Iii. Exegesis And Spirituality
II. EXEGESIS
It is not my intent here to describe good exegetical method. I assume one knows that exegesis consists of asking the right questions of the text, that those questions are basically of two kinds — contextual and content — that the contextual questions are also of two kinds (literary and historical) and that the content questions are four (determining the original text, the meaning of words, the implications of grammar, and the historical-cultural background). My concern in this essay, rather, is to take up the question of how all this relates to the ultimate goal of Spirituality.
At issue here is finding the way between the two sirens that lurk on either side, that would woo the exegete toward one extreme or the other. The sirens are exegetical methodology (Scylla, if you will), on the one side, and a popular view of spirituality (Charybdis), on the other.
These two (exegetical method and spirituality) are seen as constantly at war with one another, with the result that piety in the church is — for good reason — highly suspicious of the scholar or the seminary-trained pastor, who seems forever to be telling people that the text does not mean what it seems plainly to say. The result is a reaction to good method as such, since such a way of looking at the text seems to run at cross-purposes with a more devotional reading of the Bible, where “the Word for the day” is received by one’s direct encounter with the text in a more free-floating, associative way of reading texts. The bottom line is that such people take their own brand of “common sense” approach to the Bible: read it in a straightforward manner and apply it as you can; and “spiritualize” (sometimes = allegorize) the rest.
Came along the exegete and said “no” to such piety. Taking Scripture away from the believing community, the exegete made it an object of historical investigation. Armed with the so-called historical-critical method, he thus engaged in an exercise in history, pure and simple, an exercise that appeared all too often to begin from a stance of doubt — indeed, sometimes of historical skepticism with an anti-supernatural bias. Using professional jargon about form, redaction, and rhetorical criticism, the exegete, full of arrogance and assuming a stance of mastery over the text, often seemed to turn the text on its head so that it no longer spoke to the believing community as the powerful word of the living God.
The natural result of this bifurcation between church and academy has been suspicion on both sides, and much too often poor exegesis on the one side and almost no Spirituality on the other.
Partly at issue in this conflict is the role of history and authorial intentionality. Exegesis by definition means that one is seeking an author’s own intent in what has been written. Such a definition implies that authors are intentional and that good historical investigation can provide a reasonable approximation of that intent. This means, therefore, that the exegetical task is first of all a historical one, and that the first requirement to do good exegesis is to bring good historical sense to the task. This further means that “meaning” is located primarily in intentionality, the author’s intentionality. For the believing scholar, this means further that God’s Word is very closely tied to the intentionality of the divinely inspired author.
It is common these days to reject this view of the exegetical task, a rejection that comes from several quarters besides the pious who read the text as a direct revelation to themselves: deconstructionism doubts whether there is any significance to such a task at all; reader-response criticism argues that more attention ought to be given to the text as text, and how the text is “heard” by the reader; and we are constantly reminded from all sides, (1) that one can never fully enter into the skull of another so as to know that person’s mind — indeed, it is sometimes asked, did they know their own minds, or were they writing with unspoken agendas in hand that also affected what they said? and (2) that neither does the exegete come to the text with a clean slate, but also brings his or her agendas to the text, not to mention a whole train load of cultural baggage and biases.
Deconstructionism aside, I accept these as proper cautions to our exegetical task. But I also am prepared to repeat with emphasis, that authors are intentional, and that meaning resides ultimately in that intent. After all, everyone of those who argue against me at this point are very intentional in their writing, and would (rightly so) take great exception to me if I were to misconstrue their words in the same way they seem willing to treat the words of the biblical writer. My guide here is the Apostle Paul himself, who in writing to the church in Corinth took considerable exception to the Corinthians’ misunderstanding — more likely, misconstruing — what he believed to be straightforward intentionality in his previous letter. I refer, of course, to 1 Corinthians 5:9-10: “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with immoral people,” which apparently they took to mean (i.e., that Paul intended) that they should not associate with people outside the church who were immoral. But Paul will have none of that, so he qualifies with an explanation of his own intentionality: “not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, greedy, etc.” So also with his “not that” in Philippians 3:12, which Paul uses to qualify what he has just said. “In saying this,” he now qualifies, “I do not mean....” Therefore, let me say it again, authors are intentional, and since most authors also have at least normal egos, they do not take kindly to being misquoted, misinterpreted, or misconstrued — and all of that in light of what they understand to have been their own intentionality.
I am wont at this point to remind us all that various forms of intentionality are inherent in different literary genres and rhetorical features; that poetry, for example, is not prose, and that each has a different form of intent; or that prose is not all of one kind, and therefore that letters have a different kind of intent (depending on their type) from narrative or aphorisms; or that rhetoric sometimes involves an author in hyperbole, word plays, or metaphors, each of which has its own form of intent. When we speak of “intentionality,” therefore, we understand that to include the form/style/genre in which an author purposes to communicate.
But having made that point, let me carry it a step further, which will also lead us to our final point: the intersection of exegesis and spirituality in the task of exegesis itself. Rather than seeing exegesis and spirituality as opposed to one another, or as one preceding or following or having precedence over the other, I propose, (1) that faithful biblical exegesis belongs within the framework of the believing community, with those who follow — whether exactly so or not, but intentionally so — in the train of the original believing communities for whom and to whom these documents were written; and, (2) that such exegesis must always take into account the Spiritual purposes for which the biblical documents were written, as Spirituality has been defined in the preceding section of this paper.