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!
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