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How does a fundie know he’s right? This question was recently touched on in a long discussion with a “proud fundamentalist”. The question then was about how one knows whose interpretation or emphasis is correct, given we had four people present with interpretations that differ to varying degrees.

I now believe the tradition to be very much about grappling with scripture and the tradition, not about finding all the correct black-and-white answers. When it comes to human culture, there aren’t any final correct answers, there’s only the grappling and interactions and relationships through which lifestance “truths” are able to touch the heart… (Please see Reduce or Wrestle — Peter Rollins.)

Back to the fundie perspective, “I have the Truth, the True Fundamentals at least, and I know… because I know”.

The belief is that the truth or value of everything seen in life should be tested according to “the Word of God”… which many a fundie believes to be identically equal to The Bible, the Whole Bible, and Nothing But the Bible. Yes, I’m being a tad hyperbolic here, bear with me as I continue doing so: the point is, to them, the Bible doesn’t contain letters written by Paul, or a culture’s valuable narratives written down after decades of oral propagation, or poems by poets grappling with life, or creation mythologies from ancient tribes from the Near East, it contains the Word of God, and nothing but the Word of God.

Fair enough.

Yes, you hear me right, I just said “fair enough”, because I don’t want to talk about that right now. I’ll try to illuminate something about the fundie approach through use of my own experiences in the second post. In this post I’m talking about

Interpretation

It is impossible to read something without interpreting it. Language is like that.

The original author of a piece of text had something in mind, something they wanted to communicate. They then convert this into the symbolic representation that we call “language”. This conversion is done according to the words (symbols) as defined in the author’s culture. Now the reader has a go at the text. The symbols are read from the text, and then converted into meaning by the mind of the reader. What each symbol, word, concept, idea means, to the reader, is defined in the reader’s culture. A reader can either take from the text whatever their interpretation of it is, much like some post-modern art works being more about what the observer observes and interprets than what the artist had in mind.

Alternatively, the reader/scholar can attempt a thorough exegesis of the work in an attempt to understand the intentions of the author. With no direct access to the author’s mind, getting this as accurate as possible requires in-depth knowledge of the author’s culture and symbolism. This is of course much harder work than a reader simply using their own symbolism, definitions and concepts.

For more on all of this, see Hermeneutics on Wikipedia. If the idea of “moral relativity” scares you… language is in exactly the same situation, meaning being culturally dependent, changing over time and space.

Implications for being “right” about scripture

Traditional Jewish exegesis differs markedly from the Christian tradition. In fact, just within Christianity there is already very significant diversity in how scripture is understood.

A quick aside: did I just say the diversity is of a significant quantity, or did I say there is significance in the kinds of diversity found? A silly little example, but I often write things like this with awareness of multiple interpretations. Thus, my intentions are not to be perfectly and absolutely understood by all (that’s impossible anyway), I’m often intentionally leaving various interpretations of my writing open to my readers. (And they could always ask if they want to know what I really meant.)

How much tougher is it to understand the author’s intentions when the writing took place in Hebrew and Greek thousands of years ago, was translated, sometimes numerous times (which requires another round of interpretation and re-”symbolising” into a new language), and is now read from within a radically different culture? If it is that hard to know what I wrote, today, in our culture, in English, how much tougher is it to read and correctly understand scripture? Is it even possible?

Now tell me, in particular, what makes a Christian’s approach to exegesis of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) more “correct”, more “true”, than that of a Jew, practising within a tradition much more closely related to the culture the scripture lived in over the centuries? “We have discovered a fuller truth as revealed by Jesus and the New Testament” is no answer to that question, because as I mentioned, there’s great diversity within the Christian tradition as well, with some having an exegetical approach that draws much more on the approaches of the Jewish tradition.

Even if you want to argue the “Jews had it wrong in the Old Testament, the new revelation of the New Testament puts it all right”, you’re first going to have to understand how they interpreted it to be able to understand what they had “wrong”! This has implications for things as “fundamental” as the meaning of an offering or sacrifice in Judaism (which can influence the meaning ascribed to the crucifixion*), and the meaning of a question like “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10v17, here’s RLP’s dramatisation).

* I’m referring to interesting insights I learned from The Last Week by Borg and Crossan, a book I can’t recommend highly enough for those intent on following the Christian way.