opposing fortresses unwillingly occupied

Recent debates about how we interpret scriptures have helped me realise, again, how important it is to acknowledge - as best you understand it - what your interlocutor is saying.

So, I take the point stated and urged against my position (scroll down to 'an anchorless text') to be this: that God has not left us floundering around, unable to read Scripture adequately without detailed lessons in reconstructed history.

I agree with this point. I would not want to be pressed, unwilling, into a fortress of opposition to it, merely becuause I keep saying, but. So here is my yes.

The point I want to press, though, is that insofar as we have not been left floundering around, it is because we understand the history and context of the text. We have interpretative commonality with the writers and original authors. This is not a mysterious operation of mystic knowledge, I want to say, but a very real working of God's grace within the created order. And here, I acknowledge that mystic knowledge is probably not what my fellows in debate wish to affirm. That position is not their fortress.

So, my hunch is that we are not really in opposition over the way we know the text. What then is the difficulty?

The difficulty comes when I advance a particular view of a text's meaning, based on (what I assert is) historical reconstruction of original meanings. If someone says in response that the text cannot mean this, because it can be read without my history lesson in quite a different way, then if we are not careful, we will head toward those opposing fortresses. What is not being said (at least, I hope not), by the respondant is that history has nothing to do with it at all.

Rather, what is really happening is that the respondant is pitting one form of historical knowledge - the transmission of meanings down to us - against a much more specific, and different, set of historical claims. What is not in question at all (or ought not to be), is the vital importance of history to both positions.

So the fortresses are not opposed over the question of history. What they are opposed over seems to be the following assumption: God's grace to us would not allow us to mistake such a seemingly central set of meanings. In other words, the interpretative commonality that we think we have with the original readers and authors does in fact exist at these central points, and, moreover, this is guaranteed by the grace of God.

Now, I think that this is a highly questionable claim. Scripture itself does not appear to support it. We are not told that we can forsake the ordinary forms of meaning-analysis on an assumption that we've got it right already. So, at the very least, the claim should be allowed to be verified for any given case. After all, if the apostle Paul, direct witness and authoritative representative of Christ, could be checked against scripture for accuracy, should not the vagaries of a non-authoritative tradition, 2000 years removed from directness? So: do we really share interpretative commonality with the original authors and readers of the gospels?

Our own Reformed tradition harks back to just such a question. NT Wright notes that it was asked when Martin Luther "took the gospel word metanoeite and insisted that it didn't mean 'do penance', as the Vulgate indicated, but 'repent' in a much more personal and heartfelt way. The only way to make that sort of point is to show that that's what the word would have meant at the time. That's the kind of serious biblical scholarship the Protestant Reformation was built on..." NT Wright, The Shape of Justification

Thus, history itself is not a threat, but the very guardian of an original meaning. This should be our starting point, and I believe it's one the various views share. It's important, therefore, to be clear about the actual points of difference, rather than allow rhetoric or labels to force us into unwelcome (and ridiculous, when thought about) positions. And as I have thought about it, it seems to me that the vital question revolves about the assumption identified above. Is it warranted?

To the history books, then. Some of which, of course, will be the the other texts included in our bible: the ones that hold so much of the imagery being built on.