On Being Known
By Charles M. Wood
Charles M. Wood is Associate Professor of Theology at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. His books include The Formation of Christian Understanding (1981) and Vision and Discernment (1985).
"For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before God no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of the one with whom we have to do" (Hebrews 4:12-13 [RSV, alt.]).
THE book of Hebrews, enigmatic as it is in some respects, contains a number of striking and memorable passages which have been incorporated into the language and self-understanding of Christians. They combine vividness and aptness of expression with a kind of representative capacity, capturing and conveying some common feature of Christian witness and experience with particular vitality. This is one such passage. It has a poetic quality; indeed, as with some other passages in the book, some features of language and style indicate that underlying the passage itself is an earlier poetic or hymnic text of unknown origin, a vivid characterization of the word of God which the author of Hebrews has appropriated either directly or in altered form.1
I
The RSV translation is essentially uncontested, and I have used it here. Its rendering of the final clause, as "with whom we have to do," felicitously preserves the ambiguity of a cryptic original, which might be "of whom we speak" or "before whom we speak" or "to whom we are accountable."
The immediate context of this passage in the book of Hebrews is one of exhortation and admonition. The author of Hebrews is interpreting Psalms 95:7-11 (RSV: "O that today you would hearken to [God's] voice! Harden not your hearts, as at Meribah...") as a word now addressed by the Holy Spirit to those who have heard the message concerning Jesus: Do not harden your hearts against the voice of God, as did that generation whom Moses led out of Egypt, and who, because of their rebellion in the wilderness, were not themselves allowed to enter
1Otto Michel, Der Brief an die Hebraer, 12th ed. (Gottingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1966), p. 197.
the promised land. The God who spoke before "in many and various ways" (Heb. 1:1) has now spoken again in Jesus the Christ, offering again the possibility of deliverance-a more complete deliverance (described as "sharing in Christ," that is, sharing the life of his resurrection) than that offered to those whom Moses led. As the deliverance is greater, so also are the potential consequences of its loss through disobedience. And so the author exhorts these new hearers: "Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, that no one fall by the same sort of disobedience. For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.... "
Martin Luther, in his lectures on Hebrews in 1517-18, took the comparison of the word of God to a two-edged sword as a statement of the horrible punishment which awaits unbelievers: "endless, eternal, and incurable cutting."2 He rejected interpretations which took these verses to be part of the author's positive exhortation, and which understood the word's swordlike work to be that of paring away evil affections and the like-in effect, a cleansing, purifying work. To Luther, it was clear that this passage functions as a warning. It is intended not to reassure us but to terrify us, and thus to send us to "that one sanctuary which is Christ."3
Luther was surely correct in seeing that, in its context in the argument of Hebrews, this passage has little of comfort about it. It has the force of a warning. But as many modern commentators rightly point out, the intent of the word/sword comparison itself is not to portray the word as an instrument of punishment, but rather to stress its disclosive function. The word finds us out: it penetrates to the innermost parts of our being, discerning the heart. There are no secrets, no hidden things which the word does not reach and open up to "the one with whom we have to do." We cannot hide the truth about ourselves from God, for the word of God will make it evident. It is the fearsomeness of thus being found out-specifically, in the context of Hebrews, of having one's inner resistance to the word, one's "hardness of heart," disclosed-which accounts for the sobering effect of these lines.
But how is this piercing, disclosive character of the word of God to be understood? Words can be disclosive of their speaker, certainly. Sometimes they disclose more than the speaker intends. But here, it is the hearer who is being revealed. Note: the hearer is not being defined or described by the speaker's word-common enough functions of language, of course, for better or worse-but rather disclosed. How might this be?
II
Sometimes words establish a context for their hearers. This can happen in various ways. If I bring you news of some incident which
2Martin Luther, Lectures on Hebrews, tr. Walter A. Hanson, in Luther's Works, Vol. 29, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1968), p. 165.
3Ibid., p. 167.
might have some bearing upon your plans for next week, or remind you of some previous commitment you made but forgot, my words obviously do not create the incident or the commitment; they only bring it to your attention. But by doing so, they create a new situation for you. They make a difference, affecting your possibilities for action. Even if you proceed with your plans unaltered, there is an important sense (as a bit of moral reflection upon your action might remind you) in which you will not be doing the same thing. You will have had to take account of what I told you-or to decide to ignore it. In any case, the context for your deciding and acting will have been changed, and your decision and action will have a different character and quality, because of my words to you.
There are other cases in which the context-creating function of words is still more striking. Someone who says to you, "I apologize," is not calling your attention to some pre-existing fact, but is rather creating a fact, and in doing so is changing the relationship between you. You may accept the apology or refuse it; in either case the situation between you is not the same as it was before the apology. The words of apology have created a new context.
There is a further significant feature to apologies and to a range of similar "speech-acts" (to use the philosopher J. L. Austin's term) which distinguishes them from cases in which the speaker is merely providing some data on the supposition that it might be of interest to the hearer. An apology addresses you personally, and calls for a response. Especially if the matter is serious, the quality of your response may reveal a great deal about you. Indeed, being confonted by the apology and by the necessity for coming to terms with it may cause you to learn some new things about yourself. The words addressed to you may travel deep within you and bring you out, so to speak, showing you to yourself and perhaps to others.
Other words addressed to us may have similar and still greater disclosive power in this way. Think of the way in which "I love you," uttered perhaps for the first time in a relationship as a trustful, joyous, yet fearful self-disclosure and self-commitment, can search the hearer's heart. Those words at once establish a new context and call the hearer forth. They permit and also require a response in which, in one way or another, the real character of the hearer is enacted and displayed. Whether the response to such a declaration is honest or evasive, cautious or spontaneous, it is not unusual to feel that it has been a moment of crisis, in the proper sense-a sort of personal audit.
III
Such examples from ordinary human experience may help to illuminate the notion and the experience of the piercing, disclosive power of the word of God. This word, too, establishes a context, one in which the hearer's "innermost" reality is called forth. Several of the more abiding ways in which the word of God has been characterized-Hebrews' governing depiction of it as divine promise, for example-point both to its likeness to certain human speech-acts in this regard, and to its radical difference. In its address, this word creates the ultimate and inescapable context for its hearers' lives, and in so doing evokes the most profound disclosure of the hearers' selves. Our fellow creatures' words may be mistaken, ill-advised, misleading, or inappropriate; their proper claim on us, however valid, compelling, and important it may be, is always less than ultimate. In responding to one another's apologies, promises, declarations, and so forth, we always have to reckon with our common finitude and fallenness, and try to do the best the situation will allow. But the word of God is always true and fitting, and addresses us in the totality of our being with absolute decisiveness. In its light-as we dispose ourselves in response to it-we are truly disclosed for what we are.
Disclosed to whom? Disclosed, above all, "to the eyes of the one with whom we have to do," who is the speaker of the word. Indeed, the text makes no mention of our being made known to others, nor even of our being brought to self-awareness, by this discerning, sifting activity of this word. The word makes us knowable; but it is God who knows us. The "thoughts and intentions of the heart" may remain hidden, or at best imperfectly disclosed, to human eyes-including the eyes of the one whose heart it is. ("O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me," says Psalms 139; but also, appropriately, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it.") It may be, of course, that an encounter with the word of God will lead in a given instance to new self-knowledge, and (or) to behavior which makes the truth about oneself more evident to others. But that is a fact of decidedly secondary consequence. What matters ultimately is not our knowledge of ourselves, nor the knowledge of our fellow creatures about us, but our being known by the one God with whom we all finally have to do.
Why, then, is this passage so powerful? It is because it represents a not uncommon experience in connection with what the Christian community has been accustomed to call the word of God, written and preached. That experience may, in fact, have a great deal to do with why we call it the word of God. It is the experience of finding that through this word we are truly known: that the word has brought out the truth about us and that this truth, however dim and fitful our own awareness of it may be, is nevertheless evident to the one whose knowledge finally matters. Luther, in commenting on Galatians 4:9-a passage which bears comparison in some ways with the one under discussion-sums up its point thus: "Nevertheless, God still knows you."4 It is not, again, that we have been defined authoritatively, that a picture of ourselves has been imposed upon us from without and that we have been coerced into accepting it. Nor is it that our previous understandings of ourselves have
4Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians (1535), in Luther's Works, Vol. 26, ed. and tr. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1963), p. 401.
simply been confirmed. It is rather that, in the context created by the word, our own reality has for the first time become manifest.
Apprehending oneself to be thus apprehended is certainly no light thing, as the psalmist knew, and as the author of Hebrews makes clear. "It is a fearful thing," indeed, "to fall into the hands of the living God" (Heb. 10:31). But, given the character of the word which probes us, it can also be the source of a fundamental and exhilarating confidence, and a corresponding freedom. The same writer who calls God "a consuming fire" (Heb. 12:29) can also say, "let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean.... Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for the one who promised is faithful" (Heb. 10:22-23).
IV
"Anyone who has ever written sermons," wrote Benjamin Jowett in 1860, "is aware how hard it is to apply Scripture to the wants of his hearers and at the same time to preserve its meaning."5 The difficulty of which he spoke has probably not diminished substantially in the past century and a quarter. Jowett's own description and treatment of the difficulty in the essay from which I have just quoted still has much to commend it. However, I have quoted his statement not as a prelude to an exposition of his solution, but because it represents a common but, in my judgment, extremely problematic way of stating the problem of interpretation. (I would not, incidentally, want to claim that it represents Jowett's own way of stating the problem. It might be more accurate to say that he is describing the way the problem often appears.) The statement makes it sound as if interpretation is always a particularly unfortunate sort of compromise between the meaning of the text and the wants of the hearers: one's gain is the other's loss. At the extremes, one either renders an interpretation which is faithful to the text but has no relevance to the hearers, or one allows the hearers' wants to determine one's interpretation, thereby losing any semblance of the text's meaning. In the more ordinary, middling case, one produces a mixture of irrelevant faithfulness and faithless relevance.
Against that, I could for the sake of effect almost claim the opposite: it is only when the text is applied to the wants of one's hearers (which may, of course, include oneself) that its meaning can be preserved. But, given the ambiguity of the principal terms, that statement of my thesis would be certain to mislead. It will be better to proceed more circumspectly. There are, I believe, three senses in which the wants of those for whom an interpretation is intended are directly relevant to the interpreter's attempt to render the meaning of the text. I will try to illustrate these with reference to the preceding interpretation of Hebrews 4:12-13.
5Benjamin Jowett, "On the Interpretation of Scripture," in Essays and Reviews, 6th ed. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861), pp. 333-34.
First, any interpretative effort presupposes an understanding of the aim or aims to be served. The directive, "Interpret this text!", apart from any explicit or implicit indication of the purpose of the interpretation, is bewildering. It can only be obeyed if the interpreter assumes (consciously or otherwise) some particular purpose. In this sense, the "wants" of the hearers refers to the hearers' interpretative interest-expressed, implied, or assumed-which the interpreter must determine in order to gain a sense of her or his objectives. This is not to say that the interpreter must take a poll of the intended audience and tabulate the results before proceeding. It is rather to say that the interpreter must make a judgment, on the basis of some understanding of the nature of the hearers' interest in the text, as to the sort of interpretation to be attempted. A close historical exegesis of the tradition embedded in I Corinthians 11:23-26 would typically be as out of place as the content of a proper communion sermon as that sermon itself would be on the program of a meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. The most significant difference between the two instances is not (as is sometimes thought) a difference as to the respective "levels" of the interpretative performance required or of the hearers' capacities, but is rather a difference as to the interpretative interests to be served and of the corresponding interpretative objectives.
Attention to the hearers' wants, in this sense, is indispensable to the task of interpretation. It will not do simply to say that the aim of interpretation is to present the meaning of the text, or that it is to enable the hearers to understand the text. What both "meaning" and "understanding" involve depends upon the aims of interpretation in a given case, or sort of case. Nor does it help to stress the word "text," and to say that the aim is to elucidate the text, because there are many cases in which the aims of interpretation are relevant to a determination of what the text is.
An interpreter pursuing a historical interest, for example, might take "Hebrews 4:12-13" to designate that piece of earlier poetic text which the author of Hebrews has incorporated into his or her own treatise, and might understand the aim of an historical interpretation to be to explain the circumstances of its origin, the provenance of the terms, images, and ideas, its probable setting and function, etc. In that case, the fact that that text is now part of the book of Hebrews would be relevant only insofar as the text's availability to the author of Hebrews might shed some light upon its earlier history. It is not being interpreted as Hebrews 4:12-13; that is only a convenient way of referring to the text. (Of course, the historian need not be interested only in the earliest form of the text; this is only one possibility.) A student of rhetoric, on the other hand, might be interested in the rhetorical structure and sense of the book of Hebrews, and "interpreting Hebrews 4:12-13" then might mean giving an account of its literary character, its role within the argument of Hebrews, and so on-questions to which the original setting and sense of the text may be irrelevant. The text is not the isolated passage or its reconstructed Vorlage, but rather the passage as a part of the entire document we know as "Hebrews." And a satisfactory interpretation of the text is one which gives an adequate account of it from a rhetorical standpoint. To understand the text (whichever text one has in mind) rhetorically is not the same as to understand the text historically. Different interests are being served, different questions being raised, and different answers sought.
In my interpretation, I tried to interpret Hebrews 4:12-13 as Christian scripture. That is, my focus was not on the isolated text or its prehistory, nor simply on the passage as a part of the document known as Hebrews, but rather on the passage as a component of that collection of writings which Christians regard as somehow normative for their self-understanding as Christians and for their understanding of the witness they are commissioned as Christians to bear in the world. My interpretation has been governed by an interest in determining what this text, as Christian scripture, properly contributes to Christians' understanding of themselves and their witness. I have aimed, then, at a theological interpretation: an interpretation which serves critical and constructive reflection upon Christian life and witness as such.
Obviously, this effort has involved some historical and rhetorical considerations. Often some interpretative interests subserve others. It has also involved a particular understanding of the way in which scripture rightly fulfills its authoritative or canonical role-an understanding which is more tacit than explicit in the interpretation itself. Briefly, I believe that different components of canonical scripture different texts, different genres, different themes-properly serve very different functions in the process by which Christians gain their normative self-understanding from this collection of documents. If that is so, then one question which a theological interpreter must keep in mind while interpreting any scriptural text is the question of the proper canonical function or functions of that particular text.
My own conclusion about Hebrews 4:12-13 in this regard (a conclusion at least partly displayed in the interpretation) is that it has come to be a sort of meta-scriptural comment on the way scripture (among other things) functions as "word of God," namely, by bringing out the truth about our lives and bringing us into a relationship with "the one with whom we have to do" on the basis of that truth. The comment can have various kinds of "perlocutionary" force, to use a term of Austin's once again. By making the comment or by reminding someone of it, one may produce-intentionally or otherwise-any of various effects, depending on the context. It might serve as a warning, and be the occasion for repentance: "Righteous as you may appear, there is one who knows the heart." It might, on the other hand, serve as a word of comfort, bringing hope: "Confused as you are, there is one who knows you, and who can finally bring you to yourself." It might-who knows?-even contribute to clarifying someone's understanding of that frequently vexing notion, "the authority of scripture."
It is especially in connection with these questions as to how the text might properly contribute to Christian understanding that an interpreter may well learn from the Christian interpretative tradition, including those interpreters who are (sometimes condescendingly) designated as "precritical "-Martin Luther, for example.6 Granted that there are certain sorts of interpretative interests and issues, especially of a historical character, in connection with which more recent interpreters have a distinct advantage over their predecessors, the older interpreters often have much light to shed upon the bearing of a text upon Christian faith and witness. The fact that a text has been taken a certain way does not, of course, mean that it can or should be taken in the same way here and now. As always, the interpreter must exercise critical judgment over the proposals which come to attention. But the resources of this tradition ought not to be neglected, any more than the labors of contemporary biblical scholars ought.
V
The second sense in which the "wants" of the hearers are pertinent to an interpreter's effort to render the meaning of a text might best be grasped by considering why an interpretation of a text is needed at all. Normally, an interpretation is called for when understanding is somehow problematic: for instance, when the reader or hearer either misunderstands the text, cannot understand it at all, or needs a fuller or more adequate understanding of it. (Any understanding of a text is already an interpretation of it. It is when our natural interpretative activities do not yield the desired result that we speak of "needing an interpretation.") Here, then, the "wants" of the hearers refers to those things which must be supplied if the hearers are to achieve the sort of understanding desired. "Wants" here bears the now archaic sense of needs-which may, incidentally, have been part of its sense in Benjamin Jowett's statement.
These "wants" or "needs" may be of different sorts, depending upon the hearers and their situation, and their relation to the text and its situation. At a fairly simple level, information about the text may help: an explanation of the sort of text it is, definitions of terms which are unfamiliar to the hearers, and so forth. Or it may be that some of the concepts used in the text have no place in the lives of the hearers, and that these concepts must be taught and acquired if the text is to be understood. Or, possibly, there are factors in the hearers' minds or lives-habits of thought, ingrained attitudes, and the like-which are leading the hearers to misunderstand the text or to be baffled by it. If so, interpreting the text involves identifying these factors and working to
6The aptness of that designation is questionable, as, for example, Willi Marxsen indicates in the case of Luther in a recent essay, "Historisch-kritische Exegese?" in Kirchlicher Dienst und theologische Ausbildung (Bielefeld: Luther-Verlag, 1985), pp. 53-62.
overcome their power. Ordinarily, addressing the "wants" of the hearers in some of these respects requires of the interpeter some considerable knowledge of the particular hearers being addressed. That is one reason interpretation must be continually renewed, and one reason interpretations do not always travel well. Most of the interpretation of Hebrews 4:12-13 offered above focuses upon another sort of "want," in this second sense, which I have (rightly or wrongly) presumed my readers to have, but which at any rate is one which might be widely shared: the "want" of an account which would make the text's principal claim concerning the disclosive power of the word of God intelligible.
My decision to focus upon that presumed need was based in part upon a judgment having to do with the third sense in which the "wants" of the hearers are pertinent to interpretation. Good theological interpretation does not (if I may exploit Jowett's phrasing) preserve the meaning of the text, as if in brine; rather, it activates it, bringing the text to life and getting it into action. It does so by identifying that point in the hearers' lives at which the text has a use, that question to which it is an answer, that "want" to which it speaks. It is at that point that the text begins to function for what it is.
This is true in principle, mutatis mutandis, of any sort of interpretation. In historical interpretation-including that historical interpretation which is normally one component of the theological interpretation of Scripture-it has more to do with grasping someone else's use of the text (applying it, so to speak, to the "wants" of its original hearers, if its meaning in that setting is the object of investigation) than with one's own use of it, though the latter is also involved. Presumably, the historian has a use for the text-a reason for undertaking the study of it. Historical interpretation has a point, and historical understanding is demonstrated by the way in which one is able to make appropriate use of the text in the course of whatever one goes on to do with it.
In theological interpretation, concerned as it is with the bearing of the text upon the self-understanding of those for whom it is being interpreted, the "wants" of these contemporary hearers are more directly pertinent. At what point, in connection with what issue or problem, can the text be activated as a means for achieving and sustaining Christian understanding? My own sense of the situation in which a good number of the likely readers of this interpretation find themselves led me to choose Hebrews 4:12-13 as the text for this exercise, and then to cast the interpretation as I did in the hope that text and readers might connect.
Our situation, broadly speaking, is one of considerable confusion and conflict over the related issues of authority and rationality in theology and church. There are two opposing tendencies manifest in many treatments and discussions of these issues. They can be designated by some terms once given currency by Paul Tillich. On the one hand, a tendency toward heteronomy is evident in such things as the everpopular attempts to use formal arguments for the authority of scripture to provide justification for accepting the truth of its content, and in the claim occasionally encountered that Christian truth is sui generis and therefore not subject to rational scrutiny. On the other hand, a tendency toward autonomy is sometimes expressed in the rejection of the notion (if scriptural authority tout court, and in the affirmation that nothing in scripture is to be accepted unless it is consonant with the interpreter's own experience and reason. The arguments which embrace each of these tendencies vary a great deal in nature and intention, as does the extent to which the arguments nurture the tendencies. The dangers which the tendencies pose can be brought to mind by recalling Jowett's way of describing the sermon-writer's difficulty. In a "heteronomous" approach, the text is exalted and the "wants" of the hearers ignored; in an "autonomous" approach, the "wants" of the hearers are paramount and the integrity of the text is lost.
My own conviction is that the understanding of the character of the word of God which is represented by Hebrews 4:12-13 has much to contribute to an approach to these issues which would avoid these tendencies and their respective dangers. As portrayed by this text-and here this text is rightly representative of the tenor of scripture as a whole-the word of God does not define reality, heteronomously, imposing a view of self and world which the hearer is directed to accept. Nor is the word of God something that simply confirms the hearer's prior attitudes and beliefs. Rather, the word provides a context within which the truth of things becomes manifest. The promise of this central insight is well worth exploring.
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