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2. Toward a New Paradigm for Bible Study
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2 Toward a New Paradigm for Bible Study After critiquing historical biblical criticism as “bankrupt” in chapter 1 of The Bible in Human Transformation, Wink proceeds in chapter 3 to offer a new paradigm for biblical study. He develops a “dialectical hermeneutic” which, in its movement from “fusion” to “distance” to “communion,” allows for a reciprocal engagement between reader and text within which the personal transformation of the reader becomes possible. Such transformation is the original, but lost, interest in studying the text in the first place. Wink insists that his critique of biblical criticism is not that it doesn’t work, but that it has gotten “stuck” in the second dialectical moment—the negation that creates necessary “distance” from both text and context but that also shields the scholar from the intention of the text to question the one who questions it. Rather than remaining safely stuck in the resulting subject-object dichotomy, Wink argues that the scholar must risk displacing the subject-object dichotomy with a subject-object relationship (communion) through, using Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, an “archaeology of the subject” by the object. When subject and object are allowed the integrity to question each other, transformation becomes possible. In order to demonstrate how the movement from fusion to communion works practically, Wink describes a group study of the parallel Gospel stories of the healing of the paralytic. In the process, he returns to a place where biblical criticism, frozen in “alienated distance” from the text, cannot go—that place where the text can be experienced as the “self-disclosure of God.” Source: Wink 1973: Excerpted from Chapter 3 By way of one such attempt at a new paradigm for biblical studies, I propose a dialectical hermeneutic whose dynamic moments might be schematically outlined as follows: 11 1. Fusion N1 Negation of fusion through suspicion of the object 2. Distance N2 Negation of the negation through suspicion of the subject 3. Communion This dialectic would apply both to the exegesis of texts and to the history of interpretation as a whole.1 Between the naïveté of uncritical fusion with the horizon of one’s own heritage and the sundering of that unity by the distance of objectification lies a moment of negativity which can be variously described as suspicion, alienation, doubt, detachment, temptation, or death. And between this alienated distance and the birth of communion lies a negation of the negation, a recoil of suspicion against the suspector, an analysis of the analyzer. This second negation opens the way to an interaction between reader and text that can make possible our own personal and social development today. 1. Fusion In the beginning is the stream of tradition in which we live and move. At least for Western culture, however secular, there can be no reading of the Bible which is not already predisposed by a certain way of seeing, by key ideational preconceptions and preliminary intentions (why we read this text and not another) which are themselves a function of the influence of the biblical tradition. The tradition is our world, prior to all “objectivity,” all conceptualizing, prior also to our own subjectivity.2 It is so encompassing, so close as to escape notice. We see right through it; yet we can see nothing without it, since it provides the grid of meanings by which we filter the manifold of experience. It is our horizon. The idea of “the past” is already an objectification. But at the level of fusion, the past is the present of the heritage as the matrix in which we perceive our existence. Tradition furnishes us with our conceptions, it hides itself in our language, it provides the “available believable” which sets the parameters of belief, and it provides an orientation for the process of reasoning. N1: Negating the Fusion 12 | Walter Wink [3.239.57.87] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:31 GMT) First fusion, then confusion. A suspicion is planted. A doubt festers. One dares to question the tradition, to think the unthinkable. This is the first negativity, the achievement of distance from the heritage by means of its objectification. . . . Negation is here an essential objectification and hence distancing of oneself from prevailing cultural and intrapsychic images and preunderstandings, and consequently a dialectical moment of necessary alienation on the way to freedom and truth. Negation requires an initial suspension of prevailing understandings—“a flight from knowledge that is to be cured by knowledge. . . .”3 The Bible, wrenched from its matrix...