Walter R. Dickhaut, in his small volume, Building a Community of Interpreters: Readers and Hearers as Interpreters, proposes that listeners and hearers of a sermon, story or biblical text function as interpreters of the meaning of each of these types of expression or forms of communication. Dickhaut’s thesis maintains that the hermeneutical process is better perceived as a spiral, rather than a circle with a closed circuit, because the reader of any text can influence its interpretation (12).

Dickhaut presents his proposal in two parts. The chapters in part one explain the process of listening, which involves the numerous occasions when one meets the text, the particular angle of vision of the reader and the metaphorical filters and lenses applied in each hearing. Every time a reader encounters or meets the same text, it is not the same reader who encountered the text previously (18). Time and the circumstances of the reader have changed. He may have acquired new learning or modified certain perspectives (18). A filter applied by a reader or listener removes what the reader prefers not to engage (21). The reader is often unaware the presence of these filters. Information that does not conform to the reader’s beliefs or opinions is filtered out. Dickhaut wants the reader to be aware he is wearing these unexpected blinders in the form of biases and prejudgments. When mindful of the blinders, the reader is better able as to make appropriate adjustments (25).

Lenses, on the other hand, focus the listener’s attention on specific interests and features that aim to discover something new (21-22). Lenses empower interpreters to discover “mystery, surprise, and expectation” in biblical texts (34). Lenses function to enhance or enlarge certain details (22). The reader’s angles of vision also shape interpretation. Angles of vision are shaped by the listener’s personal experience, family history, theological and political positions and social and cultural location (27).

The second part, chapters seven through fourteen, is an expanded discussion on the lenses of
mystery, surprise, and expectation, punctuated with three of the author’s sermons. The author encourages the reader to view texts through the lens of mystery and read and listen in such a way that he is satisfied with a sense of the mystery of God rather than needing explanation and rationalization. To read with expectation is to read and listen as one dissatisfied with certain aspects of the world we inhabit (86-87). Surprise in a biblical text can be achieved by searching for things one does not understand, because in doing so the reader “is more likely to learn something new, something that surprises him” (67).

The book’s strength is its reflection on the various factors that potentially effect the listener’s interpretation of a sermon or biblical text. Thus, preachers and teachers are introduced to features that influence the listener’s interpretation of a text or sermon. The author delivers on his goal to encourage building a community of interpreters. In the Afterword, Dickhaut maps out sessions for a Bible study group that explores what happens to meaning when a reader opens a book or listens to a sermon from various angles and when wearing a variety of spectacles.

Reviewed by David Seal

Publisher’s page: http://wipfandstock.com/building-a-community-of-interpreters.html

Preview Building a Community of Interpreters: https://books.google.com/books?id=YkxNAwAAQBAJ

N. T. Wright, The Paul Debate: Critical Questions for Understanding the Apostle (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2015), xi + 110 pages.

I must confess that I am writing this double-review with both volumes of N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Fortress Press, 2013), sitting on my desk, partially open, and partially read. I must also come clean that I have intentionally decided to read first the two books under review in part because I am unsure when I will finish the Wright magnum opus (so far), but I have read and been positively challenged both by Wright’s Christian Origins and the Question of God series which go back to the early 1990s (to which Paul and the Faithfulness of God adds the fourth installment) and his earlier book on Paul (What Saint Paul Really Said, Eerdmans, 1997). For those who find themselves in situations somewhat like mine, I say up front: Paul and His Recent Interpreters (PRI) and The Paul Debate (PD) are very different books that interface with Paul and the Faithfulness of God (PFG) in contrasting ways, and will not in the end alleviate from those serious about the New Testament the burden of taking up and persisting through the latter books. Let me explain.

Wright tell us in the preface to PRI that as originally imagined, it intended to serve as an introduction to PFG, particularly in terms of mapping the trajectories of Pauline scholarship in the modern era. However, the material “quickly became more complex than I had imagined, to the point where it could no longer be contained within the larger book” (PRI, xvii). One response might be that tacking on the 350 plus pages of PRI to the beginning of PFG would have resulted in an expansion of book 1 to about the current size of book 2; on the other hand, the complicating factors appear to be less about size or length than with conceptuality, and perhaps setting off PRI on its own account can be appreciated only after working through the details of PFG.

What PRI does, then, is situate PFG within the broader landscape of Pauline studies, particularly around the turn of the twenty-first century. The three parts of PRI unfold three dominant conversations about Paul: 1) on the Jewishness of the apostle, particularly as negotiated and disputed after E. P. Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1997); 2) on Paul as apocalyptic thinker and theologian from Ernst Käsemann at mid-century through J. C. Beker, J. L. Martyn, and Douglas Campbell more recently; and 3) on the social world of Paul and the apostolic Christians, particularly as initiated and developed by the work of Wayne Meeks and David Horrell. While the discussions are explicated along separate tracks (in the three parts), Wright’s account clarifies the interconnections while also locating how these important issues are relevant to other developments in Pauline scholarship, whether the so-called “New Perspective,” those working in empire studies, or the philosophical-continental Paul. Along the way, we get glimpses about how Wright’s own constructive vision in PFG has been shaped in dialogue with these developments. In particular, we understand better Paul, not to mention Jesus, as Jewish and apocalyptic visionaries, but in ways that make sense given the social and historical world of first century Palestinian life under the shadow of the Greco-Roman empire and amidst Hellenistic culture.

Donald K. McKim, ed., Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters (Leicester: InterVarsity, 2007), 1106 pages, ISBN 9780830829279.

This book is a revised edition of the Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters (1998). In concept, the work is ingenious—I know of no other work that treats major figures in the interpretation of Scripture in this way. With respect to the working out of this concept, however, the Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters has a number of serious drawbacks. Whether one can overcome these drawbacks, of course, will largely depend on how much one already knows, but that is an especially unfortunate way to have to read a reference work.

The Dictionary consists of more than 200 articles on “major biblical interpreters”, introduced by a series of overviews of interpretive trends within different periods, divided (where applicable) between North America and Europe. The quality of the articles is often very high, although it is hardly consistent. All the article writers were naturally drawn to their subjects’ work, but there are times when a bit more objectivity would have helped. Indeed, some of the articles are too adulatory for a dictionary—for example, the over-long article on Brevard Childs, written by one of his students, is a shameless mixture of hagiography and apology. (The “studies” listed at the end of that article exclude the works of Childs’s detractors, although he had several. Other articles in the Dictionary follow a much more objective policy with their bibliographies.)

The historical overview articles are uneven in quality. The articles on “Biblical Interpretation in Europe in the Twentieth Century” and “Biblical Interpretation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” are extremely tendentious: they seem to have no other object than to paint historical criticism as a fall from faithful reading practices. They attempt to make this case in the usual way: by associating everything undesirable (from the writers’ viewpoint) with the Enlightenment, even to the point of attributing the “modernist” concern for authorial intention to a (supposed) nineteenth-century development. (Unfortunately for the authors of these articles, other entries within the same volume set the record straight on some of this nonsense—e.g., the article on John Calvin speaks in very clear terms of the sixteenth-century reformer’s devotion to authorial intention as the primary hermeneutical goal.) These two articles sometimes get the more value-neutral facts wrong as well—e.g., Schleiermacher and Lachmann are credited with the idea that Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke (p. 62), but those early source critics argued only that Mark gave the clearest representation of the original gospel narrative that underlay all the synoptic gospels. In short, readers should look elsewhere if they want a reasonably objective history of biblical interpretation in these periods. It is especially unfortunate that articles like this can make it into a reference work. The editors of reference works usually set ground rules to avoid problems of this type.

Unfortunately, there are other significant problems with the Dictionary as well. The high quality of presentation that one finds in many of the articles on individual biblical interpreters is somewhat offset by the rather tendentious selection of “biblical interpreters”. It is difficult to know why some figures were chosen for inclusion, while others were excluded. Those familiar with important names within the biblical studies guild might be very surprised to learn that there is no entry for E. P. Sanders, arguably the most important figure in the study of Paul in the twentieth century (and one of the most important contributors to historical Jesus research as well). Those looking for other major interpreters of Paul will be equally surprised to find no entry for Krister Stendahl. Omissions like these are so huge that they border on bizarre. One cannot help but wonder whether these omissions reflect a prejudice against the so-called New Perspective on Paul, a general approach for which Sanders and Stendahl might be considered the founders. (This theory finds support in the only slightly less surprising omission of two other major figureheads of the New Perspective: N. T. Wright and James Dunn—although Dunn, oddly enough, is listed as a contributor to the Dictionary.) Whatever the explanation, the omission of names of this caliber is certainly strange. Indeed, failing to list Sanders or Stendahl in a list of 100 “major biblical interpreters” is like failing to list Jackie Robinson or Ted Williams in a list of 100 “major professional baseball players”.