Reading the Bible Badly. Karl Allen Kuhn

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СКАЧАТЬ impact the meaning we discern from a biblical passage. New Testament scholar Mark Allan Powell has investigated, catalogued, and reported on differences in the ways readers understand scriptural passages. Particularly illuminating is a study Powell conducted on Luke’s parable of the “Prodigal” Son (Luke 15:11–32).4 In the study, Powell asked one hundred Americans of diverse gender, race, age, economic status, and religious affiliation to read the parable carefully, close their Bibles, and then recount the parable as completely as possible.

      All of the American respondents (100 percent) remembered the detail of the son squandering his father’s wealth. This makes sense. What a loser! But, incredibly, only a small fraction (6 percent) were able to recall the detail of the famine. And this was not a run-of-the-mill famine—it was a “severe famine.” Many were starving, and many were likely dying (see Luke 15:14). But the American readers Powell surveyed just didn’t seem to take notice.

      Powell then conducted the same study with fifty diverse respondents in St. Petersburg, Russia. In sharp contrast to their American counterparts, 84% of the Russian respondents remembered the detail of the famine. Interestingly, only 34% recalled the son squandering his father’s wealth. Wow.

      Powell presumes, rightly, I think, that the reason the Americans surveyed remembered the detail of the squandering and did not (except for a few) recall the famine is that they understood the son’s squandering of his father’s wealth as the only, or primary, cause of the son’s plight. In other words, the narrative function of the squandering was just too essential to ignore, whereas the famine (the severe famine) was regarded as an ancillary detail that could be easily forgotten! In sharp contrast, the vast majority of the Russian respondents did not consider the detail of the famine superfluous, but essential to understanding why the son was in need.

      This raises the question of why the American readers would focus on the son’s squandering and the Russian readers on the famine. Powell proposes,

One probably does not need to look too far for a social or psychological explanation for this data. In 1941, the German army laid siege to the city of St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and subjected its inhabitants to what was in effect a 900-day famine. During that time, 670,000 people died of starvation. Some of the current inhabitants of the city are survivors of that horror; more are descendents of survivors . . . In modern St. Petersburg, typical social issues (abortion, care of the elderly, imprisonment of lawbreakers, socialized medicine, and so on) are often considered through the lens of an important question: but what if there is not enough food? . . . It is, I think, not surprising that in this social location, more than four-fifths of the persons who read Luke’s story of “the Prodigal Son” and then repeat it from memory do not forget that there was a famine.5

      Here is the important point Powell’s study illustrates. Reading the parable through lenses shaped in part by their experience and historical memory, Russian readers find it speaking to dimensions of God’s character and provision quite differently than their American counterparts, whose lenses are shaped by other cultural and historical realities.

American readers understand the parable to be emphasizing the moral depravity of the son’s squandering, the licentiousness of his pleasure-seeking lifestyle, and his repentance from his sinful ways. In contrast, Russian readers, who regard the famine as the primary cause of the son’s suffering and attach less importance to the son’s spending habits, see the parable as emphasizing God’s gracious provision for and welcome of all the lost, alone, and famished into God’s kingdom. In this reading, it is God’s rescue of the needy from matters beyond their control rather than their moral transformation that takes center stage.6 In Russia (and likely also in first-century Palestine where deadly famine was an all-too-common occurrence), it makes sense that that this reading of the parable would be far more common than in America, where resources are far more abundant for many and perhaps also more frequently squandered.7

Sometime later, Powell had the opportunity to conduct a similar study on the parable with Tanzanian seminary students, in which he specifically asked them why it was that the prodigal son found himself in need. He eagerly awaited the results, wondering which of the two reasons held in opposition by the American and Russian students (squandering and famine, respectively) would be favored by the Tanzanians. The answer: neither! The majority of the responses, from a people who highly value the virtue of hospitality, identified as the chief cause of the son’s hunger the fact that no one gave him anything to eat (see Luke 15:16).8

      What we bring to a text really matters.

      The Reading Glasses We Wear

      Any act of discerning meaning is an act of interpretation (last time, I promise).

      People interpret Scripture differently.

      Our interpretation of Scripture is complicated by a host of factors, especially by what we bring with us to the biblical texts.

      So far so good?

      Excellent. We are now going to take this a step further by delving a little more deeply into epistemological and hermeneutical theory. Hang in there. This will not be as painful as it might seem. At least I hope not.

      What is Your Hermeneutic?

A foundational assumption among many contributing to the study of epistemology (the study of how we know things), and the related discussion of critical thinking, is that all knowledge is conditioned by the commitments, experiences, and tendencies interpreters or researchers bring to their encounter with the world.9 As stated above, this is no less the case with biblical interpretation. What we bring to the biblical text plays a significant role in what we get out of it.

In the fields of literary and biblical studies, we often refer to what one brings to their reading of the text as one’s “hermeneutic.”10 One’s hermeneutic—or interpretive approach—is shaped by a rich combination of realities that guides the way one reads a text. To repeat and expand on the list of things that influence our attempts to make meaning, a hermeneutic includes and is shaped by one’s:

       state of mind

       culture

       historical context

       life experiences (such as family background, education, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliations, etc.)

       view of the world, or worldview

       view of the nature of the text they are reading (e.g., what Scripture is—its nature as the word of God and humans)

       goals for engaging that text (what I am looking to get out of it)

       assumptions of how to best engage that text (how I go about accessing what I want to get out of it).

      Perhaps it will help to think of your hermeneutic as a set of reading glasses. The lenses of those glasses are shaped by the various tendencies, perspectives, commitments, and assumptions you bring to the biblical texts. And this is very important: we all need to wear such glasses to “see” anything, including Scripture. It these glasses that set the ground rules for how we view, how we interpret, the biblical writings. And the fact that Christians often read the Bible very differently is due to the reality that we come to Scripture wearing different reading glasses.

      The Perspectival and Selective Character of Interpretation

      That Scripture would be subject to disparate readings should not surprise us. Whenever any of us seek to understand an object or circumstance, our attempts to do so are always perspectival. This is simply to repeat what I have already stated: our understanding, our interpretation, СКАЧАТЬ