[This is an ongoing project that is analyzing N.T. Wright’s
5 volume series, Christian Origins and the Question of God. This series is
widely read and bridges the gap between the academic and devotional world. It
is therefore worthy to be carefully analyzed so that all readers can understand
his key points while at the same time gaining a critical eye to some of his
rather bold claims. This series of posts are concerning volume 1 – The New Testament and the People of God.]
Chapter 3: “Literature, Story and the Articulation of
Worldviews”
N.T. Wright’s approach to the concept of reading, as
presented in the third chapter of NTPG, illustrates
the difficult position he has painted himself into by attempting to bridge the
gap between the scholarly and devotional fields of inquiry. By simultaneously
dismissing and using literary criticism, he attempts to create a middle way
that recognizes what he considers the valid points of literary criticism while
still holding to a relatively traditional approach. He calls this approach
“critical realist reading” – extending his concept from the previous chapter on
knowledge.
First, Wright attempts to address – but then dismiss – two
sections of his audience. He first addresses the devotional reader who naively
believes that things can be read “as is.” Wright comments, “English people tend
to think of themselves as robust realists: we observe the facts and describe
them, we just read the text as it is.”[1] He attempts to challenge conservative
readers that pretending one is able to read without “bringing something to the
table” is foolish. He rightly recognizes that we must admit we do apply theory
when we read texts – whether we know it or not.
While I would usually be praising Wright for such a comment,
he follows this directly with a challenge to the very people who are attempting
to have integrity in this field. Wright argues that Georg Strecker - using him
as an example of figures who want to suggest that one think of books as
reflections of authors rather than reflections of history – is at fault because he is using theory:
That, I submit, is not primarily
an exegetical or even a historical judgment: it is a philosophical one.
Strecker is inviting us to move form the risky ground of making claims about
Jesus himself to the apparently safer, more secure ground of saying that this
is the state of Matthew’s own mind. We read the Sermon on the Mount and we ask
‘Is anybody there?’ The answer is no: not in the sense of an original speaker, a
Jesus sitting on a mountain talking to the crowds. There is only Matthew. We
have jumped from realism, right over an empiricist reading (Matthew’s impression of Jesus) and landed in
phenomenalism (Matthew’s state of mind).
The apparent force of Strecker’s proposal has comparatively little to do with
first-century history, and a great deal more to do with late-twentieth-century
habits of mind and reading.[2]
Many of Strecker’s claims in the Sermon on the Mount can be
challenged. However, criticizing Strecker for using theory responsibly is not
one. Wright had just finished arguing
theory must be used when considering ancient documents. After doing this,
he accuses Strecker of this apparently grave mistake. He is the one to denounce
Strecker’s agenda (which of course is clear in Strecker’s book) that Strecker
has the gall to use modern theory of reading.
This beginning to Wright’s chapter is indicative of the
entire chapter – he wants competing things – to create a critical theory that
allows for a reading of the text while at the same time making it so “homespun”
that it is not a theory that needs to be addressed all that much and would be
relatively common sense – so as to not offend his traditional readers. It seems
on the surface, then, that Wright wants to do the very thing he claimed to
avoid – avoiding theory because it can be inconvenient.
Wright furthers this point a few pages later: “Many
‘critical’ methods look so properly ‘neutral,’ but in fact encapsulate whole
philosophical positions which are in themselves contentious and highly
debatable.”[3]
Wright then considers what for him is a major problem – the ability for the
reader (modern or ancient) to reach the intent of the author. In much of modern
literary criticism, authorial intent has been discarded as impossible and
impractical. Rather, literary criticism looks toward texts rather than authors.
Even if one did know an author, an author might have been intending something
that he or she did not express in a text and further, a text can easily hold something
that the author never intended at all. Intent is not a sufficient argument for
the presence or absence of a product. This modern challenge – which Wright does
address – is a particular problem for Wright who asks whether we can know
anything at all. Being fair to the Derridean reading group who might be
observing this blog, I know that this is not
fair to modern literary criticism – just because one cannot find authorial
intent does not mean that one cannot
find meaning – I avoid describing it only because Wright himself does not.
Wright’s problem is not really in the theory, it is in what
it means for a devotional text like the New Testament. He seems concerned that
if it is true that we cannot know the intent of the author, then how can we
really “know” what reading is “right?” This brings us back to his challenge
with knowledge in the previous chapter – here he simply applies it forward to
reading. He makes this quite clear by suggesting the problem with modern
literary criticism is that of control: “One
problem with the attempt to provide an analysis which goes beyond the text but
not to the author is the lack of control.”[4]
Here, Wright resurrects a regula fidei –
a “rule of faith” wherein in Irenaeus and Tertullian presented their “rule”
which based itself on conclusions rather
than methods. Wright is not bothered
by the method per se – as he struggles to find adequate responses to the
reasons literary critics have come to their conclusions. Instead, Wright does
not like what results those methods
could find – he wants a system that has more checks and balances with more
control. Essentially, he wants a system that will surprise the traditional
reader far less.
To accomplish his goals, Wright presents a “both, and”
approach – that we recognize we cannot know the mind of an author completely
(and that a text is not confined to that one author), but that it still uses
that author as a kind of base for meaning:
What we need is a theory of reading
which, at the reader/text stage, will do justice both to the fact that reader is a particular human being and to the fact that the text is an
entity on its own, not a plastic substance to be moulded to the readers whim.
It must also do justice, at the text/author stage, both the fact that the author intended certain things, and that the text may well contain in
addition other things – echoes, evocations, structures, and the like – which
were not present to the author’s mind, and of course may well be present to the
reader’s mind.[5]
Here he seems to want to suggest that there are things in
the text which were not intended by the author and things that were intended
but that we as readers cannot know – but also that we can basically still have
enough grounding to avoid getting too off track.
The only way this is possible is through his understanding
about the nature of people who work in the context of “story.” He argues that
all people live in a “story” which here he describes as “worldviews” and that
those worldviews are similar enough beyond
time and space, for these stories to be able to be analyzed in meaningful ways:
A critical-realist reading of a
text will recognize, and take fully into account, the perspective and context
of the reader. But such a reading will still insist that, within the story or stories
that seem to make sense of the whole of reality, there exist, as essentially
other than and different from the reader, texts that can be read, that have a
life and a set of appropriate meanings not only potentially independent of
their author but also potentially independent of their reader; and that the
deepest level of meaning consists in stories, and ultimately the worldviews,
which the texts thus articulate.[6]
He essentially argues that because humans wrote the works
and humans are reading the works, that there is enough commonality, that we can
see into another’s “story” or “worldview,” experience it in that sense, and
therefore find meaning. He clarifies his position:
There are other worldviews; they
are expressed in works of literature; and they interact with our own.
Critical-realist reading is a lectio
catholica semper reformanda: it seeks (that is) to be true to itself, and
to the public world, while always being open to the possibility of challenge,
modification, and subversion.[7]
He argues that reading should be interactive between the
reader and the text and that this interaction is what provides the meaning.
Wright’s analysis eventually will fall or rise depending
upon how one considers his application of this theory rather than the theory
itself. Nevertheless, it is certainly concerning how difficult this theory is
to achieve. His critical realist reading is something that attempts to have its
cake and eat it too – he somehow feels that one can productively analyze the
mind of the author merely because both the reader and the author are humans.
This seems to be far more an issue that shows his inability to square the theoretical
and devotional – he can’t argue that the reader will intrinsically “know” the
meaning while at the same time argue that there will be any measure of
reasonable “historical” control which he suggested earlier. Instead, there is
some kind of middle ground that is murky at best.
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