<Theofragen>

This post is a bit out of sequence for me. My plan was to first trace the history of interpretation and then examine in greater detail the role that contemporary awareness of, and even fascination with, culture plays in interpreting the Bible. My friend Adam has recently posted on Cultural Hermeneutics and he asked me to respond to the opinion of our fellow PTS classmate Corey.

You can read Corey's take on Cultural Hermeneutics here. Below I offer my response to his critique. Corey's perspective is, by the way, a very common reaction to interpretation methodology that is aware of the role culture plays in the act of interpreting.

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Corey,
I appreciate your lengthy comments and your commitment to understanding hermeneutics more fully (aren't you writing a thesis on this now?). Anyway I want to challenge your perception of the Cultural Hermeneutics class. I have the course now so I cannot comment on your experience with it two years ago. Nevertheless, I see Professor Blount's task in the course differently than you. You write,
"I want to go on and challenge Taylor and Blount to recognize the most serious omission of their method. They are ultimately advocating a form of radical contextualization whereby each local situation and finally each individual becomes sovereign in itself."
I think you have let yourself fall down the slippery-slope of relativism and it scares your Newbiginian understanding of the Gospel in a pluralist society. I tend to look at Blount and Taylor's aim from a different angle. Its not that "each individual becomes sovereign in [herself]" as you suggest...quite the opposite in fact. The point of wrestling with cultural hermeneutics is done in the service of dialogue and community; i.e. it is done so that we DON'T become sovereign unto ourselves! The problem Blount and Taylor seek to remedy is that white males (such as you, Cleave and I) have controlled the interpretation of the Gospel. We have ignored the fact that we are beholden to our OWN cultural situation and that we read the Text through those lenses. The Gospel does relate the Truth of Jesus Christ to us. It is a living word that meets each of us in our uniqueness and in our connectedness with our own communities. Cultural Hermeneutics strives to dispel the myth that there is only one mode of interpreting the Bible "correctly". That does not mean that we cannot speak concretely about the texts meaning or meaningfulness. What it does mean is that when the living word meets you, Cleave and I (as North American white males) it encounters us in a different place than it does the Latin American migrant worker or the African orange-vendor in Cameroon. Cultural Hermeneutics respects a point to which you have already conceded above:
You write, "The best thing about this class is that so many things about it are good and true- the principle thing, of course, being the recognition that all of us come to the text with our own cultural and experiential lenses that shape and perhaps even determine our interpretation of Scripture. Even the central question of theology, which I take to be What is the gospel?, must be asked in culturally particular ways. Our understanding of the gospel is always formed by the particular epistemological, social and even political assumptions that we have inherited implicitly in our contexts. Any attempt to deny this fact, and to seek instead a context-independent repository of eternal theological principles that give shape to the gospel, is a recipe for cultural accommodation, theological reductionism, and even oppression.")
Another point of contention I have with your assessment resides in your understanding of the ontological divide and God's self-disclosure via cultural mediums. You write:
"It does not take the possibility that God is able to reveal Godself in and through the contextual nature of all reality with half the degree of seriousness as it takes the contexts themselves."
You seem to be so scared that by opening up the channels of dialogue across cultures ('making room at the table' so to say) your own androcentric, white dogmatic insistence that your interpretation is the right one, damnit, might be challenged. I want to rephrase, in my own words, the last statement I just quoted from your comments and maybe this will show you another way of viewing this course's purpose:
Jake thinks, "[Cultural Hermeneutics] takes the possibility that God is able to reveal Godself in and through the contextual nature of all reality seriously and appreciates that we are called to live in community and dialogue with our neighbors. We need each other and we need to truly hear the other's interpretations, respecting that the same Spirit is at work in their communities as the Spirit is in our own. Cultural Hermeneutics appreciates God's ontic otherness compared with humanity and respects the fact that God, in God's amazing love and grace, has chosen to reveal Godself to us. Yet this Divine self disclosure is limited to the extent that we are limited, finite beings who are incapable of understanding apart from language. Since languages are culturally bound we must respect the fact that other people's interpretations will necessarily differ from ours. These socio-linguistic fetters are actually the keys to liberation, for they enable us to respect one another's perception of that one great Truth via dialogue. I can think of few things that are more exquisite in God's creative design than to limit us socio-linguistically so that we are forced to listen, respect and love one another. What a sneaky and beautiful ploy!"
Corey, please don't kick against your socio-linguistic goads! Don't fight to protect your hermeneutic so that you do injustice to other interpretations. But at the same time, don't feel that your own culturally conditioned perception of the Truth is worthless... it's not, it's just not totalistic and universal.
This seems to be the tendency for my white brothers involved with cultural interpretation. They either 1) pucker their assholes up so tight that they even go so far as to dismiss culture as a factor of interpretation altogether or 2) they abandon their own culture en toto and pretend that they are actually a marginalized Latina or that they truly identify with the transgendered paraplegic. Both of these miss the mark. The purpose is to recognize that we too have a cultural identity that we bring to our task of interpreting the biblical witness. It involves an acknowledgment of the history of domination and oppression done to other interpreting communities over the years. It calls us to repent of this methodological dogmatism and to enter into true dialogue with other marginalized interpretations that threaten both our own sacred understandings of Truth and our status as dominant power-players that still participate in subjugation of minorities."

Cultural Hermeneutics

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