faith" is mired in modernist assumptions and driven by modernist anxieties.

Continue reading LeRon Shults at http://emergent-us.typepad.com/emergentus/2006/05/doctrinal_state.html

Demythologizing

The restatement of mythology is a requirement of faith itself. For faith needs to be emancipated from its association with every worldview expressed in objective terms, whether it be a mythical or a scientific one…it has tried to project God and his acts into the sphere of objective reality.

R. Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth, 210.

Demythologizing

Demythologizing is the radical application of the doctrine of justification by faith to the sphere of knowledge and thought. Like the doctrine of justification, de-mythologizing destroys every longing for security. There is no difference between security based on good works and security built on objectifying knowledge. The man who desires to believe in God must know that he has nothing at his disposal on which to build his faith, that he is, so to speak, in a vacuum.

R. Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Scribners, 1958), 84.

Rudolph Bultmann

In all such factual knowledge or knowledge of principles the world is presumed to have the character of something objective, passive, accessible to simple observation. That is, the world is conceived in conformity with the Greek understanding of being…In such a conception of the world as an objective entity, man himself is regarded as an object (as a fragment of the cosmos); his self-understanding is achieved along with the understanding of the world (and vice versa)…But the existence of man does not have the character of an objective entity but is historic existence; where it is recognized that man in his history can become a new person and consequently can also newly understand himself; where, therefore, it is recognized that the being of man is potentiality to be. That potentiality to be is always at risk; its possibilities are grasped each time by man in resolve, in decision. An understanding of these possibilities of man’s existence here and now would obviously be a new understanding each time, since a historical situation with its character of possibility is not understood if it is conceived as a “case” illustrating a general law. The historical situation cannot possibly be “seen” in the Greek sense as an objective fact; it can only be heard as a summons.

R. Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, ed. R. Funk and L.P. Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 187.

Rudolph Bultmann

All historical phenomena which are subject to this kind of historical investigation are only relative entities, entities which exist only within an immense inter-related complex. Nothing which stands within this inter-relationship can clam absolute value. Even the historical Jesus is a phenomenon among other phenomena, not an absolute entity.

R. Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, ed. R. Funk and L.P. Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 31.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1768-1834)

Schleiermacher’s system has two major factors, the grammatical and the psychological, which correspond to the two spheres of knowledge—the external linguistic codes and the internal consciousness. Grammatical inquiry attempts to develop the linguistic dimension by demarcating the meaning of individual concepts on the basis of the surrounding words. He was ahead of his time in demanding that meaning be seen in the whole, not in isolated parts. Yet he is best known for the psychological aspect. Schleiermacher taught that the interpreter should align himself with the mind of the author and re-create the whole thought of the text as part of the author’s life. The interpreter’s task then is to reconstruct not only the text but the whole process of creating the thought on the part of the author.

Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 468.