Last week I had the privilege of attending a conference at the International Center of Bethlehem, featuring academics and clerics discussing questions of hermeneutics and liberation. While I do fear the focus on Bible interpretation remains too much an elite conversation, proceeding as it does with half an eye on combating Christian Zionism and largely ignoring the practices of the majority of lay Christian worshippers in Palestine, it was nevertheless a fascinating forum.
Two thinking tools emerged which I had played with a bit in my research design: dialogue, as per Bakhtin's oeuvre, and hospitality, drawing on Levinas.
Bakhtin was most central to Patricia Tull's paper though others mentioned him. (Prof. Tull's appearance took me by surprise as a paper of hers on the Lament Psalms and Bakhtin had advanced my research design greatly, but I had no idea she had an interest in Palestine.) Anyway, in a question and answer session to another paper, someone asserted that dialogue was impossible without equality. Bakhtin I think would question this. Instead of requiring equality, he assumes its lack: you must always assume the presence of an imperfect, inadequate potentially violent and manipulative immediate addressee, invested with power because of their 'excess of seeing'. The person you're talking to never hears you quite right, and dialogue always entails risk.
So why should we, why do we keep talking? To answer this, Bakhtin might introduce his concept of the superaddressee, a notional third-party who is imagined to be the "absolutely just hearer" of any utterance, any communication, whether a cry of pain or an academic exegesis of the book of Joshua, or in the context of this conference, the politically risky but urgent statement: 'Christian Zionism is a heresy'. In the knowledge that we will be unfairly written off by some, we can say this loudly because it is uttered in the imagined presence of a just hearer. That this hearer is notional is to imply that it is the embodiment of the justice to which we aspire, thus the superaddressee's notional authority makes problematic communication necessary as well as possible.
However, Munther Isaac commented following his paper, that the endless contest over scripture interpretation is frustrating at least, and possibly doomed, a depressing cycle of thesis and antithesis which, at its worst (evoking Mitri Raheb's resistance to those obsessively seeking the so-called middle ground) results in insipid synthesis.
I wonder if this is because the superaddressee of any interpretation of scripture is necessarily human reason, and as Martin Luther once quipped, reason is a bitch.
Worship, of course, entails a different superaddressee. Bakhtin's 'tertiary model' of dialogue is smoothed out through the complete association of the addressee with the superaddressee, and when the superaddressee posited, especially in a charged dialogue such as Palestinian Christian relationship with scripture, is not reason but in fact the just God both sides of the dialogue claim to worship, a just God who really hears us, then there is always the freedom to engage the other, even at the risk of being misheard or manipulated. In the context of worship we can interpret.
Thus the imagined presence of God insists not only that we must keep speaking the truth, but that, for the dialogue to 'work', Palestinian Christian utterances in the fraught dialogue about scripture ought to involve a more explicit association of debates about meaning and interpretation with Palestinian traditions of worshipping this God through the utterance of scripture use to God.
A concrete example was provided by Munther when he described how he introduces his students to the book of Daniel. Instead of forcing them to decide what the obscure reference to "weeks and half a week" means in eschatological terms, or whatever, he tells them to close their eyes and be conscious of how they feel as the text is read -not as an object firstly to be scrutinised but as the scrutinising Word itself. The reading is as an act of fidelity to the text and thus an act of worship of God. It is after all when the cognitive is engaged with by the affective that worship becomes possible: with all your heart, soul and might, and all that.
This is long. I think I'll save reflections on hospitality to another post!
Saturday 20 August 2011
Thursday 18 August 2011
Canonical communities and canonical refugees
Anthropology of religious communities demands some engagement with the question of borders: who is in the community in question, and who is not.
Religious communities themselves would answer this question in various ways: the Baptist church I grew up in would emphasise belief; traditional forms of Islam assert particular praxes of submission before Allah, and minimally circumscribe belief; and the Syriac Orthodox community I am researching emphasises blood and origins.
Of course, each of these ways of delimiting the borders of a community struggle to withstand the duress of real life. In my research, when faced with border zone dilemmas, people will discursively negotiate these principles to include those who for some reason must be included, or conceivably to exclude those who must not. The border is an analytically problematic place to start.
The notional centre, however, maybe more fruitful. A religious community is arguably a community at the centre of which resides (or is imagined to reside) a canon, written or otherwise. While a person's interior is inaccessible, their performed fidelity to a canon is a way of demonstrating a belonging to the community which judges it to be canonical. In any case, this is through the voluntary engagement of the body, minimally through listening, potentially through the performance of ritual, and in some cases through verbal profession.
But let's stay with listening. In a global religious marketplace, it becomes possible to listen - and listen well - to a range of texts, sacred or otherwise, without committing to any as canon. This is of course a qualified blessing, but it is here also that I see the emergence of the strange 20th Century opposition or 'spiritual' to religious, precisely because the former does not demand fidelity to any particular canon.
Thus I believe that researching differences in the objectification of 'the canon', expressed firstly by how people listen, provides a key to understanding the discursive creation of in-group and out-group categories through which the faithful organise the world. The key, perhaps, is that subjectivity in which people imagine the canon to be the site of a dialogue in which they are involved, as reiterators or addressees, but not as third parties. This dialogic starting point provides for open communities of practice as well as very closed dogmatic communities, for whom real listening involves verbal assent to propositions. Even for the Syriac Orthodox community, who stress the importance of being siryāni, the descendants of Aram, the inheritors of "the first Christianity", and in one person's words, "the mother" of all Middle Eastern peoples, these narratives are reinscribed through a particular normative engagement with the Bible: in this case an our Aramaic artefact, especially used in the context of our Aramaic liturgy, self-consciously performed in our language which Jesus himself spoke, alongside the saints and the angels and in the presence of God. While many Syriac Christians will read the Bible at home as well, willing addressees of the Bible in Arabic, and therefore as Arabic-speaking Christians, it is not this that demonstrates their being siryāni, but the particular relationship they have as willing addressees of the Syriac canon in all its rich material repertoire.
This calls into question the approach of academics and clerics to liberate oppressed peoples from their canon, especially by de-canonising the text and urging a hermeneutics of suspicion. Not having to assent to every biblical proposition but to be able to simply to listen to and even resist canonical propositions is a great gift, and the grounds of creative religious subjectivity. However rejection, a cessation of listening to a canon, marks a point of departure from this creative process, and thus from a religious community.
For communities in which assent has never been the important thing, the attempt to liberate people from an ancient canon either talks past the issue or encourages a flight from a particular domestic space, a particular 'interior', a particular land called home. Within Palestine, as Mitri Raheb said last week at the same conference, some Christians have been displaced from their narrative by Christian Zionist readings of the next precisely because they feel barred from listening. This is a very real displacement. Home is never perfect, indeed it is sometimes a sad and difficult place, but is nevertheless home.
But in fact, some liberationist readings of the Bible might contribute to this displacement if disuse of the Bible results. These canonical refugees are still a minority in Palestine. People still attend their masses and services and from time to time hear texts they would rather not hear. The focus on interpretation and settling upon a satisfactory exegesis however contributes to either flight or defensiveness, whereas an emphasis upon the nature of engaged listening can be liberating of people within their canonical land, freeing them to till the often unyielding soil of their canon in the knowledge that, whatever anyone else may say, it is theirs.
Religious communities themselves would answer this question in various ways: the Baptist church I grew up in would emphasise belief; traditional forms of Islam assert particular praxes of submission before Allah, and minimally circumscribe belief; and the Syriac Orthodox community I am researching emphasises blood and origins.
Of course, each of these ways of delimiting the borders of a community struggle to withstand the duress of real life. In my research, when faced with border zone dilemmas, people will discursively negotiate these principles to include those who for some reason must be included, or conceivably to exclude those who must not. The border is an analytically problematic place to start.
The notional centre, however, maybe more fruitful. A religious community is arguably a community at the centre of which resides (or is imagined to reside) a canon, written or otherwise. While a person's interior is inaccessible, their performed fidelity to a canon is a way of demonstrating a belonging to the community which judges it to be canonical. In any case, this is through the voluntary engagement of the body, minimally through listening, potentially through the performance of ritual, and in some cases through verbal profession.
But let's stay with listening. In a global religious marketplace, it becomes possible to listen - and listen well - to a range of texts, sacred or otherwise, without committing to any as canon. This is of course a qualified blessing, but it is here also that I see the emergence of the strange 20th Century opposition or 'spiritual' to religious, precisely because the former does not demand fidelity to any particular canon.
Thus I believe that researching differences in the objectification of 'the canon', expressed firstly by how people listen, provides a key to understanding the discursive creation of in-group and out-group categories through which the faithful organise the world. The key, perhaps, is that subjectivity in which people imagine the canon to be the site of a dialogue in which they are involved, as reiterators or addressees, but not as third parties. This dialogic starting point provides for open communities of practice as well as very closed dogmatic communities, for whom real listening involves verbal assent to propositions. Even for the Syriac Orthodox community, who stress the importance of being siryāni, the descendants of Aram, the inheritors of "the first Christianity", and in one person's words, "the mother" of all Middle Eastern peoples, these narratives are reinscribed through a particular normative engagement with the Bible: in this case an our Aramaic artefact, especially used in the context of our Aramaic liturgy, self-consciously performed in our language which Jesus himself spoke, alongside the saints and the angels and in the presence of God. While many Syriac Christians will read the Bible at home as well, willing addressees of the Bible in Arabic, and therefore as Arabic-speaking Christians, it is not this that demonstrates their being siryāni, but the particular relationship they have as willing addressees of the Syriac canon in all its rich material repertoire.
This calls into question the approach of academics and clerics to liberate oppressed peoples from their canon, especially by de-canonising the text and urging a hermeneutics of suspicion. Not having to assent to every biblical proposition but to be able to simply to listen to and even resist canonical propositions is a great gift, and the grounds of creative religious subjectivity. However rejection, a cessation of listening to a canon, marks a point of departure from this creative process, and thus from a religious community.
For communities in which assent has never been the important thing, the attempt to liberate people from an ancient canon either talks past the issue or encourages a flight from a particular domestic space, a particular 'interior', a particular land called home. Within Palestine, as Mitri Raheb said last week at the same conference, some Christians have been displaced from their narrative by Christian Zionist readings of the next precisely because they feel barred from listening. This is a very real displacement. Home is never perfect, indeed it is sometimes a sad and difficult place, but is nevertheless home.
But in fact, some liberationist readings of the Bible might contribute to this displacement if disuse of the Bible results. These canonical refugees are still a minority in Palestine. People still attend their masses and services and from time to time hear texts they would rather not hear. The focus on interpretation and settling upon a satisfactory exegesis however contributes to either flight or defensiveness, whereas an emphasis upon the nature of engaged listening can be liberating of people within their canonical land, freeing them to till the often unyielding soil of their canon in the knowledge that, whatever anyone else may say, it is theirs.
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