I’m taking Cultural Hermeneutics this semester with Mark Taylor (one of my favorite professors here) and Brian Blount. We’ve been reading some Gadamer and Bultmann, getting some good background before we jump into the various cultural groups we’ll be reading interpretations from (African-American, Feminist, Womanist, Latin American, Latina/o, Asian, Asian-American, Gay/Bi-/Lesbian and Disabled communities). It’s a fascinating class; we’ve just been covering some basic stuff to hermeneutics right now, talking about how everyone comes to the text with their contextual background (their preunderstanding) and they all have some relation (life relation) to the text to begin with. People come to the text with certain questions, and even those questions will determine what meaning they will be getting out of the text. We’re reading Taylor’s Remembering Esperanza and Blount’s Cultural Interpretation as two of our main texts for the course.
Here are some quotes I really enjoy from Cultural Interpretation.
“No final, complete, comprehensive text interpretation can result from this process because changes in sociolinguistic circumstance are perpetually inviting new ways of approaching and therefore evaluating the text. A text can therefore never be interpreted completely; it can only be more comprehensively appreciated once it is understood that what is determined to be its meaning is dependent on a variety of sociolinguistic factors. A text can be envisioned as a rainbow of potential meaning whose individual colors, while visible to one interpreter or community, are invisible to many others.”
Potential meaning…that’s scary I’m guessing for some. We want THE MEANING. The text was written for a reason, to communicate a specific meaning, so what is it? But what if that’s not the case. We all come to the text with vastly different life-experiences that must be taken into account.
“Coming to terms with such a recognition teaches us that there can never be one final text interpretation…Because we also know that the human circumstance is constantly changing, we can conclude that text interpretation will remain fluid. This does not mean the text changes. It obviously remains the same. But we have found that the text is multivalent. There is no single meaning.”
But the text doesn’t change. No worries on that one. The text was written, and we must respect the text and acknowledge what is there. But it is not even possible to say that "it is our job to find the one, true, single meaning." It’s not there. The same text can have very different meanings in very different settings and cultural situations. Is that bad? Is it bad that one text can speak to many different people in many different ways…?
“Traditional approaches cannot continue without taking note of micro-interpersonally oriented interpretations; conversely, micro-interpersonally oriented interpretations cannot affirm themselves against traditional interpretations, but have to engage with them. Through such recognitions we can move toward a fuller interpretation, one that we must concede will always remain incomplete.”
A humility is required here that while we share our interpretations, our thoughts on the "potential" meaning of a text, we must always acknowledge that ours is not a full interpretation – it could always be fuller by taking into account the variety and diversity of other possible meanings that are there in the text. It is a dialogue, it is a dialectic…it is a process.
Can we be okay with that? If we say that Scripture has more than one meaning, are we dis-respecting scripture? The authors? Or are we in fact taking Scripture more seriously, being open to interpretations that we may have totally and completely missed. Thoughts?