AKMA continues his deeply important blogging about what he calls “integral” vs. “differential” hermeneutics. (It begins here, goes here with a response to Tom Matrullo, continues here with a response to my email, and goes here.)

I hesitate to try to characterize briefly the difference between the two hermeneutics, but I’m gonna anyway. Hermeneutics, usually explained as the study of interpretation, is actually the study of how we make sense of things, where “things” includes texts and the world. Integral hermeneutics thinks that to understand X is to see the simple, unambiguous, single meaning behind X; it is fundamentalism and literalism applied beyond the realm of scripture. Differential hermeneutics not only notices that there are many ways of understanding X but thinks that the best way to proceed is to pay attention to the differences among those interpretations. AKMA sides with the differentialists. (AKMA, if I got this wrong, set me straight!)

When AKMA first blogged about this, on July 10, it took me a while to muster a response, which I sent to him privately. I like his distinction and I also side with the differentialists. I wrote to AKMA with two aims. First, I wanted to know what he thought about what DH (differential hermeneutics) means for revelation. Is revelation a special type of truth-giving? If so, what does that do hermeneutics? Second, I suggested that AKMA still gave the sense (or was I merely projecting it?) that DH implies a failure: Too bad we can’t get at a unitary meaning, so we’ll have to settle for DH. Judaism, on the other hand, has taken DH for the past couple of thousand years anyway as quite positive. Judaism’s interpretations – that is, the Rabbi’s interpretations – are grounded by a text that’s taken to be revealed but not susceptible to a fundamenalist, literal reading; by a tradition that preserves the losing arguments; by a tradition of how to conduct an argument; and by an embedding of interpretation into practice since the resolution of arguments over interpretation determine how daily life will be conducted.

AKMA responded to my comments with his customary brilliance and gracefulness. Here’s one salient passage:

Differential hermeneutics, however, can locate revelation not in the text by itself, such that we’re left to assay the content of an unambiguous revelation that we can’t get at. Instead, differential hermeneutics can locate revelation in the shared practice of interpreting the Bible under the social, liturgical, communal, ethical conditions of participating in life under the Law, or under the Cross.

I’m not entirely comfortable with that, although I think there may be no practical difference in our positions. (As if I’m entitled to have a position in this conversation! Got to have standing before you can have a position.) I’m in the odd position of saying that I don’t think AKMA is giving enough weight to the scriptural text. His view of DH finds all of interpretation’s value in the play of differing interpretations and none in the meaning behind the text or the text itself. (Am I getting you wrong, AKMA?) So, we interpret revealed scripture and a restaurant menu differently because people encounter them “under different conditions, with a different stake in what they’re interpreting, and different goals in taking on the interpretation…” Notice that the difference is not that one text was written by God and the other by a person working in a restaurant.

But isn’t something crucial and real lost if you can’t acknowledge that difference? And if you’ll momentarily grant an atheistic Jew the standing to ask this: Why does AKMA seemingly shy away from saying scripture is special because it’s revealed? Is he worried that this puts us back into the game of thinking that there is a single, integral meaning behind the text, which in turn means that only one position is right and that we are justified in being intolerant of those who get the meaning wrong?

But you can believe that scripture is special without becoming an integral hermeneuticist. Suppose, for example, one were to believe that:

1. God is the author of scripture.
2. Scripture in some way stands for God’s beliefs and intentions.
3. The meaning of scripture overwhelms our mortal understanding.
4. Human understanding is always situated in a time, culture, community of practice, and language. Human understanding is only possible within such a situation.
5. Scripture is designed to maintain its meaning through multiple human situations, as human history unfolds.
6. Scripture needs a differential hermeneutics — a tradition of argument and discussion and the “proactive” preservation of differences.

Then you would be able to maintain that revelation reveals God’s truth without resorting to the simplistic integral hermeneutics that has led our species down such dark alleys. And, I believe, that that position sketches the Jewish stance towards scripture, although my belief here is strictly second-hand.

I very much like AKMA’s comments in his most recent blog about “performative criteria” — i.e., “testing truth-claims by living them out.” A right interpretation isn’t one that corresponds to the concealed meaning but one that enables you to live well. This is in response to Happy Tutor‘s blogging about post-Modernism as a way of avoiding responsibility. The Happy Toot writes:

Postmodernism is to be resisted not because it is false, nor because it can be refuted (you can’t refute an ideology), but because the moral type it produces is detestable.

My initial complain about post-Modernism agrees with this. POMO produces academics who use it destructively to position themselves as the smartest person in the room, showing why everyone else is still stuck in “the old metaphysics.” But POMO also captures a great truth, one that is liberating and is increasingly required for humans to continue inhabiting the planet. AKMA is a fearless partisan of the liberating force of POMO, and bless him for it.

What’s missing, I believe, is a sense of the joy of being situated. Yes, we are “stuck” in a culture and a history and that inevitably colors our view of the world. And, yes, there is no escaping being situated to achieve a superior view, free of cultural bias and prejudice, that can identify the One Truth. But if we stop there, we are left with the POMO the Tutor abhors. The other side of this coin, however, is that being situated is a joy and would be a blessing if there were a God. Further, within a situation we have ways of discussing and conversing that give some views more standing than others. (That’s why DH is important.) Further further, if there were revelation, it would provide a basic text that orients the conversation. Further further further, as Toot points out, practice and practicalities drive the important conversations, whether it’s soldiers arguing over tactics or Jews arguing over whether telephone wires count as demarcating a bounded community (i.e., whether they count as an erev). POMO untied from situation — and from the life of practice that constitutes a situation — does indeed suffer from the tyrannical relativism both the Tutor and AKMA abhor.

By the way, AKMA is using BlogAmp, a plugin to WinAmp that automatically generates a bloggable list of the tunes you’ve been playing in WinAmp. (I’d consider using it but I don’t use WinAmp.)

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