CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
2.1 Background of the Tri-Polar Exegetical Model
2.1.1 The Tri-Polar Exegetical Model by Grenholm and Patte
2.1.1.2 The believer’s life
The second phase is the believer’s life, or the life-context of a believer. This phase consists of a careful analysis of the life situation of believers, how the message from the scriptural text makes an impact on their particular context, leading them to make a decision for their life, according to the teaching that they received from the text.
Grenholm and Patte (2000:37) consider the phase of the believer’s life as a contextual frame which bridges the gap between text and life by taking into account the specific situation of the reading process. This is therefore a moment that focuses on a critical analysis of the life situation of the believer. Actually, the two co-authors affirm that the life context of the reader/interpreter makes a strong impact on his/her ways of scriptural reading. The reading addresses a person’s life from the perspective of various aspects of their life context, such as social, political, economic, cultural and historical factors. The reader/believer receives a message from a given scriptural reading according to the way the text challenges his or her specific life situation.
Grenholm and Patte provide an illustration of what they mean through a comparison of three different interpretations of the same biblical passage, Genesis 16 and 21 (Grenholm and Patte 2000: 20-30).9
scriptural text as revelatory so much so that the believers’ heteronomous experience of the divine presence is centred on the text as a sacrament (Grenholm 2000:16 quoting Schneiders 1991:40-43).
9Grenholm and Patte in Reading Israel in Romans (2000:p.28-30) make us observe how a pole of life situation or more precisely a contextual-pragmatic mode of interpretation that focuses on the believer’s life situation can make a visible impact on the way a scriptural text is interpreted. They present a case of interpretation with more concern on the life context of women by three scholars, the mainstream critical scholar Gerhard Von Rad and the two feminist scholars Jon Levenson and Phyllis Trible. These three scholars read and interpret the same text, Genesis 16 and 21, but their interpretation is different: Von Rad and Levenson read the narrative from the perspective of the promise given to Abraham and Sarah. Von Rad is said to not show much sensibility about the tragic fate of the slave woman, Hagar, who was sent by her mistress into the desert to die and was told by God to go back to her mistress. Levenson who is more aware of Hagar’s situation understands God’s command as shocking. To him the command illustrates that God cannot side with the oppressed. Trible considers Hagar as someone with whom all sorts of rejected women can identify themselves. Although this is not a place of recording all the details about the critical work of these scholars or to pass judgment on it, the main focus pointed out is the way the interpretation is done when the contextual perspective of the reader in her/his life situation is taken into account; there is no neutral point of view in interpretation.
The first interpretation is that of Von Rad, a supposed neutral
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and critical scholar. He disregards the vulnerability of Hagar, the slave Egyptian woman, though it is the central theme of the text according to Grenholm and Patte. When reading the narrative, Von Rad focuses on the promise given to Abraham and Sarah, and does not show much sensitivity to the situation of Hagar, the slave woman who was mistreated by her mistress and then was sent by God to return to the same mistress. By reading the text from a perspective that sides with Abraham’s God, a perspective that does not side with the oppressed, Grenholm argues that Von Rad missed an important feature of the text.
because of his reading from the perspective side with Abraham’s God.
The other two scholars’ interpretations, however, reveal that a text which is read from the perspective of a different life situation can facilitate a shift in the interpretation of the text. According to Grenholm and Patte’s observation, Levenson shows more awareness of Hagar. He pays a great deal of attention to Hagar’s story and understands the angel’s command that she goes back to her mistress as a shocking indication that God does not side with the oppressed. Instead of giving a charter of freedom to the runaway bondswoman, God just gave her an order to return to the mistress of her oppression.
Though Levenson reflects on Hagar’s situation, his interpretation differs from Trible’s.
Trible emphasises the promise given to Hagar to give birth to a son, the first born of a new people. But in Trible’s view, Hagar received a promise which was never fulfilled.
Moreover, Hagar never experienced any other consolation apart from Ishmael’s marriage to a non-Israelite woman. Consequently in Trible’s view, Hagar reflects the image of all sorts of rejected women (Grenholm and Patte 2000:28-9).
Grenholm and Patte observe that when the contextual perspective of the reader in her/his life situation is taken into account, the message of the scriptural reading cannot be looked upon from a supposed neutral point of view of the reader/interpreter. Indeed, the above interpretations of the same biblical text reveal how the panoply of prejudices that the reader/believer has acquired from his/her life-context influences the way s/he understands the biblical text, as well as the way their religious perceptions of life affect the interpretation. This leads us to the analysis of the last pole of the Tri-Polar Interpretive Model.
19 2.1.1.3 Believers’ religious perception of life
Grenholm and Patte believe that the pole called the religious perception of life “is an interpretive moment that accounts for the perceptions of life arising of heteronymous experiences” (Grenholm and Patte 2000:14). The two co-authors argue that this pole is a result of a particular religious experience through which believers envision their relationship to the life-situations in which they find themselves (Grenholm and Patte 2000:47). Grenholm and Patte clarify that the term does not refer to the entire religious perception of life, but to the broader or narrower features that are pertinent to the interpretive process of the biblical text. Actually, this may refer to theological issues involved in the religious perception of the interpreter/reader’s life towards the scriptural text. The phase is specifically defined as a hermeneutical interpretive process that accounts for the perceptions of life arising from experiences of the daily life of a believer.
It is at this level of the interpretation stage that the interpreter/reader conceptualizes the message of the scriptural text provided by the two preceding poles, that is, the message learned from the scriptural reading, which is done from the perspective of the life- situation of the reader/interpreter. The reader/interpreter conceptualizes the message according to the theological categories that shaped his/her understanding of that message.
It is during this process of interpretation that “revelation is constructed” which is more than just a conceptual truth in its verbal form. This moment focuses on creating space between the believer’s religious experiences of the events of his/her daily life such as sufferings, joyous occasions or success and so on, and the divine presence through the scriptural text. Grenholm and Patte believe that it is from this perspective that believers experience an encounter with God, hear God’s word and consequently acquire the religious dimension which will make an impact on their particular life-situations, because their decision making is enhanced by the personal interaction with the biblical text (Grenholm and Patte 2000:34). As mentioned previously, Grenholm and Patte played a very important role in the development of this method of Scriptural interpretation by elaborating on its process and shaping it into a scholarly method.10
10 From my observation, few scholars have written about the Tripolar Exegetical Model by Grenholm and Patte. As it will be developed in the following section, Draper has presented some of the weaknesses of the method and elaborated his method based on what was provided by the two scholars. Samba (2002) did not provide much analysis of either strengths or weaknesses of the model but included it in his work.
20 2.1.2 The Tri-Polar Exegetical Model by Draper
Having critically studied the Scriptural Criticism approach produced by Grenholm and Patte, Draper endorsed this interpretive model and added his own contribution. He called his reformulation of the model “The Tri-Polar Exegetical Model” or simply, “Contextual Exegesis” (Draper 2001:148-168).
Draper highly appreciated the role of Grenholm and Patte in their reformulation of a simple interpretive process into the dynamic Scriptural criticism interpretive process.
However, Draper was not fully satisfied with the process. Insights derived from reading the Bible against the background of the struggle of his home country South Africa during the Apartheid era, motivated him to emphasize the context of the reader and her/his reading community. He dismissed alleged neutrality of biblical readings, saying:
It seems important, therefore, to hold on to the key insight we derive from the struggle in South Africa, namely that the interpretation of the Bible and the theology we formulate are fundamentally determined by our social, economic and political context as readers. There are no neutral readings. Our context prompts us in the questions we bring to the text and decides what counts as answers. The context in question is not simply our faith context, but also our cultural, socio- economic and our class interests (Draper 2001: 156-7).
In addition, Draper, writing out of the experience of the abuse of theology in apartheid South Africa, was not satisfied with “theology” as the final outcome of the reading process, insisting that it should issue in “praxis” a change in the believer’s way of being and doing in their context. Draper directed his focus toward contextual exegesis by means of the tri-polar reading of the biblical text. Making the exegesis the main focus in describing the whole process, he explains the word exegesis as referring to reading meaning out of the text, as opposed to the eisegesis, which refers to reading meaning into the text (Draper 2001:156-7). This introduces an important difference between trained readers and ordinary readers in their approach to the same text.
Gerald West suggests that “trained readers are able to read the Bible critically because they have been trained to use a variety of critical tools and skills” (West 1993:23).
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Critical reading is especially important when its clear and specific purpose is to understand the meaning of the Bible in a particular setting or context. In certain contexts, critical reading “must be done because the Bible and its interpretations have often been used both to oppress ordinary people and to legitimate oppression of people” (West 1993:18-19). The apartheid ideology in South Africa provides a good example of that idea.
Trained readers therefore, are equipped with appropriate skills and ‘critical tools’ to accomplish the crucial task of critical reading. Each of the tools is applied to a particular purpose, such as the reconstruction of the historical period of the biblical text, its sociological setting, the type of the text, and so on, revealing how a biblical text is a product of a particular community or society (West 1993:26).11
West’s perspective on trained readers agrees with Draper’s conviction that exegesis in interpretation is a work of an expert, in other words, of a trained reader. Hence, both Draper and West believe that a person who has been trained and has received the skills to approach the biblical text critically becomes aware of a range of critical skills and concepts which are useful in reading the Bible as well as our context. And so, by insisting
The end goal of the trained reader in using these tools then, is to reconstruct the text that is the product of a particular society in a particular period of time. Also, the reconstruction of the text plays a major role especially in helping the trained reader when s/he interacts with the text in the light of its historical and sociological settings and to support what the text appears to say. The trained readers, then, go further in their readings to appropriately relate the text to their own contexts. Obviously, while West presents the modes of readings the Bible by the trained readers, he does not underestimate the contribution of ordinary readers, a term referring to those who have had no formal training in biblical studies, and who therefore practice what he has called pre-critical reading of the Bible. He rather affirms that ordinary readers have an important contribution to make in the church and community, as well as something to offer in a contextual reading, even to the trained readers.
11 West provides names of several scholars, such as Durkheim, Weber, and Marx, whose methodologies affirm that the biblical text is the product of a particular society and reflects that society or sector of society.
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on the term exegesis as a description of the whole process of the Tri-Polar Exegetical Model, Draper stresses the importance of critical studies/readings as a counter-balance to possible domination of the process by the context of the reader over the context of the original voice o the text (Draper 2001:154-5; 2002:12).
Continuing with his reformulation of the model, Draper draws our attention to the importance of understanding the context by bringing in the act of communication. He notes that for someone to understand a spoken statement, they should make sure they understand what is going on; otherwise they are likely to systematically misunderstand the whole issue. He clarifies his observation by using Halliday’s12
In addition to his emphasis on the context of both the text and the reader/reading community/interpreter, Draper underscores the impact that the message from the text has on the reader/reading community. He then continues with a third pole of the interpretive process which is the appropriation. To him, the whole interpretive process points to the meaning of the text as a sacred text for the faith of community in its own context, and this goal is reached only after all the three interwoven interpretive moments/poles have been three factors of communication that facilitate understanding of the surrounding circumstances. These are:
knowing the event and where it is taking place (field), the people who are communicating (tenor), and their method of communication, for example, speech, song, letter and so on (mode). In other words, one needs to know the context of what is being said. This includes cultural, social or other relevant issues such as whether the occasion is that of joy, suffering, tragedy, pain, oppression/marginalization, poverty and so on. In the same way, when dealing with the biblical text, the readers/interpreter must be aware of the context of the text they are handling. The biblical text was written to a particular community of faith in a different time and social setting. If the reader/interpreter does not take the context of the text into consideration they may risk misunderstanding its message in their own context (Draper 2001:151).
12 Halliday’s three factors that determine the register of communication are quoted by Draper; these include a) the field of communication which involves what is going on andet where it is happening; b) the tenor which refers to the agent of communication, in other words, who are the who are people communicating, and c) the method of communication, that is, is it by speech, song, letter and son on (Draper 2001: 151).
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fully explored. Draper calls the pole distantiation, contextualization and appropriation.
Below follows an elaboration on those stages starting from the distantiation pole.