From: hedrick@cs.rutgers.edu
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Liberal vs. Conservative
Date: 3 Sep 92 08:26:10 GMT

This is addressed to Joel Norris, who was responding to a posting
by Michael Bushnell.

I appreciate your attempt to understand what liberals are saying.
Unfortunately there is a spectrum of liberals, just as there is a
spectrum of conservatives.  I'm at the conservative end of the liberal
side.  I believe the Bible is generally accurate, when read with
reasonable care to ascertain the original intention of the authors,
but not inerrant.  Mike's view is probably more "scholarly" than mine,
and probably not quite so near the conservative end.

I certainly agree with Mike's caution that the Bible is not a human
being and thus doesn't have an intention, and that the original
authors were addressing a different audience than us.  On the other
hand, his posting left an impression that I'm not sure I agree with.
Maybe I just don't understand exactly what he was saying.  The
question is whether he's saying any more than what all good Biblical
interpreters have always understood: that we have to make allowances
for the fact that the Biblical authors were addressing audiences that
were in rather difficult circumstances than ours.  The nature of those
allowances will depend upon the nature of the book involved.

Paul's letters, which he uses as an example, are probably an extreme.
After all, they were letters addressed to specific people or groups.
Thus I think Paul had a more specific audience in mind than most of
the other writers, and his work was more tuned to the specific needs
of that audience.  This makes me tend to be more willing to make
allowances for differences in situation with Paul's letters than with
other parts of the Bible.

On the other hand, I think the intended audience of the Gospels
includes us.  They seem to have a fairly clear intent of showing
Jesus' life and teachings, so that the reader can believe in him.
While the authors no doubt envisioned readers with a rather different
cultural background than ours, still it seems to me that what we want
to get out of the Gospels matches fairly well what they were thinking
of.  We, like the audience they originally envisioned, are Christians
who want to learn more about Jesus.  It's important to understand that
there are 2000 or so years between us.  That's why we read books that
teach us about the 1st Cent background, and read commentaries.  Yet I
don't think I'd agree that the Gospels weren't addressed to us.

Other books seem to fall somewhere between.  The prophets seem more
specific than the historical and wisdom books.  Most of the prophets'
messages are directed to very specific historical circumstances.  When
the prophets say that Jerusalem is going to be destroyed, in some
direct sense that message isn't directed to us.  Yet the ideals that
show through in their judgements are central to the development of the
faith of Israel, which underlies ours.  Other books, e.g.
Eccelesiastes and Job, seem aimed more directly at me.

It may be that there is some major chasm separating liberals and
conservatives, and that Mike and I are both on the liberal side.  I
certainly agree with him that we can't just take the Bible as being
directly addressed to us.  There's an extra step we have to go through
-- beyond simply understanding what the passage means in its original
context -- where we ask what God would have us learn from a passage or
book.  But I think in most cases some relevance is fairly easy to see.
Good interpreters may of course be able to point out additional
things.  My concern about his posting is that although in some sense I
don't disagree with anything he says, somehow it managed to leave an
impression of a larger separation from traditional hermeneutics than I
feel applies to me.  For example, when I read Calvin's commentaries I
feel that he really knows how to draw out contemporary meaning from
the Biblical text.  Thus at least for me, I don't think there's
anything particularly liberal about the process of seeing how the
Bible addresses me.  To get the full meaning out of the Bible
certainly involves some historical study, and some use of historical
imagination.  But I think all parties to these discussions understand
that.  It may be that at times we have to reemphasize the fact that
Paul was speaking in a context that's different than ours.  But I
don't want people to think that by doing this I'm somehow
understanding the Bible in a way that's radically different from the
way others understand it.

One of my major theses is that the kinds of methods that lead to
"liberal" conclusions on moral issues are not peculiar to liberals.
Everyone uses similar methods.  There's simply a disagreement in a
couple of cases over which method applies.  Inerrancy itself is a
major theoretical difference.  But I think it has much less of an
effect on Biblical interpretation than most people imagine.