Browsing by Subject "Hermeneutics"

A history of white supremacist ideology has long shaped white evangelical churches and their theology. This has never been more apparent since the election of Donald Trump and the response to the protests after the murder of George Floyd. Amid the racial reckoning in the summer of 2020, white evangelical preachers sought to address race, racism, and racial justice. This thesis aims to articulate theological resources and homiletical strategies for white evangelical churches as they address racial injustice from the pulpit. Specifically, two predominately white evangelical churches in San Diego, which have a stated belief in and pursuit of racial justice, are studied, and the six sermons after the death of George Floyd are analyzed. The study and analysis of Park Hill Church and All People’s Church are placed in conversation with present antiracist scholarship. Examination of antiracist discussions will illuminate the homiletics of these two churches and lead to practical theological insights and biblical hermeneutics that pursue an antiracist imagination. This thesis concludes by suggesting three biblical passages, Amos 2, Matthew 15, and Acts 15, as biblical companions for imagining antiracist homiletics.

It is often assumed, occasionally argued, that when Matthew writes, in his ten “fulfillment citations” (FCs), that Scripture was “fulfilled,” he means that the occurrence of certain events “verify” scriptural “predictions.” This study argues that the FCs have another primary function—namely, to show how Jesus (or, in two cases, Israel’s leaders) brings the scriptural word to an unsurpassable, “full” limit. The key verb πληροῦν, that is, has a basic meaning of “fill up.”

The starting point is an examination of three rhetorically significant texts in Matthew’s gospel that are not FCs. In Matt 3:13-17, 5:17-20, and 23:32-36, Matthew consistently uses πληροῦν to mean “fill up” some ethical/ moral quantum. A survey of the way in which “limit-adjectives/ adverbs” (adjectives/ adverbs, that convey a limit being reached, e.g., “all”) cluster around the FCs points in the same direction—towards the hypothesis that πληροῦν means “fill up” in the FCs as well.

A potential linguistic objection is then addressed: is it possible to use πληροῦν in this way in Matthew’s Umwelt? Considering the instances of “πληροῦν + a word” formulations in koinē Greek, the study concludes that such language would have no default idiomatic meaning in the ears of Matthew’s speakers and could be used in the manner proposed.

After establishing the methodological principle that Matthew controlled the size of his FCs—and, thus, quoted precisely what he needed—exegesis of the specific FCs attempts to confirm the study’s central thesis. Consideration of relevant textual features of the narrative context in which the FCs are embedded (e.g., repetition of limit-adverbs/ adjectives, narrative-enacted “fullness”) would show that many, but not all, of the FCs point towards such a meaning for πληροῦν. Those FCs lacking such textual features can and probably should be read within the framework derived from Matthew’s normal usage of πληροῦν.

Finally, the study considers several hermeneutical implications of this exegesis. Ultimately, it would situate Matthew’s hermeneutic within scholarly discussion of “the Old in the New” and offer a contribution to Matthean christology. With the FCs, Matthew sets forth a vision of myriad images from Israel’s past (Emmanuel; Son; nazirite; light; healing Servant; nonviolent king; prophet; meek king) converging on the Jesus who fully embodies them to save Israel from the fullness of her exile.

In academia in general, and in the humanistic social sciences in particular, there is a problem. The "cruel optimism" of concepts is a problem faced by every specialization, and every discipline (Berlant 2011). In the social sciences, and history especially, cruel optimism takes the form of an endless quest to prove that our concepts today are superior to the concepts of yesterday, that if we work hard enough and get our methods just right, we will finally find pure, objective, true concepts to express historical reality. I use this dissertation in order to reconfigure our relationship with our concepts, to try to grapple with and ultimately subdue the cruel optimism of concepts. I employ discourse analysis, a method of analyzing knowledge as the imprint of dynamic relations of force and friction between institutions and human beings. Rather than seeing our social scientific concepts as the result of methodical research applied to a critical mass of archival documents, I see them as the result of power relations that are used to control reality as much as they purport to describe it. My materials are documentary sources—published social science scholarship and declassified intelligence reports using social scientific analysis. My conclusion is that we can use our concepts in a way that releases us from the dread of cruel optimism, so long as we see them as "snapshots of processes" (Levins 2006) rather than things in themselves.

Since his death in 1988, Hans Urs von Balthasar has become one of the 20th century’s most widely read theologians. His constructive theological work has won recognition among an ecumenically diverse array of scholars, especially in the Anglophone world. But his name has long been just as familiar to the field of early Christian studies. That guild remembers Balthasar less for his later works of speculative theology than his triptych of early studies on the Greek Fathers: Origen of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor. These books remain important monuments in the history of modern scholarship on patristic literature, but they are just as often remembered for betraying more about their author’s own thought than that of their ostensible subjects. Judging by their current reputation, Balthasar’s patristic studies would seem to represent little more than artifacts of a bygone era in which eisegesis could still pass for historical research.

This dissertation limns a portrait of Balthasar at once more charitable and more critical than such recent scholarship has been able to sketch. More charitable because it mounts a defense of Balthasar’s habit of bringing his own theological convictions to bear upon the task of interpreting (late) ancient texts, and does so by showing that such prejudices are not only inescapable but indispensable to understanding the past. More critical because it does not simply cavil at the supposed anachronism of interpreting (late) ancient texts in light of theological commitments often far removed from the historical context in which the sources were situated, but rather questions the content of Balthasar’s convictions themselves.

Chapter 1 makes progress toward a more charitable reading of Balthasar’s early work by outlining a “dialectical” theory of tradition in dialogue with two bodies of literature: 1) modern scholarship on the 4th century Greek theologian Gregory of Nyssa; 2) the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose concept of “historically effected consciousness” (wirkungsgeschichtlichen Bewußtseins) proves essential to a specifically Christian account of tradition but ultimately inadequate to the content of its most peculiar confessions. Chapter 2 moves toward a more critical reading of the same by first identifying the particular set of theological prejudices in light of which Balthasar practiced his retrievals of the Christian past, before then demonstrating that and how these commitments to a broadly Thomistic metaphysics of the “analogy of being” (analogia entis) shaped his several essays on Gregory of Nyssa himself. Chapter 3 questions whether Gregory’s texts can really bear such a theological burden, or whether—as Balthasar himself worries at crucial moments throughout his career—the Greek patristic tradition doesn’t tend in precisely the opposite direction. Away from an “analogical” model of the relationship between God and world, that is, towards a more “dialectical” account of Christ’s retroactive transfiguration of creation as a whole. So it is that Chapter 3 substantiates the metaphysical vision broached in Chapter 1, but does so in response to the hermeneutical program assayed in Chapter 2. The result is a more or less coherent argument about the form and content of historical theology in the Christian tradition.

Theorists of deliberative democracy maintain that genuine dialogue is premised on the mutual respect of participants, yet a great deal of what passes for civic discourse even in mature democracies takes place among political actors who avowedly do not respect one another. This dissertation investigates psychological obstacles to mutual respect, and mutual understanding, in an effort to enhance possibilities for democratic deliberation. It identifies two such obstacles in political narcissism and ressentiment, which it construes as pathologies of political judgment. More generally, the dissertation argues for a self-consciously hermeneutical and psychoanalytically informed approach to deliberation, one that seeks a deeper understanding of our interlocutors in deliberation so as to carry on a more fruitful dialogue with them. Accordingly, it argues that speech is distorted when it does not align with the subjective intent of the speaker, even when that intent is unconscious or unknown to him. It contends that a depth hermeneutical mode of deliberation is necessary to engage in genuine communicative action, and suggests a role for psychoanalytically informed rhetoric in deliberation. Finally, it offers a methodological sketch of what a depth hermeneutical approach might look like when applied not only toward understanding one’s interlocutor, but also toward offering justificatory arguments vis-à-vis the shared ethical traditions and discourses that give legitimacy to political action. It suggests we need to read between the lines of tradition to ensure that minority discourses are not overshadowed, just as we need to look beneath the explicit claims of our interlocutors if we wish to understand them.

In this dissertation I offer a constructive account of the church’s role in the process of reading and understanding Scripture. This task has become especially relevant due to the recent popularity of “ecclesial hermeneutics.” In response to intellectual trends that sought, explicitly or implicitly, to remove Scripture from the sphere church and relocate it within a supposedly more hermeneutically salubrious environment (e.g., the academy), many ecclesial readers have endeavored to return Scripture to its proper home. As Bonhoeffer claimed in 1933, presaging contemporary trends, Scripture is “the book of the church” and must be “interpreted as such.” Drawing from various theological and philosophical developments that emerged during the latter half of the 20th century, Christian interpreters have felt emboldened to follow Bonhoeffer’s lead, not only tolerating but prioritizing and accentuating the particularity of their ecclesial vantage point and the unique form of thinking constituted by its language, traditions, and practices.

This dissertation enters the debate at just this point. Ecclesiology has obviously carried great weight in recent conversations about biblical interpretation, but rarely has ecclesiology itself become a direct object of theological focus within them. Ecclesial hermeneutics has remained ecclesially ambiguous. In this dissertation, therefore, I ask an ecclesiological question as a means of answering a hermeneutical one. I set out deliberately to consider what it means to read in, as, and for the church. What “church” is presupposed in theological interpretation? What practices come embedded within it? And how does this shape the ends of faithful interpretation? In short, how, precisely, does the church function as a hermeneutical space?

Beyond merely describing what others have offered, I put forward a constructive vision. I propose to understand the church as a confluence of four dynamics, each of which is marked by a particular relationship. Together, these four dynamics constitute the church as a hermeneutical space. In short, the church exists (1) in relationship to the risen Christ, (2) in relationship to its own historical-institutional past, (3) in relationship to a particular place and the concrete bodies gathered there, and (4) in relationship to the world. Each of this dissertation’s four parts focuses on one of these dimensions, showing how its particular aspects carry hermeneutical significance. Each part consists of two chapters. In these two chapters I first focus on the hermeneutical implications of a given dimension and then listen to Bonhoeffer as a means of complexifying and deepening this analysis. It thus becomes evident that the coherence of my project owes much to Bonhoeffer, whose voice serves as the keynote that allows me to draw diverse others into conversation.

Listening to Bonhoeffer, I hope to show that these four dimensions cohere to shape the church as one hermeneutical space. This coherence is important, for I argue that recent proposals within ecclesial hermeneutics have accentuated particular dimensions of the church, but have failed to do so comprehensively. In other words, explicitly ecclesial hermeneutics commonly display onesided tendencies by relying on a truncated account of the church in which only one dimension of ecclesiology carries hermeneutical significance. Beyond being theoretically deficient, this tendency exerts a distortive effect at the level of practice. What is needed, then, is a more complex ecclesiological imagination, the fruit of which will be a more complete and theologically robust account of what it means to read in, as, and for the church.

While this dissertation’s animating concerns are deeply theological, they are altogether practical. A properly theological account of hermeneutical faithfulness is impossible without attention to the actual activities involved in the reading process. Bonhoeffer understood this well, and he proves himself to be a pastoral theologian by the facility with which he moves from the theoretical to the practical realm. Following Bonhoeffer’s example, I hope to make a constructive claim not only about a theology of Scripture or scriptural hermeneutics but about the practices and habits that sustain faithful reading.

While my heavily Christological focus (Part One) may seem to perpetuate the same onesidedness I seek to correct, I hope to show that when properly construed, the Christological dimension of the church is capacious enough to include the others. By jointly imagining the church’s historical-institutional past (Part Two), life together (Part Three), and missionary relationship to the world (Part Four) in terms of Jesus’ ongoing presence and particularity, we will find the resources necessary to imagine the ecclesiology that serves as a space for faithful reading. What ultimately emerges from this account of Christ and the fourfold account of the church that corresponds to him is a hermeneutic of discipleship, a way of thinking vis-à-vis Scripture that takes place in the wake of Christ’s ongoing action and ultimately aims at participation in it.

How do readers regain their enthusiasm for reading Scripture when what they are reading does not relate to their life’s circumstances? With all the competing voices in the world today, readers find it challenging to read the Bible when what they read is distant from their realities. Some readers have even said they prefer other spiritual books above the Bible. This paper addresses the phenomena of disengagement that is growing amongst Christian readers and looks into ways, particularly relational hermeneutics in which readers can gain renewal in reading for self-understanding, commitments, and practices.

This paper will ask the reader to make a commitment to relocating themselves in the text while paying attention to their own circumstances, emphasizing the importance of building a relationship with the text that translates into relational hermeneutics. This paper will intentionally move away from Eurocentric hermeneutics with the intent of engaging the term relational hermeneutics as an African American woman’s approach that invites readers to reframe their accounts into meaningful stories. Examining the traditional understanding of hermeneutics and cases involving hermeneutics readers can commit to “relocating” their own stories in biblical narratives that help to facilitate their readings - giving the reader the responsibility of renewing their relationship with Christ through relational Biblical stories. Additionally, this paper highlights relational hermeneutics as an African American woman’s approach and concludes with an African American woman’s account of doing relational hermeneutics that resulted in renewal. Hopefully readers can follow this approach with the intent of achieving similar results.

How do readers regain their enthusiasm for reading Scripture when what they are reading does not relate to their life’s circumstances? With all the competing voices in the world today, readers find it challenging to read the Bible when what they read is distant from their realities. Some readers have even said they prefer other spiritual books above the Bible. This paper addresses the phenomena of disengagement that is growing amongst Christian readers and looks into ways, particularly relational hermeneutics in which readers can gain renewal in reading for self-understanding, commitments, and practices.

This paper will ask the reader to make a commitment to relocating themselves in the text while paying attention to their own circumstances, emphasizing the importance of building a relationship with the text that translates into relational hermeneutics. This paper will intentionally move away from Eurocentric hermeneutics with the intent of engaging the term relational hermeneutics as an African American woman’s approach that invites readers to reframe their accounts into meaningful stories. Examining the traditional understanding of hermeneutics and cases involving hermeneutics readers can commit to “relocating” their own stories in biblical narratives that help to facilitate their readings - giving the reader the responsibility of renewing their relationship with Christ through relational Biblical stories. Additionally, this paper highlights relational hermeneutics as an African American woman’s approach and concludes with an African American woman’s account of doing relational hermeneutics that resulted in renewal. Hopefully readers can follow this approach with the intent of achieving similar results.

At times, scripture shocks and puzzles. How might Christians understand scripture’s aporia and its embeddedness in modes of domination? Confessional accounts often seek to reduce textual problems to misreading. Conversely, approaches that center oppression tend to find the text incorrigibly repressive. Few approaches imagine the text as both problematic and generative. This dissertation steers both the postliberal recovery of figural reading and the liberationist attention to context alike away from excessively theoretical construals of how reading ought to work, and toward biographical accounts of the skills, virtues, and pitfalls that attend struggles to read scripture well amid profound moral difficulties. Attending to three case studies of individuals reading the Bible under conditions of suffering and loss I ask: when Christians are wounded in their reading, how can scripture also form them well? In what follows I provide an account of the wounds of scripture and its readers. These include the wounds within scripture (painful passages, passages that contradict others) and the wounds that Christians inflict on others through destructive readings. Applying the language of wounds (with its full Christological connotation) to scripture permits Christians to take seriously the difficulty of the Bible alongside its endless capacity, by the Spirit, to heal and transform. I argue that scripture’s capacity to form well amid these wounds is a matter not so much of hermeneutical procedure but of embodied response. Thus, while my first chapter lays out a conceptual account of wounds in scripture and its readers, the succeeding chapters display three practical case studies of individual readers. I attend to apocalypticism through the life of Anna Jansz, a sixteenth-century Anabaptist martyr; the complex relationship between slavery and the Bible in the autobiography of the nineteenth-century emancipated preacher John Jea; and the pain of scriptural accounts of election in the writings of the contemporary Palestinian Melkite Archbishop Elias Chacour. In all three cases the Spirit’s grace, manifest in biography and historical circumstance, tends to these wounds, bringing life out of death on the pattern of the wounds of Christ. This dissertation contributes to the field of scripture and ethics. Through attending to the enduring difficulty and redemptive possibility of scripture in the lives of particular readers, I hope to demonstrate that scripture’s difficulties cannot be resolved simply by hermeneutical procedure. Instead, reading scripture well requires the embodied response of a life.

To say that the first Gospel is about Jesus is to state what any reader knows from the most cursory glance at Matthew's narrative. Yet the scholarly discourse about Jesus' identity in Matthew reveals a fundamental confusion about how to articulate the identity of Jesus vis-à-vis "God" in the narrative. Not infrequently, for example, scholars assert that Matthew portrays Jesus as the "expression" or "embodiment" of Israel's God, but those same scholars - often leaving opaque the theological content of such descriptors - assert that Jesus is not therefore to be "identified" or "equated" with God; Jesus is "less than God," God's agent "through" whom God works. The result is a significant lack of perspicuity regarding the proper articulation of Jesus' identity in Matthew's Gospel.

The present work attempts to bring greater clarity to the articulation of Jesus' identity in Matthew by attending more precisely to two unique linguistic patterns woven deeply into the entire narrative's presentation of Jesus, namely, Matthew's use of προσκυνέω and his paternal-filial idiom. We turn first to Matthew's extensive use of the word προσκυνέω. Such language constitutes an important part of Israel's liturgical-linguistic repertoire - used often, for example, for the "worship" of Israel's God in Deuteronomy and the Psalms - and Matthew clearly shares that theological grammar (e.g., 4:9-10; cf. 22:37). At the same time, προσκυνέω serves as a Christological Leitwort in Matthew's narrative. While the word's meaning of course depends on its context - it need not mean "worship" in every instance - Matthew uses it ten times for Jesus and in all portions of the narrative; it constitutes the most basic (proper) response to Jesus. Matthew's reservation of the word προσκυνέω for these two figures - Israel's Lord God and Jesus - and his pervasive use of it for the latter suggests it may help render more intelligible the expression of Jesus' identity vis-à-vis "God" in the first Gospel.

We begin our study of προσκυνέω, therefore, by surveying its history of usage in Matthew's cultural encyclopedia, which helps sensitize us to the linguistic "training," so to speak, in which Matthew participates. Since the narrative, however, is the actual discourse in which the meaning of words is determined, I then go on to consider the particular contours of Matthew's appropriation of προσκυνέω language in the whole narrative. Not only does Matthew use προσκυνέω frequently for Jesus - unlike Mark and Luke - but more importantly, he employs it repeatedly in Christologically provocative and literarily strategic ways. At the climactic moment of the magi's visit, for example, the magi's action is expressed this way: καὶ ἐλθόντες εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν εἶδον τὸ παιδίον μετὰ Μαρίας τῆς μητρὸς αὐτοῦ (2:11). Likewise, at the climactic moment of Jesus' temptation, those same words reappear in Satan's mouth - ταῦτα σοι πάντα δώσω, ἐὰν πεσὼν προσκυνήσῃς μοι - only to be rebuffed by Jesus in the words of Israel's most basic confession: κύριον τὸν θεὸν σου προσκυνήσεις (4:9-10). I argue that Matthew has carefully shaped these accounts to reflect one another in a number of significant details, such that the reader is left with an apparent incongruity - Jesus receives from the magi what he declares belongs to Israel's God.

Several literary phenomena further confirm that these initial appearances of προσκύνησις are not incidental to Matthew's theological grammar. The sharpness of the incongruity between 2:1-12 and 4:8-10 is intensified cumulatively as Matthew repeatedly deploys προσκυνέω language in a way that re-activates his earlier uses. In his next use of προσκυνέω - after the temptation - the leper falls down in προσκύνησις before Jesus, whom he addresses as κύριε (8:2-4). Along with other important elements, Matthew has added/adapted these words to/from his Markan source as well as "intratextually" reflected Jesus' words at his recent temptation - only the κύριος receives προσκύνησις (see also 9:18; 15:25; 20:20). In such accounts, I argue, the content of the characters' actions remains ambiguous - προσκύνησις need not mean "worship" at the story level - but Matthew has nonetheless made a number of moves at the literary and lexical levels that make his προσκυνέω motif reverberate loudly for the reader in a christologically significant manner; the προσκύνησις offered to Jesus reflects that which Israel offered to its God. Importantly, similar patterns obtain not only in the details and literary settings of various pericopae, but also in the narrative's broader shape.

For instance, Matthew - uniquely among the synoptists - brings three episodes in a row into close correspondence linguistically and thematically, which come together to underscore the question of true and false "worship" (14:33 [προσκυνέω]; 15:9 [σέβω;]; 15:25 [προσκυνέω]). The "worship" of the two "outer" episodes turns explicitly on the question of Jesus' identity (14:33; 15:25), thereby setting in bold relief the "inner" episode that highlights Israel's "vain worship" (15:9). As another example, the magi's action in the narrative's introduction of Jesus is mirrored in its corresponding literary frame - the women grasp the risen Jesus' feet and offer him προσκύνησις, as do the eleven disciples (28:9; 17). What Satan requested of Jesus - only to be refused on theological grounds (4:8-10) - Jesus receives.

Finally, I consider how Matthew closely connects the προσκύνησις offered to Jesus in the narrative's frame with a decisive episode at the center of the narrative, 14:22-33. There, the disciples render Jesus προσκύνησις as "Son of God" (θεοῦ υἱός) after Peter repeatedly addresses him as the "Lord" in whose "hand" is the power to "save" from the mighty waters. I argue extensively that 14:22-33 - both in its literary form and in its sustained appropriation of OT imagery for YHWH - compels the reader to see Jesus, the filial κύριος as the recipient of the προσκύνησις Israel reserved for κύριος ὁ θεός. How Matthew can make this christological move while affirming Israel's basic commitment to the one God, I argue, turns on the filial language that comes to expression in the disciples' dramatic confession. Matthew, that is, reshapes the articulation of Israel's Lord God around the relation of the filial and paternal κύριος.

It is to that filial and paternal language, therefore, that we turn as the capstone of our discussion of Matthew's theological grammar. I contend that the narrative as a whole reflects the basic logic of 14:22-33; to tell the story of Israel's κύριος ὁ θεός is to tell the eschatologically-climactic story of the filial κύριος who rules and saves. I examine closely several passages - and their literary contexts - that serve seminal roles in Matthew's theological grammar, tracing how each brings Father and Son together in mutually constitutive relationship around their identity as κύριος (e.g., 22:41-46; 3:1-17; 11:1-12:8; 23:8-10; 23:37-24:2). I further trace the pattern of Matthew's filial and paternal language, demonstrating the ubiquitous christological shape to Matthew's paternal idiom; the identity of "God" in Matthew cannot be articulated apart from this particular Father-Son relation. Finally, I conclude the study by considering the close relation between Matthew's Emmanuel motif and his filial grammar (1:23; 18:19-20; 28:19-20); the Son is the filial repetition of the Father, his immanent presence among the people whom he saves (1:21; 2:6).