Why We Need a New Hermeneutics
The new church needs a new hermeneutics. Current Evangelical biblical interpretation stands upon the idea that the author's intent is both knowable and supreme. Such churches claim to know "what Paul really meant in this passage and thus what God means to communicate" for example. In its extreme form this leads to Biblical literalism and churches that (for example) force women to wear veils in church (1 Cor 11). In the less extreme forms, it leads to attempts to incorporate cultural information and the idea of progressive revelation into the interpretation. To follow the example, women needn't wear veils in church, but they must submit to their husbands as the primary authority in the marriage. Their claim is that they are not taking the bible literally, but taking the principles from the bible and applying them today. Sounds nice. Doesn't work.
Here's why. Every Evangelical church takes only those principles that they are either culturally comfortable with or that they promote anyway. Principles that the bible teaches that they either cannot or will not accept are explained away. I give just two examples though there are many more. At the end of the Jew/Gentile controversy covered in Galatians, Corinthians, and Acts the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 announces its final answer to the problem. Gentiles can be Christians. They need not be circumcised or follow the law except in two ways: they are to abstain from sexual immorality and meat with the blood in it. No one denies that Gentile Christians must abstain from sexual immorality, but what of the second part of the announcement? Why do Gentile Christians today feel free to eat non-Kosher meat? The Jerusalem Council, the main group of the Apostles who knew Jesus personally, Peter and James and John and such, has required it. Why do we abandon the second part of their demand but not the first? Did it get overturned later? No. Acts was written after the Pauline epistles so this is the final word on the matter. Is it binding just on those Gentile Christians? No. It reads like a universal pronouncement. But modern Evangelical scholars will attempt to wiggle out of this requirement. Why? We don't want to be bothered with eating Kosher meat, that's why. We've just decided we're not going to follow that bibilical principle, there's nothing deeper than that. And Evangelical scholars will come up with complicated and fanciful explanations about why avoiding eating Kosher meat is just for the 1st century Gentile Christians, but avoiding sexual immorality is for all Gentile Christians forever, even though in the text the two are uttered in the same breath.
As a second example look at Jesus' ethical exhortations in his Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7). There are some really powerful principles here: non-retaliation, love for enemies, sins based not on behavior but on intent. Some really good stuff. Oh, and for most Evangelical interpreters it's all metaphorical. These aren't the kind of biblical principles they want to follow. It was all well and good for a people under the control of the Roman Empire to extol the virtue of non-retaliation, but I'm an American. If someone slaps me, I'm suing him. If someone offends me, I'm going to make sure the FCC fines him heavily. If someone says something I don't agree with, I'm going to try to get them silenced. We must crush our enemies wherever we find them without mercy. Torture is too good for them. Evangelical biblical scholars make these biblical principles "metaphorical" because they don't want to live by them. Or, put another way, they selectively choose when and where to apply them. For example, if the pastor says something offensive in church we must turn the other cheek, but if the town council zones the spot next to the church as commercial the knives come out.
What I'm saying is that the claim by Evangelical interpreters that they take the author's intent as normative and thus give weight to biblical principles is false. They give weight only to those biblical principles that they like, or that match their culture, or that they want to enforce on others. If the author's intent were primary and the Evangelical interpreters truly desired to follow whatever the bible affirmed, come what may, they would do so. But it's apparent by casual inspection that they don't. There are many more examples I could give, but I'm long-winded enough. To give an example from history, many Evangelical churches in the 19th century in the south supported slavery as a biblical principle. Thy had lots of texts to support their position. Then we burnt their cities to the ground. After that, they decided the bible didn't promote slavery after all. In the 1960s, many Evangelical churches found support in the bible for segregation. Then we sent in the National Guard to escort children to school and to stop these good Christian men from hanging their black brothers from trees. After that, they decided the bible didn't promote segregation either. So when were all these good, honest, well-intentioned interpreters wrong? Was it when they revised their stance to decry slavery or when they further revised their stance to decry segregation? And how could this in any way be a model for rock-solid, from-on-high, biblical principles? Why did the U.S. Army need to explain to these people they were wrong instead of the Holy Spirit? You'd think He'd have been a little more attentive...
The truth is Evangelical biblical interpretation has failed. A slavish devotion to the text and the canon does not guarantee that we indeed are capable of extracting the author's intent, let alone God's Word (caps intentional). In fact, since men like Wittgenstein and Quine have demolished our view of language as some form of ideal communications medium, biblical interpretation based on that assumption must be revised. Evangelical Christianity no longer worships a living God, but a dead book. A book the earliest Christians didn't even know would exist. To follow the Evangelical story, as the bible was written and became the perfect expression of God's truth, the Holy Spirit withdrew. But their story is a fable.
In reality, the bible has a less exalted position. It is not the perfect communicator of God's Mind to man. Some of the things it teaches are evil (the cherem in Joshua, for example), sometimes it contradicts itself (1 Cor 11 vs. Gal 3 on women's authority), and sometimes it's just plain confusing (baptizing for the dead in Peter). The Old Testament was at least written as some sort of national epic recounting the history of the nation of Israel, but the New Testament consists in large part of some guy's letters. The Gospels come closest to being an intentional theological history like the Old Testament, but even they are written for the following reason: "Oh, shit! Jesus isn't returning! We'd better write this stuff down so we don't forget it."
The canon is another fallacy. Theologians have often dropped entire books (Luther, I'm looking in your direction) when they didn't agree with them. There is no reliable reconstruction of the canon, nor any reason why it ended when it did. Clement's Letter to the Corinthians is a much better book than 3rd John! The canon was up in the air for at least 200 years. Books like Corinthians are clearly at least 3 separate letters that have been mushed together. Ephesians and Colossians are nearly the same book, probably a letter duplicated and sent to two churches with slightly different needs.
So we need a new hermeneutics. One that does not give the bible more than its due. One that does not pretend that we can discern the author's intent. One that can be consistently applied. That is, if we are going to pick and choose what is "truth" as the Evangelicals do, we at least want to be honest about it up front. We want a hermeneutics that recognizes that God is living, active, and present, not some dead letter. How we do this is the topic of the next article in this Category.
The church in America has failed. It has failed to be the place of healing, comfort, and joy that it should be. Instead, the church manipulates Christians in order to support its political and financial goals. The church allows no diversity of thought or practice, but instead has shattered into 22,000 denominations each of which thinks it has the only true interpretation of scripture, the only proper ethics, and is the only righteous representative of God's work on earth. In order to maintain this farce, Christians are forced to either conform to a church's practice or face alienation, ostracization, and personal attack. People swap churches regularly, often confused after being attacked by a group of people who once claimed to love them. Most church growth now is transfer growth, not expansion. Some people drop out of the church entirely, thinking themselves unworthy to be one of God's people.
