Response to "Fruitful Flailings: Reading the Anger of the Prophet Jonah" by Barbara Green, O.P.

November 10, 2004
Distinguished Faculty Lecture
Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA

Sandra M. Schneiders
Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
Professor of New Testament Studies and Christian Spirituality

Barbara, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your paper on Jonah and even more hearing it tonight. I am always instructed by your work, often delighted by your wit and whimsy, and improved, I hope, by your wisdom. So it is a joy to have the occasion to publicly thank you, not only for this paper but for your major contributions to biblical studies and to spirituality here at the Graduate Theological Union and beyond, and above all for your colleagueship and friendship.

Since New Testament studies and biblical spirituality rather than Hebrew Scriptures is my area of specialization I will enter this conversation primarily in relation to what Professor Green called “our opportunity and challenge tonight,” namely, to talk about the relationship between biblical studies and biblical spirituality. My reflections are primarily stimulated by Barbara’s reading of the textual character of Jonah whom I have tended to view as a poster child for ethnocentric narrow-mindedness, an Israelite who could only understand his identity as chosen by constructing the Ninevites as unchosen. His eager anticipation of their extermination was, in his mind, entirely justified as was his anger at God’s wishy-washy concern for those pagans.

But Barbara read Jonah differently. By taking seriously his anger as a profound human reaction rather than as a childish tantrum she invited me/us to plumb the seriousness of Jonah’s engagement with God, the world, the other, and himself. Other peoples’ anger is easily dismissed as a tantrum if we have not gotten reflectively beneath the surface of our own angers.

With the help of an, at first sight, unlikely intertext, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Barbara discerned behind the mask of Jonah’s anger the tortured face of the mortal hoping against hope for etermal life and having to cope with the realization that it was beyond his grasp. Jonah emerged from Barbara’s reading not as a petty prophetic prig in a snit but as a fellow human battered to the point of wishing for death by the unrecognized desire and despair of the human heart facing mortality, deep feelings which have the potential to make him, finally, an apt dialogue partner for God who alone can satisfy that desire and assuage that despair, not because of human entitlement but as divine gift.

This brings me to my point about the relationship between biblical studies and biblical spirituality. What the two have in common is their focus on the biblical texts. Both are concerned with reading, i.e., with interpretation. Barbara suggests at the very end of her paper, that the specificity of biblical spirituality lies not in what the biblical scholar does, that is, interpret the text, or even in how she or he does it, namely, with all the critical methods available, but in why one reads as one reads. As I understand it, biblical spirituality is not primarily a product, that is, a theoretical construction or a practical way of life that is prescribed, modeled, or normed by the Biblical texts. Rather, it is a process of ongoing engagement with the biblical text specifically as scripture, that is, as the sacred text of a believing community through which that community negotiates its engagement with matters of ultimate concern. The sometimes unhelpful shorthand for this particular “take” on the theological nature of the Bible is to call it “the Word of God.” But the biblical text can only be read as scripture, as a place of encounter with God for the individual within the faith community, if it is validly read as a text. In other words, everything that is involved in the valid interpretation of texts in general has to be true of that reading which one could call the exercise of biblical spirituality. And herein lies, as I see it, the challenge and connundrum of biblical spirituality today.

The contemporary spectrum of scholarly approaches to texts, including the Bible, includes, at one end, a naïve literalism that sees the text as the communication of authorial intention, — in the case of the Bible, of divine revelation, — and, at the other end, what I would call a hermeneutics of the hostile takeover. And somewhere in between lies a relativistic if not cyncial toying with the text as a kind of Rohrschach ink blot open to whatever games will showcase the virtuosity of the interpreter. Valid interpretation of the biblical text, whether historically, literarily, or theologically motivated on the one hand, or explicitly concerned with personal and social transformation on the other, or both of the above — in other words, the kind of interpretation commonly practiced here at the GTU — lies somewhere else on this spectrum but I think that it cannot avoid engaging these extreme positions. This amounts to recognizing that the methodologies embraced by various interpreters and schools of criticism are not simply neutral strategies for reading texts. They are, implicitly or explicitly, theologies of the Bible as scripture, or the rejection of this claim, and hermeneutical theories which are very operative in the readings they generate. The question for the biblical studies scholar involved in the process of biblical spirituality is how and where to situate oneself within the vast spectrum of hermeneutical theories and interpretive strategies operative today in the field, including those I have just called extreme.

By way of contributing to our discussion this evening, I would like to make a stab, motivated by Barbara’s empathetic treatment of textual Jonah, at identifying what we might appropriate as raw material for the construction of a responsibly critical biblical spirituality praxis precisely from the extreme positions I mentioned above. (I take for granted the importance of all the traditional and classical approaches to biblical interpretation as well as the many responsible forms of postmodern criticism. My concern here is with the problematic approaches.)

First, the approach of the biblical literalist. Whether operating out of critical naiveté or an existential insecurity before an omnipotent and capricious deity whose word one dare not gainsay, the literalist insists on the reader’s unreserved submission to the text. Even as we reject, rightly I think, this form of unrecognized non-engagement with the text we can perhaps allow ourselves to be reminded by it that what we hold in our hands is not just a book but the sacrament of the Word of God, and what we are doing is not just reading but entering into that relationship with God which Barbara evoked in relation to Jonah praying the Psalms in the belly of the great fish. The Bible as written discourse is a text like any other text. But the Bible as scripture is God’s self-gift to us inviting a return in kind. In the end, the Bible as scripture is never subject to our manipulation. And we should not allow reverence for the scriptural mediation of the Word of God to be monopolized by the literalists.

Second, what I have called the hermeneutics of the hostile take-over is, as I see it, the perversion of the vitally necessary hermeneutics of suspicion. It is a hardening of a healthy awareness of the problematic aspects of all texts, including biblical ones, into a universalized conviction that the biblical text is always and only a dangerous expression of hegemonic ideology, heteronomous power agendas, and dichotomous dualisms. It undertakes all reading as pre-emptive srike. Its criterion of validity is success in disempowering the text through domination. Nevertheless, repudiating this totalizing take-over of the text and the arrogance of the present that fuels it, should not blind us to the contribution that a judicious hermeneutics of suspicion can make to our work. We do not have to deny the revelatory dimension of the text in order to be aware that it is thoroughly and wholly a human artifact and that it is, to a large extent, the product of the historical winners. It is laced with power agendas, gender, race, and class inequality, historical distortions and all the other limitations and biases of human compositions in general and the specific problems of its own time and place of origin in particular. Any valid reading has to take account of these factors. But cynicism is not the only way to take account of them.

The third problematic hermeneutics challenging our modernist tendency to take ourselves and our methods more seriously than we take the text, is that which sees the text as a tissue of sheer indeterminacy that permits of any approach or reading strategy that the interpreter finds interesting or amusing. The text in this hermeneutical framework not only does not have a fully determinant meaning which constrains the work of the interpreter; it is not even allowed a voice in the process of making meaning through reading. Such interpreters often speak of “playing with the text.” But playing with the text and making a plaything, a toy, of the text are two different things. (We just heard both Barbara and Gina play respectfully and fruitfully, indeed delightfully, with the Jonah text). The metaphor of play, if carefully attended to, can be very helpful in our construction of biblical spirituality as process. Developmental psychologists tell us that children’s play, although fun, is very serious business. A child who is not allowed adequate time to play does not develop normally. There is reason to be concerned that children today often do not really play; they manipulate, according to pre-established rules, mechanical and electronic “games” that reward and punish prescribed performance rather than encouraging imaginative experimentation and creativity. (If that sounds like a description of some classical versions of academic biblical studies the play of ideas is not accidental!) Play is the child’s imaginative engagement with multiple possibilities, a listening to the voices of things animate and inanimate speaking in languages we adults often can no longer hear. This kind of play with the biblical text can be spiritually exciting and enriching and can give rise to original and committed participation in the project of the Reign of God. But the jaded play of the bored, overstimulated super-adult escaping from the surfeit of work and the banality of relationships into a sphere of irresponsibility, by means of a cynical, shallow, and solipsistic interpretive practice is not the life-enhancing play of the child of God. Authentic and serious playing with the text that risks entering imaginatively into worlds we do not control, into the transforming belly of the great fish, can counteract the over-seriousness of the extreme literalist, the totalizing aggression of the ideologue, and the self-regarding pyrotechnics of rootless postmodernism.

Life for the biblical scholar interested in biblical spirituality is definitely more complicated today than it was in patristic or medieval times when all biblical interpretation was in the service of the spiritual life. And it is more challenging than life in the modern academy when there was a neat division of labor between the exegete determining what the text meant and the pastor or theologian translating that data into what the text might mean today. But the contemporary, admittedly rather messy, situation offers new and rich possibilities for full participation in the process of transformative engagement with the living text of the Bible as scripture. Such engagement grounds the hope of all us sometimes angry, sometimes despairing, sometimes praying Jonahs who dare to contend with God over what matters most. I thank Barbara for befriending Jonah and thereby demonstrating that a scholarly, even erudite, joyously playful, wilfully critical reading of a text that cannot be taken literally can help us take very seriously the invitation to become new people building a new inclusive society precisely by entering into the ever ancient, ever new game of hide-and-seek between a patient and loving God and a prophet who desperately wants to be found even if he can only express his yearning in fruitful flailings.

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