THE CITY OF BIBLICAL STUDIES: Imagining Collaborative Paradigms

through the Metaphors of Space and Place

By Hannah L. Hofheinz

Abstract

This essay seeks to answer the question: How is the collaborative model of paradigms forwarded by Schüssler Fiorenza consistently translated into the reality of lived experience and concrete possibility? Braiding a biographical case narrative together with the theoretical development of paradigms and a creative application of space and place, the essay images collaborative paradigms in terms of a city. The spatial metaphor developed in concert with real lived experience highlights the political, embodied, and existential dimensions of biblical studies as a living scholarly practice. When conceptualized as an inhabited city, biblical studies theoretically, politically, and academically embraces both the diverse fullness of life and the processes of living as internal to biblical studies itself and as essential to flourishing within biblical studies.

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Introduction

As a biblical scholar walks around the city of biblical studies, she visits, shapes, and

is shaped by the various communities, loyalties, ideologies, power structures—that is, the

places—that organize the space of this city. Even when she sets out alone, walking this city

is not a solitary task. In her movement, she intersects and encounters a number of people.

She joins an ever-changing network of motion, weaving together an intersubjective whole

that is only bounded by the possibility of new interactions. Within this metaphor, scholarly

engagement in the urban neighborhood of biblical studies takes the form of cohabitation. It

is not just a mental endeavor; scholarship requires the body. Not only an abstract world of

ideas is affected by walking the city; imagining biblical studies spatially makes explicit its

embodied consequences and implications. Imagined in this way, graduate biblical education

theoretically, politically, and academically embraces both the diverse fullness of life and the

processes of living as internal to biblical studies itself and essential to flourishing within

biblical studies.

In the following pages, I propose that pursuing this spatial metaphor elaborates and

concretizes Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s argument for collaboration between the

paradigms of biblical studies. To accomplish this, I braid three elements: 1) a theoretical

development of paradigms indebted to (but moving beyond) Thomas Kuhn’s pivotal

formulation; 2) a creative description of a collaborative model of paradigms imagined

through the metaphor of space and place; and 3) a case study consisting of the biographical

narrative of a recent experience of graduate biblical education culminating in a

professorship. After introducing the case study, the paper transitions to unpacking the idea

of paradigms and, in the process, begins to explore what is at stake in proposing a

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collaborative model of paradigm interaction. Once accomplished, the paper asks how the

metaphors of space and place can expand and enrich a practical understanding of

collaborative paradigms in biblical studies. Throughout, the theory is tested alongside and in

conversation with the lived experience evidenced in the biographical narrative. In the end,

this triadic engagement leads the paper into a final imagining of what it might look like to

move between the places of biblical studies as an equal, responsible, and accountable

citizen of the city.

Walking Biblical Studies with T1: A Biographical Case

For over a decade, T was on the path of graduate religious education. Immediately

upon graduating from the Caribbean equivalent of college with a major in English and a

minor in Geography, T assumed a position as a high school English teacher. After two

unsatisfying years of teaching, T began searching more intensely for meaning in his life,

and hoping to find answers, he entered seminary. Six years later, the United Methodist

Church ordained him and he began working as the pastor of five rural Caribbean

congregations ranging in size from 29 to 120 parishioners. Because these churches were

unable to support a pastor independently, T’s position entailed preaching three sermons a

Sunday and five sermons on high holy days. As a couple more years passed, T realized

that while preaching and visioning animated him, most of his pastoral duties came as a

“chore.” He felt alive while teaching, leading workshops, running seminars, and developing

education programs, not in the day-to-day administration and care of the minister’s office.

Ultimately, T “faced that reality and named it.” He headed back to school, this time in the

1 The following narrative is based on personal communication with T in December 2008. “T” will be used as a pseudonym throughout the essay to protect his privacy.

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United States. During his education, he never ceased serving as a church minister. It was

only after receiving his doctorate and accepting a tenure-track teaching position that T took

a potentially permanent break from the pastorate in order to focus without distraction on his

work in academia.

T reports that he was actively engaged in the church and with the bible throughout

his childhood and early life. During these years, T imbibed that every life has a purpose and

that part of the human task is to discover this purpose. While teaching English however, the

“abject meaninglessness in the lives of his students and the lack of opportunities for their

future” inescapably confronted him. This contradicted his deeply held assumptions about

the purposiveness of human life and motivated him to pursue the path of seminary. There

were few vocational choices available in his Caribbean home, and most of these fell within

the bounds of civil service. As he watched most of his friends accept this occupational path,

get married, and set up a seemingly stable future, he realized that he would not be likewise

content. He needed something else, and he looked to the bible and to faith for assistance.

Seminary promised to help him find the meaning of life beyond the obvious choices of his

island’s occupational opportunities. In the process, T discovered his “purpose in life was to

help persons find their meaning in life.” Although he continued to be particularly interested in

the bible, the accessibility of critical movements in theology and ethics claimed his interest

during these seminary years, leading him to focus in contemporary trends in theology rather

than biblical studies. While his biblical courses were, simply stated, not challenging,

theology and ethics taught critical thinking to him. These fields allowed him to start exploring

the relationships and contradictions between everyday life and the accepted “standards” of

biblical experience.

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The transition out of seminary into his first pastorates proved to be a “culture shock

of an enormous nature.” While in seminary he had been able to select and shape his

experience to embrace an integrated and critical engagement with culture and the bible

together, his churches proved a much more limited environment. He was intellectually out of

step with a majority of the parishioners in the rural, isolated and poor communities, many of

whom had little schooling. Broadly speaking, his congregants looked toward the bible as the

clear and perfect prototype upon which to model their lives. “Most persons wanted to be like

Abraham – faithful to the hilt, perfect, morally upright, etc.,” and much of the preaching

simply and unquestioningly called them to this standard. The congregants struggled to let

their lives enter into their reading of the bible. T worked to open up alternative ways of

thinking about the biblical narratives in his bible studies. However, his concern with the

ways in which the biblical stories inform and are informed by everyday life experience or

cultural situations remained distant from the congregants’ way of thinking.

In his second year in the pastorate, the distance between this approach to the bible

and the living needs of his congregations was brought into sharper relief by his participation

in a World Council of Churches event in Brazil. During this event, T took part in an

interactive bible study that utilized the experience of being in the crowd of participants to re-

envision the experience of the crowd in a number of gospel narratives. The energy and

meaningfulness of the experience was fantastic. The Brazilian participants threw their

voices and bodies into the activity, which physically brought to life the energy of the crowds

in the biblical narratives. Working to facilitate moving between the approaches,

expectations, and discourses of biblical studies transitioned into a conscious and an

ongoing challenge for T in the pastorate, and later in the academy.

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Already at the age of 13, T had been jarred out of a literal approach to the biblical

text when he realized disconcertingly that that the infamous ‘apple’ was missing from the

Genesis 3 text. After reading Paradise Lost, T began to make sense of how interpretations

come together to filter and shape textual understandings. Then, while taking classes to

become a lay preacher in college, T was confronted by historical critical problematics such

as the documentary hypothesis and the synoptic problem. T reports that by the time he

entered seminary, he had a “less than pristine view of the bible,” although he continued to

hold a number of “Jesus elements” as theologically normative. T was primarily

hermeneutically oriented in his approach to the bible when he entered the pastorate. In

stark contrast to his congregants, the essential quality of the interpretive relationship

between the reader and the text was his foremost concern.

Before leaving seminary, T had been advised that continuing an academic path

would fit his interests and skills better than accepting a position in the local church. At the

time, T states that he “did not have that courage.” But as the distance between his own

interests and those of his congregation became more and more evident, he realized that

this advice had been correct. T enrolled somewhat by happenstance at a university in the

United States that viewed the bible as claiming the same authority as any other literary

work. Here, his advisor pushed him away from his stated interest in Job, theodicy, and

questions of meaning into a thesis seeking to articulate necessary elements of a Caribbean

hermeneutics. This proved pivotal to his future. In the course of his research, he stumbled

upon postcolonial theory for the first time and fully by chance. Because it was off the radar

of this university’s department, it had not been part of his education. Coming from a colonial

context, many suppositions of postcolonial thought intuitively made sense. Most importantly

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however, in this accidental discovery, T had stumbled upon a theoretical movement that

opened the door to world and culture transformation, and not just interpretive play.

At this point, T still assumed “that a biblical scholar was a biblical scholar.” That is,

although he would “learn otherwise” soon thereafter, T continued to believe that all biblical

scholars knew the same things and engaged with essentially the same skill sets. Thus, he

did not worry much about finding a theoretical or ideological fit in choosing where to pursue

his doctorate. Instead, T chose his program based on location and on the general affability

of potential advisors. In the end, he applied and was admitted to a school dedicated to world

transformation where he ironically became the student of a historical-critical and literary

biblical scholar who forthrightly acknowledged “that he knew next to nothing about what I

was doing.”

During his years of doctoral education, T recognized the necessity of consciously

and carefully navigating the complicated politics surrounding questions of biblical authority

in the multiple communities to which he belonged. While in many ways he considered

himself an agent of transformation engaged in a liberative praxis, his student persona

required a willingness to operate with a certain level of scholastic and historical

disinterestedness. While he himself had relinquished lingering traces of theological

normativity in his approach to the bible years earlier, he accepted that his pastoral persona

entailed that he would not undermine biblical authority with his congregation. This required

“being careful how to say certain things and what things to say.” T understood that certain

discourses and questions that were allowed in some situations were taboo in others.

Similarly he knew that, in practical terms, the language he used to teach his graduate

tutorial would be incomprehensible to the participants of his church bible studies, and that

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the language of his bible study would be likewise incomprehensible to his graduate

students. Yet, although he tried hard, the transitions did not always go smoothly. One party

or another would challenge him for not doing or saying the “right” thing.

T’s relationship with his advisor (and later his dissertation committee) also proved to

require significant political prowess to successfully navigate. While T viewed historical-

critical work as a tool for yielding something viable and meaningful but not universal or

objectively concrete, his advisor wanted a more “strident” historical-critical approach.

Assuming a “doctor father” role, his advisor claimed the authority to set the bounds of

allowed pursuits. While T accepted these conditions and trusted that in the end he would

gain from the process, the other student who entered the program with him decided that the

advisor’s “sense of biblical method and reading was not compatible with hers.” In order to

become the scholar that she hoped to be required that she transfer to an institution with a

better methodological match.

Taking a different path, T worked to establish what he considered a good

compromise. Able to envision and articulate the process from his work with postcolonial

theory, T shaped himself to be as compliant as he needed to be while pushing back when

he thought it necessary. He wrote a well-received dissertation designed “to fill the standards

of the school and to appeal to the committee” that was methodologically focused in

philological analysis, text critical work, text comparisons, and tradition evaluation. In the

process, he allowed his critical transformative impetus to rest quietly in the margins and

subtext with an expectation that it would be revived post-doctorate.

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The Structures of Biblical Studies: Paradigms, Ideology, and Collaborative Diversity

On the surface and before any analysis, T’s narrative clearly evidences the interplay

of diverse and at times conflicting approaches to the bible. As a person of faith, a student, a

pastor, and an academic biblical scholar, he belonged to a diverse set of communities that

manifest different sets of assumptions and understandings, which all served to shape the

communities’ approaches to the bible. In order to make sense of these differing

approaches, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza draws upon the Kuhnian concept of a paradigm.

Stated in these terms, each of T’s communities operated under the structure of a dominant

paradigm. In order to understand the challenge that T faced, it will be helpful to break from

his narrative to explore this concept more fully. While Schüssler Fiorenza accepts many

aspects of Kuhn’s working definition in her appropriation of it, she parts sharply from him in

order to argue for a collaborative model of paradigm interaction rather than one of exclusive

competition.

Paradigms, Schüssler Fiorenza explains, manifest according to their “conceptual

coherence and common intellectual interests,” communal commitment to a particular sort of

scientific practice, and the articulation of “a common ethos.”2 Or, stated differently,

paradigms are “the cultural discursive practices”3 of scholars, that hold the normative

powers of judgment and socialization within biblical studies. They not only determine, but

2 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Democratizing Biblical Studies (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 53. Schüssler Fiorenza sets forth her initial definition of paradigms out of the basic definitions offered by common reference works. See: Michael Payne, ed., Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1997); David Macey, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (New York: Penguin Books 2001); and Andrew Edgar, “Paradigm,” in Andrew Edgar and Peter Sedgwick, eds., Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2002). 3 Schüssler Fiorenza, Democratizing, 56.

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also enforce, the standards of acceptability that delimit the possible methods and languages

of accepted practice of biblical studies. Notably, Schüssler Fiorenza’s development of this

category easily extends beyond academic scholarly communities to any community

engaging in biblical studies.

The nuance of Schüssler Fiorenza’s development of the concept of paradigms in

relation and distinction to Kuhn’s is worth further unpacking. At the outset of The Structure

of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn defines paradigms as “universally recognized

scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a

community of practitioners.”4 However, in the postscript written as a response to criticism

the book had received, Kuhn modulates the presentation of paradigms to emphasize their

communal rootedness. Here he defines paradigms according to what is shared by the

members of a particular community.5 Per Kuhn, the shared attributes of individuals who

comprise scientific communities6 include: a participation in similar education and

professional initiation, an internalization of the same technical literature with a consequent

internalization of many of the same lessons, and a sharing in a similar self-vision with the

others of the community as “uniquely responsible for the pursuit of a set of shared goals,

including the training of their successors.”7 As succinctly phrased by Schüssler Fiorenza: a

4 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), xii. 5 Ibid., 176-181. 6 It is important to note that while Kuhn is concerned with scientific communities, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is primarily concerned with any scholastic community engaged in biblical studies. This essay follows Schüssler Fiorenza in further extending the applicability of paradigms to any community engaged in biblical studies. 7 Kuhn, 177.

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paradigm “articulates a common ethos and constitutes a community of scholars formed by

its institutions and systems of knowledge.”8

It is important to recognize that paradigms are identifiable even in the absence of a

developed or agreed upon interpretation or rule system.9 Kuhn, in fact, allows for a great

deal of diversity, conflict, and dialogue internal to a paradigm community.10 What is essential

is that the community, operating under a mature paradigm, engages through a common

awareness that allows for the formulation, articulation, and delimitation of a set of

challenging “puzzles” with attainable “solutions.”11 Following Kuhn, one can understand a

paradigm as a multi-dimensional infrastructure working as a tool to effectively enable a

community to successfully and meaningfully pursue certain delimited goals within this given

infrastructure. As the shared orientation of a community, paradigms organize and operate

within an inscribed and limited domain.

T, for example, recognized that he needed to transition between two fundamentally

different discourses and approaches to the bible in his role as a tutor leading a tutorial for

an introductory bible class and in his role as a pastor leading a bible study for his

congregation. Each of these communities operated under a distinct paradigm determined by

8 Schüssler Fiorenza, Democratizing, 55. 9 “They can, that is, agree in their identification of a paradigm without agreeing on, or even attempting to produce, a full interpretation or rationalization of it. Lack of a standard interpretation or of an agreed reduction to rules will not prevent a paradigm from guiding research… Indeed, the existence of a paradigm need not imply that any full set of rules exists.” Kuhn, 44. 10 Ibid., 180. 11 “…one of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions. To a great extent these are the only problems that the community will admit as scientific or encourage its members to undertake. Other problems, including many that had previously been standard, are rejected as metaphysical, as the concern of another discipline, or sometimes as just too problematic to be worth the time.” Ibid., 37.

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the shared orientation of that community. When he failed at slipping seamlessly between

these paradigms and brought the language, concerns, and goals of one paradigm into the

other, the response ranged between simple incomprehension and confusion to challenge or

hostility. The normative theological concerns of his bible study were not deemed relevant or

appropriate to the classroom community, just as historical challenges to the biblical report

were refused in the bible study.12

It is important to note that, according to Kuhn, incommensurability between

paradigms does not indicate the truth or untruth of any given paradigm’s respective claim to

be “scientific.”13 In other words, paradigms maintain a particular—and therefore

untranslatable—structural and ideological perspective that irreconcilably conflicts with the

perspectives of other paradigms. However, still following Kuhn, it is not the case that within

the context of this difference, one paradigm can claim to be scientifically “right” or “true” over

and against another. Opposing and competing conclusions cannot be ranked in terms of

validity. This helps to make sense of how T could justify and reconcile the simultaneous

validity of diverse and seemingly contradictory interpretative engagement with the bible in

the context of different communities.

While Kuhn’s formulation would seem to leave space open for multiple paradigms to

exist simultaneously in as much as they are perspectival, he does not allow for this.

12 Along these lines, T tells the story of a time when a member of his congregation challenged him on the basis that he often failed to close his prayers “in the name of Jesus.” In fact, T had been completely unaware of this common absence. He defended his choice to not always end his prayers in this way, but realized that this was a point at which incommensurability between the paradigms he was attempting to navigate surfaced and was causing difficulty. 13 “What differentiated these various schools was not one or another failure of method—they were all ‘scientific’—but what we shall come to call their incommensurable ways of seeing the world and of practicing science in it.” Kuhn, 4.

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Paradigms, Kuhn argues, give themselves over to revolution, wherein a new paradigm,

capable of answering questions before which an older paradigm had been found

inadequate, replaces the older paradigm. The transition from paradigm to paradigm, as he

understands it, is one of over against-ness and exclusivity. Paradigms are competitive,

jealous, and hostile toward each other; they are incommensurable at the level of existence.

Importantly, however, it must not be lost that the ultimate choice “between competing

paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life. Because it

has that character, the choice is not and cannot be determined merely by the evaluative

procedures characteristic of normal science.”14 The question of paradigm choice is pivotally

rooted in the dynamics of community.

Schüssler Fiorenza contests Kuhn’s competitive construction of paradigm-

interaction. Instead, she offers that, “paradigms could also be conceived in terms of

difference and shared common ground.”15 It is quite possible, Schüssler Fiorenza posits,

that multiple paradigms exist together in such a way as to foster an engagement that

facilitates mutual corrective action. Because each paradigm uses a particular

methodological approach in order to better answer a set of questions that arises from but

yet are unanswerable from within the methodological, structural, and ideological frame of

other paradigms, each paradigm manifests a unique and important perspective.

If collaboratively re-envisioned in this way, the unique and differing voice of each

paradigm plays an important dialogical role in relationship to the other paradigms. Through

dialogue, the limitations of a singular perspective are both illuminated and supplemented.

Interaction with difference helps to shatter the false universalization of any given particular

14 Ibid., 94. 15 Schüssler Fiorenza, Democratizing, 54.

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perspective, whether between paradigms or internal to a given paradigm. Paradigms do not

require an agreed upon interpretation or rule system. Paradigms manifest with significant

levels of diversity, conflict, and dialogue interior to the community.16 Further, because

paradigms are inextricably communal, they are shaped by the ongoing dynamics of power

and determination and of contest and renegotiation by diversely placed individuals.

Stated explicitly, the ideology and ethos characterizing a unique paradigm are

formulated and maintained by power-determined and power-determining communal

processes. It follows that hegemony is possible both at the level of a delimited paradigm

community as well as in the relationship between multiple paradigms—that is, at the level of

the community of paradigms. Thus, establishing collaboration between paradigms serves

an essential role both in challenging the dominance of harmful ideologies internal to a single

paradigm, as well as in the relationship between paradigms. Re-envisioning a collaborative

relationship between paradigms and encouraging interaction with difference, rightly

challenges the impetus toward a conscious, unconscious, or dysconscious17 acceptance of

a dominating ideology’s reified authority.

Terry Eagleton lists a number of possible definitions for ideology. These range from

“a socially necessary illusion” and “false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political

16 Kuhn, 44. 17 Joyce King develops the concept of “dysconsciousness” as “an uncritical habit of mind (including perceptions, attitudes, assumptions and beliefs) that justifies inequity and exploitation by accepting the existing order of things as given.” She continues: “[Dysconsciousness] is not the absence of consciousness (that is, not unconsciousness) but an impaired consciousness or distorted way of thinking.” While she uses dysconsciousness primarily to understand racism, I believe it to be an essential category of consciousness in any situation wherein one is neither unconscious (critically unaware) nor conscious (critically aware), but rather manifesting a distorted critical awareness for whatever reason. King supports the usefulness of extending this category in her first footnote. Joyce King, “Dysconscious Racism: Ideology, Identity, and the Miseducation of Teachers,” in The Education Feminism Reader, ed. Lynda Stone (New York: Routledge, 1994), 338, 346.

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power” through “the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life” and

“a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class” to “the indispensable

medium through which individuals live out their relation to social structures” and “action

oriented sets of beliefs.”18 Simply stated, there are certain processes and structures through

which meaning comes to the fore. In the words of Michèle Barrett: “Ideology is a generic

term for the processes by which meaning is produced, challenged, reproduced,

transformed.”19

According to ideological orientation, different meanings can be (and will be) claimed

of the same phenomenon or idea.20 Further, the process of working to critically recognize

ideological dynamics is itself ideologically oriented and therefore particularized. When an

ideology claims a false comprehensive universality for itself and correspondingly attains a

reified and dominant status to the exclusion of other ideological perspectives, it achieves

hegemony; thereby it successfully coerces voluntary participation in its ideological goals by

naturalizing and universalizing its own (actually limited and particular) applicability and

validity. The effective counter to the domination of this false universalization rests in the

recognition of other, multiple, and diverse perspectives that continually present themselves.

Just as per Kuhn, the inability of established paradigms to meaningfully answer questions

toward which they lead instigates ongoing, creative development of new paradigms; the

coerced naturalization and universalization of hegemonic ideology is never complete. The

18 Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 2007), 1-2. 19 Michèle Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis (New York: Verso, 1985), 97. 20 The complexity of this situation appears in the caution given by The Post-Modern Bible when attempting to define ideology: “Such definitions [of ideology] are, of course, never neutral; they are vested with sociopolitical significance in their own right.” Bible and Culture Collective, The Postmodern Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 272.

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inescapable limitations of an ideology’s particularity lead to various alternative formulations,

force a reworking of the processes by which meaning is produced, and eventually lead to

the creation of a new ideological formulation.

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza posits four distinct paradigms operative within

contemporary biblical studies. The first, the religious-the*logical-scriptural paradigm,

understands and hermeneutically explores Scripture as the revealed, authoritative Word of

God, and manifests in wide variety of forms ranging from the ancient/medieval

establishment of a fourfold sense to the modern critical narrative and hermeneutic

the*logical approaches.21 Within T’s narrative, his various church communities illustrate this

paradigm most clearly; they value and respect the bible as God’s authoritative

communication and guide to human life. As evidenced in his bible study’s mode of

engagement, this paradigm delineates the types of questions, the languages, and

approaches the community takes to explore the biblical when energetically struggling and

debating with the meaning of the Word of God.

The second, the critical-scientific-modern paradigm, uses a dyadic sign/referent

model employed by assumedly value-neutral and objective scholarship to derive positive

and unequivocal “facts” of biblical interpretation. This paradigm prevails in the positivist and

scientific modern university.22 T’s doctoral advisor openly acknowledged the dominance of

this paradigm and correspondingly required a “strident” use of historical-critical method and

21 Schüssler Fiorenza, Democratizing, 63-4. 22 Ibid., 67-8.

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scientific approaches. The result, reports T, was to “historically infect” him with the use of

the historical-critical.23

The third, the cultural-hermeneutic-postmodern paradigm, emphasizes the historicity

and contextuality of biblical studies as a process of understanding biblical texts, and the

functions of these texts, as located within the interacting languages, traditions, and horizons

of both the text and reader.24 Until his discovery of postcolonial theory, which was his

entrance into the fourth paradigm, this was the dominant paradigm informing T’s personal

engagement with the bible. The realization that an “apple” does not actually appear in the

Genesis 3 account caused T to begin pulling together the webs of interpretation. As a result,

T concerned himself with pursuing the interpretative relationships between the reader and

the text, the ways in which they mutually inform each other (with or without conscious

attention), and the ways in which a method can be fostered so as to promote intentional and

consequential interpretative engagement between the reader and the text. His entry into the

American academy placed him in the midst of an institution and community centered under

this paradigm, and his thesis seeking to articulate the elements of a Caribbean hermeneutic

fit naturally within this paradigm’s languages and goals.

The fourth, the intercultural/interreligious-emancipatory-radical democratic paradigm,

manifests an overarching commitment to change structures and patterns of domination and

dehumanization. This paradigm “investigates the ways in which scriptural texts and icons

exercise influence and power in cultural, social and religious life” in order to “redefine the

self-understanding of biblical interpretation in ethical, rhetorical, political and radical

23 “Of course, he has so infected me with enough historical-critical stuff that I am historically infected… historically infected is correct.” T, personal communication, December, 2008. 24 Schüssler Fiorenza, Democratizing, 71-2.

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democratic terms.”25 In discovering postcolonial theory, T discovered a language for

interacting with the bible in a way that previously had to be subsidiary or derivative.

Correspondingly, he was able to make explicit that he approached the bible for the

purposes of promoting human life and struggling against structures that work against it.

Interpretation and hermeneutics transitioned into a set of liberative tools to be used for

these purposes.

Creating a City: Space, Place, and Human Activity

An essential point warrants emphasis: people are not reducible to paradigms. In his

narrative, T regularly trespassed the boundaries of any single paradigm even as, at any

given time, his perspective, language, and questions were shaped by the dominant ideology

of his current community. Although paradigms and ideologies play a powerful role in

determining the languages, questions, and interactions of individuals and communities, the

two must neither be confused nor identified. A paradigm is an ideological structure formed

out of a shared orientation of a community that establishes and enforces a set of

commitments and language by which to attain those commitments. Paradigms, like all

human-created structures, are transitory constructions. People form them; people change

them; and people tear them down. Most importantly, it is people who are responsible for

interacting with the structures of other paradigms and with those people who inhabit that

structure. While a person’s location within a particular paradigm determines which particular

field of vision, or perspective, is open to her while she remains within that structure, it

always remains the person who acts and who is accountable for that action. Exclusivity,

25 Ibid., 81.

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incommensurability, or jealousy between paradigms neither necessarily entails nor justifies

similarly exclusive and dominating human behavior. Thus, although paradigms ideologically

conflict and oppose other paradigms, ultimately it is the interaction of the people and

communities shaping and shaped by the ideological systems of paradigms that must be

considered. At root, to explore the paradigms of biblical studies is to explore a human

activity.

To say that biblical studies is a human activity claims that biblical studies necessarily

occurs in and through the qualities of human life. Because human life is rooted in

experiences of spatiality, transitioning explicitly into the language of space and place will

help to theoretically concretize how a collaborative relationship between paradigms can be

understood. While Schüssler Fiorenza’s advancement of the ekklesia and forum as central

categories begins to establish a spatial metaphor, the collaborative paradigm model is

benefited by further elaboration in the metaphorical language of space and place.

There are many varying attempts to understand the relationship between space and

place. Edward Casey organizes the field according to two primary streams of thought. The

first holds space to be infinite, empty, and a priori. In this view, space precedes the

construction of places. “By ‘space’ is meant a neutral, pre-given medium, a tabula rasa onto

which the particularities of culture and history come to be inscribed, with place as the

presumed result.”26 Space is itself a universal and undifferentiated generality, a blank

environment, and prior to the formation of any particularity. But whether anything

indeterminate, unbounded, and generalized can be livable is phenomenologically and

26 Edward Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time,” in Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996), 14.

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ontologically questionable. Certainly, at the very least, a blank environment is outside of

human experience. Just as existence necessitates the spatial particularity taken up by the

human body, humans encounter the environment as something already with form. It is

never blank. Thus, even should an empty, amorphous, or indeterminate space exist, it

would have little to no practical meaning. It would be absent from human interaction or

presence, and thus, not only be irrelevant, but also unapproachable in a concrete sense by

human thought.

In the words of Casey, this is ultimately a question of whether we are “to believe that

human experience starts from a mute and blank ‘space’ to which placial modifiers such as

‘near,’ ‘over there,’ ‘along that way,’ and ‘just here’ are added… Or [whether we] are to

believe that the world comes configured in odd protuberances….”27 Perhaps, place is more

rightly claimed as prior to space. Always and without contradiction, at the point at which a

person enters experience and perceives the world, she does so from a particular place. “We

come to the world…as already placed there.”28 The particular place from which one has the

possibility of perception and experience gives access to space. The particular qualities of a

place constitute the potential qualities of a perception. Casey is careful to modulate this with

the equally constituted nature of places. While an individual’s perception is determined by

her place, she in turn impacts this same place. Further, she has the opportunity to move

from this place into a different place. The inescapable nature of human experience as

rooted in a particular place is both as constituted and as constituting.29

27 Ibid., 15. 28 Ibid., 18. 29 “Perception remains as constitutive as it is constituted. This is especially evident when we perceive places: our immersion in them is not subjection to them, since we may modify their influence even as we submit to it.” Ibid, 19. The concepts of “structural position” and

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There is a clear correspondence between a place, so understood, and with a

paradigm as it was formulated above. Both signify a particularity that is, on the one hand,

constituted by and, on the other hand, constituting the possibilities available to individual or

communal human activity. When a person reads the bible, he is always already situated in a

determining place constituted by his social-cultural contextuality and the interpretive and

theoretical frameworks to which he has access. Just as there is not a neutral and empty

prior space in which places are formed, there is not a neutral and generic engagement with

text through which the particular goals and processes of meaning production are formed:

“readers do not engage texts ‘in themselves.’”30 The goals of a pre-existing paradigm

facilitate and constitute the formulation of his questions, methods, and resulting answers.

However, through this engagement, the reader participates in the communal shaping and

focusing of the paradigm. He participates in constructing the paradigm. Further, he has the

opportunity to move from this paradigm to another. Or metaphorically speaking, he has the

opportunity to move from place to place.

Resourcing Michel de Certeau further unpacks the correspondence between place

and paradigm. For de Certeau, a place indicates a structure of relationship; a stable

configuration of elements put into relationship with one another.31 Just as a home organizes

“subject position” developed by Laclau and Mouffe in Hegemony and the Socialist Strategy, and drawn upon by Schüssler Fiorenza, align naturally with the dual quality of human experience as constituted and constituting. Schüssler Fiorenza, Democratizing, 110. 30 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 149. 31 “A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place). The law of the ‘proper’ rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own ‘proper’ and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions.”

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a variety of physical and psychological elements into a particular functional and aesthetic

structure, a paradigm organizes a variety of material and ideological elements into a

particular functional and aesthetic structure. Both of these organizational systems represent

only one temporally limited construction out of many possible. They are a contingent

arrangement of elements, and nothing in their own nature requires these particular elements

to relate to each other in this particular way.32

Thus, the action and consciousness of a scholar is necessarily particularized by her

paradigm—that is, by the place in which she stands. The ideology of this paradigm, as the

“process by which meaning is produced, challenged, reproduced, transformed,”33 inevitably

shapes her engagement. It determines and enforces the language, methods, and “puzzles”

of her biblical study. But, just as the movement of people from place to place is natural and

undeniable, a scholar should not be understood to be limited to any particular paradigm.

She has the option of reshaping and/or moving from this original place to another place.

She recognizes that the structure of her current place is only one contingent gathering of

elements out of many possible. She recognizes that it is particular. Understood in this way,

a false claim of universality, the hegemony of a dominant paradigm of biblical studies, takes

the form either of house arrest or agoraphobia. To the extent that a scholar is coerced into

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984), 117. 32 Following Laclau and Mouffe, this is the condition of possibility for hegemony. If the particular structure of a paradigm were necessarily the only option there would not be the possibility of alternative paradigms and the given paradigm would have some sort of rightful claim to universality. “In order to have hegemony, the requirement is that elements whose own nature does not predetermine them to enter into one type of arrangement rather than another, nevertheless coalesce, as a result of an external or articulating practice.” In the context of this paper, I understand the articulating practice to be the role of ideology. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics Second Edition (London: Verso, 2001), xii. 33 Barrett, 97.

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viewing a limited place as the totality of her options, the doors have been locked and the

possibility of her dynamic movement out into the city of biblical studies has been removed.

To the extent that a scholar fears moving beyond the security and stability of her particular

place, she exhibits a form of agoraphobia. Rightly understood, paradigms are simply the

places that organize and create the space of biblical studies.

Understanding biblical studies as a space encompassing these multiple places

reestablishes a focus on the agency of human activity, as an individual creatively and

dynamically inhabits, constructs, and moves between paradigms. Spaces exist through the

activity of people, because they are formed out of human activity. In the words of de

Certeau: a “space is a practiced place.”34 A space has none of the stability of placial

structures; it is indeterminate and multivalent. Space is a category of the ever-moving

possibility of human encounter. Only the movement of a person from place to place brings

the multiplicity of places into relationship. He brings into relationship a space.35 The notion

of a space has content only in relation to a person’s dynamic interaction with places either

through movement or rest. Paradigms are the places that human activity brings into

relationship and thus forms into the space of biblical studies. Biblical studies, developed in

this way, is the dynamic opening of relational possibility by placed people moving between

(or resting in) the particular locations of distinct paradigms.

By positing biblical studies as a space organized by the places of multiple

paradigms, the possibility of collaboration is determined by how people employ their powers

34 de Certeau, 117. 35 “Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities… it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a ‘proper.’” Ibid.

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to navigate and draw into relationship the distinct locations of differing paradigms. Reframed

according to the spatial metaphor, the problem of collaboration becomes a problem of

transit. How does a person get from place to place? Places that are metaphorically close

together (more similar) are more easily traveled between than locations more disparately

placed. The limits of collaboration are the limits of the human creativity and innovation in

developing methods of transportation between ever more distant points. Just as Heidegger

insists that the boundaries of space are not stopping points but beginnings,36 the boundaries

of biblical studies are no more and no less than the beginnings of new opportunities to

begin further diverse interactions. The built space of biblical studies understood this way is

not bounded by exclusion but by processes of inclusion.37 Stated differently, the city of

biblical studies is “the radical democratic emancipatory space of possibility and vision.”38

36 “A space is something that has been made room for, something that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.” Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1975), 155. 37 It is worth noting that Schüssler Fiorenza posits that the “overlap” between the “overlapping circles” of biblical paradigms is what “constitutes the ever-shifting heart of ‘common ground’ of biblical studies on the whole, whereby the incompatible elements of each paradigm—those which would be at the center in a competitive construction—become progressively decentered.” The argument I am presenting here in terms of understanding biblical studies as a space organized by the particular places of the paradigms takes the conversation in a slightly different direction. Rather than being primarily concerned with questions of overlap, agreement, or intersection (although it is this as well), my formulation emphasizes the quality of biblical studies as rooted in an undetermined and shifting potential of human action. In this way, it goes beyond recognition of overlap to accept interactions between irreconcilable places as also forming the space of biblical studies. Schüssler Fiorenza, Democratizing, 55. 38 Ibid., 119

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Radically Democratizing the City: Politics, Power, and Human Interaction

The discussion thus far has primarily considered the human individual as placed and

active. However, it is not as solitary individuals that humans live into either paradigms or the

places of the world. Indeed, “action…is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be

deprived of the capacity to act.”39 Human life is communal life, and, likewise, paradigms

articulate a shared ethos of a community.40 Further, at any point at which humans engage

with each other, there will necessarily be some element of organization and government.41

As Hannah Arendt writes: “Before men began to act, a definite space had to be secured and

structure built where all subsequent actions could take place, the space being the public

realm of the polis and its structure the law.”42 How then should biblical studies be

understood as a space organized by the multiple places of paradigms in relationship to

human interaction, or community, and not simply human action?

While a solitary individual can command a sort of force or strength, this is not

sufficient for opening public space. The power to open spaces requires togetherness; power

requires a plurality of acting subjects.43 Following Arendt, what keeps a space open is the

potentiality brought forth by people being together, a boundless dynamis she names as

39 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 188. 40 It is important to remember that, “[a paradigm] articulates a common ethos and constitutes a community of scholars formed by its institutions and systems of knowledge.” Schüssler Fiorenza, Democratizing, 53. 41 Margaret Kohn, for instance, offers a discussion of this in the chapter “Space and Politics,” in Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 13-26. 42 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 194-5. 43 Ibid., 201.

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power.44 Power is the potential arising when people act together. If graduate biblical

education takes seriously Schüssler Fiorenza’s challenge to “focus on evolving educational

democratic processes of communication for a multiplicity of religious and cultural

communities,”45 it will perform its basic duty – namely, opening up a space for biblical

studies by fostering the power founded in togetherness and interaction. For this to happen

however, the paradigms of biblical studies must “be constructed in democratic terms as

promoting collaboration, interaction and dialogue/debate.”46 The collaborative model of

paradigm interaction that the spatial metaphor concretizes is pivotal. Just as multiple places

each occupy a unique location and yet by means of their simultaneous existence are

organized by human action into a unified spatial relationship, the multiple paradigms of

biblical studies, while circumscribing a unique ideological perspective incommensurable

with other paradigms, can be organized into a coherent and collaborative space of biblical

studies.

Imagine these paradigms as buildings giving architectural shape to the city of biblical

studies. Each building is independently built to meet certain needs, accomplish certain

goals, and house certain resources. For instance, there might be a library, a store, an

apartment building, and a house. Structurally, they have nothing to do with one another;

they are non-relational. Human communities, however, bring these self-standing structures

into relationship by forming neighborhoods. In so doing, the individual uniqueness of each

44 “Power is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence… Power is always, as we would say, a power potential and not an unchangeable, measurable, and reliable entity like force or strength. While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.” Ibid., 200. 45 Schüssler Fiorenza, Democratizing, 25. 46 Ibid., 55.

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building is transformed into a collaborative part of a collective whole without compromising

the self-contained and unique integrity of each building. When a given structure is no longer

needed or is no longer able to fulfill its purpose, people renovate, abandon, or demolish it.

Once again, the stress rests on human action. A collaborative model of paradigms

claims a collaborative model of human interaction, and a collaborative model of human

interaction, envisioned according to Schüssler Fiorenza’s ekklesia of wo/men, is rooted in

liberative human politics. It draws upon the deep well of radical democracy. This point has

been well made by Schüssler Fiorenza in her development of the ekklesia as the

transformative political space for a radical democratic biblical studies. As she states in The

Power of the Word: “[An] ekklesia of wo/men is historically and theoretically conceptualized

as the alternative—not the counter or anti-space—to empire. Ekklesia is constituted not by

super- and subordination but by egalitarian relationships. It is not a reversal of kyriarchal

domination and subordination but a space that is ‘already’ and ‘not yet.’”47 While empire is

characterized by over/against-ness, super- and subordination, and the domination of

hierarchical dualisms of various sorts, the ekklesia of wo/men opens up new totally other

spaces for a radical democratic participation of all wo/men.

By moving to the model of the ekklesia of wo/men and correspondingly to a

collaborative model of paradigm interaction, a space is opened for effectively fostering the

plurality and diversity required to counter the false-universalism of a dominating ideology

hegemony. “There is no radical and plural democracy without renouncing the discourse of

47 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, The Power of the Word (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 70.

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the universal and its implicit assumption of a privileged point of access to ‘the truth,’ which

can be reached only by a limited number of subjects.”48

Radical democratic plurality, at the level of paradigms, is achieved by fostering the

equal presence of multiple ideological perspectives similar to how neighborhoods require

multiple buildings of various types. Multiplicity illuminates the limitation of each paradigm’s

vantage to the processes produced by its ideological perspective. Further, and equally as

important, a radical democratic collaboration of paradigms promises to catalyze an ever-

expanding awareness and condemnation of excluding other paradigmatic perspectives.49 As

Laclau and Mouffe state: “the multiplication of political spaces and the preventing of the

concentration of power in one point are…preconditions of every truly democratic

transformation of society.”50 Biblical studies, thus conceptualized, would be “a space for

people to dialogue, debate, argue, and collaborate with one another, to seek not only to

understand the diverse voices of biblical texts but also to explore, assess, and evaluate

them in terms of their impact on contemporary publics and religious communities.”51

48 Laclau and Mouffe, 191-2. The quote begins: “The discourse of radical democracy is no longer the discourse of the universal; the epistemological niche from which ‘universal’ classes and subjects spoke has been eradicated, and it has been replaced by a polyphony of voices, each of which constructs its own irreducible discursive identity. This point is decisive….” 49 Quoted by Schüssler Fiorenza in The Power of the Word, Sheldon Wolin seems to support this point in recognizing the contradiction between the reality of democracy’s exclusive practices in history and its ideal: “Now while it is true that the demos refused to extend democratic citizenship to women, metics, and slaves, that refusal unlike the refusal of the aristocrat to admit the demos to high office, would contradict the idea of democratic equality. Or, stated differently, democracy was and is the only political ideal that condemns its own denial of equality.” Schüssler Fiorenza, The Power of the Word, 76. 50 Laclau and Mouffe, 178. 51 Ibid.

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Walking the City of Biblical Studies

Biblical studies approached through the metaphor of space and place opens into the

explicitly dynamic and political realm of human interaction. It becomes a city. Each

paradigm manifests as one structure amongst many structures, one building amongst many

buildings. And like buildings, each paradigm is recognized as a human construction,

designed for a particular purpose. People build paradigms out of the materials at hand, for

the needs of the day, and people will remodel and demolish these buildings as time passes

and needs change. No urban structure is meant to be everlasting and no urban structure is

confused as all-encompassing. People move from building to building just as T navigated

from paradigm to paradigm.

T, however, needed to move silently and secretively. While he belonged to various

communities that each required acknowledgement and respect for the perspective of a

particular dominating paradigm, his path necessitated that he find ways to move effectively

betwixt and between. He worked to slip unnoticed from the perspective of one community to

the next because of the professional and political risks to trespassing ideological

boundaries. T self-reflexively allows that his familiarity with and predisposition toward

postcolonial thought offered him many theoretical and practical tools to understand how to

accomplish this surreptitious movement. He felt justified in maintaining a slippery identity

that could move between communities. He did not view his accompanying compromises as

challenging his scholastic or personal integrity, but he does acknowledge that they came at

a cost to the fullness of his education and the transformative impetus of his scholarship.

Schüssler Fiorenza’s collaborative paradigm model frees individuals to move visibly

between paradigms and, correspondingly, to be accountable for this movement. It opens

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the door to imagining graduate biblical education as a journey through an urban city. Within

this imagining, meaningful engagement in biblical studies manifests in cohabitation, living

into, dwelling. Graduate education becomes a process of learning how to be an equal,

responsible, and political participant in the radical democratic promise of the public space.

As those who engage each other in biblical studies walk, each in her own way and for her

own purposes, they visit, shape and are shaped by the various communities, loyalties,

ideologies, and power structures—in other words, the places—that organize the city of

biblical studies, including a multiplicity of political, religious, social, and economic structures.

Just as one runs errands in the neighborhood, this walking biblical studies collects,

combines, and explores the combined available resources according to the needs of the

day. Like running errands, even if one sometimes sets out alone this is not a solitary task. It

is an activity that will intersect and engage a number of people. The network of motion

weaves together an always changing intersubjective whole that is truly only bounded by the

possibility for new options.52

A myriad of steps synchronically and diachronically shape, traverse, and utilize the

many places that have been constructed for the purposes of living. As de Certeau states:

“Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects etc., the trajectories it

‘speaks.’”53 In traversing the space of biblical studies, what if one engages just as

pragmatically, resourcefully, responsibly, and joyfully as I walk my urban neighborhood

streets? I know that I will be encountered by the unexpected, possibly by the violent, and

probably by the heart-wrenching. In walking, I know that I am not alone, yet that I will at

52 “The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces, it remains daily and indefinitely other.” de Certeau, 93. 53 Ibid., 99.

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times have to forge a new way. I know that I will encounter others to whom I am drawn and

those from whom I am repulsed, but that these interactions are necessary.54 In walking, I

am reminded that the world extends far beyond my own reach and vision, but that by

interacting with others my reach will extend to embrace more radically the fullness of life

and opportunity that the world offers. In walking, I see, smell, hear, feel, and live the

communal consequences of political decisions. Urban planning is not a question impacting

others, but a question of my own wellbeing. In walking, I remap the changing structures of

my city. The city of biblical studies will be brought to life by the freedom and visibility of each

footstep.

54 Ibid., 103.