Siris on Sacred Texts
Jason Kuznicki on Oct 3rd 2007
A rejoinder to my post on sacred texts. Commentary below the fold.
This seems the heart of the disagreement:
Consider a Sikh singing the verses of the Sri Guru Granth. He is reading the text. But it’s not quite right — even in the strongest and most narrow-minded forms of conservative Sikhism — to say that the Sri Guru Granth is not demanding his engagement with the text, or that there is no room for interrogation of the text. On the contrary, Sikhism requires that there be such an engagement or interrogation, because it sees the Sri Guru Granth as a perpetual teacher, and such engagement or interrogation is essential to the process of learning. It just requires that you also allow yourself to be engaged by, and interrogated by, the Guru.
Now, I grew up Southern Baptist, and I have met many narrow-minded and fundamentalist (the two overlap but do not by any means coincide, since you can find narrow-minded non-fundamentalists and more open-minded fundamentalists than one might expect, since the reasons people become fundamentalists are legion) Baptists in my day, and the view of Scripture in such circles is not different in its basic outline. What is required is that you come before the text as a student, not as a judge. You may question and puzzle and struggle all you wish; just remember that you are there to be taught, to let the passages speak to you.
Yet this is exactly the problem with sacred texts: We readers are always students; we can never be judges. Our role is set out for us beforehand, by an extraordinary claim attached to the text itself. We may approach that text literally or figuratively, we may argue over its meanings, but to doubt the value of the text is to doubt its sacredness. Always we are students, and always, when a difficulty exists, the error is presumptively in our own understanding rather than in any relevant feature of the text itself. Sacredness may not destroy all interpretation (although fundamentalism makes an effort at making it do just that), but sacredness certainly does play the interpretive game with loaded dice.
Filed in The Belfry
The comment that everyone must approach sacred texts as students and never as judges makes me think of humanity in a perpetual state of childhood with no possibility of attaining adulthood.
In several discussion forums, I have seen people respond to challenges to their religion, if they are Christian, that exhibit childishness. “you are going to burn in Hell followed by and I will be laughing for eternity.” A mature person is not going to take pleasure in the pain of others.
It would seem that you are saying sacredness stifles understanding.
To me, spirituality may be described as the search for understanding those things that are inherently greater than one’s self. In that sense, religious experience is analogous to the experience of a small child in the presence of its parents. But that analogy doesn’t imply immaturity. What does equate to immaturity is a dogmatic refusal to challenge oneself and one’s own assumptions about the nature of reality and morality. This includes those people who would claim that any attempt by anyone to disagree with their assumptions is motivated by Lucifer just as it includes those who describe every statement in opposition to their collected so-called liberal viewpoints as motivated by Hate.
The sensationalism surrounding the nut-case contingent of sacred-textual fundamentalists severely hurts the discourse on the topic of the proper place of texts in religious devotion, and in the society within which religious and secular values come into conflict. It washes away the substantive issues and replaces them with a he-said/she-said kind of argument about which side houses the more ridiculous extreme. I think most people would agree that it’s ridiculous to consider the death penalty appropriate for many of the “capital crimes” listed in Leviticus. It’s also ridiculous for atheists to claim to understand the faith of huge numbers of religious persons, each of whom will have generally carved out their own understanding of how self, sacred texts, and Supreme Being all fit together in a whole that lets each person live life more effectively or serenely.
Jason, I don’t agree wth the dichotomy you propose between being a student and being a judge. The proper role of a student is not subimssion, but discourse. As a student, I try never to let a teacher get away with an error. As a teacher, I try never to ignore a student’s objection. A person can be student, teacher, and judge at the same time. It’s the best way to learn from each other.
Sorry if my “platitudinal” approach to these comments irritates, but my aim is not to argue. My aim is more to depict the intellectual landscape on which I’d like to see these sorts of discourses occur, rather than the battlefields that so often serve as the venues for the “culture wars.”