The Indefinite Interpretability of the Bible

How is it possible that a collection of texts from ancient and alien cultures has personal relevance for millions of believers today? Once again I find the research of Brian Malley in How the Bible Works: An Anthropological Study of Evangelical Biblicism provides meaningful answers.

I’ll start with his four-fold model of what is actually happening when evangelicals or fundamentalists “interpret the Bible”.

1. 1. 1. 1. The first point is that evangelicals are “inheritors of an interpretative tradition”, meaning that they have inherited a tradition that tells them that their beliefs are Bible-based. They inherit a set of beliefs along with the additional claim that those beliefs are derived from the Bible. The tradition presents the Bible as a book to be studied, “but the goal of that hermeneutic activity is not so much to establish the meaning of the text  as to establish transitivity between text and beliefs.” The tradition stresses the fact of a connection between doctrines and the Bible rather than particular connections. “Thus a great deal of ‘what the Bible says’ may be transmitted quite apart from actual exegesis.” Example: the Bible says both that all things are possible for God and that God cannot do certain things. Without direct exegesis of the texts it is permissible for the evangelical to believe that the Bible says X on the assumption that some verse can be made to support X even if the verse is not contextually relevant to the belief in X.
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            And this raises a critical point: the goal of evangelicals’ hermeneutic activity is to establish transitivity between the text and the reader’s understanding. This is not necessarily identical with interpretation in the normal sense of the term. The means of transitivity is indeed sometimes what might be called the texts meaning: I Timothy 1:17 describes God as “immortal” and was used as evidence that “God cannot die”—a definition of “immortal” and thus a semantic representation of the text. But sometimes the object of reading is not what would normally be called the meaning of the text at all. Titus 1:2 (together with Hebrews 6:18) was offered as evidence that “God cannot lie.” But “God cannot lie” is not a semantic representation of Titus 1:2. That God cannot lie is presupposed in this text, and therefore regarded as part of the meaning of the text, but it is not the meaning of the text, and any translation that replaced this verse with “God cannot lie” would be regarded as an inadequate translation. “God cannot lie” is not the meaning of the verse in the normal, semantic-equivalence sense of the term. It is an interpretation only in the weaker, broader sense that its justification or warrant—the evidence for it—is drawn from the Bible. Participants in the discussion were picking out Bible passages relevant to the question, “what can God not do?” but not necessarily about that question. The texts they cited stood in an evidential relation to the proposition “not all things are possible with God” without this statement capturing the meaning of any particular passage. (p. 84)

         2. There is no “hermeneutic tradition” that is passed on; there is no particular way of reading and interpreting the Bible that is part of the tradition. Evangelicals may claim to read the Bible literally but a closer inspection shows that there is no consistency in practices that they avow to be literal readings. Consequence: “in each generation, the interpretive tradition mobilizes hermeneutic imaginations anew.” Believers are free to find new readings that they can interpret as supports for a church’s teaching.
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         3. What drives evangelical Bible reading is “a search for relevance” — in much the same way any other communication is. In this search readers are free to move “beyond the text as given”. Dual contexts are recognized: the historical one of the original composition of the text on the one hand and the message God wants to convey to the reader today on the other. See the above quotation on the question of God . A believer undertaking a personal Bible study may read a story and to make it relevant for a situation in his or her life will impute motivations, inferences, storylines that are not in the text, and omit from the text certain details that rob the story of personal relevance to the reader. “Part of the genius of a good preacher is to figure out a way to mine new insight from a seemingly mundane passage.” Belief traditions make interpretations of the Bible quite unlike the interpretations of other texts.
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            Some ways of going beyond the text as given:
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            [Extending] the semantic field of a world beyond what it has in the text as given. [Quoting a sermon by Williams, a preacher…]

            The early verses are introducing Paul to these people in a very real sense so let’s look at them that way. Verse 1: “Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, and called to be an apostle, and set apart for the gospel of God.” Now believe it or not, that verse is rich with information about Paul. For instance, he gives us two descriptions of himself that on the face of it seem like they might be somewhat contradictory. Servant and apostle. As a matter of fact, the word for servant here is really the word that in other places is translated slave. So on one hand he describes himself as a slave, and yet on the other hand it’s like he pulls rank, I mean apostle—whoa! You know, these were important people. These were special people with a very special designation, a very special mission, to this day we are the beneficiaries of their ministry through the written word. And so, to say apostle was to claim a level of authority that was very, very real. But it’s interesting that he combines those two— apostle, yes, but in attitude, slave, servant. He’s not going to use his position of authority to lord it over them, to try to be dictator; rather he’s going to come to them as a servant, a slave of Christ, one who has that spirit of service.

            The Greek word δοῦλος is indeed variously translated as servant or slave, though these words have quite different valences in English. Here Williams takes servant from the text and, by glossing it with another term—slave—extends its semantic field so as to accentuate the contrast with apostle.

            Paraphrase the passage, adding remarks that expand on what is actually in the text:

            He also is very clear in this verse to tell us that this is not something he has conjured up himself, for two different times he makes very clear the fact that this is something he has been entrusted with. He says “I was called to be an apostle” and “I was set apart for the gospel of God. I didn’t come on this myself. I didn’t ask for this. This isn’t something where I worked my way up the ladder of authority or something like that—no, these were designations that came from God himself, I have simply accepted his call. I have acknowledged the fact that I am set apart for his purposes.”

            Here Williams reads a great deal out of two adjectival phrases. His exegesis is consistent with the story of Paul’s conversion and calling as related in Acts 9, but he supplies contrast cases—“I didn’t come on this myself. I didn’t ask for this.”—that bring an emphasis to called and set apart that they do not have in the text as given.

            A few sentences later he uses the same technique again, to emphasize Paul’s claim that the gospel message was implicit in the earlier Hebrew prophets:

            [Paul] says, “This gospel is the one that God promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures. It’s not something new that I’ve created, I’m not just pulling this out of thin air, even I would have seen it had I understood, because it was there. It had been predicted, it had been, the plan had been laid out already in the scriptures which we knew,” which would be the Old Testament scriptures. He says, “And this isn’t created out of whole new cloth or something. It’s in continuous flow from what God has put before us for years if we had just seen it.”

            The notion that Paul might have simply invented the gospel is introduced by way of contrast to bring fresh life to Paul’s claim that the gospel antedates him.

            Elaboration, or adding specifications to what the text says:

            And in verses 3 and 4 he lays out for us several important facts about Christ. He tells us that Jesus is both human and divine, for he says he was a descendant of David but also the Son of God. Son of David; Son of God—that great mystery of the two natures of Christ—human; divine. To have lived back in those days to see Jesus walking down the street you could have said “There goes a man” and you would have been accurate. You could have said, “There goes God,” and you would have also been accurate. Do we understand that completely? No. But it’s clearly outlined for us not just here but in many places through the New Testament.

            Here Williams takes a passing reference to Jesus’s dual nature and expands it by proposing a scenario in which Jesus’s fully divine and fully human natures are explicitly articulated, in a version—fully human, fully divine—that goes considerably beyond the text, reading into it several points of orthodox Christology. . . . Paul’s statements are ambiguous, and that Williams, in expounding them, is adding to them a great deal of specificity and orthodox expansion. . . The text, in fact, is perfectly consistent with an adoptionist Christology.

            All of the above and more:

            Then this important phrase that ends verse 4. Who are we talking about here? And Paul is clear, Jesus Christ our Lord. Now don’t miss that [laughs], that’s key in what were going to be looking at as we go through this. Jesus Christ our Lori. What effect did that have on Paul? Verse 5, he tells us. Through him, that is, through Christ, through the power which he gave him, and/or his name’s sake, to the glory of Christ, then Paul uses the editorial “we”—we received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles. The word there could just as easily by the way be translated “nations.” This is a missionary verse. To call people from all the nations to the obedience that comes out of faith. We call them to place their faith in this Son of God and to follow it with obedience, an obedience that grows out of that faith. And that was the task that drove Paul from the moment that he had met Jesus on that road to Damascus and understood that this was the person who was both man and God, the one who was declared to us as God through the resurrection. Once he caught on to that he was then driven to take that message of grace and declare it to all the nations.

            Now, the clincher, and here’s where we’ve been heading. Verse 6: you also. Bingo. This isn’t just about Paul. It’s about the people who are reading this and it’s about us. You also are called to belong to Jesus Christ. Wow. What in the world does that mean, to belong to Jesus Christ? Well, the you also [laughs] just keeps pointing us right back to where we’ve been. What did it mean for Paul? It meant that he had a sense of mission, of call. It meant that he went with a spirit of service, to be a slave to Christ. It meant that he focused his life on the gospel of God regarding his son, the message of the Son of God. It meant that he had confidence in who Christ was, his Lord. It meant that he was driven to share that message with all the nations, wherever in whatever way he could. That was what drove him. You also are called to belong to Jesus Christ. So it means all of those things for us as well. Do we sense a call to be involved in what God wants us to do? Are we willing to approach it with a spirit of service? Do we have that same confidence in Jesus Christ as our Lord? Do we have the heart for the nations that he had?

            The techniques analyzed here, while common, are intended to be illustrative only. They reflect the workings of the hermeneutic imagination, the inference system that enables us to contextualize utterances and extract their significance for social interaction. The point, however, is that Bible readers, in searching to find a text’s relevance to their lives, can go beyond the text as given. Not only can they contextualize it either historically or devotionally, but they may also employ the hermeneutic imagination—expansion of a term’s semantic field, paraphrase, elaboration, folk psychology—to go beyond the text as given and to establish the relevance of the text to their lives.Here Williams does more than semantically transform the text: he uses the text (modified, even in this short passage, by semantic expansion, paraphrase, and elaboration) to construct a rich image of Paul, and to suggest that his listeners ought to mimic Paul in these respects. The text gets arranged into a psychological profile of Paul’s focus, motivation, and attitude, and that profile in turn becomes the basis for his exhortation, that his audience ought to sense God’s call, to have a heart for service, and to spread the gospel to those who have not heard it. The hinge point in connecting Paul and his modern audience is the you also, where the you is understood not in Paul’s context, as a reference to the early Roman church, but to a modern congregation.

            The techniques analyzed here, while common, are intended to be illustrative only. They reflect the workings of the hermeneutic imagination, the inference system that enables us to contextualize utterances and extract their significance for social interaction. The point, however, is that Bible readers, in searching to find a text’s relevance to their lives, can go beyond the text as given. Not only can they contextualize it either historically or devotionally, but they may also employ the hermeneutic imagination—expansion of a term’s semantic field, paraphrase, elaboration, folk psychology—to go beyond the text as given and to establish the relevance of the text to their lives. (pp. 113-117)

         4. “The interpretive tradition is perennially caught between the Scylla of interpretive freedom and the Charybdis of irrelevance: too much hermeneutic freedom and the tradition disintegrates, loosing its epistemological appeal; too little interpretive freedom and the Bible becomes merely an irrelevant historical artifact, rather than the ever-living word of God.” Both freedom and determinacy are necessary. “At present, the evangelical tradition solves this problem by maintaining fairly rigorous standards of exegesis in its scholarship and quietly ignoring those standards in the churches. There is no hermeneutic tradition at Creekside Baptist or any other church I have seen, but there is a hermeneutic tradition in Bible colleges and seminaries. I suggest that this is a very practical response to the conflict between maintaining ongoing biblical relevance in the pews and hermeneutic determinacy in the classroom.”

Indefinite interpretability

In group Bible studies each person may offer what impresses him or her about a particular passage, “what it meant for their lives.”

Their interpretations were usually expressed with some degree of tentativeness, and were framed as observations on the passage rather than as expressions of “the meaning.”They did say that the text had a meaning—and a real, definite one—but none of them pretended to know it exhaustively. Their claims, at most, were to know part of the meaning of a passage. They seemed untroubled when different people took away different lessons from the discussion—after all, the Holy Spirit might say different things to different people. Their attitude toward the text was much less exclusive than Zuck—a professor at a conservative seminary—describes. . . .

. . . [P]artial, nonexclusive meanings fit rather cleanly within the devotional frame for Bible reading. What impresses a person out of the text need not be God’s message for everyone at all times, but only God’s message for that particular person, or that particular church, at that particular point in time. Part of the meaning will do: no more definitive exegesis is usually needed. . . .

Indefinite interpretability is important because the interpretive tradition requires the ongoing relevance of the Bible. (pp. 125 f)

And if the Bible is understood to be the “word of God” then there is a heightened expectation for believers to find in it relevance for their personal lives.

Malley, Brian. 2004. How the Bible Works: An Anthropological Study of Evangelical Biblicism. New York: Altamira Press.

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