As I mentioned in the previous post, we have been having a debate in my department about what is the best way to teach an Intro to Bible class at a Christian liberal arts college. I thought I would share some of my thoughts and the issues surrounding this debate.
My approach to the task has been a non-theological one. I am interested in introducing the students to the content of the Bible and the critical issues surrounding its study. I focus some on the development of the text and the history of ancient Israel and surrounding cultures, but mostly I try to familiarize them with the content of the Bible. I also teach basic techniques for interpretation.
In all this, I am taking a non-theological approach. Or, more precisely, I am taking a pre-theological approach. Students here are required to take Intro to Theology the year after they take my class, and so in many ways I see my classes at least in part as being preparatory for theology. To my mind, theology is something that you do with the text after you have interpreted it. Of course, I discuss the theology in the text, but not the question of how the text relates to questions of God, truth, reality, etc.
It turns out that my colleagues had some problems with this approach. Some of them didn’t like it because they thought I wasn’t coming at the subject from a Christian perspective. Others thought that I was being hopelessly modern (as opposed to postmodern) in thinking that the text had meaning apart from its interpreter. It is this latter issue I want to address.
While I would say that I am fairly postmodern in the way I use the Bible in theology, there is a part of me that cannot get over the idea that the text has meaning. I recognize that the meaning is not there until the reader reads the text, but I don’t think it is purely the context and expectation of the reader that produces meaning. If it is, then why read a text at all? Or why prefer one text over another. To my mind, there has to be something in the text that exerts a controlling effect over the interpretation.
I know that in recent years the move has been to incorporate theology into the reading of the text. This supposedly produces “theological interpretations.” As one of my colleagues put it,
[I]f you avoid the theological claims of the text, if you do not expose yourself to the theological claims of the text, you cannot possibly find its meaning. I believe meaning is not simply in a text but is something that happens when I hear and respond to its claim.
But while I agree that the text makes claims, to my mind the first task it to understand the claim that is being made, then decide how to respond to it. They are two separate tasks. To say that if I do not respond to the claim then I don’t understand makes no sense to me. What if I ignore the claim? Is that not a response? It also raises the question of how there can be so many good biblical scholars out there who profess no religion.
I agree that we should go on and do something with the text after we have interpreted it, but I fail to see why interpretation should not precede the decision of what to do with the text. As I commented to my colleague who made the statement above, he seems to mean something more than I do when we talk about meaning.
I am sure there are those out there in the biblioblogosphere who can champion the other side of this. I am thinking in particular of Steve Cook and Chris Spinks, but this is no doubt an issue that others have thought about. I would love to get some feed back and critiques of my position. I am happy to be shown that I am wrong, and my colleagues in the department here would be grateful to you if you could help me see the error of my ways.
Next post in the series: Pre-Scriptural Levels