Content area
Full Text
Merold Westphal. Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009. 160 pp. $19.99 (paperback), ISBN 9780801031472.
Whose Community? Which Interpretation? belongs to a series by Baker Academic called "The Church and Postmodern Culture." The editor, James K. A. Smith, provides the rationale for reading Merold Westphal's contribution: "For 'peoples of the Book/ whose way of life is shaped by texts, matters of interpretation are, in a way, matters of life and death" (9). Based on "To Read or Not to Read," a 2007 report from the National Endowment of the Arts, we are living in a post-literate or sub-literate culture where, it is safe to conjecture, the biblical text plays a diminutive role in the formation of Christian identity. Friedrich Nietzsche's once controversial claim - "there are no facts, only interpretations" - seems irrelevant in the absence of a text to interpret.1
For the remnant of Bible-reading Christians, "matters of interpretation are, in a way, matters of life and death" (italics added). Do not miss the qualifying clause. While we are no longer witnesses to the violence behind sixteenth-century Protestant and Catholic persecution of Anabaptists, such violence is sublimated behind present-day Orthodox anathemas of iconoclasts or Emergent denunciations of Calvinist creeds. In short, interpretative practice often fosters animus among brothers and sisters in the household of faith.
Enter Merold Westphal - a leading continental philosopher who teaches at Fordham University. Aimed at academic, pastoral, and lay theologians, his new book fights against the hermeneutics of violence in the church, proposing instead a hermeneutics of peace, the goal of which is to discover what political theorist John Rawls named an "overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines" (126), a consensus that should achieve not only peaceful coexistence - "I won't bomb if you don't bomb me" (128) - but also peaceful cooperation between "enemies" like Jim Wallis and Jim Dobson or Brian McLaren and D. A. Carson.
Sound too good to be true? Westphal cites "The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification," a 1999 document signed by the World Lutheran Federation and representafives of the Roman Catholic Church, and The Meaning of Jesus, a book coauthored by revisionist scholar Marcus Borg and traditional scholar N. T. Wright, as salient...