Hermeneutics, Identity, and Ethics

For the past several days we’ve been in the weeds of a particular issue: the helpfulness (or lack thereof) of “authenticity” as a criterion for assessing our actions. I want to put such reflection within the larger project which is this blog / my life.

Increasingly I realize that for “people of the book” hermeneutics (i.e., how we interpret the scriptures as relevant for our own lives), our identities as people located in particular faith communities, and our ethics are inseparable. In my theoretical world of biblical scholarship, this means that identity and ethics follow self-conscious biblical interpretation, but in the real world all three of these influence each other, and any one can be the driving force for the other two.

“Storied Theology” is a phrase coined as both an indicative and an imperative. (1) It is descriptive of the kind of theology we find in scripture. God has tied himself to a particular people’s story and history, and revealed himself as a character within its drama. The consummate revelation of this God is in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. (Of course, what “consummate revelation” means will vary by biblical author, but that’s another topic for another day.)

(2) The biblical storying of God is not merely what we see, but what we’re called to do and what we’re called to live into.

Put these things together and you get any number of ramifications. One of them is what we have seen over the past week: our lives must be read as part of a narrative that is defined by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Together, this network of events tells us: (1) that God must exercise transformative power in order for this world to be a place that honors and glorifies him; (2) that sin exercises real power and produces real guilt that must be dealt with as God makes all things new; and (3) that the world is heading for a time of fulfillment and restoration.

This means, in turn, (1) that our lives must seek out and participate in the transformation God is seeking to bring about if we (Christians) are to faithfully bear the name of God’s king (Christ) into the world but also that the world we encounter is so beautiful and good as to merit restoration;  (2) that we must not set ourselves up as the measure of our own activities but rather we must anticipate that we will often feel the pull of doing what is evil and that we’ll do many things requiring forgiveness; and (3) that we must have hope as we look for the world (including ourselves) to become what we are not yet, and that we must use the glorious future (not the broken present) as our canon.

Life. Death. Resurrection. Those give shape to the narrative God has written his people into.

About a year ago I was having dinner with someone who expressed astonishment about a conversation he’d had with a Christian. The person rapidly insisted that the crucial things were to believe in the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus. “But religion,” my friend said, “is about making you a better person, not all that other stuff.” Well, yes. To both. Religion is to transform us into something better, to open up communion with something higher. But we only know what that “something” is, what the shape of being a “better person” might be when we know what our story is.

Because Christian theology is storied theology, it’s imperative that we get our story straight. Looks like I got a bit distracted here. How does all this story stuff impact hermeneutics as a former of our identities as well as our ethics? Stay tuned.