Charles Bledsoe’s comment to a post at BSA here.
It’s been a little while since I took his course here on the Hebrew Bible, but if I recall, and understood him correctly, Dr. Baden is of the view that reading and interpreting the Bible is, and has always been a creative engagement with it. Readers have always taken creative license, as it were, in coming up with new meanings for, deriving new theological understandings from it. And there’s no reason why that isn’t a legitimate thing to do, so long as one doesn’t make the claim that one’s exegesis is the only authentic, original, sense of the text.
Equating authenticity with original authorial intent, or the the text’s meaning in its Sitz im Leben (1) is where readers go wrong. The Bible’s meanings aren’t anchored in, and needn’t be true to the original authorial intent. Bultmann described the Bible as an ”arena” for creatively exploring existential questions and concerns. To my mind, it’s better that it be such a dynamic matrix for the imagination of new meanings that speak to our contemporary experiences and concerns than just a static artifact with fixed and fossilized information about what ancient Israelites believed. Better a Bible that’s a living, interactive-creative process than a relic that’s only of historical interest, or an instrument of a theological dogmatism that would lock us into outmoded, backward, archaic beliefs.
Perhaps this is more my thinking than Dr. Baden’s, although I would like to think that he would agree with me. I know who would disagree, literalistic fundamentalists who think that the Bible is the static Word of God whose meanings are immutable. But I’m at peace with their disagreement, and take from it reassurance of the correctness of my perspective.
(1) Sitz im Leben – German pronunciation: [ˈzɪts ʔɪm ˈleːbm̩]) is a German phrase roughly translating to “setting in life”. It originated in Biblical criticism, and stands for the context in which a text, or object, has been created, and its function and purpose at that time. Wikipedia
