a hermeneutic of hearing

okay, so you're probably not interested in this, but it's a paper i just wrote for my hermeneutics class, and the topic really drew me in. it's brief- 500 words, as that was our limit - and somewhat out of context without knowing the biblical story of Amnon and Tamar, and especially without familiar with Trible's book, Texts of Terror. but here it is anyway.

Phyllis Trible, in her exegesis of the story of Amnon raping his sister Tamar,[1] writes, “Amnon has desired to see and touch her, for with these senses he has made of her what he wills. But to hear her voice is another matter; it disturbs the fantasies that eyes and hands have fashioned. To hear might mean repentance. So Amnon chooses to close out her voice.”[2]

Trible compares Tamar to the Wisdom in Proverbs.[3] Amnon leaves Tamar, symbolic of beauty and wisdom, broken and desolated. Thus, the story becomes a metaphor for a broken hermeneutic, one that treats the text – like Amnon with Tamar – touching and seeing, feeling and manipulating it to please the senses, rather than listening and therefore risking a call to repentance.

Comparing the Bible to the earth, Nancy Pereira writes, “Some parts are hard, and others are swampy… yet there are countless fertile places to be worked on . . . . in the same way as the land: with tenacity, determination, wisdom and pleasure.”[4] Rather than risk hearing, risking the call to repentance, it is far easier to remain in the broken hermeneutic, to avoid the hard and swampy places; it is far easier to remain in broken and desolate relationships than to hear the other, and once again, risk a call to repentance.

Gerard Loughlin describes this broken hermeneutic when he speaks about biblical scholars taking the Bible apart – thus breaking it – leaving “little room for ideas of inspiration, divine or otherwise,” and leaving us simply with “a text like any other, a wholly human work.”[5]

Modernity offered us a way to avoid the hard and swampy places, a way to touch and see without hearing by focusing on solid answers to elude difficult questions. Don Michael Hudson says that Christians use the “methods and the thinking of modernism to project an image of a God who removes questions and doubts. Modernism, then, becomes a way of thinking which attempts to tame and reduce God to logical categories so that our worlds will be predictable.” [6] Postmodernity then offers us an invitation “to trust a God who is beyond our comprehension.”[7] This offering gives us the freedom to step into those hard and swampy places and to hear the words that are written and spoken, thus giving us the ability to move beyond a broken hermeneutic into one that may offer wholeness and grace.

The Bible is “living and active,”[8] it is simultaneously the word of God and the words of man, these are words that cannot simply be seen and ones that cannot be touched, but must be heard. We must not act deaf like Amnon, but must listen. We must not leave the text desolate like Tamar, or deaden it by removing its inspiration, but hear its words. This listening is risky, it can call for repentance, but we can do nothing less with this sacred text that calls us to trust “a God who is beyond our comprehension.”
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[1] 2 Samuel 13:1-22.
[2] Phyllis Trible. “Tamar: the Royal Rape of Wisdom.” Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984, 46.
[3] Ibid., 56.
[4] Nancy Pereira, “The Body as Hermeneutical Category: Guidelines for a Feminist Hermeneutics of Liberation.” Ecumenical Review 54 no. 3, July 2002, 235.
[5] Gerard Loughlin, “Making it Plain.” Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 111.
[6] Don Michael Hudson, “Dance of Truth.” Mars Hill Review. Bainbridge Island, WA: Mars Hill Forum,
no. 12. Fall 1998, 13-14.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Hebrews 4:12.