Authority of texts: Talks with interpreters

This post is fulfilling my promise to follow up on Lurie's agurment on the authority of texts on the web. I had a chat with my hermeneutic lecturers and decided I will not cut N paste any bit of thier feedback. Hope you bear the length, I'm just being a good student -:)

• This is what Dr. Philip Culbertson had to say after co-teaching a course on “The Bible in Popular Culture”

I showed the students, first, a very familiar translation of Psalm 23:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside the still waters;
He restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths
For his name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I shall fear no evil;
For you are with me;
Your rod and your staff—they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
In the presence of my enemies;
You anoint my head with oil;
My cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
All the days of my life,
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord,
My whole life long.

The students were very quiet as I read the psalm from the document projector. There seemed to be no comment from them, but rather a sense of listening and waiting. Next I showed them the recent HipHop translation of the Psalm, from Timothy Holder’s The Hip Hop Prayer Book (New York: Church Publishing, 2006):

The Lord is all that, I need for nothing.
He allows me to chill.
He keeps me from being heated
And allows me to breathe easy.
He guides my life so that I can
Represent and give shout outs in His name.
And even though I walk through the hood of death,
I don’t back down, for You have my back.
The fact that He has me
Covered allows me to chill.
He provides me with back-up
In front of player-haters,
And I know that I am a baller
And life will be phat.
I fall back in the Lord’s crib
For the rest of my life.

I read out the HipHop text slowly, and discovered that the students laughed often, and rather loudly, at the end of each line. I was a bit surprised: I’d never thought of Ps. 23 as a source of amusement. I felt confused both by the text itself, and by the students’ reactions. I felt how unfamiliar the new translation was, and I felt disoriented or de-stabilized. My struggle was, I think, to figure out whether I could move a familiar set of meanings from one set of comfortable signifiers to another set of startling and uncomfortable signifiers. I felt as though the “assumed” (my assumptions, obviously) original signified meaning had disappeared in the “trans-lation”. I felt as if I had lost my ability to play within the familiar text of Ps.23, and with that loss of play came a kind of grief.

This seems like a great example of deconstruction, in that the new translation seemed, to me, to render the text incoherent. I stumbled, in my heart as well as my head. How could it be possible that “chill” means the same thing as “lie down in green pastures”? If “chill” doesn’t mean that, then what does it mean? I wondered if the original author of Ps. 23 would have recognized “chill” as a synonym? Would she have recognized any convergence of signified meaning between “chill” and “lie down in green pastures”?

The new translation did not match the “hyperlinks” embedded in me as a 62-year-old white male raised from birth in the church. Ps. 23 carries, for me, the authority of familiarity, plus a variety of emotional agglutinates including comfort, nurture, and a hint of controlled threat. Interestingly, I could find those agglutinates in the new translation, in spite of the way the unfamiliar signifiers disoriented me, but finding them was hard work, and not particularly satisfying.

Did this exercise jeopardize a sense of divine authority in Ps. 23? No, because I don’t generally consider the Psalms to be divinely-inspired, but rather, a group of hymnic poems that carry the authority of profound human experience in the face of an imagined divine. But I have spent, like millions of others before me, some time looking to certain passages in the Bible in order to “borrow” the comfort that some human being before me has found and used. This is what seemed removed by dealing with a vocabulary that confronted me with the profound disorientation of implied meanings with which I could not identify. But I also wondered whether if I could hear the HipHop text read out loud, as I have so often heard the traditional text read out loud, that I could experience the same emotional ebb-and-flow through the voice of someone to whom the vocabulary seemed to “fit”.

To bring this all back to Peter Lurie’s argument, I think there is more at work here than Derrida’s deconstructionism is designed to contain. I liked Lurie’s article because of the questions it made me ask myself, and I am fascinated by Derrida. But I also believe it is virtually impossible for Christians to read the Bible without some sort of involvement with our psychodynamic inner world, for surely, after all, that is where our sense of “authority” lies.

Some years ago, I argued in an article that because the word authority is built on the Latin root auctor, which means to nourish, that any authority which does not nourish is false authority. I approach the authority of the Biblical text, then, as an exercise in nurturance, however loosely that term might be defined. In the end, I think I was more nourished by Lurie’s article than I was by the HipHop trans-lation of Ps.23. Lurie’s article allowed me to “play” inside my inner world, and thus nurtured me, and in that sense, offered authority. The HipHop translation disoriented me so much that I forgot how to play.

So does a web reading of a Biblical text dissolve its authority automatically? No, not to me, as long as the web reading leaves room for nurturing playfulness. It’s only when that playfulness is removed that the authority of the text becomes jeopardized.

More talks with the......................