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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
This paper is about the relevance of Jacques Derrida's thought to biblical interpretation. It focuses specifically on the question of determinacy: whether there is something definite and determinate which is the object of textual interpretation, or whether texts are subject to an infinite number of incompatible, but equally valid, readings.
1 This point has been effectively argued by Stout, Jeffrey, “What is the Meaning of a Text?” New Literary History 14 (1982) 1–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Barth, Karl, The Epistle to the Romans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933) 1–26.Google Scholar
3 Barth himself said (perhaps in a moment of weakness) that his basic approach to Romans consisted simply in taking it seriously, and that he would approach Lao Tzu and Goethe in the same spirit (Romans, 12).
4 These positions are presented here in simplified form, and translated into the American context. Broader and more nuanced descriptions, set in Derrida's own continental European context, can be found in the succinct treatment by Taylor, Mark C., Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) 1–34Google Scholar, and, more extensively, in Caputo, John D., Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) 120–206.Google Scholar
5 I am borrowing the term “objectivism” and my description of these two general varieties from Bernstein, Richard, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983) 8–16Google Scholar. On Derrida's relation to them, see Mitchell, Sollace, “Post-structuralism, Empiricism, and Interpretation,” in idem and Michael Rosen, eds., The Need for Interpretation: Contemporary Conceptions of the Philosopher's Task (London: Athlone; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983) 55–57Google Scholar. For an extended essay on the harmful effects both these positions had on biblical interpretation, especially in the age of the Enlightenment, see Frei, Hans W., The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).Google Scholar
6 Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology (trans. G. D. Spivak; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) 6–26.Google Scholar
7 Hirsch, E. D., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967) 8. In Hegel's and Husserl's attempts at systematic philosophy, which dominate Derrida's philosophical landscape, this “subjectivist” view is closely tied to a kind of conceptualist objectivism, since both have in mind an absolute subject which is the origin of one absolutely grounded set of concepts.Google Scholar
8 Saussure, Ferdinand de, Course in General Linguistics (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986) 15–17, 99–120.Google Scholar
9 Ibid., 23.
10 Ibid., 114.
11 Ibid., 118.
12 Derrida, Jacques, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in R. Macksey and E. Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; idem, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs (trans. Allison, David; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973) 129–60Google Scholar; idem, Of Grammatology, 6–26; idem, Positions (trans. Bass, Alan; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) 38–96.Google Scholar
13 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 49; idem, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 272.
14 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158.
15 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 271; idem, Of Grammatology, 6–26. For similar critiques, see Proudfoot, Wayne, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)Google Scholar passim, and Lindbeck, George A., The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984) 19–24.Google Scholar
16 Derrida, “Differance,” in Husserl's Theory of Signs, 138.
17 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 247–49.
18 This general point is well argued by Nineham, Dennis, The Use and Abuse of the Bible: A Study of the Bible in an Age of Rapid Cultural Change (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976).Google Scholar
19 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158.
20 Derrida, Jacques, “Signature Event Context,” Glyph 1 (1977) 182.Google Scholar
21 Ibid., 191
22 Ibid., 193.
23 Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975) 113–30.Google Scholar
24 LaFargue, Michael, Language and Gnosis: Form and Meaning in the Acts of Thomas (HDR; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985)Google Scholar. Culler has been criticized for his tendency to identify “competence” in reading English literature (his primary interest) with the traditional reading habits of English professors (Lentricchia, Frank, After the New Criticism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980] 108–10). My study tried to overcome this difficulty by showing that the nature of “competence” proper to any given text can be derived from a careful study of indirect clues given in the text itself.Google Scholar
25 Advocating that the modern person ought to be challenged by Mark assumes that, while there are a plurality of valid perspectives and worlds, some perspectives have more claim to our respect than others. I have presented a theoretical explanation and defense of this position in “Some Foundations for a Pluralist, But Critical, Theory of Religions,” JAAR (forthcoming).
26 We ought not to assume, as Barth did (Romans, I), that, “If we rightly understand ourselves, our problems are the problems of Paul.”
27 This distinction is similar to the one that Hirsch draws between the “meaning” which the text has for its author, and the “significance” it might have for other people or later ages (Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, 8). My proposals here differ from Hirsch's primarily in that the aim of my “first stage of interpretation” is not to recover “the author's intention,” or to understand the author's mind, but to become competent to construe his words as he construed them, and so to see reality as he saw it.
28 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1982) 269–74. I too would advocate the ultimate necessity of fusing ancient and modem horizons—otherwise, biblical interpretation become of merely antiquarian interest. I am simply arguing against a premature fusion of these two horizons.Google Scholar
29 Bernstein, Richard, “The Rage against Reason,” Journal of Philosophy and Literature 10 (1986) 186–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
