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Tuesday, 14 November 2006 14:13 |
 | | Marc Mullinax |
"What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art... Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all."
ÇƒÏ Susan Sontag
ï
MARS HILL ÇƒÓ Last week I discussed a liberal interpretation of ancient texts, wherein one reads the ancient words as if they had modern agendas in mind.
Itës
called eisegesis. Itës our natural tendency to read into a text the
passions and ideas by which one is already seized. One starts not with
the text, but with oneës neurosis, and then looks for scriptures that
sustains it.
If one is
already anti-anything, one goes to sacred texts for justification of
that bias. We all do this. We are well-intentioned but opinionated,
fallible folks who want to find as much material in support of our
position as possible. We rarely pause to study scripture in context to
see if it really agrees with our position or not.
Whatës at stake? We silence the divine voice with our own.
So in eisegesis,
we "read into" the text just about anything we want. Usually whatever
insecurity or habit we have us will guide our reading of holy writ. We
even search for the absence of something. I once had a friend who said
that because there was no explicit rule against pre-marital sex, he
could therefore engage in it without guilt.
But there is a way out of this liberal bias in biblical interpretation. Itës hard, disciplined, but well worth the time.
Exegesis means
"reading out of" the scriptures: Line-by-line, verse-by-verse,
chapter-by-chapter. Exegesis allows the text to stand on its own with a
minimal amount of subjective interpretation. It means shutting down our
pet prejudicial and modernist ways we read the text.
Todayës
ideologies are not properties of the original text. People bring their
ideology to it, and import their own meanings to the texts. We should
instead ask questions of the texts: To whom was this text first useful?
Who were the original hearers, and what were they "hearing" in this
text? Text informs our context, not vice-versa.
This is hard. We very easily accept the premise that our concerns today have been the ever-abiding concerns of people of faith.
There is no
innocent reading of the Bible. The Bible will mirror whatever conflicts
we have. (It may mirror only the conflicts we nurse along.) If
somethingës not within us, we wonët find it in the Bible. If we think
life is a struggle, we will find struggle as a theme. If we think life
is a feast, or a party, weëll use the Bible as a happy hunting ground
for our partying.
In any event, we
are doing spiritual work. We are always embodying and acting on our
invisible values. Becoming awake and conscious of ourselves before we
become biblical interpreters is a major part of the life of mature
spirituality.
In conclusion,
we live in a river of tradition, and it is easy to get swept along in
the mainstream. It is hard to make it the shore, to the sidelines,
catch oneës breath, and see where weëve been, where weëre headed and
who we might be.
Where you are
depends on what you see. The trick in ancient text interpretation is to
recognize our blind spots as we seek to see something old again, as if
for the first time. Liberal interpreters of ancient texts may be too
entwined in modern contexts, so that they miss out on the warmth of
ancient fireplaces.
ï
Dr. Marc S.
Mullinax, chairman of the philosophy and religion departments at Mars
Hill College, can be reached at mmullinax-at-mhc.edu.
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