SCM Studyguide: Biblical Hermeneutics 2nd edition

SCM STUDYGUIDE TO BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS

2nd Edition

David A. Holgate and Rachel Starr

© David A. Holgate and Rachel Starr 2019

Published in 2019 by SCM Press

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Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Where Do We Want to Go?

2. Past Experience and Present Expectations

3. Tools for Exegesis

4. Our Reality

5. Committed Readings

6. Enabling Dialogue with the Text

7. Our Goal: Life-Affirming Interpretations

Summary of the Interpretative Process

References and Further Reading

Acknowledgements

We prepared the first edition of this book while working with teaching colleagues and students of the Southern Theological Education and Training Scheme. Though the approach is our own, we are thankful to all those who helped us develop it. Since then, the book has been widely used in theological education, and we are grateful for the invitation from SCM to revise it for a second edition. This process has shown us how much the discipline of Biblical Studies, we and the world have changed since 2006.

For this second edition, we would like to thank all those who have continued to encourage us to be better biblical interpreters. David would like to thank friends and colleagues at Manchester Cathedral, the Department of Religions and Theology at the University of Manchester, participants in the Scriptural Reasoning and Scriptural Encounter groups, and John Vincent of the Urban Theology Union. Rachel offers her thanks to friends and colleagues at the Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education, Birmingham, especially David Allen, Dulcie Dixon McKenzie, Paul Nzacahayo and Carlton Turner for offering comments and resources for different sections of the book. Thanks also to Bob Bartindale for his helpful comments and other colleagues from the Methodist Church in Britain for their support and use of the book in the Worship Leaders and Local Preachers course.

Working together on this project has reminded us that biblical interpretation is a collaborative activity. We hope that you will find opportunities to interact with others each time you seek to work out what the Bible is saying to you today.

Introduction

Purpose

This book offers a framework for interpreting the Bible. It goes beyond showing you how to do exegesis and enables you to relate the Bible to your experience of everyday life. While we have tried to provide a clear approach to biblical interpretation, we do not intend to be prescriptive. We offer this Studyguide to you as a practical tool to help you to develop good interpretative strategies of your own. There should come a time when you feel confident enough to be able to set this book aside. By then, we hope that you will have proven to yourself that, while there is no single, agreed method for interpreting the Bible, there is a great deal of agreement on the resources that need to be used by responsible interpreters.

Practicalities

You can use this Studyguide in a number of ways. Initially, you may find it helpful just to review the Contents page and the Summary at the back. As you need to learn more about each of the steps in this process, we hope that you will read through each chapter more fully. Please enter into dialogue with the book.

Where you disagree with something, explain to yourself why you do so and offer a better alternative. This will help you develop an interpretative strategy of your own. As you use this Studyguide to develop your skills, we hope that the ‘Try it out’ boxes will offer you practical help with the passage you are working on.

1. Where Do We Want to Go?

Introduction: using this book

This book is designed to help you become a better reader and interpreter of the Bible. It offers an integrated approach, introducing a range of critical methods to enable you to interpret biblical passages for yourself. We do not suggest it is possible to arrive at one final correct interpretation of any biblical passage. Rather, the process outlined here is designed to help you interpret the text carefully, critically and creatively. And to be open to fresh insights each time you read the text, in the light of new information about yourself, the world and the Bible.

Alongside this book, you may find it helpful to have access to a dictionary of biblical interpretation, to look up key words and concepts discussed here. One book we regularly refer to is the Handbook of Biblical Interpretation (4th edition, 2011) by the father-and-son team of Richard and R. Kendall Soulen. The website www.bibleodyssey.org, a project of the Society of Biblical Literature, offers short articles, maps and videos introducing biblical passages, context and interpretative methods.

Identifying our reason for reading the Bible

Each time we turn to the Bible, we do so with a particular purpose, for example, to refer to a passage as background reading for an English literature course, or to learn more about Jewish or Christian beliefs. But we may have a deeper motivation for reading the Bible: because we regard it as a sacred book, a great literary work, a useful historical source, or perhaps a problematic text that needs to be challenged or understood.

Try it out

Jot down a few thoughts on how you view the Bible, and then try to state your underlying reason for reading the Bible.

There are many reasons for studying the Bible, all with different goals and outcomes. As authors, we regard the Bible as a text of great importance for the academy, for faith communities and for the wider world. For all of these contexts, we seek to offer a method of reading the Bible that encourages an ongoing quest for life-affirming interpretations of the text. All readers of the Bible need to recognize that the Bible witnesses to the faith of the communities from which it arose, even though clearly not all readers will share this faith. While we both write from a Christian perspective and believe that the Bible informs, enriches and directs our interaction with God, the method outlined here recognizes that many people read the Bible with other eyes and commitments and that such readings are also valid.

Identifying our reasons for interpreting a passage

However we view the Bible as a text, it is worth answering two quite practical questions before we open it. What do we want from the Bible, for ourselves and for others? And therefore which passage(s) are we going to read?

The Bible is a collection of books, most of which have a long history of development, and all of which have a long history of interpretation and influence. This means that the Bible is a complex text that can be difficult to handle. As readers, our individual context and identity change over time and this also affects our reading of the Bible. To avoid getting lost in a sea of questions, each time we read the Bible we should clarify our purpose in doing so to help focus our study.

Try it out

Read the story of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17. What questions do you have for this text today, and what questions does it have for you?

The story of David and Goliath is often included in illustrated collections of Bible stories for children, and when the title is mentioned we may find that our first memories are of such a version. There are many good things about reading the Bible as a child that we should maintain as adults: children read playfully and imaginatively. But it is important to recognize that we may not have been told the whole story as children. Reading about David and Goliath later in life may raise many new questions for us, even if as adults we are still often discouraged from asking questions about the Bible.

These new questions may fall into a range of categories:

Historical: Why were the Israelites and the Philistines at loggerheads?

Geographical: Where are Socoh and Azekah?

Cultural: Was David following normal military practice by cutting off the head of his dead enemy?

Narrative: If David is presented as a skilled musician and warrior in 1 Samuel 16, why is he described in v. 42 as ‘only a youth’?

Psychological: Was the young David traumatized by having to carry his enemy’s head with him, for example holding it ‘in his hand’ when he went into King Saul’s presence (v. 57)?

Relational: How does violence inform David’s relationships, with his enemies, supposed friends, and even family members? If we acknowledge David’s violence here, does it help us name and challenge his violence towards Uriah and Bathsheba, for example? A helpful resource in relation to this last question is the Bible Society’s #SheToo Podcast series (2019).

By reading this passage attentive to these and other questions, we notice the strangeness of even this familiar story. Thinking back on our prior knowledge of the story of David and Goliath, we may notice how incompletely we recalled it, perhaps because it was told to us selectively as children. Equally, we may have heard a sermon on the passage that presented David as an example of faith. Yet, reading it now against, for example, reports of death and dismemberment in conflicts across the world, such an interpretation may strike us as inadequate because it fails to recognize the violence in the text or to relate it to the violence we must face in our own lives.

If we try to insist that this account is not really about warfare, but rather spiritual or theological matters, then we only need to look back to the end of 1 Samuel 16, which suggests that God sent an evil spirit to torment (some translations say, to terrorize) King Saul. In case we have missed this shocking statement, the next verse describes the king’s servants as saying to him: ‘See now, an evil spirit from God is tormenting you’ (1 Sam. 16.15). We then find ourselves with a theological problem and have to ask what sort of God 1 Samuel 16—17 presents.

The above example shows how quickly our Bible reading can raise numerous questions and interpretative problems for us. To help us sort out which of these issues we are to work on and which to set aside for the present we need to be guided by our overall purpose in reading the Bible and our present goal in reading this passage. We cannot and do not need to tackle every sort of question at once.

Try it out

Think of your overall purpose and your immediate motivation for reading whatever biblical text you are currently exploring. These will normally be determined by some everyday need that provides you with a focus for study.

There are many reasons why we engage in biblical interpretation. We may be involved in formal teaching, and have to provide a considered answer to a matter of interpretation; for example, about what different texts might teach about human sexuality. Perhaps we are facing a personal crisis and hope that the Bible can offer some guidance. We may have recently watched a film, listened to a song, heard a comment, or visited a building and been struck by the way a biblical theme is reflected there. Perhaps we are involved in church leadership and have been asked to preach on an unfamiliar Bible passage.

We try to interpret the Bible for all sorts of reasons but the questions with which we turn to the Bible are not always the ones it answers. The text often leads us in a different direction, provoking other questions than the ones with which we began. Because of the propensity of the Bible to send us off somewhere else, it is necessary for us to plot where we are now and where we hope to get to at the outset, a bit like a sailor setting off on a course with many potential hazards and diversions. If we know where we have started from and where we are aiming for, we can check our progress along the way. In biblical interpretation this does not, or should not, guarantee that we will arrive at our intended destination; certainly not in the sense of arriving at the conclusions that we expected at the outset. But it will help us to place limits upon our enquiry and ask the right questions of the text. If we find ourselves blown off-course by the force of the passage, at least we will know this and be able to account for it. Perhaps the original questions we began with have not been answered by the text but we may have been led to explore other questions that now seem more important.

Provisional and responsible interpretation

As authors, we do not believe that it is possible to arrive at a final, definitive interpretation of any biblical passage, but instead encourage working towards a responsible interpretation of a passage for a particular purpose and time. This is a vantage point in an ongoing journey towards deeper understanding of the Bible, of ourselves, and of the world we inhabit.

Any interpretation should be offered with self-awareness, making evident to ourselves and others that we understand the limitations of our interpretation. We should seek to read the text (and ourselves) with integrity and honesty, resisting temptations to short-change ourselves or others with simplistic or trite answers. We should try to bring our deepest and truest questions and convictions to our conversation with the Bible, and seek out the best answers we can discover.

Try it out

The Lord’s Prayer is one of the most well-known passages in the Bible, so it is likely that you will already know something about it. Perhaps you know it by heart. If so, recite it to yourself. What seems to you to be at the heart of this text?

Now read Matthew 6.9–13 carefully and attentively. In what way does this reading confirm or question your prior understanding of this passage? How does your current life situation shape your reading? How might you test out whether your reading is a responsible one?

In the years since we first wrote this book, both of us have experienced significant changes in our own lives, as well as witnessing wider social, political and environmental change. Rachel spent three years living in Buenos Aires, researching women’s resistance to domestic violence and asking questions of how Christian teaching around marriage might be transformed by listening to such experiences. For the past nine years, she has taught biblical studies, feminist and contextual theologies at an ecumenical theological college in Birmingham. Revising this book has made Rachel more aware of the need to read with close attention to the multiple connections and frequent silences of the Bible.

Over the same period, David has been the principal of an ecumenical theological college and a residentiary canon for theology and mission in an urban cathedral. In the latter role, he has learned to read the Bible with people of other faiths and heard its call to work for social transformation more deeply. He often prays with others, ‘Help us to work together for that day when … justice and mercy will be seen in all the earth.’

The text swirls around us as readers, as threat and promise, offering both life and death, but rarely a firm place to stand. Often, the Bible seems to say to us, ‘Listen again. Listen with others. Listen for others.’

2. Past Experience and Present Expectations

In Chapter 1, we began to consider our overall reason for studying the Bible, as well as the particular task in hand. The next step in the process is to clarify our relationship with the Bible, so this chapter considers how our collective and individual experience of the Bible affects the interpretative task.

This chapter begins with asking where and how we might encounter the Bible in our day-to-day routine. It notes how the Bible has shaped communities and cultures. Indeed, throughout history people have used the Bible to control and oppress others as well as to encourage and support them, and it is important to take account of this mixed legacy in our interpretations. The first section of the chapter ends with the suggestion that, despite the West’s cultural familiarity with the Bible, it remains an alien, mysterious text. The second section of the chapter examines differing expectations about the authority and status of the Bible. In the third section, we look at the status of the Bible as scripture in Jewish and Christian communities.

An everyday, extraordinary text

If we live in a western, nominally Christian context, we are likely to encounter the Bible in a variety of places: growing up at home or in school as story; in synagogue or church as sacred scriptures; in a court of law as a solemn witness to oaths of truth-telling; in popular culture, art and the media as shifting fragments of a (once) common language. Let’s look briefly at some of these contexts of encounter.

Even in twenty-first-century Britain, where people of many faiths and those of no religious commitment live side by side, we may first encounter the Bible at a relatively young age. Perhaps we heard stories from the Bible (related as part myth, part moral instruction) at home, church or school. Indeed, as we considered in Chapter 1, it is hard to imagine how those of us who were raised in a nominally Christian context can ever read the Bible without some prior knowledge of its stories, characters and teachings.

Try it out

What are some of your earliest beliefs about the Bible? When did you first encounter the Bible, in childhood or later in life? Make a list of images or phrases that highlight how you were introduced to it. How has your understanding of the Bible changed during your life?

As well as being a collection of powerful stories, the Bible has been understood as a formative document, which is able to shape communities through study of it. We offer two examples here of Christian communities that see the Bible as integral to their common life.

In the early 1700s, the Moravian community at Herrnhut in Germany drew up a document called The Brotherly Agreement. Drawing closely from the Bible, this text, known as The Moravian Covenant for Christian Living, formed the basis for Moravian community life. The following extract illustrates this method of shaping social relationships according to certain biblical teachings:

15. We will endeavour to settle our differences with others in a Christian manner (Galatians 6.1), amicably, and with meditation, and, if at all possible, avoid resort to a court of law (Matthew 18.15–17).

Moravians established a number of communities in Britain. The Fairfield Moravian Settlement on the outskirts of Manchester was founded in 1785. It was self-sufficient with its own church, schools, bakery and farm. The community’s intention to be formed according to biblical teaching impacted on all aspects of life. Women and men were treated as equals (despite the diversity of teaching in the Bible on gender relationships). Marriage partners and other key decisions were decided by the casting of lots (although lots were used in the Bible primarily in relation to inheritance and the taking up of new responsibilities, for example the selection of the replacement for Judas is conducted by lot in Acts 1.26). Today, through engagement with other aspects of the biblical tradition, the community continues to support mission and social welfare projects, including sheltered housing.

A twenty-first-century example of a community that seeks to be formed by Bible is the Community of St Anselm, a new monastic community established by the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. Each year, a group of young people form the community, which is focused on prayer, theological reflection and service. Each section of the community’s Rule of Life begins with a biblical verse. The section on study begins with Proverbs 9.9–10 on the importance of seeking wisdom, and invites members to make the following commitment: ‘We make time for God to speak to us through Holy Scripture. We study the Scriptures with all our heart and our mind and spirit’ (Rule of Life 2016, p. 16).

Even beyond intentional religious communities, the Bible’s status comes from its value as a holy object. Witnesses in an English court of law usually take an oath on the Bible or another significant or holy book to tell the truth. In 2013, a proposal to end this practice was defeated, the argument being that swearing an oath on a religious book such as the Bible still has a profound impact on witnesses. The power invested in the Bible is demonstrated in other ways around the world; for example, Brazilian Christians might bury a Bible in the foundations of their new house for blessing and protection (Schroer 2003, p. 8).

In the digital age, many of us encounter the Bible online, intentionally or unintentionally (see Michael J. Chan’s article ‘The Bible and the Internet’ online at Oxford Biblical Studies). The number of references to the Bible made in the secular media may come as a surprise to us. For example, in 2018, the book of Leviticus was mentioned in a total of nine articles in the Guardian newspaper, the majority being references to its instructions on caring for neighbours and seeking justice for those who are poor and strangers; but also with reference to debate over sexuality, and, in an interview with British author, Kit de Waal, as a work of literature. In 2003, Sri Lankan-born, Birmingham-based scholar R. S. Sugirtharajah tracked biblical references in the British media. He noted the humorous irreverence of many ironic references as well as the continued cultural force of biblical quotations and allusions. He described much of the media’s use of the Bible as simply ‘looking for something that fits’ (Sugirtharajah 2003, p. 78). However, he also noted the tremendous power appeal to the Bible can have – both as a source of comfort and as a means of oppression. Sugirtharajah described much popular usage of the Bible as ‘poaching’ or