Category: Hermeneutics

I had a small breakthrough in my thinking about my hermeneutical project yesterday morning before church, perhaps the most frustrating time for such an insight, since I absolutely had to be present at the beginning of the Blessings of Palms before the procession and Palm Sunday liturgy. I managed to scribble down what I think were the key notions, and — as my study leave begins sometime in the near future — I’ve made a plan to renew my blogging about “meaning”, along with posting some of the backlog of sermons and devotions I had left unposted.

One of the ideas that’s been rattling around my mind for ages has involved my not having a catchy label for what I’m about. That is in part a matter of stubborn vanity: I don’t want my ideas to gain a toehold (or a casual rejection) based mostly on the adjective appended to “hermeneutics” in a convenient tag. If you’re going to agree or disagree with me, I want you to have thought through my premises, not just ridiculed/embraced a fad. That’s almost pure vanity, of course; the world has lots to do, and keeping up with my random thoughts is not necessarily one of them. It’s my job to earn attention, not just stomp my tiny foot and demand it.

But I resist a label for other reasons as well. Whenever I think of a possible label, in the same moment I conceive a reason for that not being an apt characterisation of my project. “X Hermeneutics” — but it’s not really X, since people generally understand X to refer to this set of premises and activities that I’m calling into question. “Y Hermeneutics,” but Y isn’t a positive value for me, just an adventitious outcome. If someone suggested “Neti neti hermeneutics,” I’d have to concede that that might be the best alternative.

But as I think through the topics about which I want to write [eventually, if God permits me time], I realise that one way to wrangle the problem would take the shape of an essay/chapter that simply catalogues all the vaguely applicable alternatives I can imagine, and explaining their negations. So that’s now on my list (along with about fifty other things I need to write. Mercy, I hope I live long enough to write at least most of them.)

I realise after writing that last paragraph that I should note that the title of this post was meant to refer to the blog, not to me — but both senses do fit.

If you try to understand hermeneutics in order to control interpretations, you will neither control interpretations nor understand hermeneutics.

If all you want to do is to understand interpretations, your hermeneutics can reach deep and explain much. Your hermeneutics won’t help you control interpretations — but you’ve forgone that anyway.

My Baltimore Orioles are about to play in the American League Divisonal Playoffs tonight, and the experts say that their opponents — the Detroit Tigers — should win the series. That’s OK with me; I never expected the Orioles to go this far, certainly not to finish first in the Easter division by twelve games over the New York Yankees. Based on everything that experts on baseball know, the Orioles’ season has been exceptionally improbable.

Since the Orioles have defied the odds this year, a great many people — some partisans of the O’s, some just ordinary sane sports fans — have wondered whether the experts reasoned incorrectly about the strength of the team. Especially since the Orioles have surpassed the experts’ estimates for three consecutive years, people suspect that there’s something about the Orioles that the experts just aren’t getting right: “the intangibles,” as sports writers often say, or “chemistry” or “clubhouse leadership.” Reasonable people look at the discrepancy between projections and results and wonder where the projections went wrong.

A onth and a half ago, Dave Cameron (no, not that one) wrote an elegant piece explaining that No, the experts haven’t been wrong at all; they’ve been exactly right, and the Orioles’ performance actually demonstrates their correctness rather than undermining their status. How can that be? It can be because improbable things happen all the time. Mildly improbable things happen daily; somewhat improbable things happen occasionally; very improbable things happen rarely; and utterly improbable things happen once in a lifetime, or an epoch, or a millennium, or what-you-will. But improbable things happen, and they happen at a rate we can measure and make sense of.

The point relative to my beloved O’s, the team that gave us the 1966 World Champions, is that although the Orioles have outperformed expectations for three years running — a very considerable sample size — their improbable streak of winning falls exactly where we would expect it to on the spectrum of “teams doing better than projected.” In cameron’s words, “the existence of an outlier does not prove that a model is broken. In fact, the existence of the right amount of outliers is actually evidence that the model works really well. The question isn’t whether we can find outliers in the data; the question is whether there are more outliers than we’d expect given a normal distribution.” And it turns out that, yes, the Orioles’ record falls neatly within the expected distribution of teams outperforming (and underperforming) projections. In fact, once you look at the distribution, other recent teams have been even luckier than the Orioles over a three-year stretch; the Angels had a five-year stretch of luck in the late aughties and early ’teens. Improbable things happen all the time.

So sport supporters should relax about trying to argue that the experts are wrong about their formulas (it’s possible, of course, but… improbable). Teams have long stretches of luck, good or bad, and that’s why sport is entertaining even when we know the projected outcomes.

All of this pertains to another field of my interest: namely, the study of the Bible. The Bible narrates a great many utterly improbable events. On the basis of their radical improbability, many very sensible people argue that these events did not take place, a sound enough conclusion when you look at the great span of human history and the great number of claims that have been made on behalf of utterly improbable alleged events. Most people, most of the time, reject out of hand most of these improbable claims, so one can hardly complain if sensible people reason that the events described in the Bible should likewise be rejected.

Like Orioles supporters, though, a great many adherents to traditions (biblical and non-) want to assert that our extraordinary events not only happened despite the odds, but indeed should be understood as the most reasonable explanation of the circumstances and allegations surrounding that alleged event. While the experts on biblical batting averages say “No one has hit for an average over .500 in major league history, so we decline to believe that Joshua slugged Canaanite pitching to the tune of a .633 average,” supporters of the Hebrew Conquerors say “Well, the Bible says Joshua hit .633, and in those days they played without leather gloves, and the pitcher’s mound was probably not very sturdy (else we’d have found archaeological evidence of pitcher’s mounds in antiquity, which we haven’t), so the best explanation for the biblical story of Joshua’s amazing batting average is that he had a career year against uneven Canaanite pitching.” Joshua’s alleged batting record must not only be true, according to this line of thought, it must be probable.

Of these two perspectives, I think the sceptics have by far the strongest case. They’re looking at the records, the circumstances, and the propensities of sport fans to exaggerate, and they’re unconvinced.

The fans tend to take two steps, both of which I think problematic. The first is that they sometimes take it as granted that in order to claim that something is true, it must be probable. Modern life certainly provides a propitious context for this step, since nobody doubts that it’s true that the Orioles won their division this year. So many claims about so many matters of probability or improbability can be tested very easily, with outcomes so near to certainty as makes no practical difference, that the “truth” bit of a claim can seem to be either given and necessary, or false and unsustainable. Orioles fans have not been satisified that experts agreed that the team finished first; they want experts to agree that the Orioles should have finished first, in a way similar to people who believe that not only did Joshua hit .633, but that it’s likely that he hit .633. (I think they are wrong to reason so.)

Similarly, supporters of unlikely events suppose that they may not be permitted to think that improbable things ever happen. Of course, everyday life should dispel this supposition. A friend whose nickname is “37” (srsly) was recently in a queue at the Department of Motor Vehicles and drew the ticket numbered 37. Now, I’m not sure how many numbers were on the roll of tickets; I would estimate the number as probably upwards of 999, since the tickets wouldn’t fit four digits, and cycling through 1 – 99 over and over might run some risk of confusion if there was a particularly long queue. So the chance that a gentleman nicknamed “37” would draw number 37 in the queue is about one in a thousand, and only if he were damned to several lifetimes of annual visits to the DMV (a fate of eschatological cruelty beyond the imagination even of the Christian apocalypticists) could one regard his drawing the number as nearing “probable.” At the same time, among improbabilities, this example is pretty small-scale (however striking and mmeorable it was to 37). In other words, it is not the case that “improbable things happen, so there’s no good reason to be sceptical about the Bible”; contrariwise, a great many things in the Bible are so improbable that we can’t reasonably complain if people don’t believe them to have happened.

Neither, on the other hand, is everyone obliged to doubt something just because it’s wildly improbable. Part of the point of the stories in the Bible, after all, is that these seemed to be extraordinary events even to those who reported them. If one is confident that certain extraordinary events happened two to five thousand years ago, well, there we are. But such believers should be straightforward about just how profoundly improbable the allegations are, and should not try to wrest the improbability dial from “nearly impossible” to “well, of course.” I accept that the maths tell against some of what I assent to having happened in Roman Judea. I don’t think I can screw up my credulity to think that every improbable thing narrated in the gospels (or the rest of the Bible) happened just as reported. I have various reasons for making distinctions among them, which cumulatively do not have the astringent rigour of simply denying all of them or (for that matter) affirming all of them. And my observation of improbability suggests that however comforting that rigour might be, my capacity to ascertain which improbabilities did happen and which didn’t, which teams will win and which won’t, is no better than the sport experts’ capacity to anticipate the Orioles’ winning season.

I know the Tigers are more likely to win three of the next five games against the Orioles, and I know that even if the Orioles defeat the Tigers, they’ll face a challenging opponent in Kansas City or Cleveland. And whoever wins the National League Championship* will be a strong opponent, too. Go, Orioles!

* I was hoping the Pirates would win, partly because I retain some affection for the team I saw so often at Forbes Field in the days of my youth, but mostly so my Orioles would have a chance at a measure of revenge for the two World Series that the Pirates won from us by 4 games to 3 margins.

In the examples I’ve been discussing, we see settings in which someone ventures expressive behaviour, which the audience then accepts or discountenances (“Keep your hands off me!” “Don’t you dare speak to me that way!”). In these examples, the authorial intention matters less than do the circumstances of the expression. We can similarly regard (let us say) the sermon and the academic lecture as settings wherein authorial intention may also matter less than it does in other discursive settings. In the sermon, the specific intent of a prophet, an evangelist, a law-giver or epistolary apostle may be taken up and subsumed into a greater comprehensive consepctus of what message should be proclaimed for that congregation in those days (of course, if one ascribes authorial agency to God, we suppose that the message ought always be guided by the author’s intention; but since God’s intentions are even less accessible than human intentions — ”My thoughts are higher than your thoughts” — and since the Bible is not always immediately transparent to any alleged divine intention, I bracket that possibility for the time being). Similarly, the technical biblical scholar justifiably derives clues for interpretation from unintentional aspects of the text. One can think of other examples of interpreters drawing inferences from unintended circumstances as well: the detective, the psychoanalyst, the harbour pilot.

The difference between a sound and an unsound interpretation, then, need not be measured by their relative approximation of an author’s intention. A harbour pilot who navigates her cargo to the dock, reading the waves, winds, traffic, and instrument panel, has undertaken a successful interpretation. The criterion of success in that case draws on very widely-recognised standards. Audiences apply less generally accepted standards for a successful classroom lecture or Sunday sermon, but the relatively smaller domain of shared criteria doesn’t imply that no standards obtain, or that the criteria are less important. Expressive endeavours require interpretive response, and different response call forth critical evaluation of the expression and response. Such scholars as Nicholas Lash, Fracnes Young, Stephen Fowl, and Stephen Barton have discussed this phenomenon as interpreting biblical texts as performance; here I simply add my testimony to theirs, with the caveat that sometimes, some other proponents of interpretation-as-performance adhere (to my mind, misguidedly) to the authorial criterion. Just as a performance of Mahler’s Ninth or Waiting for Godot or a still life with fruit and game need not match an authorial intentional in order to succeed in some discourses, so biblical interpretation correctly draws on authorial criteria in some circumstances more than others.

On Meaning, the all-in-one page

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Nothing will protect you from interpretive error. No way of reading will ensure that you’ve understood or implemented the text correctly. You can, however, increase the likelihood of a sound or commendable interpretation in a number of ways. Most of them boil down to “loving what you’re interpreting so much that you willingly, eagerly, seek out more and more aspects and dimensions of the text” (here, “the text” meaning in the principal case “the Bible”, but more generally “whatever you’re interpreting, whether a gesture, a pastry, a painting, a film, a poem, whatever). When I was a kid, I so loved baseball that I wanted to understand it inside out. I played some — as well as my athletic gifts permitted, which mostly meant “throwing a tennis ball against the strike zone chalked on the outside wall of the gym while pretending I was pitching for the Orioles,” although there was also a catastrophic year of Little League. I attended baseball camp and was advised by coaches and sometimes real baseball players (!!). I watched a lot of ball games. I studied baseball history. I analysed baseball, in the way one did before the advent of sabermetrics. I played, devised, refined, and played again a series of baseball simulations. I understood a lot about baseball from exploring, considering, studying, trying (and failing), and keeping at it. In no way was my understanding definitively correct, but my interpretations of baseball depended on specific reasons I could cite and explain.

Likewise my understanding of the Bible has been enhanced by study of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, by learning about the ways that generations of readers have construed it, by observing ways that artists have represented it, by observing and participating in the organised practice of shaping community life more closely to reflect what we read therein, and so on. If I were to say, “I love baseball, but I hate mathematical analysis of it” (as many people do), one could make a plausible case that my appreciation of baseball was limited by that disavowal. Likewise, if I were to say that I love the Bible, but only in the way that the churches have received it over the millennia — not in the light of what we may for heuristic purposes call disinterested historical analysis — we provide a prima facie reason for an observer to think our love of the Bible is limited, and we as much as admit that our understanding of the Bible is limited, too. In the end, some dimensions of the text and its interpretation will matter more to us for particular purposes and in particular settings. The rules of baseball are not especially fascinating as literary prose, but understanding and applying them carefully requires thorough study. One can certainly say “The baseball rules are dull as dishwater” while at the same time endeavouring conscientiously to make sure that a baseball game is played in compliance with those rules. One can even propose a poetic reading of the rules that brings out the admirable geometry of the physical dimensions of the playing field (nonetheless subject to variation in the pattern of the outfield walls and the proximity of the stands to the field), the rhetoric of reticence which studiously recoils from identifying a player or team by name, the force of the repetitive invocation of earlier rules in the later stages of the nomothetic corpus — but I doubt such an endeavour would win assent from many readers. Your poetry teacher, the ardent baseball fans among more than a hundred years of literary appreciation of baseball, and current audiences all would agree that your ardour for the poetics of the Official Baseball Rules was misplaced, and that your high estimate of their poetic qualities was erroneous. Although nothing will protect us from interpretive error, the best way to minimise the likelihood that we stray from sound interpretation into outlandish folly requires us earnestly to seek out as much as we can learn about the texts we care for, and to consider them on their merits, in consultation with other learners, with broad horizons of possibility, and articulate our interpretations carefully.

On Meaning, the all-in-one page

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You may ask yourself — Why is this guy trying to hard, in so many ways, to disabuse us readers of the notion that there subsists a “meaning” as a property of a text, such that we correctly interpret that text by replicating as closely as possible the text’s subsistent meaning? This is not my beautiful text! This is not my beautiful meaning! You may ask yourself, but if you ask me I’ll reply, “Only when we recuperate from the misplaced premise of subsistent meaning can the innumerable benefits of taking an alternative approach come into clear focus. Only when we realise that we’ve been managing perfectly well without subsistent meaning can we see how much better we get along without that distraction.”

Once you accept the possibility that the extremely powerful consensus of language-users accounts sufficiently for success in linguistic communication (apart from any subsistent meaning) and, indeed, accounts much better for linguistic change and other phenomena, myriad implications crowd to mind. To take one example (one I used in my essay for Yale Div School’s Reflections), one can make the sound argument that the wisest interpretation of the Matthean Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats is not for an ageing white academic to write an article about the nature of parables, whether the sheep, goats, and recipients of charity are Gentiles, disciples, or any other group, but rather simply to go out and offer a meal to a hungry person. The practiced interpretation does not eclipse or invalidate the technical interpretation — and I’ll continue pursuing the more academic kind anyway, cos I just am that way — but discerning the meaning and applying the meaning aren’t necessarily separate processes. Moreover — and here we touch on a residual comfort of conventional subsistent-meaning hermeneutics — one can arrive at practiced interpretations clumsily, misguidedly, wrongly; but the same applies, as it turns out, to technical exegetical interpretation, and separating the latter out as the primary function of interpretation hasn’t demonstrably diminished the amount on interpretive “error” in churches and culture. It is more complicated than that — as is interpretation-as-practice — and neither exegetical diligence nor practical activism precludes the possibility of error. Nothing will protect you from error, or insure that you have the right interpretation that will authorise you to compel others to abide by your (that is, “the Bible’s”) command.

On Meaning, the all-in-one page

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At this point — having catalogued the reasons for recuperating from the immanent-meaning hermeneutics of conventional interpretive discourses — we can better see the problems concerning “application” or about interpreting non-linguistic expression as problems that arise from taking an approach that works adequately for one particular interpretive practice and deploying it not only as a canonical method for other interpretive practices, but treating it as the authoritative approach. Thee’s nothing whatsoever wrong with looking for verbal equivalents, guided by authorial intention, when pursuing certain distinct ends. But that conventional approach misfires, stalls, falters and projects its own maladaptation onto practitioners and texts when brought to bear on non-linguistic expressions.

Linguistics scholars versed in relevance theory point to this as a breakdown of the “code metaphor”, the latent assumption that verbal (and often non-verbal expressions as well) expressions can be mapped one-to-one onto “interpretations,” in the way that a coded message can be decrypted by the methodical application of the correct process. (My paper “A Code in the Head” from the SBL a couple of years ago, which I cleverly posted over at Academia.edu instead of here, addresses this in more detail.) To repeat: rather than decrypting expressions according to “real meaning”, we venture attempts at apprehension, exchanging responses until we arrive at a mutually-agreeable state of satisfaction (or dissatisfaction). Relevance theory’s extremely convincing descriptive insights illuminate the aporias that arise from embedding the code metaphor into our interpretive assumptions. It goes awry when its practitioners go forward from there to treat relevance theory’s maxims as something close to a prescriptive regimen for interpretation (just as speech-act theory helpfully describes what usually goes on in communication, but goes catty-wumpus when it assumes prescriptive authority over interpretation). Sans code, however, we do our best to apprehend the rationale and import of an expression, and respond thereunto in the way that best expresses our understanding of the expression (utterance, gesture, composition, whatever) in view.

On Meaning, the all-in-one page

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If you’re interested — bless your heart — in reading all the two-paragraph bits I’m writing about hermeneutics, I’ve compiled them into a WordPress page, with links out to the comments for each particular segment. The whole thing doesn’t flow as smoothly as I’d wish, but if I were to write this for publication I would iron out the wrinkles. It’s starting to get long, considering I only write two paragraphs at a time, but over the course of a few weeks all those paragraphs add up. Anyway, the “On Meaning” link in the “Pages” bar above will take you to the “the story up to now” page.