Illumination & Deconstructionalism

Meditations & Contemplations:
When Does “Illumination” Start Approaching “Deconstructionalism”

 Interaction with N. T. Wright: The New Testament & The People of God

I was a bit taken aback in another forum recently when a correspondent assigned the label “post-modern” to my manner of Scriptural interpretation.  My initial reactions was “where in the world did that come from?” because my self-analysis would have never even considered such a thing.  Horrors!

Then, in my progress through TNT&TPOG in chapter 3: Literature, Story and the Articulation of World Views, I discovered Wright saying something very similar.

Wright is discussing the various manners with which people deal with literature.  He assigns four levels to the process of reading.  There is the reader, the text itself, the author of the text (generally his intentions), and the event / story that the author about which the author is writing.  Now with regard to how people approach this four-tiered activity, Wright gives a concise and helpful analysis. 

He speaks of “naive realists” who approach the text from the view point that “it says what it says and that is all there is to it.”  These folk approach Scripture as if the author was transparent, without motive and simply stating things as they are.  This view point corresponds to a naive acceptance of a newspaper report.Then Wright speaks of “phenomenalists” who approach the text who begins to suspect that the newspaper writer has not completely separated himself from the event and has indeed colored it somewhat.  The question now becomes more “what does the author intend for us to understand?” more than what actually happened.

Wright goes on to describe other approaches which generally correspond to the higher critical positions - form / redaction criticism, that sort of thing.

Lastly, Wright briefly addresses deconstructionist approaches but only in passing.  He does not believe that they have seriously affected theological reflection yet.  But he describes their approach in this way: (p. 59) The idea of this school, put absurdly simply, is that the only thing to do with a text is to play with it for oneself: I must see what it does to men, and not ask whether there is another mind out there behind the text.

Deconstructionism removes the 3^rd and 4^th tier from consideration in thinking about the reading experience.  It is of no significance, ultimately, what the author’s intentions were, what he was trying to say or whether or not the event / story actually happened.  All that is important is the individual’s reaction and response to the reading itself.  The interaction is not across all four tiers, it is only within the first two: reader and text.

Wright then goes on to discuss the idea of sensus plenoir or the “full meaning” of a text. Here is something near and dear to all Reformed exegetes.  The idea that Scripture interprets Scripture and through exegesis we can approach the distillation of ideas which are beyond, perhaps, even that which the author himself understood at the time of writing (this is of course disputed).  The point that Wright makes is that when serious conservative Christians begin to approach the Scripture, that often it becomes something more than dealing with all four tiers, but rather we begin to deal with just the text itself and to interact with it in a general and perhaps, subjective manner.

Now, Wright has stopped preaching and begun meddling.

Wright doesn’t stop there, he goes on to address the more common “devotional reading” attitude which he ascribes to the “pietist tradition.”  Here he lays it out quite clearly and all to accurately.  The reader, (p. 54) through a devout reading of the text (finds it) translated at once into a message about (the) reader (himself) [divine inspiration]. Thus the idea of normative reading applicable to everyone and the whole church is sub-ordinated to the “message from God for me!” To which idea Wright incisively observes “embedded in the pietist tradition (is) exactly the same account of reading as we find in the postmodernism of Barthes, Derrida, Rorty or Fish. ... What matters is ‘what the text says to me.’” 

It occurred to me, reading all this, that Wright is addressing a serious misconception, rampant in the church, about the theological term “illumination.”  What he says has ramifications for the whole task of preaching when we assign to it the status “The Word of God For His People.”  Now Wright does not reject sensus plenoir nor the “bridging horizons” necessity of preaching, but he does raise a valid caution against a too lackadaisical approach to it.  It forces me to ask the question “when am I dealing with a subjective evaluation of God’s intention for this passage and when am I confident that what I am saying is God’s will for His people to which I and they are bound to be obedient and responsive?”

Further, this discussion reminds me, that every time we take on the deconstructionists in our defense of the Gospel, we must also remember to remove the “plank” from our own eye.  If I am reading God’s Word with too subjective an emphasis, too much of a “me” centeredness, and reaching conclusions about its teaching which I cannot relate to a higher order, normative-for-the-whole church relation, then I have to seriously question my own inconsistency in hermeneutics or worse, hypocrisy in attitude. 

So, what is needful is for us to submit to the task of finding in God’s Word His Word for His people, of which we, individually are a part.  As God left Job to wonder about His actions for quite a while, so we are often without a “Word from the Lord” about much of our daily life, explanations of its circumstances and Divine intentions for how it is to be used.  It is somewhat arrogant to expect God to furnish these things to us if He did not do so with most of the Biblical saints of either the Old or New Testament varieties.  I need to remember that to walk by faith is not to walk by sight nor by specific hearing, but rather by the light that God has furnished me and all the rest of His people, through His Word. That simply should be sufficient... ... for all of us.

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