Response to “Thinking of/With Scripture” by Alon
Goshen-Gottstein, “On the ‘Path of Love’ Toward the
Divine” by Omid Safi, and “Reading the Song
Iconographically” by Ellen Davis Barry Harvey,
Baylor University
With his description of the dialectical tension between the Tree of
Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Goshen-Gottstein provides us with an
eloquent trope for our deliberations about scriptural reasoning.
Scripture is the Tree of Life in this trope, with both the history of
interpretation within the two communities that include the Song of Songs
within their respective canons, and the history of modern biblical
scholarship comprising the tree of knowledge. What this latter tree
produces, says Goshen-Gottstein, both enhances and complicates our
access to the spiritual core of Scripture. Instead of depicting these
discourses as baggage we bring to Scripture, however, why not continue
with the trajectory of his figural reading, and recognize both
interpretive strands as ambiguous yet irreducible features of scriptural
reasoning. As the human being was told that “cursed is the ground
because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the
plants of the field,” so too do we struggle with the biblical text,
nourished by the fruit and contending with the thorns and thistles
yielded by our interpretive traditions, knowing in the end that we must
finally hand ourselves over to the dust of the ground in which the Tree
of Life is rooted.
For her part, Davis begins her paper firmly at the tree of knowledge,
with the form critical approach of Hermann Gunkel. And yet this point
of departure is not absolute, but is conditioned by her understanding of
the wider witness of Scripture and the Christian tradition. In her
iconographic reading of the Song of Songs she offers us a different take
on the role that tradition (including that part of tradition that is the
canonization of Scripture) plays in determining the meaning of a
biblical text. The meaning of the Song, according to Davis, is in its interaction
with the other texts of Scripture, as these are read
within an ongoing tradition. Scriptural reasoning is not only
thinking of Scripture and with Scripture, but also thinking with friends
and fellow travelers about what we read in Scripture. And if I
have read him correctly, this process of “thinking with others
about Scripture” is what Safi has
in mind when he states that he wants to avoid a “protestant
reading of the Qur’an” and focus instead on “the
interaction of particular interpretive communities with the Sacred text
throughout history.”
Davis and Goshen-Gottstein remind us, each in their own way, that
when reading the Song of Songs as Scripture some sort of hermeneutical
surmise about its literal meaning is required at the outset. By
“literal” I do not mean its putative
“historical” sense as determined by some critical
reconstruction (e.g., Gottwald’s sociological reconstruction of
Israel’s origins), but the sense of the letter, of what is
written. For Davis the literal sense of the Song is figural, proffered
in the form of a mystical writing. Goshen-Gottstein, by contrast,
follows most modern scholars who insist that we must start with
“just what it is,” a straightforward celebration of human
love. If one begins with Davis’s interpretive standpoint, the
question of whether “just what [the Song] is” is as
straightforward as conventional modern scholarship takes it to be moves
to the top of the agenda.
With respect to Safi’s paper, I was intrigued in his
discussion of the “Path of Love” with parallels between
these Muslim mystics and certain strands in the Christian tradition.
His contention, for example, that for those who follow the madhhab-i
‘ishq, the ‘ishq or love for God would enfold
the whole of creation resonates clearly with the Augustinian position
that we rightly love our fellow creatures in the love of God. So too
the description of beauty in particular humans as manifestations
(tajalli) of the Divine converges at many points with
Augustine’s discussion of signs and the role they play in all
interpretation. Finally, all three papers put to us the question of
whether human love and desire is best understood in light of longing for
the divine, or love of the divine in the context of human love conceived
apart from any and all theological descriptions.
Permit me to conclude by making what some may regard as a problematic
claim, though others might see it as self-evident. In the end,
one’s mode of reading Scripture is finally constituted not by a
theory of some sort (though theories are both presupposed and produced
along the way, particularly when there are academics involved), nor is
it keyed to some sort of universal human experience (here I do wonder
about Safi’s invocation of “spiritual experience”
as an interpretive category). Instead it is one’s membership and
apprenticeship in a community or communities of life and language that
establishes for any given interpreter her or his hermeneutical framework
for reading both text and world. The practices of these communities
define a shared (in intention if not in agreement) interpretation of
human life. For the three traditions represented here, this
interpretation is as this life is lived before God, from a desire for
God that is denoted in human terms.
This does not mean that our understanding of texts and of the world
and our place in both cannot change, for that would be patently false.
Each of us, however, was initiated into a particular imaginative grasp
on these matters by virtue of the time and place of our birth, and we
spend the rest of our lives refining and modifying that grasp through
our engagements with others and with the material world that we all
share. Nor does it mean that human communities and their convictions
are so constituted that convictional differences among diverse groups of
human beings go “all the way down,” so to speak, such that
they are both inevitable and ineradicable. The process of adjudicating
convictional disagreements is never carried out in a vacuum, but is
always situated within an institutional setting that is itself aligned
with some set of convictions, which in turn is orchestrated by an
imaginative construal of how human beings are related to the world they
inhabit. We are therefore not in a position to say that convictional
disagreements are ever absolute or ineradicable. They are instead
“expected, but not inevitable, fundamental, but not ultimate,
enduring but not inherently ineradicable” (James McClendon).
© 2003, Society for Scriptural
Reasoning
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