Joseph Marchal: Studying Paul’s Letters
In Chapter 8, (African-American Approaches: Rehumanzing the Reader against Racism and Reading Through Experience) Demetrius K. Williams explores and describes 5 goals of African-American hermeneutics:
- To demonstrate racism in the history of biblical interpretation.
- To expose racism in this history.
- To examine and explore the tradition and history of biblical interpretation in this community.
- To suggest a strategy for reading biblical texts.
- To develop a “radical orientation toward or even rejection of traditional interpretation.”
- The last point, in particular, calls for a focus on the “socio-religious-political orientation” associated with scripture rather than the usual emphasis on content-meaning. (159).
This is an ideological approach to reading biblical texts shared by other “marginal readings” such as feminist, postcolonial, and queer approaches (159).
Williams illustrates this approach on Philemon.
In Chapter 9 (Asian American Perspectives: Ambivalence of the Model Minority and Perpetual Foreigner), Sze-Ku Wan identifies the issue of relation in a dominant culture, calling it the twin myths of model minority and perpetual foreigner (180), providing a pre-understanding of Paul in a similar situation which “enables us to approach the biblical text with boldness and humility” (181). Wan demonstrates this approach on Galatians.
Jeremy Punt sets forth a critical theory of interpretation (Chapter 10, Postcolonial Approaches: Negotiating Empires Then and Now), exploring “the uneven and complex power relations that result from imperialism, colonialism, and other forms of marginalization” (192). Punt introduces two important aspects of this approach: a) the examination of writing from the marginalized people themselves; and b) the search for alternative and counter-readings of biblical texts which “like other resistance readings, complicate and fracture the received interpretation and refuse to adopt a simple and single reflection on reality” (195).
Punt’s example is on Thessalonians 4-5.
Chapter 11 (Queer Approaches: Improper Relations with Pauline Letters), by Joseph A. Marchal concludes the collection of essays. Marchal proposes a unique definition of queer, that is, as an umbrella term for “odd, abnormal, or perverse” (210). He suggests that it should indicate a “challenge to regimes of the normal, a desire to resist and contest such a worldview” (210). It is a disposition rather than an identity. Basing this strategy on Foucault and Butler, Marchal suggests that queer theories of nature “challenge the foundation through which arguments and claims to identity, authority or power proceed” (212).
Marchal considers his queer-resistant approach in relation to two other more traditional approaches which rely on a more authoritative perspective of the text.
- The historical contextual approach.
- The apologist affirmative approach.
In short, according to Marchal, queer approaches start with contesting and interpreting normalization, and provide, “a supple cipher for what stands over against the normal and the natural to oppose and thereby define, them, and what inheres within the normal and the natural to subvert , and indeed pervert them” (218).
Category: In Depth, Spring 2014