Building a Community of Interpreters: Readers and Hearers as Interpreters

by Walter R. Dickhaut

Introduction

the aim of this book is as much, or more, to address those who read Scripture and hear it read, and those who listen to preaching.

Reading requires as much creativity as writing.

In a very real sense, by the assigning of meaning (i.e., interpreting) to the writer’s words, the reader is creating a new story—the reader’s story—not exactly and not precisely the story imagined by the writer.

During the course of these pages, I will speak of writers and speakers as those from whom a message originates—as senders—referring to those who are addressed by their communication as readers and hearers—as receivers.

Part I A Community of Interpreters

1 Once Upon a Time

my proposal that listeners and hearers make up a community of interpreters, a community that not only receives meaning that has been produced by others but also produce meaning themselves.

Important

whether looking ahead or behind, a reader is always able to keep track of the place to which she wishes to return.

By way of contrast, were I hearing these lines rather than reading them, I would not enjoy the options available to the reader. In fact, as hearer, the more I try to either review or anticipate as I listen, the more I risk losing my place altogether and, perhaps, along with it critical dimensions of the oral narrative.

The written words, the line-in-print, are the author’s interpretation of the story-as-told, but the reader’s interpretation of the story-as-read lives yet between the lines.

When a story is being told rather than read, the storyteller, in addition to the listener, is an interpreter as well.

The tonal qualities of the voice, its elocution, its shifting force, are clues as to how the teller interprets the story and, therefore, hints as to how the storytel...

if the storyteller is reading or telling a story that was authored by someone else, the hearer does not get the author’s interpretation alone; the hearer gets the author’s interpretation as interpreted by the reader or teller.

The important thing is that as hearers we don’t simply take in what is read to us without looking it over, bringing our own understandings and convictions into whatever pictures are being drawn, evaluating not only what we have come to believe but also what we believe we know, sorting out inconsistencies that appear, and forming conclusions about what it says and means to us, as interpreters.

As readers and hearers, we are not empty vessels into which the meanings of others are poured. As interpreters, readers and hearers do not simply listen to meaning assigned by others; readers and hearers assign (i.e., create, produce) meaning too, and this makes them interpreters.

2 When Texts Close and Open, Open and Close A Swinging Door

by interpreting—that is, in assigning new meaning(s) to what is read in a heretofore closed text—the reader (or it could be a hearer as well) reopens a fixed narrative and, in some way, changes it in what is an endless process so long as there are those who continue to reopen texts that were previously closed.

When new information or understanding is added to an already closed text, the text is no longer closed but reopened so that something new can be added in what then came to be called a hermeneutical circle.

In the case of both addition and subtraction, once a text has been altered in this process, it will be interpreted differently and the meanings assigned to it will be different as well. My suggestion is that this description of the interpretive process justifies the conclusion that biblical interpretation is more like a spiral than a circle.

3 What to Look For On the Hunt

4 As Text and Reader Meet Of Meetings, Filters, and Lenses

The Meeting

Since Scripture has a face value when a reader first opens its pages in search of a particular text, it can be said that the reader is meeting that text for the first time.

Each time a reader meets a given text, something is different. Not only have time and the circumstances of the reader changed, but the reader has likely acquired new learning, modified certain perspectives, and encountered fresh insight or discovered a puzzle heretofore not seen; the text is the same, but other things have changed. In this respect, this reader is a changed reader and so, in a certain sense, a new reader; and though bringing along the memory of previous encounters with the text in question, this new reader is meeting this text in a new context, as if for the first time.

In the accumulation of facts and impressions, questions, and perceptions on emerging points of interest and concern, the reader will be sorting through all this information, making decisions about what to keep, what to discard, and what to store on the shelf.

Filter and Lenses

The existence of both filters and lenses accounts for many, if not most, of the disputes we have about what Scripture means for us, in our time, and in our world.

A filter functions largely in a preconscious mode; it sets aside or removes what the reader prefers not to engage, often without our awareness.

Filters diminish perception (for good and ill), enabling one to see less (things you don’t need or want to see). They function essentially as a sorter, sifting out certain unwanted perspectives, features, facets (e.g., any number of prejudices or biases), and things it is unnecessary to see

Filters are largely the agents of prejudgments, the solution of choice when contending with cognitive dissonance.

Lenses, on the other hand, are instruments of intention; they focus the interpreter’s attention on specific interests and features that aim to discover something new;

a reader will consider a variety of interpretive perspectives in the study of a particular text, moving back and forth, in and out, among multiple interpretive possibilities, all in the interest of discerning the purposes of God and becoming more fully aligned with them. This often proceeds without a conscious awareness.

5 Where to Stand

An Angle of Vision

the views of each and all will be filtered through an angle of vision that is shaped by personal experience and family history, particular political and theological commitments, and matters of social and cultural location (such as gender, race, nationality, economic status, psychological make-up, etc.).

My proposal is that the interpretation of Scripture depends a great deal on where we stand (our stance, if you will). The angle at which we approach biblical texts will be shaped by any number of personal, social, political, religious, economic, historical, cultural matters—on

One’s line of sight is of critical importance because it is from this precise angle that questions are posed. It is, likewise, this same framework in which possible answers are considered and decided. The data that are presented by life-in-the-world are thence sifted, refined, and framed as an interpretation that is congruent with the angle at which one stands.

Interpretation is choosing among various alternatives with the aim of assigning meaning to the arrangement of the words on a page. The reader decides to assign meaning to an event that is narrated, judges the importance of this or that occurrence, measuring and characterizing the extent of its significance. All this proceeds within the deliberative mind of the reader (as with the writer previously), standing in a particular place, with a precise line of sight, seeing at one particular angle. The writer of Scripture looked out upon certain events from one angle, and the reader stands in a profoundly different place when reading the writer’s report of those events twenty-plus centuries later.

So, in the reading or hearing of any text of Scripture or any sermon, there will be multiple points of view on the meaning of the text in question, multiple competing angles with which to contend.

As a reader begins to read a text, and a hearer begins to listen, they engage it from their distinct angle of vision, with their collection of convictions about the nature of human life, their respective theological commitments, their own expectations of what the shape of the future should be. Hence, they enter and reenter a process of interpretation and reinterpretation, the result of which is not simply a restatement of meaning from the past but a production of meaning, new meaning, formed for the first time.

6 Beginning Before the Beginning

“West of Eden”

I am proposing that such alertness to the possibility of discovering more than the obvious meanings in a biblical text is necessary, in part, because mystery, surprise, and expectation are inherently theological. They connote an ineffable otherness that (some would say who) moves like the wind, that may be seen only after it has passed in review, that seems to appear in masquerade, and that hides out amidst the lowly of the earth—an otherness that surprises us along the contours of mystery, and bestirs us to a threshold of expectation.

Part II Of Mystery, Surprise, and Expectation

7 A Great Mystery

The word god itself, small (i.e., little) as it is, whether spoken aloud or pondered in the quietude of meditation, leads immediately into shadows of uncertainty, curiosity, and wonder. No surprise, then, that the ancient Hebrew people were so cautious about encrypting a word by which to refer to this mystery that is beyond not only understanding but even uttering. If you cannot utter a word, you can hardly understand or explain it,

there is precious little sense of mystery, or even allusion to it, in much of the rhetoric of today’s churches, not in its formal and informal conversation, its official utterances and pronouncements, its preaching and teaching, its educational curricula, its prayer.

What I suspect is that the more our religious institutions continue to suffer the loss of size, power, and identity (these three characterizations are surely interrelated), the more vigorous will be the insistence on claims of certainty with respect to both the mode(s) and reality of a divine presence, and, correspondingly, the more we will suffer the loss of a sense of mystery in our work and worship.

Increasingly have I come to believe that the absence of a sense of an ineffable mystery diminishes every dimension of not only church life but countless dimensions of the fabric of our culture as well.