Phillip A. Davis, Jr. | Daniel Lanzinger | Matthew Ryan Robinson (Eds.): What Does Theology Do, Actually? (Leseprobe)

Bible and Method 73
Biblical studies’ heavy, ongoing investment in critical methodologies, its
methodolomania, 6
has attracted scrutiny for different reasons, but can also be
challenged in particular for the accompanying unacknowledged interests and
their inevitable, overt or subtle, promotion of such interests. Method is not merely
the guide showing the academic way, but conjures up scenarios within which
scholarly engagement can or cannot take place, creating structures that both
enable engagement and disable or disallow scenarios considered inapt. 7
Amid
issues pertaining to power in and of interpretation, unacknowledged interests
together with an insistence on objective, neutral interpretation amount to an
‘‘innocence syndrome’’ and has compellingly been exposed time and again as
feigned and dangerous: feigned, given interpreters’ situatedness that provides
the context from where and through which human existence for the individual
and / or groups involved, are filtered and thus defined; and dangerous, because
‘‘the myth of innocence is in itself a highly political agenda’’, 8 with the peril intensified
by attempts to disguise and sublimate it. 9
Putting innocence aside allows that the grounding of biblical interpretation
and decisions about method can be accounted for in chronological and socially
determined moments; 10
after all, both interpretive results and processes and
mechanisms of interpretation are contextual. Growing acknowledgement of the
socio-political situatedness of methodologies implies accounting for the effect of
methodologies in biblical studies by taking scholars’ (and scholarship’s) social
locations into account. Biblical scholarship that takes its social embeddedness
serious as point of departure and frame of understanding does not discount
proper and adequate historical consciousness in a zero-sum game. Bridging the
6
À la Sandmel, who coined the term parallelomania for the relentless search (claims!) for
parallels and analogies often without historical or literary basis, in biblical and related
studies; cf. Samuel Sandmel, ‘‘Parallelomania,’’ Journal of Biblical Literature 81 (1962): 2---
13. With methodolomania is meant the enchantment with methodologies for their own
sake, to the extent of replacing interest in the texts they are applied to, often with little
theoretical concern regarding the methodologies and their use, and apparently oblivious
to interpretive contexts or settings.
7
In a similar way that map is not territory (cf. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory:
Studies in the History of Religions [Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
1978]), method is not procedure; at least, method is not simply procedures and techniques
to be followed.
8
Fernando F. Segovia, Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins (Maryknoll:
Orbis, 2000), 173.
9
The post-Enlightenment historical and literary critical reader assumes a disinterested,
objective, and also apolitical stance, all of which are a myth; cf. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ‘‘The
Reader in New Testament Interpretation,’’ in Hearing the New Testament: Strategies for
Interpretation, ed. Joel B. Green (Grand Rapids, Carlisle: Eerdmans, Paternoster, 1995),
312.
10
Cf. Joel B. Green, ed., Hearing the New Testament. Strategies for Interpretation (Grand
Rapids, Carlisle: Eerdmans, Paternoster, 1995), 6.