Wolterstorff Quote

One of the texts I'm reading for my next seminar is Wolterstorff's Divine Discourse. While the material is quite heavy at times, one passage in particular struck a chord (a pleasant one at that) with me as I was reading tonight. In asking why it is that the Christian community continually returns to the "medium of revelation," (i.e. the Scriptures) rather than just extracting the understood meaning and being done with the text, so to speak. For those who might be interested, Wolterstorff's answer is as follows:

"What seems to me the right answer to this question has two parts; and it's especially the second part of the answer that we must keep in mind, lest we inflate the significance of our inquiry. The first part is that the community assumes, by its practice, that no matter how successful prior interpretations, additional discernment is aloways possible; the activity of discerning the divine discourse is forever incomplete. It is that in two ways. For one thing, I cannot in general just assume that what God said to me in my situation, or to my group in our situation, by way of this text is exactly the same as what God said to other earlier readers and interpreters in their situations. But if there is indeed a rich diversity in the particularity of what God said to different people by way of authoring this text, then those different people have to try to discern that. Secondly, the fact that interpretation is forever incomplete is grounded in the subtlety of the text as well as in the diversity of what was said to whom. Sometimes we're stymied in our attempts at interpretation; often our interpretations get it wrong. The Bible is a rich and subtle letter from a friend of ours to a group of us. Over and over when we come back to it, whether as individuals or as a group, with the question in mind of what the friend was saying, we are rewarded with new insight. In part that is because each of us at a particular stage in our lives is cognitively privileged with respect to certain facets of reality and cognitively underprivileged with respect to others. If one has lived in luxury all one's life, certain aspects of the biblical text will almost certainly escape one's attention; if one has lived under oppression, certain aspects will jump out.

The other part of the answer is that the community assumes, by its practice, that the significance of the Bible goes beyond its being a[n] instrument of divine discourse. The community assumes a surplus of significance for the Bible. For one thing, the words and the worlds projected prove worth contemplating in their own right; there is an art of biblical narrative, an art of biblical poetics, and fascinating resonances about the parts of the text and the worlds. Furthermore, the church down through the ages has found itself drawn to using the words of Scripture for its own discourse: it speaks its own praise and lament in the words of the psalms, it speaks its own blessings in the words of Paul, it speaks its own hopes in the words of Revelation. But thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the church has wanted to be so formed by the very phrases and images of scripture, the narratives and songs, the preachments and visions, that it sees reality and imagines possibilities through those phrases and images, through those narratives and songs, through those preachments and visions."