MetaCatholic

I want to draw attention to an interesting post on a subject I find remarkably uninteresting. I tend to look with some bemusement on the whole egalitarian-complementarian debate about biblical texts dealing with gender roles. Just occasionally they furnish me with enlightenment, but as often as not they bemuse and baffle me.

David Lang comments rightly:

Whether we speak of paradigms, eisegesis, or presuppositions, the basic warning is always the same: if we are going to translate and interpret the text correctly, we must do our best to avoid being influenced by our pre-existing assumptions.

That’s easier said than done, of course. Like the proverbial log and speck (Matthew 7:3-5), we are very good at seeing when others are reading their presuppositions into a text, but often blind to the fact that we are doing the same.

I think the reason for my bafflement with this debate is twofold:

1. I don’t share the presupposition that we can move directly from patterns of living reflected, commanded, or prohibited in the text to patterns today. (This seems shared by both sides of the debate) What we see in the text is the tip of the iceberg of Judean and Graeco-Roman culture, and we need to fill in far more information via historical construction than is present in the text to read it properly. (Take a look at Bruce Winter’s Roman Wives, Roman Widows for an example of (re-)constructing a “new woman” to interpret an old text.)
2. In line with what we can construct of characteristic patterns of thought in the ancient world, and ways in which we can read them in, say, Pauline texts, it seems to me entirely unlikely that Paul would have understood the complementarian-egalitarian debate either. Both are modern paradigms, one pre-dating the 1960s and one post-dating them. (I use “1960s” with its not infrequent coded meaning as a metonym for a semi-mythical paradigm shift in our Western culture).

Debates about modern paradigms, presuppositions and the like, as David says, tend to impute them to our opponents while asserting our own understanding as that of the text. But we need to be aware not just of the diversity of our contemporary paradigms, and their influence on our interpretations, but even more so of their cultural distance from the paradigms of those who authored our texts. I suspect those caught up in this debate find it hard to listen to those of us whose initial reaction is “Duh? What.”, but perhaps a broader conversation about paradigms might yet  find new ways forward.

Kudos to Duane Smith for the 21st Biblical Studies carnival. It introduces me to a number of new blogs, which is always one of the treats of the carnival. Thanks Duane for all your hard work.

John Hobbins has several posts on the interpretation of the Genesis accounts of the Fall, and moving on to Cain and Abel. They are particularly fascinating on detailed examination of the language. It does seem to me, however, that this would in fact be enhanced by further exploration of its canonical context following the first creation narrative: being fruitful and multiplying is precisely targeted by the pain of obtaining food and bearing children, and having dominion marred by enmity between serpent and human.

Some of this ties in with the questions raised by Kevin Wilson about source criticism. The interpretative task does both: the examination of the particular textual strand, and the ever-increasing circles of its contexts. Doing this properly may expose tensions between sources and redactions, but always needs self-awareness that with but a few exceptions (such as Mark’s Gospel) the sources themselves are but an interpretative construct from a final text. 

Equally, in all sorts of ways, one cannot stop with the canonical text. Whatever claims are made about the authority of the canonical text, subsequent readings of it (which include poetic and artistic representations of the narrative) are themselves implicated in its meaning(s). The Augustinian interpretation of Paul’s interpretation of Adam’s sin was and is for many the authoritative meaning of the text.

The importance of canon, perhaps, is not in that it provides a final form of the text, or a uniform synchronic text collected out of a multiform diachronic variety of texts, but that it points to the texts as located in a reading community that turns to them in both diversity and uniformity, as those texts which the community authorises to author its conversation and its life.