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11 Biblical Interpretation and Critical Commitment The Gospel of John It is told that at a synod in Ephesus, “the robber synod,” a sharp dispute arose among the the*logians, about whether or not God had a body. And when the majority of the learned decided that God did not have a body, there was an old Egyptian hermit who left the assembly crying, with the words: “They have taken my God from me and I do not know where I shall go and search for him.” I am in sympathy with the old monk. Sigmund Mowinckel told this story in a debate about the church as a “spiritual community.” Both the old hermit and the Norwegian professor could not conceive of a conceptualization of religion, the divine, and the church that did not take historical, particular, embodied reality into account. Unlike the hermit and the professor I am concerned here not so much with the concrete embodiment of the divine and of religion but with that of biblical scholarship. Is it possible for biblical scholarship to be value-neutral, objective, detached, and unbiased or should it be? How does the commitment to a particular community, theoretical perspective, and historical struggle impinge on or foster critical inquiry and biblical scholarship? To approach this question it is appropriate to identify my own social location. I speak here today as a wo/man who because of her gender traditionally has been excluded from the articulation of the*logy and church leadership by church law and academic convention. I was invited as a biblical scholar whose academic home is the United States, where the political right utilizes biblical language and authority for sustaining a reactionary and antidemocratic “politics of subordination.” And I speak in a German accent as a Christian the*logian at the fiftieth anniversary of the Kristallnacht on November , , the year I was born. This particular social location raises important epistemological and hermeneutical questions and concerns. As a wo/man privileged by education and 181 182 Changing Horizons race, I ask how scholarship in general and biblical scholarship in particular can be changed in such a way that the voices and contributions of the previously excluded “others” can become central to our understanding of the biblical world, religion, and the divine. As a member of the American academy, I am concerned with how biblical scholarship can transform its ivory tower mentality in such a way that it can contribute to the public-political articulation of a religious vision for a more humane future of the world. Finally, as a Christian the*logian I must take responsibility for the violence perpetrated by religion in general and Christian the*logy in particular whenever the divine is “embodied” in exclusive, elite terms of privilege fostering oppression and vilification of the subordinated “others.” As a feminist biblical scholar and the*logian I do not raise these questions for individualistic and confessional reasons. Rather I have delineated my own rhetorical situation in the interest of changing the discipline that marginalizes such “embodied” scholarly engagement. Therefore, the following three arguments engendered by my particular social location will structure this paper. I argue in the first place that biblical scholarship must recognize its scientistic posture of universalist objectivity as masking its “masculine embodiment.” Secondly, biblical studies needs to reconceptualize its task and self-understanding as engaged rhetoric rooted in a particular historical situation. Finally, I will indicate how such a reconceptualization of biblical discourse and interpretation in terms of rhetoric can open up the problem of anti-Judaism in the Fourth Gospel for critical reflection and the*logical evaluation. The Empiricist Paradigm of Biblical Studies The value-free rhetoric of historical-critical studies was shaped in the political context of heresy trials and the struggle of biblical scholarship to free itself from dogmatic authority and ecclesiastical controls. It corresponded with the professionalization of academic life and the rise of the university. Just as history as an academic discipline sought in the nineteenth century to prove itself as an objective science in analogy to the natural sciences, so also did biblical studies. The mandate to eliminate value considerations and normative concepts in the immediate encounter with the text is to assure that the resulting historical accounts would be free of ideology and dogmatic imposition. While biblical scholarship asserts its scientific character by rejecting all overt the*logical and religious institutional bias, at the same time it inhabits a name and space marked by the traditional biblical...

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