| Biblical banditry in our
time
The Jesus announced a new age in which
God is sovereign in summoning human response to grace and truth that exceed human
purview and ingenuity. Many have sought to neutralise this audacious message.
Within an assumed objective scrutiny of gospel writings, his message of the future
of God becoming present is laundered through imperious adjudications within modernity.
The gospel’s veracity is also laundered by bleaching any distinctive announcement
of truth within postmodern sensibilities. The v In the modern era, a veritable Trojan horse was delivered
into the city of biblical testimony, from which a tacit war of attrition was undertaken.
The Trojan horse of presumed objective method was considered innocuous but it
effectively delivered a “fifth column” within Christian testimony. Biblical interpreters
imbued with modernist values of presumed objectivity operated like a guerrilla
campaign seeking to control a realm by neutralising it from within. Armed with methods of whittling down
the horizon of any ancient writing to its presumed historical context, an impression
was given that methods of interpretation were becoming more precise as they progressed
toward the contextual truth of biblical texts too. This impression was sustained
as every previous wreck of method was plundered in order to make a more concerted
foray into the truth, each time supposedly better armed for the task. In a landscape strewn with obsolete
wreckage, each new foray into the truth also sought to sabotage any other such
quest, ransacking hypotheses in inter-guerrilla warfare between competing methods.
Postmodern responses assert that truth per se cannot
be the focus of biblical interpretation. Speculative games are therefore played
within the relativity of many stories, which also harbour tacit ideologies that
must be exploded for the sake of mutual acceptance of diversity, whatever its
expressions. As a primary resource
of Christian faith, biblical imagery is profound and fecund in continually transforming
human life. Interrogation of biblical testimony through ever-shifting hypotheses
will not yield more faithful encounters with its explicit imagery than reflective
readings so readily caricatured as being naïve. Personally and socially,
biblical testimony can be transforming beyond a modern propensity to interrogate
objects or postmodern demolition by suspicion. Rationalists
and relativists claim to have no agendas, yet both positions are loaded with presuppositions,
such as the need to offer rational explanations for paradoxes of faith, the plausibility
of social panaceas for addressing human compromise or the celebration of trivia
that supposedly represents diverse voices. Both rationalists and
relativists have and will continue to abuse biblical testimony, each within their
versions of fundamentalism. The delicate task for any scholar is to sustain intelligent
and reflective engagement with writings that continue to speak with veracity into
human experience, for example Jeremiah and Romans, as their theological images
speak of human life before menace and mortality while also being addressed in
the vocative grace of God. v An assumption that biblical writings
cannot be adequately heard without a secondary apparatus is readily asserted when
advocating the necessity of certain methods—a text can only be read by those with
the right apparatus to read it properly. Yet by being read through such an apparatus,
a text assumes an esoteric status. It remains “unreadable” except by those who
have been inducted into the secrets of how it should be read. This is often directly
stated as a lament concerning those who “do not know how to read the text.” This
imperious lament fails to recognise that biblical testimony has always been received
as Scripture within the congregational life of Christian worship and joyous relay
of good news! Focus on a secondary
apparatus has a tendency to displace Scripture, becoming the primary focus within
academia. Biblical fragments tend to become fodder for sustaining the initial
thrill of engaging novel tools of interpretation. Analysis of motivations and
conditions of context easily become the primary concern of those who “know” how
to read or to unlock a text in the “proper way.” Secondary interpretive
methods are always being displaced or becoming obsolete, often leading into a
cul-de-sac from which an entire trajectory of scholarship must eventually back-track. Post-modernists recognise this. Yet conjectures
and hypotheses become a focus of diversity for the sake of diversity. Merely recycling
texts through arbitrary foci or tribal agendas only generates interpretations
that are in constant flux, like waves of the sea. In quest of an adjudicating vantage
point for interpretation, methods developed from ever-shifting hypotheses are
readily captive to ephemeral speculation that can nevertheless adhere to the latest
hypothesis with dogged tenacity. The work of theology can mimic hubristic presumptions
of human autonomy in assertions of modern certainty or postmodern
relativism. The history of Christian testimony
shows the fragility of any theological agendas without the resilient paradoxes
of testimony to Jesus Christ disclosed in grace and truth for humanity. This focus
is our singular source of anchorage in the flux of human ideals, conjectures and
novelties that either imperiously assert the adjudicative terms of reference for
any relevant word from God or smugly deny its contemporary relevance as unique
by asserting that among discourses, there is nothing new under the sun.
Hypotheses posing either as imperious knowledge or a play of plurality, derived
from desiccated writings that are viewed with scepticism as to their explicit
claims, are most unlikely to address people in their perennial exposure to menace
and mortality. It is in relation to menace and mortality that biblical testimony
speaks with enduring veracity and grace, engaging intelligent faith in Christ. v Interpretations were once more diverse than modern standardising
approaches could appreciate. Recent focus on difference too, is without the capacity
to engage the difference between human aspiration and mortality, which raises
the stakes for human life to the ultimate difference between creator and creature.
This is also the difference between our many words and hearing a word otherwise.
Ultimate reality and genuine difference
permeate the central themes of Christian testimony, such as recognition of difference
between creator and creature, the necessity of humility in not professing to
be wise in everything pertaining to human wholeness and dignity, with a willingness
to trust the strange word of a paradoxical reality in which loss is gain because
life exceeds death. These are given pervasive affirmation in biblical testimony,
even as they are given definitive focus in New Testament proclamation. Biblical testimony presents a vocative
encounter with God who in love, approaches human life in its profound joys and
abyssal traumas, to invite humanity into triune communion. This testimony to grace
in the midst of creation is given decisive and winsome expression in Jesus Christ.
This reality surpasses the methods and conjectures of changing hypotheses in quest
either to control interpretation of Scripture or to fragment the gospel’s veracity.
The word of God speaks otherwise as it is heard in saving grace and truth amid
enduring menace and mortality experienced by people. |
