Reinterpretation as an Act of Peacebuilding…

For one of my comprehensive exams I focused on the history of feminist biblical criticism and its development in the field. It was my methods exam. Though I was told that I would never write a dissertation that was feminist, I did just that. This comp exam helped get me there. Each religious community tends to think of their process of interpretation as unique but there are far more similarities in approaches than you can imagine. There is, after all, the canonical texts that interpretation is fundamentally built upon. Jews and Christians share the OT/HB, and so Jewish and Christian feminist biblical interpreters wrestle with some of the same ethical questions/frameworks. Some seek to recover and/or reclaim, others choose to reject (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Esther Fuchs). All of these are approaches, some of these involve methods. Feminist biblical scholars do so with the tools of the discipline: historical criticism. Going over each of these approaches I was also confronted with communities and individuals who also wrestled with the biblical text as their sacred text. Enslavers created a “Slave Bible” because they knew the power of the text to effect liberation. Freedom texts, they feared, could incite rebellion. Famously, Howard Thurman’s grandmother remarked once that, “I promised my maker that if I ever learned to read and if freedom ever came, I would not read that part of the Bible”– refusing to read the Pauline Epistles because of her concern that they justified her enslavement. This Spring I’ve thought alot about how The Shalom Center created the Chapter 9 Project, where they confront the revenge violence in the ending of Esther through a complete re-writing of the text for the congregation setting. Teaching an Episcopal continuing ed course, I also thought about the absence of violent prophetic texts in the lectionary. Is this deliberate? A model to emulate? All of these approaches show how the act of reinterpretation can be an act of peacebuilding. Rather than denying the importance of these texts in religious communities it seeks to wrestle honestly with what they represent.

So it feels kind of full circle, the hermeneutics exam and now wondering how we can’t use these critical analyses to do something positive.