Big Questions: : What do traditional readings say about the text (and the tradition)?

There’s an old saying in hermeneutics that “A text can’t mean what it never meant.” It’s a warning against truly novel readings of ancient texts; after all, if something has been read for two thousand years, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be the first to ‘crack the code’ ! I say ‘truly novel’ because a lot of what seem to be novel interpretations are actually rediscoveries of older ones. To spin it in a more positive way, one of the blessings of being in a tradition is having the benefit of hundreds and thousands of years of accumulated wisdom — we don’t have to start from scratch. And that’s why one of the big important questions to ask when reading a biblical text is ‘What does tradition have to say about this?’ That said, a living tradition is never about ‘vain repetition’ or blind trust; so we also ask a second question here, ‘What does that have to say about the tradition?’ In this, this question bridges between the ‘explore’ and ‘challenge’ steps in the Integral Hermeneutic method. It explores further by investigating what others have said about a text, but also starts to challenge those readings too — sometimes the very act of discovering another reading from a different part of the Christian tradition can be enough to get us to critically assess our own.

That introduction covered a lot of the whys for this question. Asking what the tradition has to say about a text is helpful because it means we aren’t left on an interpretive island but seek out the help of those who’ve gone before us. I’ve found this to be a great benefit to my Scripture reading over the years. Reading old commentaries and sermons — the older the better — can be really eye-opening and unlock new-to-me insights into texts I thought I already knew well. This step can also help get us out of the ‘small town’ or hermeneutical bubble problem, where we simply haven’t been exposed to the range of readings faithful Christians have had throughout the past two thousand years. As I mentioned the other week, it’s absolutely fascinating to me that opposite sides of a theological debate will often use the exact same passages as proof-texts. So then, this step can either support or challenge our initial hypotheses, but will improve our reading either way.

(As a quick practical note, while we live in a wonderful age when a wide variety of ancient sermons and commentaries is available in good translations, few of us have the time to read these. One fantastic resource that should be available in any good theological library, or in some cases online, is the Ancient Christian Commentary series, which provides, in a verse-by-verse format, short relevant excerpts from the Church Fathers. It’s always fascinating and often enlightening!)

But we don’t accept those traditions passively. We receive them, but also question them.

A great example of this is with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, found in Genesis 19. For ages and ages, this was used as the great proof text against homosexuality — more than what was found in Leviticus or anything in the New Testament. But a fair reading of the story would have to make anyone ask how and why that would be. After all, a lot happens in that story and none of it good: There’s an attempted gang-rape of out-of-town visitors, a father offering his two daughters to the mob in an attempt to save his guests, threats of murder, and an attempted home invasion. Why would the tradition fixate on the apparent sex of the visitors? (As angels, the guests only appeared to be men.) If we’ve already asked the question ‘What else do the Scriptures have to say about this?’, we’ll be likely even more confused, since Ezekiel 16 defines the ‘Sin of Sodom’ as arrogance and a refusal to help those in need. It seems then to be a story about a breach of Ancient Near Eastern hospitality codes. So what’s going on?

If we flip to the second half of today’s question, and look at what the traditional interpretation has to say about the tradition itself, we find that the interpretation that focuses on the apparent sex of the strangers arose in late Second-Temple Judaism, when Greek culture was flooding the Eastern Mediterranean world — and with it, the practice of pederasty, in which a middle aged man would take a teenager under his wings to show him the ropes of being a man. While such relationships were ideally to be chaste, it was generally assumed that most did have some sexual element to them. Such a tradition was as disturbing to Jews then as it is to us today, so they co-opted this text for their purposes as part of their polemic against foreign, Gentile ways. It seems to have been a two-step process to get to an anti-homosexuality reading: First, ‘here’s a story about God’s condemnation of Gentile sexual excesses’; then second, ‘these sexual excesses are about the biological sex of the people involved.’ Since the early Christian elimination of the Gentile-Jewish division removed the need of this polemic, only the gendered part of the traditional reading jumped out. So, by shifting the focus of our interpretation of this text to the abuse of visiting strangers, we’re actually restoring the older biblical tradition about it.

The point of all this is simply that it’s helpful to know a bit about how others have interpreted a given passage in the past. But that doesn’t mean we accept and repeat those readings unquestioningly. If they’re correct readings, they’ll be able to stand up to our questions.

Reflection Questions

1. Have you ever read a book from the past or visited a church from a different tradition from your own and encountered a different interpretation of a familiar text from what you knew? If so, how did that make you feel? Looking back at it, did that new-to-you reading ‘stick’? How did you discern whether to accept it or not?