AKMA has responded to my response to his thread on “differential hermeneutics.” (He’s also responded to email from Tom M.)

On the key question of whether there’s something special about Scripture, we’re not yet in agreement. And we may never be, thus providing an example of Differential Hermeneutics in Action. AKMA, and post-Modernism in general, wants to untie reading (= interpreting) from the meanings “behind” a text. In particular, the “right” interpretation is not the one that reconstitutes in the reader the author’s original intention. There are lots of good reasons for recognizing this rupture between what we understand and what the author meant, and when it comes to scriptural interpretation the reasons include the terrifying result of believing that you have the right interpretation; armed with a belief that I know what God meant, I may feel justified in wreaking destruction on those who disagree.

And yet, if there is such a thing as revelation (and I am required here to note that I don’t think that there is), doesn’t it have to mean that God is telling us something in a way that we can understand? And if revelation tells us something that we can understand, then isn’t it telling us what God thinks and feels — God’s intentions? I don’t see how you can exclude the possibility of understanding what God had in mind and still think there’s revelation. [1]

So, here I am about to engage in the hermeneutic act of trying to figure out what AKMA has in mind. I think AKMA thinks that if we say that a hermeneutics of revelation tries to get at what’s in God’s mind, it has to be an “integral hermeneutics” that assumes only one interpretation is right, thus leading to intolerance. But that doesn’t necessarily follow. Suppose we say that revelation expresses God’s meaning in a way that humans can understand but God’s meaning surpasses our simple understanding and overwhelms languagw. So, we are forced to engage our understanding together, through discussion and disagreement. Further, to speak in a way that humans can understand means to speak in way that can be reappropriated by each generation with its differences in culture and language; that’s why scripture has survived the ages.

Why do I insist on this to AKMA? Because we share ethical/political aims. We want to be inclusive, not intolerant. We want a way of sincerely embracing people who also trying to understand God from widely divergent starting points. We don’t want to slap people down and shut them up simply because they understand God differently. AKMA writes:

We’ll rely on people we trust, we’ll look back on what the ancients have taught us, we’ll try to help one another along, and we’ll try humbly to accept correction when people whom we respect suggest that we’ve got something important wrong.

What this doesn’t allow us is a stick with which to beat the annoying people who persist in promulgating erroneous interpretations; we can’t say, “That’s just not what it means!” (not in an absolute way). In response to mistaken interpretations, a differential hermeneutic would advise that we make as plain and persuasive a case for our interpretation as we possibly can, and let willful or foolish interpreters do their best.

If that’s all DH did, then every tolerant person would agree to it. But DH says more than this. (It has to, for otherwise DH is nothing but tolerance.) It says that we cannot read the author’s intentions:

Differential hermeneuts will, however, allow that different people will imagine [my emphasis] different authors, and there’ll be no way to pin a really real intention to a really real author and make from that a really final interpretation.

Granting the impossibility of knowing the real, final interpretation of the author’s intentions especially when it comes to God, there’s got to be more to interpreting than imagining, especially when it comes to scripture. If revelation is God speaking in a way that we can hear (and, by the way, can not hear or mis-hear), then there has to be more than what I as the reader bring to the party. That does not mean that there is a unitary meaning or a meaning that we foolish mortals can be confident enough is right that we can stop listening to others.

Earlier, AKMA explains the result that’s driving his line of thought, I believe:

I’m not reluctant to ascribe authorship of Scripture (in some sense) to God, but I refuse to exclude people who disagree with me on this from my account of hermeneutics.

… <big snip>

…”the Bible” already constitutes an interpretive decision that includes some people and excludes others; ascribing its authorship to God narrows the body of agreeable interpreters even further. And (as a differential hermeneutician) … I have to account for those people’s interpretations, too.

But I think AKMA doesn’t have to exclude non-believers from his account of hermeneutics; he just has to exclude them from people he thinks are capable of understanding what revelation says. How can you believe that revelation is God talking to us in a way that we can understand — which to me simply means believing in revelation — without excluding atheists from the body of “agreeable interpreters”? When I say that scripture was written by barbaric humans (stone the witches, kill the homosexuals) and has less revelatory power these days than Updike’s Rabbit series, AKMA ought to stop paying attention to what I say God meant by the book of Job [2]. You may still want to listen to me when I discourse about the history of Canaan or about Paul’s word usage patterns, but I have announced that I am not engaged in trying to hear what God is saying through scripture. You can still “account” for my interpretation — DH explains why people have different interpretations and gives us a way to try to find value in them. You just won’t count it for much. You will, however, keep in mind that all interpretation is situational and fallible, so you won’t tie me to a stake and gather bundles of wood to show me the error of my thinking.

Let me sum up (sorry for the length). AKMA writes:

I just don’t believe texts have “meaning” in any way that escapes our attributing meaning to them.

“Attribute” puts the bulk of the burden of interpreting on the reader; “imagine” puts all of the burden there. If we take “attribute” to mean “involves us” or “depends on us but not just on us,” then we get what I think is a clearer picture. Every act of understanding is situated in a specific person, language, culture, and history. But if understanding revelation consists of nothing but me throwing meaning at a text, then there is nothing left of revelation. It is indistinguishable from me reading the words formed in my bowl of alphabet soup. If, on the other hand, revelation is God speaking to us in a way that we can understand, it doesn’t mean that there is a unitary meaning and that those who don’t get it are simply wrong. The advantage of differential hermeneutics is that we can say that the differences among those who are trying to hear the word of God engender the conversation that is the way to hear what God is trying to say.

So let me do my own rephrasing of AKMA’s differential hermeneutics as I would apply it to scriptural interpretation: The way we humans can try to hear the word of God is by talking with one another. We aren’t arguing about who does a better job of inventing meanings for a text that is incapable of speaking for its author. We’re arguing about words written by God to speak to us — a voice we can hear, a voice that is there, although we can only hear it together and can only understand it imperfectly. Our conversation is aimed at hearing God’s intentions more clearly. If hearing His intentions is impossible, then revelation doesn’t speak and our conversation is mere chatter.

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Two notes:

1. What I think is true of interpreting revelation I actually think is true of all acts of interpretation. I don’t think we are as cut off from the author’s intentions as AKMA seems to believe.

2. Perhaps we should leave room for atheist scriptural interpreters who preface every remark with, “Now, if there were a God, we can see in this passage that He would have meant…” and then proceed to explicate God’s word without believing it’s God’s. I’m sure there are examples of such. These people are worth reading. But they are only worth reading if the text they’re explicating is worth explicating, and it only has accidental and incidental value if the text isn’t God speaking in a way that we can understand.

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