A little Hauerwas heresy, courtesy of a comment by Eric

Pontifications » Blog Archive » “Sola scriptura is the seedbed of both fundamentalism and biblical criticism”

God certainly uses Scripture to call the Church to faithfulness, but such a call always comes in the form of some in the Church reminding others in the Church how to live as Christians, no “text” can be substituted for the people of God.

But the use of this book is both a divider and a uniter. I think that there is a role for personal appropriation of Biblical stories, but as we get further from the Biblical settings from which these writings came, there is much less clarity about meaning, since we have travelled almost two millinea from a time and culture of which nearly everyone (in America) has very little clue.

Ironically, by freeing the Bible from the Church and putting it in the possession of the individual conscience, the Bible becomes, in the process, the possession of nationalistic ideologies. America becomes a Christian nation sanctified by God.

This is surely the case with a lot of “individual” (yet still rarely untouched by previous preconceptions of Scripture, by whatever teachers, good or bad, that we have had), but I am unsure as to whether that is ALWAYS the case. For example, where did Jesus , or better, some of the prophets, get their reformative leanings (that Jesus guy, maybe he did have something unique; just maybe)? This tells me that in the community, the seeds are sown for dissent as well, and the community grows just a bit out of that experience of challenge (but not without much struggle; stonings, crufifixions, martyrdoms, stuff like that)

Fundamentalists and biblical critics alike fail to acknowledge the political character of their account of the Bible, and they fail to do so for very similar reasons. They want to disguise how their “interpretations”underwrite the privileges of the constituency that they serve.

And those they serve would have it no other way.

If I deny that the text has “a meaning,” some biblical scholars fear an uncontrollable subjectivism. Interpreters, especially laity, can simply make of the text anything that they wish, creating the meaning of the text at will. Such a presumption, however,  assumes that the only entities involved are the text and the individual interpreter. Texts and interpreters, however, work only within contexts that make what they have to say irrelevant or interesting. What is required, then, is an account of how new readings help us to extend our habits in ways no foreseen.

Why is it that the WHOLE process has to be made into some big Cecille B. DeMIlle production, so that everything is done by a lightning bolt of a pen on the tablets. I often like to point to how Paul, in one of his epistles, said “I baptized none of you……but then retracts, and said Well, I did baptize so and so, but other than that, I don’t remember it” (I Cor. 1:14-16). That kind of throws a big monkey wrench into the whole “Verbal inspiration deal”. Here, obviously, is human error, and frailty (of memory).

Thanks, Eric, for posting that link to this Hauerwas stuff!