The Trinity Institute Conference

Here is a thoughftul piece about the Trinity Institute conference. We invite other participants to use this blogsite to discuss the conference. And once again, we invite other conservative, Vancouver Island Christians or those sympathetic to that very general category to submit contributions to steve.weatherbe@gmail.com

By Colin Liske
On Thursday and Friday, January 20, 21, St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Nanaimo hosted a conference with a live link to Trinity Institute in New York City. This was Trinity Institute’s 41st National Theological Conference.
Dr. Steed Davidson from Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkley, CA, opened the conference with a sermon on ‘ROL’ or ‘reading out loud.’ He modelled the notion of ‘reading out loud’ on the account of Philip and the Ethiopian in Acts 8:26-39, where Philip ran up to the Ethiopian’s chariot and heard him reading the book of Isaiah. Davidson challenged the usual missionary interpretation of this passage in which Philip is seen as bringing the Gospel to the Ethiopian. Among other things, Davidson mentioned the fact that this Ethiopian was someone who came from a very sophisticated African culture .
The whole point of ‘reading out loud’ in Davidson’s sermon was to indicate that reading the Bible should be done out loud because this involves the whole community in the understanding and interpretation of the text that is being read. In so doing, we may be led to a variety of understandings or interpretations of the text. We may be able to see these texts through the eyes of other people.
Dr. Teresa Okure, professor of New Testament and Gender Hermeneutics at the Catholic Institute of West Africa, Nigeria, in her presentation likewise emphasized seeing the biblical texts through the eyes of people in other cultures, emphasizing that the Word of God is not really a text, but a person, Jesus Christ. She pointed out that we need to understand that in the text the person of Jesus is speaking to us, and that it is what this person has to say about his love for us and our love for others that needs to guide our understanding and applications of the text. She said that the Scriptures must be read in their cultural and gender context, pointing out, for example, that her language in Nigeria has no male or female pronouns, making a gender bias in interpretation difficult. Since the Bible speaks of both male and female as adam, gender differences have effectively no meaning in Scripture. She indicated that St. Paul himself had to begin to see his own Jewish tradition with new eyes on the road to Damascus. She also noted that the Gospel has specific good outcomes, and that we can rise above the narrowness of our own cultures, that we need also to see the text through the eyes of others, and then on the basis of Jesus’ love, emphasize those things in our culture that fit with what Jesus says and reject those things in our culture that do not fit with Jesus’ love. Our speaking the words of the Bible needs to be a speaking of what is clearly and really good news to people in other cultures.
Dr. Walter Bruegemann, a well-known Old Testament scholar and professor emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decartur, GA, said that biblical interpretation has gone from a pre-Critical phase, through the Critical phase, and now on to the post-Critical phase. He criticized the Critical phase, by which he no doubt meant ‘Historical Criticism’ in general, as imposing an evolutionary and rational perspective on the texts, thereby assuming that what came later was better. Instead, he said, we must get back to a more imaginative, open, and perhaps more ancient view of the texts, suspending disbelief and not being concerned with the historical ‘facts.’ He then spoke of two newer Criticisms, Rhetorical and Ideological Criticism. By Rhetorical Criticism he seemed to mean that one must go ‘inside the text and see how it works, not get behind the text.’ The text is a set of symbols and signs that yields a new kind of reality, so that the world depends on a new kind of utterance. By Ideological Criticism he seems to mean that the texts come to us from the perspective of various ideologies, and we need to know what these perspective are in interpreting the texts on a variety of levels, whether social, economic, denominational, and so on. Thus Jewish modes of interpretation were more open and seemingly never finished and did not so quickly arrive at a conclusion. It believed that the texts were layered and conflicted, and that meanings of the text could be developed over time. Jesus himself often said, ‘But I say unto you.’
Gerald West , professor at the School of Theology at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in South Africa led a Bible Study of Mark 12:38 – 13:2, in which he involved the participants in discovering for themselves how important the context is in interpreting Scripture. He spoke of it as ‘contextual’ Bible Study. He then emphasized that we need to ask what the text says to our own context today.
The good thing about these presentations is that it indeed may be quite helpful to see the Biblical text through the eyes of others, of other cultures, particularly to lead us to see what we might have missed in our understandings of the text. To that extent, reading out loud and as such involving the community and other cultures in helping us to understand the Bible can be very good.
The worrisome part of these lectures is that they appear to suggest that an understanding of the Bible is what we think it is, that whatever people think it means is in fact what it does mean, whatever culture the thinking may come from. At least until we see something different in it. By such an approach, it is easy to ‘read our own meanings into’ the Scriptures (eisegesis) rather than ‘reading the author’s original intended meaning out’ of the Scriptures (exegesis). There appeared to be no proper exegetical control on this procedure. But of course that is intended.
A proper understanding of Scripture rather needs to come from the text itself as it first of all speaks to its own time, in the context of its own customs and culture, and is then applied to our own day. It has often been said that ‘context is everything.’ And indeed it is. It is in that manner that a proper ‘contextual’ study of the Bible is what needs to be done.
A worrisome aspect of Bruegemann’s lecture is that he set up a rather rigid categorization of hermeneutics, the science of interpretation, in pre-Critical, Crtitcal, and post-Critical stages. Such appellations already greatly prejudices the matter, as if the pre-Critical is outmoded. Indeed, the pre-Critical stage which he castigates already includes some of the procedures that were spoken about at this conference, especially that of seeing the text in its own original context. But the so-called pre-Critical understanding of the text also believes that the text actually says something. Once a text is allowed to say anything and everything, and then only for a time, then it really says nothing at all.
We ourselves can agree with Brueggemann that an evolutionary imposition on textual interpretation by Historical Criticism is unacceptable. But there is also further reason to reject Historical Criticism, not the least of which is that it is not historical. It is not historical because it does not follow the traditional criteria of doing history. It is not historical because it is largely sophisticated speculation based on non-existent editors, and, not to put too fine a point on it, it can seem to arrive at hardly any agreed upon conclusions.
While seeking input from the community and other cultures in interpreting the biblical texts can certainly be helpful, the problem with the perspective presented at this conference is that a straightforward and direct meaning of the Biblical texts seems to have been set aside. In the end it leaves the Bible standing for practically nothing. This was reflected in the prayers that were offered by those who spoke. No one ever prayed in the ‘name of Jesus,’ or to the ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.’ One wonders what the name of their God is.