Personal Hermeneutic Snapshots
“Our subjective experiences and unique identities are actually gifts that aid us in noticing truth in a text that has been overlooked by those who do not share these particular experiences and identities.”
For this reason, I will intentionally bring my whole self to my interpretation of scripture. My personal hermeneutic, shaped by the above factors, as well as by my Lutheranism and my affinity for Liberation Theology rooted in relationships with the undocumented community and experiences living and studying in Latin America, is that the Bible is God’s liberating self-revelation to us. Through the Bible, I expect God to bring to life, lift up the lowly, privilege the poor, disrupt systems and status quos, break down walls, and blur boundaries. Within my hermeneutic, if the Bible is not being utilized to liberate and contribute to the flourishing of all God’s people, then it is being misused.
“I approach the Bible as a conversation partner. The Bible converses and debates with itself, why should that conversation and debate end simply because the pages did? ”
The Bible is the story of God’s love for creation, and it offers understanding of who God is and who we can be in response. However, the Bible is not infallible and not to be read without question or suspicion. It has long been used to justify murder, genocide, oppression, slavery, white supremacy, and more. The Bible contains such a diverse array of texts, authors, and perspectives that one can read anything that they want to out of it through prooftexting. As a result, my criteria for approaching Scripture is that of suspicion and grace; questioning the perspectives that have led to harm (of people, creation, and community), but open to understanding different approaches to the texts as my perspective is limited to my own experience as a white, American, middle-class, educated, queer, mainly female-identifying person. It is important to bring your own experience to interpretation, as it is impossible to separate it from yourself and trying to do so will only lead to false claims of universality and assumptions based on privilege and continued upholding of the status quo.
“I see the Bible as a powerful, influential, and didactic text that describes people’s wrestling and experiences with the divine character in a particular historical context. ”
“In being the Word of God, the Bible demands intention and care when it is opened, read, received, and shared.”
My personal hermeneutic is shaped by a reverence for the Word of God as infallible in containing the message God desires for us to receive from it, but also by a caution that it is not inerrant; in other words, in facets including but not limited to grammatical and literary structure, cultural acquisition, historical translation and presentation, and human interpretation, the Bible fails, by human hand, to portray that message which it infallibly contains.
“I believe deeply that we can hear whispers of God’s transformative love in the stories of the Bible, recognizing that they are mis-remembered, insufficiently embodied on a page, and only told from the vantage point of one, limited and often greedy species.”
I approach the Bible with an expectation that research, education, and tact will be required to engage every single passage. Collectively, the canon has been used to justify genocide and other atrocities more than any other published work. On a few days a year, it is a surprising source of spiritual colloquy. More often than not, it is a book that I struggle to open. I am a creature that loves to flex her imagination. And too many people have closed their imaginations and eyes to the work that’s required to situate this historical literature. Also, my experience as a person with chronic illness and pain gives me the perspective that work is a privilege. I cannot do the heavy lifting of Biblical interpretation every day, not unlike how my body ebbs and flows in its willingness to exert rather than survive. Just as I know that the opposite of work is not, in fact, the highly elusive and able-bodied concept of sabbath, the opposite of my personal hermeneutic is not spiritual discipline. It is unbalance. And a lack of healthy boundaries.
“Given my current context in this specific iteration of time, I believe interpretation of the Bible should seek to be liberating for communities forced to occupy the periphery by the structures of neoliberalism. ”
Specifically, I understand biblical texts to be only a limited collection of histories that illuminate the interactions between humans and the Divine. Given my current context in this specific iteration of time, interpretation of these texts should seek to be liberating for communities forced to occupy the periphery by structures of neoliberalism. This personal hermeneutic is theoretically influenced by de-colonial and queer thought and centers ways of being that are counter to imperialist-white-supremacist, ableist, capitalist, heteropatriarchy. However, the margins are not limited to oppressed ways of being. Rather, in taking cues from bell hooks, the margins can be seen as spaces of resistance and radical openness and possibility.
“With the Bible, readers can see an array of people’s understandings of God. With the power of the Holy Spirit, all those who interact with these texts engage with the divine in divine activity, but this presence does not place them outside of human error and sinfulness.”
I believe that the Bible is a compilation of books written by people who were trying to figure out who God is and what God had done, is doing, and will do. Often times, the people who told, wrote down, compiled, circulated, and preached these books may have misheard, misunderstood, and misused their experience of God in a way that harmed people, both intentionally and unintentionally.
“I always return to the hermeneutic of love. I ask myself the question: What does this text tell me about how to love of God, my neighbor, or myself?”
When I come to the scriptures, I am always asking questions, attempting to feed an insatiable curiosity. Why is the text written this way? Who wrote it? When was it written? How many times has it been edited? What does it tell me about God? Are there any parts that portray God in a way that doesn’t make sense to me? As I read, I ponder, I do research, and I seek the opinions of people both similar to and incredibly different from myself. Regardless of the answers, or lack of answers, I find, though, I always return to the hermeneutic of love.
“The Bible, like all good art, is our best attempt at capturing the essence of truth and beauty, of the divine, and as such requires filtering through human limitations.”
I understand the Bible as a source of ultimate truth –a truth deeper than times, dates, and facts –but as recorded and therefore rendered through an intensely human lens. To interpret the Bible is to dig through the human influence to find eternal truth. Given this, I find the Bible to be dynamic, my interpretations of its pages constantly shifting as my own immediate context does. These eternal truths in their very nature can only ever be captured through the messiness and limitations of human methods of communication.
“I think reading Scripture gives us an opportunity to learn how to think theologically about the human experience. When we read Scripture, we are presented with models for how to discern and interpret God’s activity in the world.”
I believe that the primary purpose of the Bible is to be a resource for imagination. This seems to capture both the nature and limitations of scripture. I believe Scripture contains something of divine revelation, both insofar as it attests to God’s self- revelation in the person of Jesus Christ and also insofar as it tells a story (not the story) of God’s relationship with God’s people throughout history. But that revelation was apprehended by humans, interpreted by humans, selectively recounted by humans, communicated through human mediums and is now re-interpreted by us today. The Bible has human limits. It doesn’t have answers to all of our questions, and the answers it gives aren’t always the right answers.
“For me, biblical interpretation is never just an intellectual exercise. Reading the Bible is an act of faith and devotion. ”
The homiletician Anna Carter Florence uses the story of Jacob wrestling with God in Genesis 32 to describe the process of reading scripture. As Jacob grapples with God until he gets a blessing, the process of reading the Bible involves wrestling with the text, the various ways people have and do read it, and our own experience. The hope is that through this commitment to wrestle, we, like Jacob in the story, would get to see God’s face and live. My way of reading Scripture is absolutely informed by the weight I put on deepening my relationship with God and my understanding of the Christian call to love our neighbors and work for justice. Loving God and neighbor informs how I read the Bible, and my reading the Bible informs how I love God and neighbor. In this committed wrestling, I see more and more of who God is. Over time this back and forth transforms me, empowers me to witness to God’s work on earth, and draws me closer to God’s love.