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Introduction:
Hermeneutics
Derek Poole
Comment
Alan Wilson
From
the Director
David Porter
What
is Hermeneutics?
Brendan W Devitt
The
Bible and the Church
Alwyn Thomson
Hear
the Word of the Lord
David Bruce
Patience:
An attribute of love
Graham Cheesman
The
Bible and Christ
Alwyn Thomson
Understanding
Scripture: Issues of Gender
Fran Porter
The
Bible and the Christian Life
Alwyn Thomson
Take
me to the Theatre
Steve Stockman
Anabaptist
Hermeneutics
Walter Klassen
Reading
the Bible Then and Now
Alwyn Thomson
Cross-Cultural
Communication
Alan Wilson
FROM
THE DIRECTOR
It is appropriate that this issue of Lion & Lamb takes up the theme of
hermeneutics. After ten years this still remains the core task at the
heart of all that ECONI seeks to do -- the application of biblical principles
to the situation in Northern Ireland. Hermeneutics is simply the way we
go about understanding what the Bible has to say and bringing that to
bear on our experience of life and the world in which we live. It is the
task of both interpreting the Bible and making that interpretation real
in our lives and community.
Of course how we go about that task is influenced by the presuppositions we bring, those ideas that we take for granted, about how the Bible should be interpreted and how the world around us functions. Consequently, like many things in the Christian life, there is difference and dispute among Christians on this whole topic. Yet the Bible remains for us the Word of God, the final authority on matters of faith and practice. As John Stott has commented our problem is not our commitment to the authority of the Bible but an authoritative hermeneutic or method by which we learn to interpret it.
What we can agree is that the text records for us the action of God in history. Intervening in the lives of communities, nations and individuals those who encountered God in this way reflected on their experience and began to record in story and song, drama and ritual history and prophecy, their Spirit inspired understanding of what God was doing. Over the centuries that record has been written down and collated into a text that Christians acknowledge as inspired, a revelation of God.
The problem is, at its closest point, the culture and setting of these stories is now at least two thousand years away from our contemporary setting. While, despite such divergence, much is direct and plain in its meaning, much equally remains obscure and distant to the experience of human beings today. All of us need background information and explanation that is not normally part of our everyday lives to be fully aware of the significance of the stories we read.
This problem of dealing with a text is not of course unique to Christianity. The current problems with the peace process in Northern Ireland are, at one level, a problem of hermeneutics. Since 1995 the political parties have had the experience of encounter with one another in the talks. Of course this for some was but the latest round of such engagement over the last thirty years, so much baggage was brought to the process. Some of it helped in understanding what was happening, some of it was a hindrance as new relationships and understandings needed to happen. In the autumn of 1997 that encounter was broadened and the process intensified with the aim to get a broad consensus on an agreement to put to the people concerning the future governance of Northern Ireland. After months of debate and negotiation a text was finally agreed and in a highly charged political atmosphere a substantial majority accepted it as the basis for a new start. Yet it was hardly off the negotiating table in May 1998 before the debate began on its nature and the meaning of its content.
Now, barely nime months on from that fragile point of consensus, the text has become a focus of dispute and not agreement, conveying blinding clarity to some and studied ambiguity to others. Is its constitutional bias nationalist or unionist? Does it set out specific conditions for setting up the new dispensation of devolved government? Do certain things need to happen and when? Is a required standard of behaviour to be part of the new arrangement?
The impasse focuses on questions of decommissioning, cross border bodies and executive seats. Yet the details of textual interpretation should not allow us to ignore the clear imperatives that the agreement contains. There is logic in the text that is both moral and political. At its heart is a vision of an inclusive democracy and a process that helps us leave behind the violence and domination of the past. During its short history of nine months this purpose has been put to the test, whether at Drumcree, Ballymoney or Omagh. Those with a mindset cast by the certainties of the past have sought to erode the fragile matrix of trust that made agreement possible in the first place.
It is important to remember that the agreement still belongs to us all and not just the politicians. It is as a community concerned to find a reasonable way out of the cycle of violence of our past that we must together act as guarantors of the spirit that informed the agreement. Even if aspects of it prove difficult to work we must insist that our leaders honour its underlying dynamic and find a way to address the fundamental clash of perspective.
The imperative towards democracy and the need to ensure that societal change is brought about solely through the democratic process requires the decommissioning of illegally held arms. In a context where the use of violence to bring about political change remains morally legitimate in the eyes of some, it is regrettably inevitable that they will first seek to ensure that the political potential really does exist to bring about necessary change in the conditions that gave rise to their violence.
The commitment to inclusiveness and the need to ensure that all have ownership and a sense of belonging in their own place requires the sharing of power. Our history has been one of an in-built majority, guarding and even abusing its power. It is no surprise that some are as concerned to resist a power sharing executive as they are to block cross border bodies, especially an executive that involves those whose agenda for change goes beyond what they consider reasonable expectations.
It is in this context, and not the highly charged corridors in which it was forged, that the text of the agreement now needs to be interpreted and made to live. It is a context where neither trusts the other enough to make the first move, where one observer has commented that the unionists have their domination and the Provos their guns. Of course the reality is that the experience of unionists over the last three decades is not that of domination but of terrorist onslaught, and many do not see how simply stopping what you had no moral right to inflict can be sufficient basis for trusting any new found democratic credentials.
However it is true that many in the unionist community have yet to fully understand the depth of alienation and resentment that gave rise to the anger that fired both the peaceful march of constitutional nationalists and the dark engine of IRA terror. Is it possible that the only way to bring about republican repentance is through the unionist embrace - and it will be unionist magnanimity that nurtures the republican journey beyond their long war of attrition? The irony is that the same embrace and magnanimity is what republicans need to find within themselves if they are to see their enemies undergo a parallel journey of repentance.
At the heart of the hermeneutical question is not the text but the community. It is about relationship and the lack of trust that festers in a divided society, and may yet make it impossible for us to work together. The role of the Christian community is crucial in all of this. Ultimately our God did not simply leave us with a text but a person; not only a book but also a spirit filled community; not primarily an interpretation but a living embodiment of the truth. And significantly it was God's embrace and magnanimity, the fullness of his grace in the incarnate Word, Jesus, that ignited the repentance of people like you and me, former enemies of God.
David Porter - ECONI's Director
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