01.11-The Reader’s “Social Location”
Chapter 11 The Reader’s “Social Location” For those of us who embrace the Bible as God’s Word, our goal is always to hear what God was saying in Scripture. Because we believe God inspired the authors, we look for that meaning first of all in what God inspired the original writers to say to their original audiences. However else a text might be applied, it is the original meaning we can be sure was correct, and that provides us the model for how to apply Scripture in our own situations today.
Some students of literature have moved away from the question of what the author meant to the question of how a reader understands a text. Although we do not emphasize that question here (our primary goal for interpreting the Bible is understanding what the author meant, because we believe the Bible’s authors were inspired by the Holy Spirit), it is an interesting question and has some relevance. Different readers understand texts in different ways, and that is often because of the cultures and traditions we start with. Being sensitive to this issue can help us better understand why people interpret texts the way they do. Sometimes it can even expose our own prejudices or ideas we simply took for granted because we assumed that everyone thought the same way. For example, a minister in a church that practices infant baptism may read about the baptism of the jailer’s “household” (Acts 16:33) and see a proof for infant baptism here. Someone who practices only believer’s baptism will object that we do not know that the jailer’s household included infants and that they all seem to have heard and believed (Acts 16:31-32). In modern biblical debates, everyone reads chosen passages in light of other passages they believe support their viewpoint. This is not to say that we should not try to make a better case for one position than another, but simply to observe that we most naturally incline to positions we have been taught. Recognizing the history of various lines of interpretation can help us guard against bias in the way we read the Bible. Church history is a very important safeguard in helping us put our own views in broader perspective. We can recognize the background of our own views and consider how this background influences us for good or ill. We can also challenge ourselves: how “obvious” is a view of a Bible passage if no one in history ever thought of it before? (This is not to say that majority views in church history are always correct, either. Sometimes those majorities simply reflect the cultures of those Christians writing down most of the interpretations! But church history does help us be more cautious.) Recognizing different backgrounds (“social locations”) of various interpreters can also enrich the way we read the Bible. People in different settings ask different kinds of questions than people in other circumstances do, so we can sometimes learn from people who ask different questions as long as we follow the rules of context noted above. For example, Medieval European theologians focused on what the Bible says about issues like the nature of God, Christ, salvation, and angels. These questions are legitimate (and issues like Christ and salvation are central to the New Testament and to Christianity), but a believer who is beaten every day while working as a debt slave in Pakistan will also want to hear what the Bible says about justice, about suffering, and about comfort. The questions do not contradict one another, and both may come to legitimate conclusions; the Bible is big enough to address both kinds of issues. Listening to the voices of different interpreters committed to Scripture in different cultures can help us recognize a variety of questions and issues we may not have considered before. Of course, we must learn Scripture in its own setting very well first, so we are not tempted to make it answer questions that it does not address. We cannot force Scripture to say what it does not say, so we must be careful to read it in light of its first cultural context; for some of our questions it provides only general principles. But only by asking the questions will we find out. (A warning here: some people’s cultural assumptions can bias them to totally misunderstand the Bible. Some westerners start from the antisupernaturalistic assumptions of their culture, hence ignore or try to explain away miracles in the Bible, though God’s powerful acts are all through the Bible and at the very heart of biblical Christianity. By allowing their cultural biases to overrule their faith in what Scripture actually says, they cannot come to the biblical text with honest humility to hear its message. Most Africans, whose worldview recognizes the reality of both God and a demonic realm, will not make this same mistake.) Women in many cultures have asked questions about social roles in the Bible that men have neglected, and have provided helpful conclusions. Latin American scholars have raised issues of justice that many western scholars have failed to notice. Asian scholars have noticed principles of community, honor and shame, family, and saving face. In the same way, African, Caribbean and African-American interpreters have asked questions about the African presence in the Bible and church history and about slavery that many traditional European interpreters have neglected. It is to these questions of Afrocentric interpretation and slave interpretation that we now briefly turn as an example of how social locations can help people ask useful questions. After this we will briefly discuss some other issues in application.
1. Afrocentric Interpretation This is merely one example of Christians in particular cultures asking particular kinds of questions; I offer this example because it is one of those with which I am more familiar.
There are extreme forms of Afrocentric interpretation that distort the biblical record no less than traditional Eurocentric interpretations have-for example, those forms which claim that everyone in the Old Testament was black (as some Europeans assumed they were white). But when by “Afrocentric” we simply mean asking questions relevant to African history, we are ready to explore issues that some Eurocentric scholars have ignored. (In these sections we draw on information from Glenn Usry and Craig Keener, Black Man’s Religion [Downers Grove, IL, USA: InterVarsity Press, 1996]; and Craig Keener and Glenn Usry, Defending Black Faith [Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1997].) Again, we do not identify with characters in the Bible solely on the basis of race; otherwise only Jewish people could identify with many characters in the Bible! But it is helpful to know that a number of Africans do appear there.
Before we can look for Africans in the Bible, we have to establish what we mean by “African.” Technically, by Africa today we mean everything from northern Africa to southern Africa, but those boundaries are somewhat arbitrary historically, drawn traditionally by Europeans. Israel is not very far north of Egypt, so redrawing the maps slightly might move Israel to Africa! (By no one’s definition can it be in Europe; the traditional boundaries place it in Asia, on the border of Africa.) Different criteria would arrive at different boundaries, some of them not useful historically at all (based on some genetic traits, one can argue that Norwegians and Fulani belong to one group whereas most Africans and Japanese belong to another group!) But for the purposes of modern Africans who ask the question, it makes sense to include everything from northern to southern Africa. One Eurocentric scholar objects to African writers who want to include ancient Egypt as part of their heritage, but then curiously claims ancient Greece as part of his heritage--even though he is from a northern European area that the Greeks barely knew and regarded as utterly barbaric! We can look first at ancient Nubia, an empire which existed from perhaps as early as 3000 BC and which nearly all scholars today agree was an African empire whose people were quite dark in complexion. This kingdom is typically called “Cush” in the Hebrew Old Testament, sometimes translated “Ethiopia”; the term refers not solely to modern Ethiopia but to all of Africa south of Egypt. In some periods of Egypt’s history the Nubians conquered Egypt and Nubian Pharaohs reigned on its throne; one of these was Tirhakah, ally of the righteous king Hezekiah in the Bible (2 Kings 19:9). Moses also married a Cushite, or Nubian wife; when his sister complained, God struck his sister with leprosy temporarily to teach her a lesson (Numbers 12:1-10). King David had a courier who was Nubian (2 Samuel 18:21). One of Jeremiah’s closest allies (and Jeremiah had very few) was not a native Judean but was an African immigrant who worked in the royal court (Jer 38-39). It is also possible that Zephaniah the prophet (Zephaniah 1:1, if “Cushi” here means “a Cushite,” a possible reading of the Hebrew) and some other figures in the Old Testament were African immigrants adopted into Israel. With Egypt, Nubia was expected to come to recognize the one true God someday (Psalms 68:31; cf. Isaiah 19:24-25). Egypt plays one of the most prominent roles in the Bible, appearing them far more often than Rome. Some nineteenth century European ethnographers, cognizant of Egypt’s great accomplishments but biased by racism, doubted that the Egyptians were of dark complexion. But a survey of ancient Egyptian artwork shows that, at least in that period, Egyptians were typically of reddish-brown complexion and some were quite dark (especially those in the south, toward Nubia). But unbiased by modern prejudices, different complexions mixed freely in Egypt, producing what is often called an “Afroasiatic” population from the intermarriage of Asiatics and Africans. Such mixing actually affected ancient Israel. Joseph’s wife Asenath, mother of the tribes Ephraim and Manasseh, was Egyptian (Genesis 41:45; Genesis 41:50; Genesis 46:20). The “mixed multitude” that left Egypt with Israel (Exodus 12:38) included those of Egyptian blood, but given the multitude’s behavior in the wilderness, they may not be our favorite models! On the other hand, most of the Israelites probably had some Egyptian blood. Many of Abraham’s servants were gifts from Pharaoh (Genesis 12:16), passed on to Isaac (Genesis 25:5) and Jacob (Genesis 27:36); though only 70 direct descendants of Jacob went to Egypt (Genesis 46:27), the number of servants may have been even larger. When Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites (Exodus 1:11), it is not likely that he freed their servants; rather, the servants became part of Israel. In the New Testament, the first fully Gentile convert to Christianity was from Africa, a court official of the Kandake (“Candace,” in most of the translations, was a title for the queen mother). He came from a famous Nubian kingdom known as Meroe, which had existed since 750 BC and was known to the Romans and other peoples (Acts 8:26-40). This conversion was a southward example of the “ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8), symbolizing a greater harvest to come in church history. Nubia was later converted to Christianity through Egyptian missionaries in the fifth and sixth centuries AD, and maintained its independence as a Christian empire until 1270, then regained it until the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, when internal weaknesses allowed it to be conquered by Arab invasions from the north. During the early Arab period in Egypt, when Arabs there thought of Christians they did not think much of Europeans, with whom they had less contact, but of Africans. English translations call the court official “Ethiopian,” but “Ethiopia” was a Greek term applied to all of Africa south of Egypt (what Hebrew called “Cush”). Here it applies to Nubia (where the Kandake ruled), not to what is called Ethiopia today. But modern Ethiopia as a whole converted to Christianity before Nubia as a whole did; Syrian missionaries Frumentius and Edesius preached the gospel there, and finally the Axumite emperor Ezanas was converted and led his empire to Christianity around AD 333, about the same time the Roman empire was converting to Christianity. Some Ethiopian Christians were already present as observers at the Council of Nicea (AD 325, along with six Arabian bishops). Later Ethiopia had to defend Egyptian Christians against Arab oppression in some periods of extremism. The leaders in the church in Antioch, the first major missions-sending church, were multicultural (Acts 13:1). In addition to Paul (a Jew born in Turkey but raised in Jerusalem) and Barnabas (a Jew from Cyprus), and Manaen, “brought up” with Herod (possibly as a high-status family slave later freed), two leaders may have been from north Africa. One is Simeon called “Niger,” meaning “Black”; “Niger” was a common Latin name, but as a nickname (as it is here) it may indicate his dark complexion. The other is Lucius of Cyrene. We cannot be sure of his ethnic background, as Cyrene’s population was a mixture of Jews, Greeks, and native Cyrenians; but its location was certainly in north Africa. For that matter, North Africa continued to play a major role in earliest Christianity. The Roman Empire was not so much a “European” one (in the modern sense) but a “Mediterranean” one, including southern Europe, northern Africa and western Asia. Over half of the most prominent early church fathers (Cyprian, Augustine, etc.) were from northern Africa; as a nineteenth-century German scholar opined, “It was through Africa that Christianity became the religion of the Roman empire.” Tertullian, a north African theologian, coined the term “Trinity” to describe the biblical doctrine and became known as the “father of Latin Christianity.” The leading defender of the Trinity was Athanasius of Egypt, whom his enemies called a “black dwarf,” suggesting that he was short and of exceptionally dark complexion. After the European invasions into north Africa, one north African bishop fled in a boat to Italy, and a portrait of him found there clearly indicates that he was black. Ultimately the church declined in north Africa, however. It was torn by internal strife between professing Christians (the Donatist controversy; quarrels with the Byzantines) and later crushed by Christian heresies (Arian invaders, barbarians from northern Europe that had been converted to a very defective form of Christianity, oppressed the orthodox Christians of Africa). Likewise, in Nubia, a gradual loss of clergy because of a lack of adequate biblical training centers led to Nubia’s weakness and decline. In both cases, the Arabs conquered lands where the churches had already weakened themselves. But what much of the world forgot until modern revivals of the gospel in Africa, except concerning Christian Ethiopia, both the Bible and early church history remind us: Christianity is an ancient faith of Africa, even before it was a faith of northern Europe.
2. Slavery and Bible Interpretation
People have taken various religious texts out of their original historical contexts to justify their own behavior. Rarely has this practice been so blatant as when religious texts have been used to justify slavery. Sometimes these texts (like Ephesians 6, treated above) actually were meant to limit the horrors of slavery in cultures that practiced slavery, but such texts were later abused to justify slavery itself. This is one reason why it is so important to understand what a text originally meant, not just any given tradition of interpreting that text. But as we will briefly observe, some slaves did resonate with the correct meaning of Scripture in ways that were inaccessible to slaveholders because sin had blinded the minds of the slaveholders.
People sought religious justifications for slavery both in the Arab and western worlds. Arab tradition claims that Muhammad held slaves, but there is no basis for supposing that Muhammad made slavery worse than what already existed in his day, and in fact he may have limited it. After the Arabs conquered the Sassanian empire in 642, however, they took over the east African slave trade. By the ninth century, many Arabic texts (cited by Bernard Lewis in Race and Slavery in the Middle East [Oxford, 1990]) reveal a racial prejudice against Africans as stinky, lazy, and suited for slavery. The mighty empire of Songhay was eventually toppled in part by pressure from northern Arabs and Berbers for more slaves. By the nineteenth century the terrible march across the Sahara, Tippu Tib’s near depopulation of the upper forest region of the Congo, and other horrors had reached their peak, but they had continued for over one thousand years. The Arabian peninsula made slavery illegal only in 1962, and outside observers still claimed a quarter of a million slaves there afterward; it continues today in Mauritania, the Sudan, and elsewhere. Those who practiced this abuse of others naturally sought justification for the practice. Building from an earlier Jewish tradition not in the Bible, Arab slave traders argued that all descendants of Ham (not simply Canaan as in Genesis 9:25, fulfilled in Joshua’s day), hence Africans in general, were meant for slavery. Slavery was engrained in Arab culture; in the nineteenth century the sultan of Morocco resisted outside forces to abolish slavery, claiming that it was part of their religion as well as their culture. In 1855, when the Turks tried to outlaw the slave trade in their empire, under British pressure, Shaykh Jamal issued a fatwa from Mecca declaring the Turks now apostate from true Islam. He announced that it was therefore acceptable to kill them and to enslave their children. Western slave traders, starting with the Spanish and Portuguese but soon including the British and Americans, borrowed the “curse of Ham” and various racist stereotypes from Arab slave traders. Although the Arabs had been engaged in this practice for many centuries, the Europeans pursued plantation agriculture more brutally, stuffing masses of captured Africans into cargo holds for the three-month voyage across the Atlantic. The earliest slaveholders in the U.S. refused to allow their slaves to hear about Christianity, protesting that the slaves might get the idea from it that they were equals of the slaveholders. (Their fears were justified: most slave revolts in the U.S. involved Christian teaching.) But eventually they were able to secure some preachers who would preach from the Bible more selectively, avoiding its themes of liberation, justice, or other matters that might cause troubles. The south was at that time the least evangelized part of the thirteen colonies, in a country which, before the Second Great Awakening, may have had only seven percent church attendance. But while slaveholders came up with a selective way to read texts, a growing abolitionist movement looked for more general biblical principles. Passionate for justice, British evangelicals in the 1790s (especially related to Wesley’s growing Methodist brand of Anglicanism) had two main causes: missions and opposing the slave trade. The Wesleyan revival shook Britain in a number of ways, but one was creating a new climate of concern for evangelism, justice, and obedience to God. William Wilberforce and his Clapham Sect worked to abolish slavery in the British Empire until finally, on Wilberforce’s deathbed, they succeeded in persuading enough people about their Christian views. The Methodist revival impacted the Americans, too. The 1784 Methodist General Conference declared slavery contrary to God’s law; the 1812 conference forbade slaveholders to be church elders; in 1826 the Maryland conference unanimously denounced laity holding slaves. In 1825 even the bishop of Georgia, in the heart of slave country, considered requiring all Methodists there to free their slaves. The African Methodist churches in the U.S., as well as other black American denominations, also opposed slavery. In 1789 the Virginia Baptists resolved that slavery should be abolished; Quakers like John Woolman had always opposed slavery; as early as 1710, Anglican Bishop William Fleetwood had condemned slavery. By the mid-1800s the American debate became fiercer and some churches withdrew from it, but many continued the fight. Abolitionist Christian leaders like Charles Finney, Lewis Tappan and Theodore Weld built their case against slavery from biblical principles. LaRoy Sunderland’s antislavery manual drew principles about justice from every section of the Bible to use against slavery. For example, he pointed out that the penalty for kidnapping was death (Exodus 21:16; Deuteronomy 24:7; cf. 1 Timothy 1:10), and correctly understood that kidnapping in the ancient Mediterranean world meant slave trading (e.g., Genesis 40:15). He therefore declared that all slave traders should be put to death, and that slaveholders, who deliberately sustained the slave trade, supported it and should also be executed. Meanwhile, the slaves engaged in some Bible interpretation of their own. The slave preachers often allowed them to hear only a small selection of biblical texts, but they could not avoid texts which talked about all humanity being descended from Adam or about all people having equal access to God’s grace through faith in Christ. Slaves would sing songs about God delivering Israel from slavery in Egypt, and the slaveholders, who were too morally depraved to understand the connection, did not realize that the slaves were praying for their own deliverance. One slave who had learned how to read later reported that he used to read the Bible while he was a slave and he found in it confirmation of what most slaves already believed--that God opposed slavery. He found there the principle that God made all humanity from one person, and that they therefore were of equal worth in God’s sight. We should not read into the Bible something that is not there. But because the slaves heard the Bible at their point of need, they were able to hear themes that were already there which the slaveholders did not expect. Our attachment to our traditions can keep us from hearing anything new. Not everything new is right; but not all of it is wrong, either. To apply the Bible most fully, we must be ready to ask fresh questions, as long as we search the Bible on its own terms (in context and original background) to supply the answers.
3. Other Issues in Application The ideal in applying any biblical text is to find analogies in our setting as close as possible to the original setting. The closer the analogy, the more likely our claim to be explaining how the biblical writers would preach to our situations today. We must be careful to get the correct analogy; for example, we should read Jesus’ criticisms against the Pharisees as criticisms of religious people in error, not as against modern Jews (Jesus was also Jewish). We should read the plagues of the exodus as directed against an idolatrous empire enslaving God’s people, not against modern Egyptians (God actually wanted the Egyptians to know about him-- Exodus 7:5; Exodus 7:17; Exodus 8:10; Exodus 8:22; Exodus 9:29; Exodus 14:4; Exodus 14:18; and God has a good purpose for Egypt-- Isaiah 19:24-25). In other words, we should hear Scripture humbly, rather than using it as an excuse to condemn other groups to which we do not belong. We should be read to apply its teachings to ourselves first, when applicable (James 3:1; Ezra 7:10). Of course, not all Scripture is applicable individually; prophecies of judgments against nations are corporate judgments, not judgments on every individual who happens to read them.
We need to know Scripture well enough to know which texts are applicable to which problems. In the long run, this is best served by knowing the Bible thoroughly, not simply by using a concordance. If someone wants to explain why premarital sex is wrong, they can find plenty of condemnations of “fornication” (in some older translations) or sexual “immorality” in the Bible (besides lists, cf. e.g., Deuteronomy 22:13-22; Prov 7; 1 Corinthians 6:12-20; 1 Thessalonians 4:1-8). But other passages like Matthew 1:25 (in which Joseph and Mary practice sexual restraint, even though married, till Jesus’ birth), provide us lessons that also challenge sexual temptations. The contrast between Joseph’s sexual purity and Judah’s sin in Genesis 38-39 (treated above) likewise provides some lessons more graphic than a mere recital of references from a concordance would. A concordance is helpful for locating a word; your own personal study will help you learn and remember where to find a concept. Scientists can engage in “applied research” or “basic research.” In “applied research,” a scientist may be seeking a particular solution, say, a cure for cancer. They are more likely to find a cure specifically for cancer sooner than someone doing “basic research.” But “basic research” is simply pursuing all available knowledge, which will provide more various cures along the way, as well as providing information that may prove necessary to cancer researchers. Basic research thus yields a larger profit in the end. In the same way, studying the Bible regularly to learn all that one can learn from it will yield more than simply searching the Bible for an occasional topic. One can only learn so much about a topic before one runs out of material; if one knows the Bible well, however, one knows where to turn to find material relevant to that topic. One also can research deeper into any given text if one has a broader base of biblical knowledge from regular study. To practice study oriented toward application one can start, privately or in a group, studying passages to determine their original meaning and then asking, “If the original writer were here today, how would that writer apply this text?” (See, for example, the case of Mark 2, treated when we discussed getting lessons from narratives.) Since most texts were originally meant to be applied, although in a different setting, thinking about how to apply them is the right way to approach them. Of course, as noted above, some can be understood and applied only by the way they fit into the larger book as a whole. In the end, we must understand the Bible well enough to understand the points and principles the writers were communicating in their setting, so we can recommunicate them properly for our own setting. The Bible is a very practical book, but getting to all the treasures of its practical message demands of us some serious work. Scripture admonishes us to seek wisdom and understanding (Proverbs 2:2; Proverbs 4:7), to work hard (Proverbs 4:23; Proverbs 10:4), and to start our search by fearing God (Proverbs 1:7). It is when we fear God that we become least inclined to read our own desires into the Bible and more willing to hear there God’s message to us.
Books by Craig Keener Note: this section may be omitted from distribution of this course.
1. Academic works in biblical studies for a more general audience:
• The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, December 1993. Roughly a quarter of a million in print (available in several languages, including Arabic, Armenian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish; being translated into others, including Chinese, French and Russian).
• Revelation, for the NIV Application Commentary series (Zondervan, 1999).
• Matthew. (IVP NT series, InterVarsity Press, 1997).
• Paul, Women & Wives: Marriage & Women’s Ministry in the Letters of Paul. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1992.
2. Heavily academic works (especially for scholars)
• The Gospel of John: A Commentary. 2 vols. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, November 2003. Over 1600 pages.
• A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999. Over 1000 pages.
• The Spirit in the Gospels and Acts: Rebirth and Prophetic Empowerment. Peabody: Hendrickson, 1997.
3. Church-oriented academic works •Defending Black Faith, co-authored with Glenn J. Usry. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1997.
• Black Man’s Religion: Can Christianity be Afrocentric? Co-authored with Glenn Usry. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1996.
• ...And Marries Another: Divorce & Remarriage in the Teaching of the New Testament. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1991.
4. Church-oriented works informed by scholarship
• Gift and the Giver: The Holy Spirit’s Work Today (Baker, 2001; revises his earlier 3 Crucial Questions about the Holy Spirit).
• Understanding and Applying the Scriptures. Co-authored with Danny McCain. Bukuru, Plateau State, Nigeria: Africa Christian Textbooks, 2003. (This is the book for which I originally collected most of the material in this interpretation manual.)