Dogma and Poor Interpretation

Recently I read Hutter's Suffering Diving Things, a book recommended to me by a very intelligent friend who is much more conservative (not to mention intelligent) than myself. It was a decent book. But one of the things that I have been mulling over since I read it was his belief that the Holy Spirit guides us in creating doctrine and dogma. I thought and thought about it and realized one thing: I disagree.

Let's use Hans-Georg Gadamer's thoughts in Truth and Method to help with this. He writes about the Catholic church's hermeneutic that led to the Reformation, saying "the Bible was the church's sacred book and as such was constantly read, but the understanding of it was determined, and...obscured, by the dogmatic tradition of the church" (174). All of us Protestants then typically jump in and celebrate how Luther made everything better. But Gadamer knows better: the Reformers "developed the universal principle that all the details of a text were to be understood from the contextus and from the scopus, the unified sense at which the whole aims" (175). This doesn't seem too terrible. But Gadamer goes on; "Insofar as Reformation theology relies on this principle in interpreting Scripture, it remains bound to a postulate that is itself based on a dogma, namely that the Bible is itself a unity...Reformed theology is also dogmatic and excludes any sound individual interpretation of Scripture that takes account of the relative context of a text, it's specific purpose, and its composition" (175).

If you've followed along this far, this statement will hopefully be the kicker: "By ultimately asserting the Protestant credal formulae as guides to the understanding of the unity of the Bible, it too supersedes the scriptural principle in favor of a rather brief Reformation tradition" (175). Meaning is not fixed. If we objectively declare what scripture means, there is no longer any need for scripture. We can just follow our dogma and doctrines at that point. Gadamer wrote that "understanding belongs to the encounter with the work of art itself" (100), and I would say it is the same with scripture. If we read the text through the lens of dogma, we suddenly put ourselves over the text, rather than at it's feet. It is the equivalent of Moses looking at the burning bush for ~30 seconds, declaring that it is a symbolic representation of God's mercy, and going back to his shepherding, never to hear from God.

To be a "good" interpreter, I believe we must first allow a real encounter that looks for the things in scripture that challenge our dogmas, our doctrines, our presuppositions, and then chooses to not explain them away (see nearly everything Charles Colson says these days for an example), but dwell on them and be challenged and changed by scripture. We believe that we have a complicated God, and that Bible was inspired by him, so why do we so often try to make the Bible simplistic? Brueggemann is right, God is irascible. Let's work from there for once!

Peace,
Matt