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Interpreting a pluralistic religious tradition - Panel discussion January 22, 2002; Remarks by David Jobling
(l-r) Don Schweitzer (Chair of the Saskatoon Organizing Committee), Marc Ellis, Betty Lynn Schwab, and David Jobling at the January 22 panel discussion.
Christians and Jews inherit religious texts that express a variety of religious and ethical viewpoints. How can a Jew or a Christian interpret the pluralistic tradition in a way that is faithful to a given text and yet consistent with one's own ethical/religious standards?
I respond to the question as a Christian, but as one who specializes in the Jewish Bible. I take "religious texts" to mean the Bible, though obviously there are other things it can mean. The problem, as I understand it, is what we do when the sacred text, the Bible, demands or praises behaviour or attitudes that we believe are wrong. When parts of the Bible condemn homosexual practices, or glorify the extermination of enemies in war, or enforce narrow community boundaries by, say, disallowing marriage out of the community. These would be some examples.
I want to suggest several sorts of answer, generally in order of increasing attractiveness to me. But all the answers, even the first, have insights that are worth discussing, and they are by no means all mutually exclusive.
1. There are Christians who simply do not accept the terms of the question; they do not see their faith as "pluralistic," and do not agree with the premise (at least as applied to the Bible) that "Christians" inherit religious texts that express a variety of religious and ethical viewpoints." They cannot countenance the idea that any part of the Bible is ethically wrong. I am very far from such people, but they sometimes function as a reality check when I want parts of the Bible not to say what they do say (I think, for example, of the various attempts to deny that parts of the Bible condemn homosexual practices).
2. There are some who see the Bible as moving from "lower" forms of religion to "higher," the higher then cancelling out the lower. Christians have been attracted to this as a way of dealing with the "Old Testament," but such development is also sometimes claimed within the Jewish Bible. The most interesting form of this approach is the claim that the Bible has its own hermeneutical tendencies which we may legitimately carry further than the Bible carries them. For example, Rosemary Ruether sees a "prophetic principle" tending towards social justice, which we can legitimately apply to the issue of justice for women, even though the prophets themselves do not so apply it; while Phyllis Trible even finds a "depatriarchalizing" tendency in the Bible which feminist readers need only carry further than the biblical texts carry it.
3. A historical view may suggest that biblical texts which we now find unacceptable had in their own time positive merit, and helped maintain community, even though we now find them a threat to Christian community. Perhaps easiest to deal with is the exclusiveness which we find, for example, in Ezra and Nehemiah. The tiny restored Jerusalem community had to think first of maintaining its separate identity, or it could never have survived. Total destruction of a conquered city, it has been argued, averts the very present danger of epidemic when conditions in the city have deteriorated. Even the forbidding of homosexual acts might seem more acceptable -- extending an argument of Carol Meyers' in a situation where population growth is the paramount need and sexual energy is a prized communal resource. Contextual theology!
4. Very popular in the liberal seminary is a strategy of seeing the Bible as emerging out of conflicts, and taking sides in these conflicts. This strategy has become more sophisticated as sociological approaches to the Bible have developed in the hands of Norman Gottwald and others. As many of you know, I introduce the Jewish Bible in my course in terms of conflict within the postexilic Jewish reconstruction between "Priests," seen as representing a dominant class, and "Deuteronomists," representing a subordinate class. The shape of ancient conflict can be made to line up remarkably with the shape of conflict in our own time -- Gottwald dedicates his celebrated The Tribes of Yahweh to the people of Vietnam. The "bad" texts can now be dealt with in two ways. Either they come from the "bad" side in ancient conflicts, or they can be reinterpreted in terms of those conflicts: Israel's wars become entirely more palatable as wars of liberation.
5. The Bible as "dialogic truth," to use an expression from the title of a Schnell lecture that Carol Newsom gave here. I have just read in manuscript her forthcoming book on Job, where she carries much further than anyone else in biblical studies the use of Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of "dialogic truth." Truth in this view emerges not from the refinement of a set of propositions, but in the meeting, friendly or conflictual, of different possibilities. Dialogic truth never becomes settled truth; points of view in dialogue may shift, but they do not converge on a single option. If they do, the concept of truth has ceased to be a dialogic one. Newsom reads the book of Job as insisting on this sort of irresoluble dialogue. The different characters express different "moral imaginations" (to use a category from recent ethical theory). Throughout Job these different imaginations clash -- and not at all in the spirit of polite intellectual debate. The very meaning of human existence is at issue, and the protagonists simply do not agree about it.
In my introduction course, we find a point of view quite like this, but applied to the whole canon of scripture, in Gabriel Josipovici's The Book of God. What Job (according to Newsom) deliberately is, the Bible (according to Josipovici) becomes through the partly "accidental" process of its creation out of a vast variety of different kinds of literature from different circumstances. This makes the Bible into a debate, often with the gloves off, between different ways of understanding "life, the universe, and everything." The debate does not end; Israel's wisdom scholars, for example, do not agree with its prophets, and never will. Both are simply there, there for us. To create our own "canons within the canon," shutting out the voices we don't like, is simply to miss what the Bible is all about.
6. Finally, the Bible as our "unconscious." I take this term from the American Marxist critic, Fredric Jameson, who sees works of literature in any age as a processing of the "political unconscious" of that age. The fundamental social contradictions which a society cannot solve, and therefore tries to deny, can be discerned by a close analysis of its literature. I believe that we in the West, and certainly not only those who are still part of traditional religious communities, have internalized the Bible at the level of our basic drives. We need, particularly those of us who are publicly and professionally linked to the Bible, to unpack these unconscious ways in which the Bible drives us. Those of you who have taken the Integration Seminar know what I am talking about. When we see a part of the Bible that we don't like -- and this can work both individually and communally -- we need to consider the possibility that it corresponds to a real aspect of ourselves which we are repressing rather than dealing with. Nathan Loewen is writing his Master's thesis, for example, on the peculiarly warlike way in which one prominent theologian presents his demand for Christian pacifism.
Rosemary Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk
Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality
Carol Meyers, Discovering Eve
Norman Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh
____, The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction
Carol Newsom, on Job, forthcoming
Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious
By David Jobling
