Playing with Scripture: Reading Contested Biblical Texts with Gadamer and Genre Theory (PhD thesis)

ABSTRACT: Reading texts as Scripture brings two hermeneutical assumptions into tension: that the text will continually say something new and relevant into the present situation, and that the text has stability and authority over readers. The collapse of ecclesial authority structures and the array of twentieth-century critical approaches to the Bible seem to take this tension past breaking point. Given how contested the Bible’s meaning is, how is it possible to ‘read Scripture’ as authoritative and relevant? This thesis uses Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics to explore this problem of Scripture. Rather than anchor meaning in author, text or reader, Gadamer’s phenomenological model of hermeneutical experience as Spiel (‘play’) offers a dynamic, intersubjective account of how understanding happens, avoiding the dead end of the subjective–objective dichotomy. It alerts us to the interplay of tradition and prejudice in our reading. The thesis then addresses some criticisms of Gadamer. Modern genre theory introduces some granularity into Gadamer’s underdeveloped model of Spiel, accounting for the different roles played by readers in different genres using the new term Lesespiel (‘reading game’). This is tested in three case studies of contested texts. The first examines the recontextualization of psalms in the book of Acts, situating the varied Lesespiele within their historical horizon and genre. The second is the use of Hagar’s story (Genesis 16) in nineteenth-century debates over slavery. Abolitionists and pro-slavery apologists cannot agree on what the text means because they cannot agree on its Lesespiel. This suggests criteria for evaluating each reading. The third is the rape and murder in Gibeah (Judges 19). The anachronistic Lesespiel of horror film shows how Spiel can resist a problematic tradition of interpretation while still honouring the text’s integrity. In each case study, the application of ancient text to contemporary situation is neither arbitrary, nor slavishly bound to tradition, but playful. Understanding how our own reading happens within the various Lesespiele of Scripture, and in dialogue with tradition, may help us engage more constructively with other readers of contested biblical texts.

My supervisor was Professor Liam Semler at the University of Sydney.

My thesis has now been published by Routledge.

Contents

Introduction

Part 1
1 Gadamer in conversation	
	Four conversations	
	The hermeneutical experience	
	Gadamer and his critics	
	Conclusion	

2 Spiel
	Gadamer’s phenomenology of Spiel	
	Spiel in conversation	
	The phenomenon of Spiel
	From Spiel to language	
	Unanswered questions	
	Game theory	
	Conclusion	

3 Genre	
	Analysis of genre theories
	Genre and biblical studies
	Bringing genre into Spiel	
	Conclusion

Part 2
4 Reading psalms in the first century
	What to do about Judas in Acts 1?
	Testing the hypothesis
	Conclusion

5 Reading Hagar in the nineteenth century
	A contested text
	The apologist Lesespiel
	The abolitionist Lesespiel
	Evaluating the payoffs
	Conclusion

6 Experiencing that night in Gibeah as twentieth-century horror film
	The tradition
	The Spiel of tradition
	Horror and RGS
	Experiencing horror in Gibeah
	Conclusion

Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendix: Breakdown of OT citations in Acts by genre