Biblical Interpretation I

The 1989 film Do the Right Thing was director Spike Lee’s first big splash, and it was a watershed event, that divided the country, brother against brother, sister against sister, families split . . . ok, so it didn’t really do any of that. What it did do was illuminate how any given symbol—any given film, any given painting, any given written text—can have very different meanings for folks with different backgrounds. Do the Right Thing is about racial unrest in the Bedford- Stuyvesant neighborhood of New York City. At the climax of the film, the character Mookie—in a response to the murder of a friend by the police—picks up a garbage can and throws it through the window of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, setting off a riot that destroys the last white-owned establishment in that block of Bed-Stuy.

At the time, many of the film’s critics asked the obvious question: does Mookie do the right thing, and most of them answered “No.” Further, the film was accused of being an incitement to violence and racial unrest, although to my knowledge that never materialized. But it put director Lee on the defensive, and one of his responses sticks in my mind. He said that he never gets that question from black audiences. No black person ever asks him if Mookie did the right thing; they get it.

Putting aside the moral question (hold your cards and letters, folks, I’m not trying to claim one way or another), Lee points to a valuable insight. The way a particular writing, film, photograph, or painting is understood depends in part upon the social location of the viewer. If you are a poor and inner-city you comprehend Do the Right Thing completely differently than if you are middle-class and suburban. Our upbringing, present surroundings, what we hear and see every day, and our financial straights, all influence the meaning we find in any given work.

And that, of course, applies to Scripture as well. How we’re brought up, what we’ve seen, our experiences and present situation, all determine how we view any given passage. And the basic fact of the matter is because we’re not from first century Palestine, we view Scripture completely differently from (a) the way its authors intended and (b) the way its original audiences would have done. Further, we—white, middle-class Protestants—understand Scripture differently from South American campesinos or South Korean factory workers.

Oy vey! What’s an educated Christian to do? If scripture means different things to different folks, if it was written so long ago by people so different from us, so far away from us, if your social location shapes how you are able to comprehend, what hope is there to come to a balanced, informed decision on what Scripture means? Are we doomed to propagate our own cultural biases, our own preferences, our own idiosyncrasies in our understanding of the Bible? Is there a way we can be assured of what it means for us?

Questions like this have plagued the Christian enterprise for millennia, and they form the subtext for the current debates about scriptural authority. Historically, there have been three ways of approaching this issue: literalism, the church, and historical-literary-critical techniques. Next week, we’ll look at each of these answers in turn, and why we Presbyterians have tended (rightly, I believe) toward the latter.