I’m so tempted to write a rhyme about this, but I need to stay focused on stuff I’ve already got to get done by the end of the day.

Meanwhile, enjoy the fruit of postmodernism when applied to Biblical interpretation….

Person: But it seems as though some Christians lose face of spirituality when all they do is quote the bible all the time. I have seen Chrisitans who quote the bible day in and day out but be the main ones pointing fingers and calling names, and doing dirt. And they always want others to conform to the way they think and feel like the rest of us, and how we think and feel is obsolete.. I mean we all are not going to get the same message from the same bible verses.. It is up to interpretation, right?

Me: I got a question for you.

Do you believe that texts have objective meaning to them ? (Bible or otherwise)

Person:
It all depends.. also it depends on what you mean by objective meaning?
please elaborate….

I can give you an example.
The book of Ruth, when Ruth advised Naomi to
go to Boaz Ruth 3:1-5 and so on…

me personally i took this as her saying it was ok to make her self
known to him, but to let him pursue her…but another person in my class
didn’t see it that way… that is where i was going about reading the same verses
but not getting the same message…

Me: what do you mean by means ? what do you mean by depends ?

Person: it depends on the material.. you did say the bible or otherwise
and i asked what you meant by objective meaning..

that can be looked at in many ways… so i ask you
what do you mean by objective meaning…..

Me: what do you mean by ‘what do you mean by objective meaning’ ?

Person: you know what… nevermind… have a good night

Me: I’m asking a legit question. You obviously use certain words to communicate certain things to me and expect me to take them a certain way. Am I free to interpret your words in a fashion other than the way you intended them and do you think that your questions were clear enough that they could be understood ?

In other words – do words have objective meaning ?

That’s where I left the convo. She may or may not respond back.

Okay, so it’s not THAT funny. It’s more sad than anything.

For those paying attention to the above conversation who haven’t figured it out yet – the person above is assuming absolute meaning in her words when asking me questions. In fact, she’s assuming absolute meaning in her words…. and using that absolute meaning to deny absolute meaning to the words that others use, whether it be me, a Biblical writer, etc…

John Piper touched on this in Don’t Waste Your Life with the following words:

“In other words, since we can’t know objective reality outside ourselves, there can be no objective meaning in what we write either. So interpretation does not mean trying to find any objective thing that the author put in a text,, but simply means that we express the ideas that enter our head as we read. Which doesn’t really matter because when others read what we have written, they wont’ have any access to our intention either. It’s all a game. Only it is sinister, ecause all these scholars (and small-group memb ers) insist that their own love letters and contracts be measured by one rule: what they intended to say. Any mumbo-jumbo about creatively hearing ‘yes’ when I wrote ‘no’ will not go down at the bank or the marriage counselor.

And so it was that Existentialism came home to roost in the Bible: Existence precedes essence. That is, I don’t find meaning – I create it. The Bible is a lump of clay, I am the potter. Interpretation is my creation. My existence as a subject creates the “essence” of the object. Don’t laugh. They (speaking of philosophers of the 50’s-60’s) were serious. They still are. Today it just has other names.” (DWYL, pp. 24-25)

Piper then goes on to describe what brought him out of this mess:

Into this morass of subjectivity came a Professor of Literature from the University of Virgina, E.D. Hirsh. Reading his book Validity in Interpretation during my seminary years was like suddenly finding a rock under my feet in the quicksand of contemporary concepts and meaning. like most of the guides God sent along my path, Hirsch defended the obvious. yes, he argued, there does exist an original meaning that the writer had in mind when he wrote. And yes, valid interpretation seeks that intention in the text and gives good reasons for claiming to see it. This seemed as obvious to me as the broad-day sun. It was everybody’s assumption in daily life when they spoke or wrote.

Perhaps even more important, it seemed courteous. none of us wants our notes and letters and contracts interpreted differently than we intend them. Therefore, common courtesy, or the ‘Golden Rule’, requires that we read others the way we would be read. It seemed to me that much philosophical talk about meaning was just plain hypocritical: At the university I undermine objective meaning, but at home (and at the bank) I insist on it. I wanted no part of that game. It looked like an utterly wasted life. If there is no valid interpretation based on real objective, unchanging, original meaning, then my whole being said, “Let us eat, drink and be merry. But by no means let us treat scholarship as if it really matters.” (ibid, p. 25)

After talking about the ‘God is dead’ movement of the late 60’s, Piper ends this portion of his story with these words:

“So my deliverance in the late sixties from the madness of killing God led naturally in the early seventies to my deliverance from the hypocritical emptiness of hermeneutical subjectivism – the two-faced notion that there is no objective meaning in any sentence (but this one). Now I was ready for the real work of seminary: finding what the bible said about how not to waste my life.” (ibid, p. 26).

I’m tempted to cite one more quote from Piper relative to this entry. In fact, I will:

“My debt at this point to Daniel Fuller is incalculable. He taught me hermeneutics- the science of how to interpret the Bible. Not only did he introduce me to E.D. Hirsch and force me to read him with rigor, but he also taught me how to read the Bible with what Matthew Arnold called “severe discipline.” He showed me the obvious: that the verses of the Bible are not strung pearls, but links in a chain. The writers developed unified patterns of thought. They reasoned. “Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD (Is. 1:18). This meant that, in each paragaph of Scripture, one should ask how each part related to the other parts in order to say one coherent thing. Then the paragraphs should be related to each other in the same way. And then the chapters, then the books, and so on until the unity of the Bible is found on its own terms.” (pp. 25-26)

We’ll see if my dance partner responds back. Of course, I already know that citing Piper to her isn’t going to do much of a hill of beans of anything. But I will pray that she escapes the hermeneutically and epistemologically suicidal path she’s tredging down/through.

She’s not the only one. And I’m betting that many of you reading this have encountered this same subjective approach to the scriptures yourselves. I had a similar convo over on the 5th a few days ago that ran along the same lines…. I may go back and resurrect it…. I may not.