Method
Matters: Essays on the Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Honor of David L.
Peterson
Joel M. Lemon and Kent Harold Richards (Eds)
Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009
Reviewed by Yahu Vinayaraj
Method Matters in
Biblical hermeneutics. This book is a handbook of methods in Hebrew Bible
scholarship. This collection of essays it contains focused discussions of
traditional and newly emerging methods including historical criticism,
ideological criticism and literary criticism, as well as numerous case studies
that indicate how these approaches work and what insights they yield. The additional
essays provide a broad overview of the field by reflecting on the larger
intellectual currents that have generated and guided contemporary biblical scholarship.
In order to focus a particular method of biblical interpretation, this review
concentrates on the essay on Postmodern Literary Criticism: The impossibility
of Method by Mark. K. George (p. 459-478).
Mark K. George makes
clear that the method matters only in modernity. Method as a systematic,
orderly series of steps that a scholar follows in order to analyze a text from
a particular vantage point, is a modern paradigm. Then, what does the method do
in postmodernity? Postmodern thought seeks to move beyond the modern paradigm. Postmodernism
does not assume that biblical interpretation as an apolitical activity. For postmodernism,
neither the interpreter nor the text is objective or innocent. Just like the
text, the interpreter is also influenced and shaped by the larger social,
economic, political, theological, historical, and cultural context within which
she or he is situated. What is the most important for postmodern biblical hermeneutics
is that the reading of the text. It is the reading that creates new texts. Of course,
it points towards the possibility of multiple readings and multiple texts.
The methods of
reading exercise power in the interpretative process. It is the question of power
in the process of assigning meanings is the locus of scrutiny in postmodern hermeneutical
criticism. Who speaks for whom? How the other is being portrayed? What is the power politics of both the text
and the interpreter? Postmodern interpreters seek to counter the exercise of
power and allow multiple meanings of a text to emerge, even though they
contradict each other. Here, the
interpreter is also challenged and invited to deconstruct her/ his own assumptions
and power consciousness.
The question of
meaning, particularly absolute or ultimate meaning, is a final challenge
postmodern interpreters make to the concept of method. Postmodernism does not
allow any foundational claim for a particular meaning. Derrida challenges the
fixity and rigidity of a particular meaning and offers multiplicity and
fluidity of meanings. Interpretation cannot convey ultimate Truth; it can
merely participate in the referential condition through its ongoing process of
creating new interpretations. Thus, for
postmodernism, to use a particular method to ascertain “the meaning’ of a text
is impossible.
The question then
arises is what do we mean by the postmodern literary criticism? George argues
that it is a “polythetic mode of classification that does not fix the
boundaries, leaving open the possibility of movement within and between classes
of objects” (p. 465). What is important for George in his postmodern (non) method
of biblical criticism is the “commitment to the impossibility of one
interpretation dominating all others; therefore, interpretations may be
meaningful within the interpreter’s particular context, but not necessarily beyond
it, which encourages other interpretations to be offered” (p.466).
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