Christ vs. the Hermeneutical Death Spiral part 3: Red Flags
This is an article in a series. Please see:
Christ and the Hermeneutical Death Spiral Part 2
Christ vs. the Hermeneutical Death Spiral, Part 1
Corrupt Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics and the Theologian
If you pick up a book or article on corrupt hermeneutics which argues for an antidote, which is not merely descriptive or retrospective, you’re always going to see it discussed with a wide range of historical alternatives. You might be surprised if I make the complaint that for theology, this is not a good thing and its a red flag for corrupt hermeneutics.
Christian Theology, and therefore any discussion of meaning, is supposed to be set on the basis of an organic instead of superficial dependency upon the belief and demonstration of a supernatural agency that works before the theologian, not after him. The logic follows that whatever you propose as a theologian it should be an offering not grounded first in reason, will, emotion or any other insular humanly produced industry or epistemic locus but set in a thing which insists on an other-worldly alternative to our own formulations. But the urge is always for the theologian to follow the broad spirit of the age, to fit in, to propose something that is immediately accessible to the prevailing methods and presuppositions.
To choose one “rule” from column A and speak of it as good or bad by comparison to those in column B which are the same kind of items is from the start this red flag for which I speak for bad hermeneutics. The pulling of modern and historical alternatives to your theory of meaning for comparison is not a red flag and not our giveaway, quite the contrary. It’s this engagement in a rigorous scholarly exercise to test a proposition against another when none of them carry their own force of meaning to make such a comparison necessary.
You know something is wrong. No one is going into combing through Truth and Method and Heidegger and speak about how Ricœur’s is a superior position on the nature of meaning if meaning showed itself unambiguously as centered on a historical person. No one is going to write reams of paper speculating what kinds of species of animal life should live in heart of the Congo or in unexplored regions of the earth if we have explored those regions and know. No one is going to say “I think alien life in the Sirius star system is carbon-based” or “I think it’s silicon-based” if we have gone there and know. But in Christianity, we burn up all our intellectual capital and time reading and lauding this kind of speculative theology instead of investigating the transcendent artifact we say we have in hand. Our scholarly hermeneutics is a red flag that we know nothing, and obviously prefer it, since it never adds anything more to what the simple historical phenomenon of the word of the Hebrew prophets delivers to the mind without them.
We forget that a revealed God is one who offers knowledge otherwise impossible. Original Christianity no matter how secretly embarrassing its methods and Truth might be to the thinker, never was and could never be a faith that triumphs in any way by joining that which is doggedly against it and could come only from brains and brawn.
It presents not a line of reason through an eloquent and perfectly parsed rhetorical flourish and neat organization, or a good idea that is a better alternative to another idea not so good, but insists a truth that is ultimate is saving is no idea at all. Truth is a simple fact of history that shows God’s existence, nature, and plan, set before its audience which either overwhelms or underwhelms them in our demonstration of its love or its hatred and indifference.
This is meant to set a baseline for all talk about meaning: do we really want the Truth, not or only a personally compatible version of it? If you want the truth, choose the one that looks like what is not here but belongs here.
The Christian theologian is always supposed to be an investigator and champion of the Christian idea against irrational, unfounded, constructed and merely fashionable ones. The real definition of the Christian theologian is something more like a pneumenaut of entirely new spaces, seeing entirely new things revealed 2000 years ago, spirits riding on a ship not physical and made by human hands, not like an astronaut who can only penetrate new matter beyond old matter.
In the theologian’s presentation, if the analysis of another hermeneutic and comparison to the chosen hermeneutic is done to show error by contrast, that’s what we want, but not if what you propose is essentially the same as the error you eschew.
For me to positively demonstrate this error, or if it even exits in part, it is still effective to show error by contrast, but not by the same kind of contrast which is the same as the error. What is needed is to show the whole of the defective enterprise by its difference to something alien to the whole process, which is not fundamentally like it, since this is supposed to be that otherwise impossible Christian revelation. The theologian is removed from all contrived systems from the start. Zooming out, staying at a distance where one is informed of them as an observer, not an inhabitant, and performs analysis from the perspective of wholes instead of parts.
He tries to determine the extent to which the indispensable assumptions of the approach he proposes (and by extension the text in which he proposes to apply a certain hermeneutic) is compatible with others in respect to its ability to render a meaning that agrees with and magnifies the meaning of transcendent substances instead of relatively prosaic superficialities. If your going to contrast what is presumed to be alien to a mundane or defective idea to show their incompatibilities, our operational rule is that the idea must at least be as radically different as a prosaic thing to the alien thing.
It’s the presumption and belief that we have something unique and radically foreign which is not a method, not an idea and not a feeling, but a public, supernatural event.
Gadamer was right in that the process is at least supposed to be more about Truth’s than Method’s, but Truth in Christianity is without his entirely subjective control of its meaning. Yes, we have become inured and numbed by “science,” by the idea that, if our eyesight to resolve a destination is failing, no matter where we set our minds to go, a proper number of precise steps, instead of a proper number of precise steps in a particular direction, will bring us home. The takeaway here is that a destination as part of the science of methods that are reasoned to and constructed by humans are always in orientation with the tendency for human insularity and independence. If the destination is not supposed to be human, at least in part, then if we have any eyesight left we had better use it make sure the course to it matches, not that we are walking. If the destination is foreign then the method should be foreign, that is, the supernatural destination object is itself the makeup of the lens through which we clearly find our orientation to it.
If you think that I am building to something like “use the spirit and he will tell you what it means,” this is no more idiosyncratic and subjectively grounded than it is to the equally human scientific method, which is great for the settling of the emotions and discovery of matter but useless for anything else.
“Spirit” is a concept, an idea, we must remember. Millennia of human religious history is about the entertaining of this concept endlessly in philosophical discussion, but our belief is that the Cross established “Spirit” as a reality in history. If that is true, the Cross destroyed “spirit” forever as unknown, unreachable, unfathomable, and a product only of the mind and emotions. The same with the ideas “God,” “truth,” “faith,” “evidence,” “righteousness” and “sin. To then say “spirit” and not biblically qualify it and establish it without the possibility of disconnection in a perspicuous and universal fact not revealed by science or subjectivity, believing that it’s nonetheless with power and a real thing of objective transcendence, is a worship of a human concept as much as Grant Osbourne’s Hermeneutical Spiral can be a worship of method.
An emotional attachment to an insular idea and then several of a certain kind of rational steps, or an intellectual attachment to rational steps and then to an idea, instead of one to and from the supernatural appearance of phenomena, is an attachment to us, not it. If this supernatural phenomenon is said to originate in what is essentially reason and emotion itself, orientation to it and exclusive dependence upon it for your means of meaning is not the loss of meaning, reason or love, just a degraded one in which you are now a helpless dependent. The belief in it as transcendent is still the symbol of its own kind in ontological relation to its being of creation, but only a being that will die with it. You can have all the love and good feelings and intellectual pursuit you want, but I hope that it comes from a real place that is imperishable.
All of the foregoing is why our kind of approach to the problem here is not going to burden you with hundreds of pages of explanations and illustrations of one author’s philosophy against another. This is decided for us, because, as I have said in another way, you won’t find a nut through a painstaking search under the shade of a tree that does not bear them. We need to match the kind ofnut for the tree, but to do this we need to speak about trees not as atoms or ideas or the result of a natural process but as totalities from a distance.
Not that a close examination of the tree is not essential to its speciation and then it’s fruit. I only propose that because we as Christians have lost the ability to make sense of and revere biblical totalities and ultimate’s, and have spent so much time under a humanly constructed tree given as the only one we are supposed to visit, we have called that tree divine because we don’t know how to leave it and find the other one that need not be called anything to be divine.
The Tree is the Tree of Life. It’s not some other tree. The first step then in leaving a perishable tree and finding that Tree of Life is to break our gaze upon the dying one, and its identifying bark, leaves and stems, and fix it on the horizon until our eyesight improves to see distances. We might just see on the horizon the good tree we left long ago that we wandered away from, and then start our trek back to it with only it as our destination. We don’t start with speculation, we start, again, by honestly determining what looks most like is not from here but belongs here.
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