A couple of people (Bryan and Jeff) have recently had posts related to biblical hermeneutics in a post-modern setting. Today I had the opportunity to sit in on a seminar led by Anthony Thiselton with a visiting group of theologians & students from a German University, on the topic of Paul and Post-Modernism. There were some interesting points made about biblical hermeneutics along the way.
Thiselton approached the massive topic of post-modernism by choosing to speak about a few key figures and their main contributions: Michel Foucault and truth-as-power; Roland Barthes and language as disguise; Jacques Derrida and deconstruction & deferment; Francois Lyotard and powers & worldviews; and Richard Rorty & Stanley Fish and pragmatism.
Thiselton prefers to think of post-modernism as a “mood” with a mix of the above features, rather than as a period in history. He was able to ask then about how Paul, and the Christian faith, might find compatibility and incompatibility with this sort of mood (which he thinks characterised first-century Corinth just as much as twenty-first century Europe & America). He found certain elements of this mood valuable and compatible with Christian faith, such as a reaction against a positivist and scientific worldview and a distrust of surface-grammar. He found other elements to be highly suspect to a Christian worldview, such as Lyotard’s rejection of grand narratives.
Towards the end of the session Thiselton was asked a question about undergraduates who come to biblical studies classes claiming that it has been proven that nothing has any meaning. His response was helpful. For one thing, he suggested that this represented a misunderstanding of Deridda, who was more nuanced than that, and who particularly aimed for his contribution to apply to poetic texts. Furthermore, he pointed out that there is great variety in Scripture; and that we can reach a sort of “pragmatic” closure on certain issues: For example, if we read “Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate”, we can be confident enough of a straightforward interpretation of this statement to say that we’ve reached pragmatic closure on it. (That’s my attempt at encapsulating what he said, so it’s not his actual phrase.) In other words, it’s not as though there are two options open to us – perfect comprehension or total mystification. Biblical hermeneutics is a viable enterprise!
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Thiselton prefers to think of post-modernism as a “mood” with a mix of the above features, rather than as a period in history.
That makes so much more sense to me. Thanks for the post.
Jeff
I agree with Jeff that describing PM as a “mood” is helpful and I might quite agree.
Hey Matt, I have been wondering – if PM tends to reject grand narrative approaches – does everyone’s beloved Bishop of Durham then have anything to say to the PM mood? He’s such a grand narrative kind of Bishop.
Glad to hear it’s of interest…
Brian: I suppose NT Wright’s conception of the grand drama of scripture which incorporates us all and provides a sense of meaning & direction would constitute something of a defiance in the face of a prevailing postmodern mood. But of course, the Scriptures are also full of little narratives (which are highly valued in a post-modern setting) – and perhaps these little narratives provide an invitation to consider the bigger narrative of which they are a part.
Interestingly, Lyotard himself doesn’t discredit the Bible as metanarrative – although he does dismiss the metanarratives of Freud (the subconscious explains everything), Marx (the struggle for control of means of production explains everything), and Darwin (evolution explains everything).
You know, I’m not entirely convinced that Thiselton is reading Lyotard correctly, if he thinks what Lyotard says about metanarratives is threatening to Christianity (Walsh and Middleton make the same mistake, IMO). It seems to me that Lyotard’s concern with metanarratives is related to universally imposed systems of meaning which are intended to find agreement amongst all people. That is to say, Lyotard does not object to people finding meaning by rooting themselves within particular stories — it’s just that he argues we shouldn’t think that our particular story will be compelling or convincing, or (importantly) must be accepted by those who embody other narratives. Hence, Lyotard prefers the petit récits over the metanarrative — and hence Christianity can begin to takes its place, away from triumphalistic notions, as one petit récits amongst many. Just a thought. I wonder how Thiselton would respond…
I have a feeling that in that section of the presentation, Thiselton was aiming to respond to the ways in which postmodern features had reached (sometimes twisted) popular reception (thus the undergraduate who says it has been proven that nothing has any meaning); so I think I might have given the wrong impression about that part – but I’m not sure. I do think that his understanding would be that at least at a popular level it is a feature of postmodern mood that universal explanatory narratives are considered suspect.
Yes, I agree with your last sentence, but the key here is how we define “universal”.
Perhaps, at a popular level, people have taken this to mean that it is impossible to formulate a narrative that presents a coherent picture of the world. But this is not (IMO) what Lyotard means by “universal”. Rather, I think he is saying that there is no narrative that can be imposed upon all people and accepted as compelling by all people. However, this does not mean that we are incapable of formulating a narrative that, for us, presents a coherent picture of the world. So, Lyotard’s famous definition of postmodernity as suspicion towards metanarratives, is simply a suspicion of those who would try to impose their narratives upon all people.
Nice post Matt. of course the problem occurs for us because we are a proselytising faith. Evangelism is where the hard edge of post-modernity comes into conflict with us. We WANT to persuaude people to take on our narrative (though without the imposition that poserorprophet rightly raises).Both pop and literary P/M hit us with this one. But are we looking for pragmatic closure anyway? The popular Christian perspective is that we will know everything when Jesus comes back, a view we know to be erroneous. Surely the whole point of the age to come is that it will be an eternal arriving at something better, knowing more, loving more, being more. True, we will have a glorified body such as the Lord has today, but we won’t be the Lord! We won’t be all knowing even then. That is something that would be attractive to a P/M and I have to say to me also. I guess it also means that I may never actually know the answer to the question “Is wrestling fixed?”
Thanks for your clarifying thoughts guys. The image of persuading rather than imposing is a useful one. Indeed, the narrative in which we see ourselves as situated ought to have something strangely attractive about it.
I suppose the emphasis in “pragmatic closure” ought to be on “pragmatic” more than “closure”: As you say Steve, we see as in a mirror dimly. But we can have enough confidence in key areas to be able to act on them.
I’ve gotta say that I strongly disagree with Thiselton on the Derrida point viz. he only concerned himself with poetic texts.
The emphasis in good old Jacques tends to be that reality is radically textual (there is nothing outside the (con)text) and the point is that no texts have a stable and pan-historical meaning, but a shifting one, in contrast to the structural linguists at the time of his early texts who believed one could discern a final determined structure to (for example) mythological and ancient texts. Any stable meaning in a text tends towards deconstruction, because it is inherently unstable – the methodology (such as it is) of deconstruction is something akin to accepting the terms of a particular discourse or text, and showing how it is contradictory in its own terms that it “deconstructs” itself. Every time one tries to fix a meaning, it slips away, like stepping in the same river.
The point is then, that one cannot possibly resrict the class of texts open to interpretation, deconstruction etc. The blurring of the boundaries between literary, philosophical, historical and philological texts, as well as between the disciplines that obstensively study these types, is one of the core themes of Derrida’s work (and one of the core reasons why so many analytic philosophers hate him). The texts he personally deconstructed were not at all “poetic” texts, they were, on the whole, the writings of philosophers, but with a wide variety of other figures thrown in for good measure, linguists, poets, authors – in chronological order Husserl (Origin of Geometry), Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Of Grammatology), Nietzsche (Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles), Marx (Specters of Marx), Kierkegaard (The Gift of Death), Given Time (Baudelaire, but also Mauss). The point is that there are no boundaries, or that boundaries (ie between philosophical texts and non-philosophical texts) are false, interdependent and deconstructable. I would like to see where Thiselton got this notion from because it seems against most readings of Derrida floating about in this post-Derrida space.
Yes, that’s interesting, and makes good sense. Thiselton had a quote from Derrida about the “especially applicable to poetic texts” thing – although I can’t recall what it was from. I think his point was not that non-poetic texts are exempt; but that there are different rates at which texts “tend towards deconstruction”. I think this was his point anyway, but I may have missed what he was doing here.
That seems reasonable – obviously a very abstract poem is far more quickly tending towards ‘meaning instability’ than a sign which says boldly NO ENTRY.