Author & audience

Prejean said:

***QUOTE***

You separate hermeneutics and Church in ascertaining divine meaning, but that's simply your own opinion. For someone who supposedly presents arguments, you have surely failed to offer one for separating hermeneutics from the interpretive community.

***END-QUOTE***

Since this is a standard Catholic caricature of the Protestant position, it is worth giving separate attention to.

When a Roman Catholic speaks of “the church,” or the “interpretive community,” what he means, of course, is his own church—the church of Rome.

It should be needless to say that I never separated divine meaning from the interpretive community. To the contrary, I’ve repeatedly brought them together. What I’ve done, rather, is to separate meaning from the magisterium.

Let’s begin by distinguishing between the primary and secondary interpretive community of Scripture. The primary interpretive community is the community to which, for which, and within which the revelation of God was given. And since the Bible was written over a period of about 1500 years, the primary interpretive community varies with the book or subsection under review.

The Psalter affords as fine an illustration as any. Many of the Psalms were written expressly for the public worship of Israel. And even for those which had a separate origin, they were incorporated into the public worship of Israel. So here you have a tight fit between author and audience.

Based on their titles, as well as internal historical and autobiographical references, it is often possible to date a given Psalm (e.g. pre-exilic, exilic, post-exilic), relate it to a particular holiday (e.g. the Hallel, Ps 113-18; songs of ascent, 120-34)), and/or identify the author (e.g. Moses, David, Solomon, Asaph).

With this information in hand, we can, in turn, construe a Palm in light of other relevant background material. We can relate a given Psalm to parallel events in the Torah or Historical Books. We can relate a given Psalm to other books of the Bible earlier than or roughly contemporaneous with the Psalm.
Some Psalms review the history of Israel up to the time of composition (e.g., 78). Others supply an inspired commentary on prior revelation (104; cf. Gen 1). Still others overlap with the wisdom genre outside the Psalter. So we interpret a given Psalm in light of its literary allusions.

We can pinpoint the interpretive community. Was it the Exodus generation (Ps 9)? Israel under the monarchy (e.g., Psalms of David)? Israel in captivity (e.g., 137)? Israel at the restoration (e.g., 126)?

We can also compare the MT with the LXX. Where such information is available, we can draw on archeology, ANE literary genres, period historians, and the like.

This is the historically responsible way in which to reconstruct the primary interpretive community.

Then there is the secondary interpretive community, past and present. Every theological tradition exemplifies an interpretive community, viz., the Latin Church, Orthodoxy, Calvinism, Lutheranism, Anabaptism, Anglicanism, fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, Essenes, Messianic Judaism, Copts, Armenians, Christian cults, &c.

These, in turn, have many internal variations, both synchronic and diachronic.

What Prejean has done is to separate hermeneutics from the primary interpretive community and smuggle in his own secondary interpretive community--as if Roman Catholicism had a monopoly on communal interpretation. And from his standpoint that may well be so, but that’s simply his opinion since he has surely failed to offer a supporting argument.

One mark of theological maturity is a capacity for self-criticism and critical detachment, the capacity of one interpretive community to listen to another in case it can learn from another.

Owing to its affectation of a divine teaching office, the church of Rome is incapable of self-criticism. Once it makes a wrong turn it continues down that path, ever further from the true destination.