communities” may find divine communication that was violent and can use such readings to sanction their own destructive transformation agendas.
Transformative reading of the scriptures is therefore, for me, a deliberate predetermination of the boundaries of the positive changes in individual and communal life that are possible in response to the demands or promises of the Holy Scriptures. Such visions of positive transformation are not necessarily inventions of Christian communities but can be traced throughout the Bible.
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout … so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it (Isa 55:10–11).
The transformative promise is that “the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken” (Isa 25:8). This God will make God’s home among human beings and dwell with them; “they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away” (Rev 21:3–4).
deliberate but because readers bring past accumulated resources and models that make it possible for them to “anticipate” what the text is supposed to mean when they read it. In hermeneutics, we consider it a strength to make an effort critically to observe what we are doing when we read. For this reason, it matters that I clarify who I am as a reader of the text.
As a Zimbabwean, a Christian shaped by my pietistic Swedish missionary background and then influenced by Enlightenment Western theological scholarship, I approach the texts with a hybrid identity. I bring both conscious and unconscious motivations to the reading process. One of my strongest interests is to ensure that my reading deliberately contributes to the positive transformation of institutions, practices and ideas so that they facilitate the fullness of life for all people. The idea that the “fullness of life” exists is not only shaped by my reading of the Gospel of John 10:10 but is also reinforced by ideals that come from different movements and visions of the shared “good life.” Such visions are also present in other faiths and hence the need to reflect within but also across faiths.
In this self-description, I have already pointed to what I consider to be one of the main challenges for interfaith transformative hermeneutics, namely the heterogeneity of intra-faith interpretation. There are varied approaches among Christians as to the relevance and applicability of the different books and words of the Bible to the faith and life of Christians as well as the various methods of reading them. Even though they will not always be explicit about it, many Christian traditions work with some form of a canon within the canon;
certain books of the Bible are preferred to others. For example, Luther had a fondness for Paul’s letters. Pentecostal Christians will find books like the Acts of the Apostles more appealing to them, just at Seventh Day Adventists will highly value the books of Daniel and Revelation.
Differences in faith traditions are shaped by a number of influences, the strongest among which includes education, culture and socioeconomic and political experiences. I, as a theologian from the global South, received my formal training in the reading of the Bible from Western educators or from Southern scholars trained in the West. Of course, many of us have now gone on to do other things with this knowledge, sometimes to the embarrassment of our academic progenitors. During our formation, one method of reading biblical texts that was considered orthodox was the historical approach, which worked with the assumption that the text as we have it in its final form has several histories. One can look at its own history or look “for the historical setting(s) that generated it,” or use “it to write history.”4 The assumption behind this approach is that biblical texts are
4 Serge Frolov, The Turn of the Cycle: 1 Samuel 1-8 in Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 7.
enclosed in theological wrappings, in some circles viewed as “corruptions”
that are a result of the editors’ machinations. It was assumed that the editors came from the different religious communities. The responsibility of the biblical scholar was therefore to go back to the earliest phase of the text to uncover its original uncorrupted core because that was where its true meaning lay. (This is a kind of caricature of course.)
Such an approach assumed that the readers ought to cleanse themselves of all preconceived reading lenses or pre-understandings that would obscure the true meaning of the text. This was the case at least until Bultmann helped us to understand that all interpretations are shaped by interest, including historical approaches, which are also guided by “a certain putting of the questions to history.”5 The assumption was that serious biblical scholars, unlike church theologians, were supposed to rid themselves of such theological baggage so as to get to the heart of the biblical text in order to find the truth. When some of our teachers felt that the processes of peeling away these editing layers might be futile, they started to look at texts as pieces of literature that could be read in their final form while striving to “isolate the literary entities that underlie the received version and identify the literary processes that brought in into being.”6
Sometime in the twentieth century, scholars mainly from the South and others from the North, preferring to be explicit about their sociopolitical and economic interests and how these impinged on the process of reading, began to revise the reading practices they had learned and reshape them to consider their context as an integral component of the interpretive process. These so-called “contextual hermeneutical” approaches sought—to various degrees—to take the Bible as a text for faith communities, which must be read from this starting point. What this means is that when the words of the Bible are read, studied, explained and performed in the ritual of worship, the text is viewed as a vehicle through which God speaks to God’s people. Since God spoke only in context, the context of the people, especially those who were most vulnerable, provides the interpretive key.
These “poor and marginalized” subjects of the reading experience were not to be viewed merely as victims who could identify their plight with similar victims in the biblical stories. In the process of reading, they were supposed to find the redemptive and transformative voice of God in the narratives, because God sided with those who were oppressed. The contextual methodological community experienced a serious challenge when reading texts that presented God as unjust or where the biblical people of
5 Rudolf Bultmann, The Presence of Eternity; History and Eschatology (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1957), 110—22.
6 Frolov, op. cit (note 4), 7.
God were behaving in ways considered repugnant to modern readers. Here, the ways between this community and the majority of Christian readers and ordinary Christian communities tended to part.
This brings me to another challenge I wish to highlight as we seek to develop a transformative hermeneutics across Christianity and Islam: the challenge of representation and scope of influence. Today, many ordinary church members read the Bible in ways that tend to be different from biblical scholars. It is common to see, at least where I come from, that as soon as students of theology go back to serve in their faith communities, they disregard the critical tools they acquired from their training. The question this raises for our project is: do we as biblical scholars and theologians represent our faith communities? Others are more cynical, observing that while scholars and Protestant churches opted for the poor and the marginalized, the poor and the marginalized opted for the Pentecostal churches. If academic reflection on the use of sacred texts has only limited impact on the reading habits of ordinary members of faith communities, how do we expect to influence their lives? In other words, if those religious actors who have the power to influence the beliefs, structures and practices of the majority of the faith adherents do not share in the transformative vision shared by the scholars, does it really matter what we do here?
For me, the dilemma described above also provides the way out. It is clear that behind the possibility of harnessing the transformative dimension of the sacred texts is the question of authority or legitimacy. For me, this fundamental question of the conflict over who possesses the authority to speak on behalf of God in both Christianity and Islam today could be defining regarding how we want to reflect on transformative hermeneutics across the two faiths. But what is the source of legitimacy? In his helpful paper, “The Legitimacy of Economics,”7 Kenneth Boulding discusses it as a phenomenon and identifies six sources of legitimacy of which I shall highlight three.
Boulding starts by pointing out that “legitimacy is something which we take for granted when we have it, almost without question, while when we do not have it, the system falls apart with such rapidity that there is no time to investigate [the causes].”8 He also makes an important distinction between legality and legitimacy where an “institution can be legitimate…
without being legal, and it can be legal without being legitimate ….”9 He goes on to identify six sources of legitimacy of which I shall focus on three.
The fourth source of legitimacy on Boulding’s list, which I think informs
7 Kenneth Boulding, “The Legitimacy of Economics,” in Economic Inquiry (1967), vol. 5, no. 4, 299-307.
8 Ibid., 299.
9 Ibid.
the actions of many religious actors in my part of the world, is that of
“mystery and charisma.”10 Here, legitimacy comes from the tendency of people to regard as legitimate that which they do not fully understand or
“only dimly understand.”11 In contemporary Africa, the currently growing influence of so-called prophets who speak on behalf of God and perform miracles can be ascribed to their use of mysterious claims that they have special powers to access realms to which ordinary human beings have no access. What they say is taken to be indisputable truth since it is supposed to come from God.
Closely connected to the fourth is the fifth source of legitimacy, which is “communication through accepted symbols of legitimacy.” Here “rituals, clothing, incense, music, dance, art, architecture and so on are devoted in no small part to creating the symbols of legitimacy.”12 In many Christian communities, at least in Africa, just as in Europe in the past and still in some churches to this day, the ability of religious authorities to speak on behalf of God for good or bad was legitimated by several rituals and symbols. In contemporary Africa, the flamboyant lifestyle of such religious figures and the high regard with which they are viewed make it possible for them to issue directives to their followers, which the followers accept without question. Similar directives coming from a religious university professor speaking on the authority of his research knowledge will not command the same response as long as he cannot communicate through these accepted symbols of legitimacy.
The sixth source of legitimacy according to Boulding, “consists of alliances and associations with other legitimacies. Legitimacy, as it were, is something that rubs off, and if a less legitimate institution can ally itself with a more legitimate one, the legitimacy of both may even be increased.”13 He gives the “frequent alliance of church and state” as an “example of this phenomenon.”14 We have seen an increase in the building of alliances of religious actors in different parts of the African continent giving legitimacy to one another as those who are speaking on behalf of God. In many cases, these actors have decimated the meager livelihoods of poor people in the name of God. Their gullible audiences are willing to part with their wealth in the hope that God is going to bless them and change their plight of poverty to prosperity. These actors are not interested in challenging the political and economic systems that impoverish these people.
10 Ibid., 301.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 302.
14 Ibid.
The hope of our conference is that we can build alliances and associations across our religious divides in order to develop ways of reading the sacred texts in a manner that will promote positive transformation in our faith communities. Maybe what some of us may lack in the form of mystery and charisma can be compensated for by clarity of divine communication.
Maybe our transformative hermeneutics could seek to uphold alternative symbols of communication aligned to justice, peace and reconciliation.
Below, I attempt such transformative hermeneutics using 1 Samuel 1–7.