A Primer in Hermeneutics (13) Conversion - Exerpt from his Facebook series
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Thus we come to the final stage in our thinking about hermeneutics from the juxtaposition of insights gained from Paul Ricoeur and René Girard. It may have been noticed that the discipline of hermeneutics as I am telling the story cannot be divorced from the person and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. While many would claim to have a Jesus centered hermeneutic what is meant by that is questionable. For many in first naiveté and critical distance a Jesus centered hermeneutic means a “personal relationship” with Jesus. However, they still bring to their readings of Scripture (and life) every kind of unexamined grid imaginable. Jesus does not redefine terms such as human, revelation, God, history, spirituality but is subsumed under old definitions that I have argued no longer work.
Pre-modern first naiveté hermeneutics is dominated by literalism, critical distance interpretation by skepticism. In both cases most persons in these places still assume
1. A Platonic split between the perfect Ideal and the imperfect Real.
2. Personhood as ‘autonomous individual.’
3. God defines Jesus rather than Jesus defining God.
4. A sacrificial view of the atonement (one fir, the other agin).
5. Both are grounded in ‘understanding seeking faith’ rather than ‘faith seeking understanding.’
6. Both are ultimately anti-intellectual: Persons in first naiveté eschew the findings of science, persons in critical distance completely distrust language. Yet both seek ‘secret’ knowledge, first naiveté folks through ‘word studies’ or ‘revelations’, critical distance folks in New Age trends.
7. Both render the Bible ineffective: first naiveté folks by hyper-emphasizing “its divinity” and perfection and critical distance folks by hyper-emphasizing its “humanity”, fallibility and misdirection.
Christian theology is ultimately about change in perspective.
In his first book Deceit, Desire and the Novel, René Girard observed a change throughout the writings of many great novelists like Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, Proust and others. A change of perspective occurs in each of these great novelists and it all amounts to the same thing every time. It is a conversion, not a religious conversion, but a shift in the way they understand human relations. Girard would say one can find a similar phenomenon in Shakespeare. They encountered the relation between mimesis and sacred violence in themselves and in their characters, each of them, in their own historical and cultural way, dominated by the Symbol of the Crucified.
If we are in a Matrix then conversion is the red pill. Not a religious conversion to a set of dogmas or doctrines nor is it an invitation to a “personal relationship with Jesus.” It is a conversion of a much higher order. It is a conversion that affects…everything. Conversion means to see through another’s eyes, to really understand that it is when we look out at the crowds as though we are hanging there on Golgotha’s cross, when we “take the place” of Jesus, when we see through the eyes of The Forgiving Victim, it is here from this perspective so much of the gospel seems foreign to us. We hear Jesus utter things about forgiveness but that is not how we feel hanging there. What do we want? Revenge! When do we want it? Now! We find ourselves closely identifying with imprecatory (cursing) Psalms whereas Jesus quotes vindication Psalms. It is “Seeing through Jesus Eyes” which the New Testament is so keen to bring about in its hermeneutic conversion process.
This can be seen in the great paradigmatic early Christian conversion story of Sa’ul. This is the story of the truly righteous man. There is no doubt about it. Sa’ul took his faith seriously. He was a diligent student, mastering the words of the Master Rabbi’s under whom he studied, memorizing whole portions of Tanakh, and memorizing the halakah constantly being debated between the masters, and then carrying out these rulings in his day to day existence. There was probably no more shining fine example of a good person, a holy person like Sa’ul.
Sa’ul loved his God. His God was the One God, the Only True God. One day he might have been in Jerusalem and heard a debate about the execution of Jesus of Nazareth. That was one he had missed out on. After some research and gathering of information Sa’ul concludes that the carrying on of this Jesus story is unholy and defames the Name of his Great God. His Great God is no failure. His Great God is no wimp. His great God could never, ever be associated with the name of a criminal, a blasphemer. Never, not in a thousand million years. So Sa’ul went to the High Priest, which means Sa’ul was a person of some influence, to get letters to exterminate this plant which had just broken the soil, this weed in The Holiness Lawn. Off he and his storm troopers ride into the sunset, the good guys off to get those bad savages.
When B A N G ! ! ! A Globe of Light encircles Sa’ul, then seven words (in English), a question by Sa’ul, six more words and a command. Paul opens his eyes and cannot see. He is blind. This is disconcerting at a number of levels. It’s not like they had a Braille Torah back then. Most disconcerting I am certain is that for the next several days he had to wrestle with the fact that he had been blind to something he could not see, but now he did. Somehow God, the Holy One of Israel, was with Jesus. Can you imagine trying to wrap your head around that one coming from Sa’ul’s perspective?
Sa’ul’s conversion happens when Ananias lays hands on Paul and utters the eschatological word of peace, Shalom, when he opens his mouth and says, “Brother Sa’ul.” These two words set the stage, give the perspective from which Sa’ul can now see. This is when he sees. This new seeing, this new perspective, was all about seeing through the Eyes of the Forgiving Victim. That. Changed. Everything.
And so it is that just as questions bring us from first naiveté to critical distance, so it is conversion that is the midwife to second naiveté. You see, this is all really very, very simple really. You can have one of three perspectives: that of the persecutor, that of the retributive victim or that of the Forgiving Victim. There are only three perspectives. A Jesus centered hermeneutic looks at and interprets everything as though it was oneself that was being crucified, oneself as a common criminal, oneself called a blasphemer, oneself as a social scapegoat. The Gospel is never more focused, like the most powerful laser than it is right here. For here God is revealed as a reconciliatory God, here atonement is revelation and revelation is atonement. Here the speech-act of God begins, here is the New Word, here is the only New Perspective. To know God is to know God through these eyes, the eyes of the Crucified who loved his Abba enough to go through this pain and degradation, trusting that his Abba wouldn’t let this be The End for him. Jesus loved his Abba and he knew his Abba loved him. He trusted his Abba. Jesus thus, even in death becomes a hermeneutic model for us showing us how to trust God. His resurrection is a confirmation of this. In his crucifixion we too are invited to see with new eyes, we are called to conversion.
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