{"id":3800,"date":"2015-06-16T16:40:05","date_gmt":"2015-06-16T23:40:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newcoolthang.com\/?p=3800"},"modified":"2020-01-09T04:13:21","modified_gmt":"2020-01-09T11:13:21","slug":"the-non-problem-of-interpreting-revelation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.newcoolthang.com\/index.php\/2015\/06\/the-non-problem-of-interpreting-revelation\/3800\/","title":{"rendered":"The (Non-)Problem of Interpreting Revelation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c[After Newton t]he universe is one great harmonious order; not, as for Thomas and the Middle Ages, an ascending hierarchy of purposes, but a uniform mathematical system\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cNature was through and through orderly and rational; hence what was natural was easily identified with what was rational, and conversely, whatever, particularly in human society, seemed to an intelligent man reasonable, was regarded as natural, as somehow rooted in the very nature of things. So Nature and the Natural easily became the ideal of man and of human society and were interpreted as Reason and the Reasonable. The great object of human endeavor was to discover what in every field was natural and reasonable, and to brush aside the accretions irrational tradition that Reason and Nature might the more easily be free to display its harmonious order.\u201d<\/p>\n

John Herman Randall Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind, p. 260,76<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Within the scriptures we find very little, if any mention of some \u201cproblem\u201d with interpreting (personal) revelation.\u00a0 While we do find numerous example of how problems arise from interpreting scriptures (JS-History), we also find that revelation is always the clarifying solution to such problems of interpretation.\u00a0 Why is it, then, that the interpretation of revelation is mentioned so often within the bloggeracle?\u00a0 What assumptions and values must be in place for interpretation to be construed as a problem and what was the historical emergence of these assumptions and values?\u00a0 In order to approach the \u201cproblem\u201d of interpretation I will first draw a conceptual trichotomy and will then draw a brief historical sketch of how the problem of interpretation was invented.<\/p>\n

I would first like to briefly contrast Naturalism, Humanism and Theism, hoping that this tripartite taxonomy will serve to highlight the logical contingency of our problem since the refutation of any one does not entail the truth of any other.\u00a0 Naturalism is the view that I will associate with the Scientific Revolution in which right and wrong, truth and falsehood are based in nature and the quantitative\/logical rationality that is read off of it.\u00a0 The relativism of Humanism is what Naturalists often pretend is the only alternative to their own view and says that right and wrong, truth and falsehood are based in human beings and the qualitative interpretations that their different cultures and perspectives actively project onto the world.\u00a0 The third view, Theism, is just as absolutist as Naturalism, but insists that right and wrong, truth and falsehood are qualitative purposes and meanings that come down from God through His representatives that have been invested with His power and authority.\u00a0\u00a0 (These -isms are notoriously vague terms, so I am simply describing what I will mean by them in this post.)<\/p>\n

The purpose of drawing this taxonomy is to illustrate how interpretation is only a problem – in a straight forward sense – within Naturalism since each person has equally fallible and interpreted access to the same reason and truth.\u00a0 Within Humanism, by contrast, interpretations are the pluralistic, and often times conflicting sources<\/em> of truth and goodness rather than some kind of obstacle<\/em> to them.\u00a0 Similarly, within Theism uniquely authorized interpretations are the source of truth and goodness rather than some kind of obstacle to it (as they are in Naturalism) or merely one among many equally legitimate and mutually contradictory interpretations (as they are in Humanism).\u00a0 To summarize: Naturalism and Theism are harmonious, but Humanism is not.\u00a0 Naturalism sees interpretation as a problem, while Theism and Humanism do not.\u00a0 Humanism and Naturalism are egalitarian and roughly modern in nature, while Theism is not.<\/p>\n

Having established some degree of logical independence and contingency within each of these positions, I would like to briefly sketch the historically contingent emergence and transformation of interpretation within these three worldviews.\u00a0 Prior to the Scientific Revolution of the 17th<\/sup> Century (from which rose Naturalism), Truth \u2013 as studied within the universities \u2013 was the qualitative purpose or meaning that was to be found within the harmonious hierarchy of purposes and meanings that was the created universe.\u00a0 Whatever else an impartial description of natural facts was within this latter, Theistic context, it was not truth.\u00a0 Indeed, such a claim was very close to blasphemy to such pre-modern minds.<\/p>\n

The Scientific Revolution, however, transformed the natures of both the universe and the Truth that is found within it.\u00a0 Rather than a hierarchical system of qualitative purposes and meanings, the universe was a uniformly mathematical system \u2013 VERY much like unto a machine.\u00a0 Within this system, hidden purposes and meanings became demoted (they eventually became banished altogether) as intellectual virtues.\u00a0 Qualitative descriptions of the world became merely \u201csecondary qualities\u201d that are merely derivative upon the \u201cprimary qualities\u201d that can be quantitatively measured.\u00a0 The qualitative truth found within the book of scripture came to be seen as merely \u201cfigurative\u201d, with a \u201cliteral reading\u201d being granted only to those parts that squared with the quantitative, and in some sense more \u201creal\u201d truth found within the book of nature.\u00a0 The transgressable moral boundaries that define purposes and meanings were replaced with moral ideals \u2013 similar to mathematical optimizations – towards which we could only approximate.\u00a0 Stephen Jay Gould\u2019s claim that religion and science now have non-overlapping magisteria might be a tad too strong, but given the radical transformation that occurred in the concept of truth, it is very difficult to say that Theistic religion and Natural science seek after one and the same truth in any straightforward sense.<\/p>\n

Despite its radical departures from medieval scholarship, the rise of natural science and enlightenment thinking retained, indeed depended upon some aspects of that prior tradition.\u00a0 The close relationship between nature and reason \u2013 between is and ought \u2013 within Naturalism very definitely depended upon the concept of natural law that was very much a part of Theism.\u00a0 To be sure, these two traditions (Theistic Scholasticism and Naturalistic Science) each differed in how they saw the relationship between is and ought. In the case of Scholasticism, since truth just was a purpose or meaning, inasmuch as there was a continuum between is and ought, truth lay much closer to the latter.\u00a0 Within the newer scientific tradition, however, truth lay more with the \u201cis\u201d side of that continuum.\u00a0 Despite these differences, however, the early Naturalistic tradition took from the earlier Theists the idea that the observable world has purposes that are morally significant built into it, and thus claimed that the observable\/natural world has morally significant reason (of a quantitative rather than qualitative nature) built into it.<\/p>\n

Within the most straightforward versions of this Naturalistic picture, a deistic God created various aspects of the world for some moral purpose, and it is our contingent traditions and superstitions that have disguised or corrupted the goodness and reasonableness that naturally exist within nature. \u00a0As Naturalism transitioned into its more atheistic variants, however, it began to see nature itself as the original source of rather than the derived (from God) embodiment of reason and thus truth and goodness.\u00a0 From this idea that nature is mathematical and the natural is reasonable, modern economic theory \u2013 especially of the non-interventionist variety of the French Physiocrats and Adam Smith – utilitarianism and cosmopolitan politics follow quite easily and \u201cnaturally\u201d.\u00a0 Even Kantian ethics in which rights and duties are willed with the universal consistency of reason is very much in this vein.\u00a0 Within each of the disciplines, a unique and optimized solution to any problem is thought to follow from the interactions among various ideals within some boundary conditions.<\/p>\n

It is against this Naturalistic standard of nature being equated with the (quantitatively) rational that the \u201cproblem\u201d of interpretation arises.\u00a0 Within this early tradition of natural science, whatever is universal must also be natural and therefore good \u2013 the way things are \u201cnaturally\u201d since a deistic God made them that way.\u00a0 The idea of \u201cnaturalness\u201d also suggests a lack of choice in the matter such that anything more than a passive receptivity to nature and her reason constitutes a source of contingency and thus irrationality.\u00a0 (The parallels here with the longing for a mechanical, non-volitional method in science where actively made choices are minimized is not accidental.)\u00a0 Thus, when social scientists started describing the vast amounts of diversity and plurality that exists throughout the peoples of the world, it became clear to the Naturalists that universality could not simply be assumed or uncritically projected onto their own institutions, habits and beliefs.\u00a0 It became imperative, then, to see through all the traditions and social conditioning that continued to disguise or corrupt the universality or naturalness of the world in order to get to its pure rationality and optimality.\u00a0 This is the problem of interpretation.<\/p>\n

The Naturalistic impulse finds expression within the bloggernacle today by seeing the prejudices, traditions and social conditionings of prophets as a source of epistemological fallibility \u2013 again, falling short of an optimized ideal – and thus untrustworthiness.\u00a0 From this perspective, actively made decisions and contingent interpretations corrupt the purity of the natural reason that they seek to find, recognize or read off of the natural world.\u00a0 These people see interpretation as a problem because they assume that all personal revelation \u2013 if it is to be true – must be universal and thus uniform in the same way that nature is across all peoples and times.\u00a0 The only way in which revelations might differ or contradict each other, then, is due to the traditions and superstitions that the individual and his\/her social context actively bring to and thus corrupt the otherwise pure reason of revelation.\u00a0 The interpretation of revelation is thus a problem because it introduces a source of contingency and irrationality into something that is assumed to be universal, uniform and egalitarian like unto a mathematical system.<\/p>\n

The Humanists, however, saw interpretation as a very different sort of problem than the Naturalists did.\u00a0 For the Humanists, it is the traditions and passions of human beings – rather than an impersonal and mechanical nature – that are the qualitative sources of right and wrong, truth and falsehood.\u00a0 From their perspective, then, it is not interpretation as such that is the problem, but the interpretation of authority figures.\u00a0 More specifically, the Humanists object to how authority figures try to impose their interpretation of the world upon others in order to bend the latter to the will and passions of the former.\u00a0 The orthodoxy of authoritative interpretations, then, is wrong because 1) it manufactures and reinforces a manipulative \u201cfalse consciousness\u201d, 2) it is a silencing form of domination and repression, and 3) it stifles the creative progress that comes with new perspectives.\u00a0 What Humanists especially object to, then, is the attempt by authority figures to portray their own contingent, traditional, and\/or culturally conditioned interpretations as if they were \u201cnatural\u201d or in some sense less interpreted or less contingent than others.\u00a0 Thus, interpretations of right and wrong, truth and falsehood are actually very good and desirable, in and of themselves, they being the only source of such values.\u00a0 The real evil, however, comes from the domination and repression of one interpretation by another under the guise of hierarchical authority or non-contingent naturalness.<\/p>\n

Consequently, the interpretation of personal revelation is a problem of a very different kind for the Humanists of the bloggernacle.\u00a0 Rather than seeing biases and social conditioning merely as an epistemological shortcoming with respect to some practically unreachable ideal (as the Naturalist does), the Humanist will see such things as the reinforcement and perpetuation of unrighteous dominion \u2013 the violation of moral boundaries – and thus unworthiness.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 While both groups seek to maintain a \u201ccritical distance\u201d from the interpretations of church leaders, the Naturalist does so because it sees politics as a whole to be an obstacle to \u201cnatural\u201d truth while the Humanist sees bad politics as dominating an otherwise authentic, inclusive and participatory truth.\u00a0 The problem, in summary, is not that too many human interpretations influence us, but rather that of too few interpretations influence our views of right and wrong, truth and falsehood.\u00a0 Humanists, in other words, see universality and uniformity (the very heart of a quantitative method) as vices which disguise and mask domination within the world.<\/p>\n

Within the church, of course, we are forced to accept neither of these interpretations of the problem of interpretation \u2013 both of them being relatively late comers that were explicitly aimed to overthrowing their Theistic precursor.\u00a0 Not only is another view in which interpretation is not a problem possible, but it has actually existed in various forms.\u00a0 Like the Humanists, the Theists need not be convinced by the Naturalists assumptions that moral ideals are like unto the quantitative optimization of nature, reason or some other such ideal.\u00a0 As such, the qualitative interpretation of nature and revelation is hardly an obstacle or problem in need of being overcome through the proper use of reason and\/or method.\u00a0 Within the Theistic worldview, the hierarchical nature of the universe and its qualitative Truths suggests that disagreements and contradictions at differing levels are not automatically in need of resolution as they would within a flat and mathematical worldview. Put differently, the idea of localized sub-purposes and sub-meanings does not clearly and necessarily suggest universality or uniformity of any specific kind.\u00a0 Indeed, within such a system it makes perfect sense for God to anticipate the beliefs and social conditionings that a person will bring to their interpretation of any revelation and adapt His message accordingly.\u00a0 In other words, within the moral boundaries set by God there might exist any number of meanings and purposes that, while appearing contradictory to the Naturalist, are equally valid. \u00a0What unifies and regulates this plurality of qualitative sub-purposes and sub-meanings are not natural facts about the world that remain constant across space and time, but higher qualitative purposes and meanings, culminating in God Himself.<\/p>\n

Theism thus grounds the Absolutism of Truth in the purposes and meanings \u2013 aka interpretations – of authoritative persons rather than impersonal nature.\u00a0 Theism does not, therefore, entail the open-ended-contradictions and anything-goes-relativism of Humanism.\u00a0 On the contrary, the whole idea of setting somebody apart \u2013 the very thing that set Joseph Smith apart from the plurality of preachers within his community – is that not all perspectives and interpretations have an equal right to expression and inclusion within God\u2019s community.\u00a0 There may not be moral ideals, but there are moral boundaries that we ought not transgress.\u00a0 Like the Humanist, the Theist is comfortable with a plurality of interpretations so long as they do not contradict, subvert or otherwise transgress the moral boundaries that have come down from above through the channels of God\u2019s authority.\u00a0 Indeed, the whole point of one\u2019s ordination and reception of priesthood keys is that they become authorized to actively interpret their own personal revelation (contra Naturalism) in a way that effects other people (contra Humanism) so long as such leaders stay within the moral boundaries set for their stewardship by those above them. \u00a0In other words, neither the epistemological fallibility of a leader nor their being influenced by conservative culture\/politics are, in and of themselves, justifications for seeking a \u201ccritical distance\u201d from the prophets.<\/p>\n

It is for reasons such as these that the interpretation of revelation is never seen as a problem within the scriptures.