Book Review: The Return of Oral Hermeneutics
WCIU Journal: Cross-Cultural Communications Topic
September 24, 2020
Review by Gilles Gravelle
See the publication announcement of this book here.
The Return of Oral Hermeneutics (ROH), by Tom Steffen and William Bjoraker (Wipf & Stock, 2020) is bold, somewhat controversial, certainly single-minded, and appropriately so. Significant research over the last 40 years provides us with enough understanding about orality and the oral origins of the Bible to begin to arrive at some well-founded conclusions. Add to this, current postmodern reflection on the Enlightenment era and its influence on biblical studies. However, it’s not all negative reflection.
Applying academic rigor in biblical studies has yielded some deep scholarship that continues to correct, amaze, and inform. Rigorous Enlightenment-influenced methodology has benefited many of us. Being removed from a compilation of texts that were orally constructed over a period of roughly 4,000 years by cultures far different than our own is no easy task. Scan the extensive sessions of a Society of Biblical Literature meeting guide and you will see how much we continue to discover and how much we still struggle to understand. This ancient text called the Bible is like a massive puzzle that scholars continue to piece together, sometimes in the face of a powerful force of traditional “safe” understanding.
This is why The Return of Oral Hermeneutics is such a helpful contribution, not just for oral origin studies, but also for the function of orality and story in ancient times. ROH is helpful in bringing together much of the current reflective learning in various disciplines these days. Indeed, it’s almost a one-stop shop sort of introduction to Enlightenment positivism and literacy’s effects on textual hermeneutics, along with a Jewish history of group oral composition, learning, the role of scribes, oral retention, and community guardianship for future generations. Add to that, current views on oral performance criticism, pedagogy, and epistemology. The authors cover all of these topics and more in arguing for a return of oral hermeneutics.
Dueling Hermeneutics
The authors are clearly on a mission to recover something extremely important and indeed lost to the Western monolithic world of literacy and precision. They challenge the value of textual hermeneutics (TH) in helping regular believers’ ability to experience the drama of Scripture.
I guess reformers tend to bite off pretty big junks in making their arguments. I mean, we’re talking about textual hermeneutics based on a scientific method that has been passed on in seminaries all over the world for a couple hundred years. Now the authors want us to consider how TH has not been very useful in helping regular believers understand the Bible text, identify with it, and know how to apply its lessons in situations like injustice, corruption, trafficking, HIV/AIDS, and even hunger. I’ve had enough conversations with seminary graduates from non-Western countries to realize that many of them don’t know how their biblical education can help with day-to-day struggles of their own people. Scholars are still needed, and textual hermeneutics is still important in the academy. The authors of ROH seem to agree with that, although it feels like reluctant acceptance. Still, the academy only covers a tiny percent of Christians in the world. It seems the authors of ROH are working for the masses who don’t know what do to with the Bible. Therefore, comparisons between textual hermeneutics and oral hermeneutics are made throughout the book. Sometimes it’s simply for contrast, but often times it is criticism lodged against TH for deconstructive purposes.
What Is the Bible?
How one defines what the Bible is, influences how one studies it. The Return of Oral Hermeneutics begins by defining and describing what the Bible is from an OH perspective. The authors say it’s not just a book of ideas and categories viewed through a Western lens with little regard for historical and cultural distance. They view the Bible as an encompassing story about “ruptured and restored relationships involving humans and the spirit world through a material interface.” It can’t be restricted to the world of Enlightenment rational logic and predictability.
To make their case, the authors spend time exposing some of the Enlightenment’s effects on hermeneutics, accusing it of breeding positivism, which then produced a hermeneutic that was “objective and therefore error-proof.” This means interpretative possibilities of any portion of Scripture are limited to a certain Western monolithic understanding as determined by people who apply a sound textual hermeneutic. While not going so far as to say TH is no longer defensible, they suggest that two kinds of hermeneutical models would be better than one. In addition to TH, they offer oral hermeneutics as a way to gain fuller meaning that is a more natural model for today’s listening, reading, and viewing audience.
The authors claim TH spends more time talking about a story to understand what it is supposed to mean, whereas OH’s interpretative method is to get into the story and experience it perhaps the way the first audiences did. That requires communal oral telling, demonstration, interpretation, and repetition, combined with oral performance (tone, gesture, facial expressions, etc.) to make the biblical characters come alive. This is certainly not the usual monotone reading out loud of a printed Bible text that many of us have known. Experiencing the text the OH way will naturally lead to deriving interpretations that may likely differ from meaning derived through individual reading, especially in different cultures, and that seems to be an end goal for OH.
If interpretation isn’t so predictable in different geographical areas and eras, as the authors claim, does that mean biblical meaning is also subjective? Not necessarily so. ROH doesn’t attempt to define but rather describe and portray meaning through stories and characters. They, like other authors before them (Vanhoozer 1998; Walton & Sandy 2013), believe linguistic and literary devices help exegetes and interpreters know what the authors attempted to get across to their audience. Another guardrail, they say, is that interpretations have certain boundaries set by the universal community of faith. So ROH is not a free-for-all, but rather a broadening of interpretive possibilities.
Cognitive Science and OH
Moving on to cognitive science, the authors contend that OH utilizes more of the senses than TH does. That is, oral storytelling, along with oral performance and questions about a Bible story and its characters, uses a full range of communication styles. This stimulates the right brain in perceiving images that lead to action, and the left brain for reasoning, rationalizing, and verbalizing. Such multi-modal ways of meaning-making make meaning more memorable (excuse the alliteration).
The authors emphasize how OH is not verbatim telling of the written text. In fact, good storytelling avoids verbatim and repetitive telling. This is because OH is not about exactness, trying to get the audience to all agree on how the text should be interpreted. Rather OH is about getting people to actively interact with a story, and that requires a more natural story telling style that engages.
The authors are not that concerned if the same stories sound a little different with each telling simply because oral transmission over the centuries operated the same way. They point to recent research that reveals how much of Scripture, especially the New Testament letters, were group composed rather than individually composed. The latter would require the Apostle Paul and other New Testament authors to write their letters in much the same way I sat down alone to compose this book review. However, research reveals that authors did not work in isolation but rather orally processed their thoughts with a community of believers. Only when they were done did a scribe, often a bonded servant, put the words into written form. But even that written text was only meant as a guide for the oratorical style used to communicate the letter’s content to a community of people, as the authors assert. Few people at that time could read or write, and indeed few people trusted something written down over hearing it for themselves from a trusted communicator. These arguments are justification for natural, non-verbatim storytelling.
Pedagogies and Epistemologies
The call for a return to oral hermeneutics is also a call to rethink hermeneutic pedagogy in general. That is, the method used to teach what the Bible says and means. The authors point out the problem of fragmentation. Western pedagogy tends to break things down into small parts for analysis. Study topics have their own discrete focus, such as key word studies. It’s difficult to see the big picture or even reconcile how the parts produce the big picture with such fragmentation. Instead, OH begins with the big picture, the grand narrative. The goal of this pedagogical method is not so much about attaining rational knowledge. Instead, it’s more about seeking spiritual insights.
The OH method requires some understanding of how different epistemologies influence the way cultures learn the Bible. Western ways of knowing have already been covered in this review. The authors spend some important time helping readers understand Hebraic epistemology, which is knowing by telling and experiencing. It is a narrative epistemology. This begs the question, if oral construction and distribution of the biblical texts was by means of story-formed narratives to be experienced, thus more deeply understood and memorable, why not apply the same method in modern Western context? Did Enlightenment epistemology with its emphasis on individual reading and parsing actually produce a disadvantage in learning about the meta-narrative story of the Bible in deeper ways? The authors seem to think so.
Character Analysis
A central component of OH involves character analysis. Indeed, it seems to be the backbone of OH, given the amount of space the authors give to this topic. As they propose, “God revealed his character seldom through ideas, seldom though propositions, but predominately through his actions and his interaction with the characters of the Bible.” This makes sense considering good stories have clear plot lines moved forward by characters. The authors express concern over how TH strips things down to singular propositional truths which is disembodied from the full narrative made up of events and characters. We might see some detail, but we miss the bigger theological message altogether. Learning isn’t just explained (Western pedagogy). It is gained through characters telling and acting out events that demonstrate and illuminate. OH spends a good deal of time asking questions about characters to gain a deeper understanding of what God was saying and doing, and this should lead to deeper theological insights. Character analysis appears to be a key tool in doing oral hermeneutics because it requires people to reflect on those characters and think about how what they learn reflects on them or their own situations today. Because of this, OH could be considered practical or applied hermeneutics as opposed to theoretical hermeneutics.
ROH provides examples of oral storytelling styles, types of questions, examples of story and character reflections, and ways to do group dialogue about stories and characters.
Final Thoughts
This review may seem long, but it only provides a very high-level view of the large ground the authors cover in this book. It seems the goal of The Return of Oral Hermeneutics is to help regular believers gain a deeper understanding of God through story hermeneutics, and then know what to do with those interpretations in their own social and cultural settings. Insights gained through character and story analysis should “illuminate rather than mystify.” It should also give people joy as they learn to see themselves in this grand story of God’s love, patience, and redemption. This can happen better if the stories are told, acted out, demonstrated, heard, and discussed within a community of believers. Then let the theologizing begin!
References
Vanhoozer, Kevin J. 1998. Is there Meaning in This Text? Grand Rapids: Zondervan
Walton, John H., & Brent Sandy. 2013. The Lost World of Scripture.: Ancient Literary Culture and Biblical Authority. Downers Grove: InterVarsity.
Gilles is Director of Research & Innovation with The Seed Company. He is also is part of the WCIU adjunct facility in translation studies. He earned his PhD from Free University, Amsterdam.