I must admit that I am not a blogger, but I am willing to try it out. Now...what to write about?
My current topic, I suppose, should begin where I am currently working. It was my great pleasure to take a seminar on the Sermon on the Mount with Dr. Jonathan Pennington from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. It was, to my delighted surprise, enlightening, motivating, and challenging in unexpected ways.
One of the most interesting aspects of Dr. Pennington's material was his hermeneutical (interpretive method of the Bible) approach, and my hermeneutical assumptions have been at least challenged. For single-meaning-multiple-significance types such as myself, there is at least one problem that should be addressed: how do we bridge that gap between meaning and significance? I mean, it's one thing to go through a technical book on how to do this (Grasping God's Word by Duvall and Hays comes to mind); it's another thing entirely to be able to describe that fuzzy path, traveling from "meaning" (what it "meant" to the author and original audience) to "significance" (what it "means" for us today). Who can articulate this well? I am not saying this can't be done, but I, for one, cannot. The practice of preaching hinges on the preacher's ability to travel from meaning to significance week in and week out, but it's one thing to do it and another thing entirely to describe the process. It seems to me to remain in that blurry field of "art" rather than that concrete method of "science".
Dr. Pennington's approach is refreshing. He challenges the notion that significance should be considered separately from meaning. I note the following: (1) authorial intent grounds us in "meaning" (whatever that word might mean :D); (2) there is a certain trajectory in the history of interpretation that is intimately related to authorial intent--and we are in that history of interpretation; (3) correct or incorrect readings of the Bible are rather understood as "good" or "bad" readings (I recall his rather apt illustration of an infrared image with "good" readings represented as very hot, and "bad" readings respresented as very cold); (4) any reading of the Word of God that neglects the cultivation of our love for God and neighbor (Augustine) is suspect (a "bad" reading); obversely, any reading of the Word that cultivates our love for God and neighbor is, at the very least, a better reading than one that neglects it.
This, to me, is potentially freeing. I have been guilty in the past, particularly due to my penchant for correction and love for truth, of taking the sledge hammer of exegetical knowledge and, in a rather unloving way, correcting those with whom I disagreed. As I suspect it is true of many who are in biblical fields of work, my tithe of correct understanding sometimes neglected the weightier matters of love and mercy. I found myself straining out a parsed Greek word and simultaneously swallowing my apathy for God and my fellow man. Can a conservative accept the view, in our anti-post-modern understanding, that it is just possible that significance is an integral part of meaning? Is it possible for me to judge my friend's Jeremiah 29:11 bumper sticker and his technical misinterpretation of it as ignoble and incorrect at the same time that I regard his cultivation of his love for God and neighbor--a direct result of his misinterpretation!--as not only noble, but right?
