Textuality, Culture and Scripture: A Study in Interrelations

By Wesley A. Kort

"Textuality, Culture, and Scripture", a study of the necessary and close relations between the three concepts, describes the prominent role of texts and textuality in Western modernity and the exchange of textual for material understandings of culture that becomes apparent in the middle of the twentieth century. Taking its starting point in the turn or return in cultural studies to textuality, the argument addresses the necessary role of texts and textuality in cultural, group, and personal identities. Central to the argument is the thesis that “scripture,” rather than an occasional or optional textual category, should be seen as playing a necessary role in an adequate textual theory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781785271618

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Textuality, Culture, and Scripture

Textuality, Culture, and Scripture

A Study in Interrelations

Wesley A. Kort

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Wesley A. Kort 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952776

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-159-5 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-159-8 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

1. The Rise of a Materialist Culture

2. Textuality and Culture

3. Scripture as a Necessary Category in an Adequate Textual Theory

4. Scripture and the Bible

5. Reading the Bible as Scripture

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Preface

The Bible, even today, holds an unrivaled position of eminence and does so for many reasons. Three come readily to mind. It is the most influential text in the formation and history of Western culture and partially of others, and the culture for which it is central is not confined to religious contexts but includes everyday living. The second reason is that biblical texts constitute a complex, historically and culturally rich, and intriguing collection of ancient material that seems, even to the present day, to be an inexhaustible object of inquiry and lively scholarly debate. The third and most obvious reason is the standing and role of these texts as central for Jewish, Christian, and related religious traditions.

On the face of it, one would think that these three reasons for the Bible’s standing and role, while distinguishable, need not be at odds with one another. The first of the three has the advantage of common agreement. Even if the Bible’s contribution to the formation of Western culture is regarded by some as hindering the advance of cultural, especially scientific, interests, all would have to agree that the Bible is without rival when it comes to texts that have had a culturally formative role. The second and third reasons, however, have sponsored positions that are largely incompatible and even in conflict. One purpose of this book is to propose that the noticeable incompatibility between the second and third reasons is unfortunately exaggerated and can be eased.

The division of two kinds of interests in the Bible, scholarly and religious, is marked by exclusions imposed from both sides. Those who approach the Bible as a complex collection of historically and culturally interesting texts, an approach most related to scholarly, especially historical, pursuits, tend to exclude religious interests taken in them. This discounts the historical and cultural fact that the Bible has been and continues to be for countless people in diverse times and places crucial to their personal, group, and even cultural identities and worldviews. On the other side, religious, theological, and ecclesiastical bases for regarding the Bible highly can hold insufficient regard for historical and critical biblical scholarship. This deprives religiously motivated readings of the Bible of the richness and complexity of the texts seen in their historical and cultural contexts and developments. A basic intention of this book is to argue that these distinguishable and often contrary ways of reading the Bible can be brought into closer relation to one another. That task begins with a more adequate understanding and appreciation of the cultural status of texts and textuality. The gap is aggravated because both sides are affected by the inadequate understanding and appreciation for texts and textuality that has emerged in and from modernity and is now firmly in place.

A second purpose of this book, then, is to address and alter the current and widespread failure adequately to take into account the role and standing of texts and textuality for a viable culture and for the identities and worldviews of persons and groups. While the two approaches to reading the Bible are at odds for many other reasons, overcoming their differences depends first of all on restoring the primacy of texts and textuality in personal, group, and cultural identity, and to relate the textual category of scripture to that primacy.

In an earlier book I proposed that everyone has a scripture. This statement raised some question because it was largely misunderstood. A likely reason for the misunderstanding is that the statement could be taken as another instance of a frequently deployed but questionable apology for the study of religion and even for religion itself. This apology, which takes many forms, claims that non- or anti-religious people display, despite themselves, interests and behaviors that can be seen, at least to some degree, as religious. Apologies of this kind broaden the definition of religion so that everyone can be taken to reveal religion-like interests. This means, then, that there is nothing especially unusual about religious people. The misunderstanding of what I said arose from the assumption that scripture is and must always be a religious term and that by proposing that everyone has a scripture I was drawing the circle of religion around everybody. Apparently I had not made as clear as I thought I had that I was not using the term only in a religious or theological but also in a cultural and textual way. I assumed that I was doing with the category of scripture what is taken as commonplace for a similar term, namely canon. A wider use of canon does not mean that all who use it, such as faculty in departments of English, are religious. So, too, scripture can be a neutral as well as a religious term. Its basic connotation is of writing and, by extension, texts, and it was with that in mind that I deployed the term. If there were a better term for the task than scripture, I would use it. Because there is none, I use scripture to indicate the place or role of texts in granting persons and groups their cultural locations and identities. When I say that everyone has a scripture, I do not mean that all scriptures are religious and that by having a scripture every person or group is more or less religious. I shall argue that texts and textuality are basic to personal and group identities and people’s understanding of the world and of their places within and to it. I shall make and defend the proposition that texts having this kind of standing for people can be called their scriptures and that everybody has them.

Another reason for writing this book is that I view with regret the separation that has occurred in late modernity between religion and the wider culture, a separation that tends to impoverish the culture and to trivialize religion. Regrettably, this separation is not only accepted by many people on both the religious and secular sides of the split but even celebrated by them. While it is important to recognize that, given both the diversity of religious affiliations and the lack of them in modern culture, a separation of religious from nonreligious interests is necessary for the provision of a public arena, but this separation is practical and not a matter of necessity or principle. It is important to understand that the two sides are not, as seems widely to be taken, wholly disconnected. This sense of disconnection is due in large part to the lack on both sides of an adequate regard for the personal and cultural primacy of texts and textuality. I shall argue that texts are primary for all and that all have scriptures. However, this is not to say that all are religious. The differences between religious and nonreligious people arise from the differing texts they take as primary.

A final reason for writing this book is the concern I have for the direction of late- or postmodern culture, including academic culture, toward making practical and theoretical materialism prominent and even dominant. My concern arises not only from religious convictions, since religion, although alienated by such a culture and weakened in its potential by that alienation, can survive under those conditions. It also arises from my training in and identification with the humanities, particularly literature and literary theory. One of the principal cultural and academic roles of the humanities, and especially of literary studies, has been, until quite recently, to preserve and promulgate texts and textuality. My concern, then, is related to the course of late modern culture and the effects on academic culture of materialism because an important consequence of materialism is to compromise the primacy of texts and textuality. One of my goals, therefore, is to trace the sources and to anticipate the consequences of what could be called a materialist culture and to point out why such a descriptive is oxymoronic.

I approach the category of scripture and the questions raised by it, then, not first of all from the religious or theological but from the cultural side. Among precedents for doing so, Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach stands out. He observes, near the beginning of the book, that one can observe in human behaviors a tendency to treat some texts in a scripture-like way, revealing, he concludes, what could be called a a human propensity to scripturalize.¹ He goes on to say that, while in the West the concept of scripture has been formed primarily in reference to the Bible, we may now be in a position to see it the other way around, that is, to see understandings of the Bible as scripture as derived from a larger concept of scripture.² Even wider in implication is his assertion that no theory of language [I would add, no theory of textuality] is complete that does not include, and serve to elucidate [the category of], scripture.³ He treats the category of scripture, finally, not as indicating a kind of text or as deriving its standing from its origins, but as indicating the relation of human beings to texts so regarded, to texts as read.⁴ I take him to say, further, that reading texts as scripture is not primarily a matter of projecting a standing or role on them but rather the result of what he calls a human propensity(I would say a necessity) to scripturalize, to have a scripture.

Smith’s assertions provide a starting place and stimulus for what follows. This approach does not negate the force and significance of approaches from the religious or theological side. It is only that such approaches will have more specific purposes and goals. While we shall approach religious and theological interests toward the end, this project will not cross the threshold into those more specific discursive arenas.

Because prefaces often end with expressions of gratitude for help along the way, I want to include an expression of that kind as well, but it has to do not so much with particular persons as with my background. While my attention to biblical literature is related to the interests of literary theorists and critics in the Bible as literature, an interest that peaked during the closing decades of the previous century, turning to these interests was natural for me. But my move was less from literary studies to biblical texts than the other way around. My interests in literary studies can be traced to exposure since my youth to biblical texts.

Although it also carried costs and lacks, there were benefits in my having been raised in a Dutch Calvinist home. Textual structure was granted to my early life by reading from the Bible after meals and attending worship services on Sunday both in the morning and the evening. Central to those services were sermons, and the texts that formed the bases for these sermons alternated between the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament and the New Testament. I don’t recall when I began more deliberately to listen to these texts when read and to the sermons based on them, since the process of becoming more aware was a gradual one, but I became attentive to textually based preaching.

Pastors in our denomination were trained to preach sermons that, like Calvin’s, would be based on close readings of biblical texts. I took for granted that a sermon would involve an examination of a text and would mine its meanings and implications. This attention to the texts taught me, however unaware of it I was, respect for texts, the kinds of insights and impact texts can have, and how texts were or could be related to one’s life and world. The sermons of clergy to which I was exposed were seriously undertaken, and I still remember some of them as particularly engaging. I was not primarily drawn by sermonic rhetoric or the theology conveyed, still less by being made to feel guilt or the prospect of divine wrath. No, the preaching was aimed primarily to grant access to the meaning and force of the biblical text and its relations to the hearers’ lives.

Especially engaging for me were sermons based on biblical narratives. Colorful characters, dramatic occasions, and complicated interactions, whether in the stories of the Hebrew Bible or the narratives of the New Testament, were made vivid for me. These stories, however familiar they became, seemed always to contain yet unrecognized meanings, and I could relate to them almost effortlessly. Hearing the text read before the sermon whetted my interest for what the sermon would reveal about it. The text was always more important than the preacher or the congregation, and if the sermon had an effect it was due to what the text could be revealed to contain.

This regard for textuality largely accounts for my later interests in literary studies. While I did not bring the same expectations to literary texts that I brought to hearing biblically based sermons, many of the ingredients of those early experiences were carried over. Of special importance was a high regard for texts. In my readings of literary texts I tried to treat them with a critical attention and interpretive expectation that resembled my hearing biblical texts read and explored. I thought of literary analysis, interpretation, and evaluation as a form of service to the text and not a form of mastery over it. Even less did I catch and carry the bug of suspicion that came to infect so much of literary criticism in recent decades. I did not think that the critic stood above the text scrutinizing it for evidence of something hidden behind it, whether psychological or political, that was less honorable than the text itself, something causative to which the text cold be reduced. And I took it for granted that the meaning and force of the text was due not only to the author but also to the nature of texts and textuality.

This book, then, deals not only with the topics of texts and textuality in their relation to culture and to personal and group identities but also with the Bible as a text. It does so because biblical texts, among many other and more important things, fully extend the properties and potentials both of texts and textuality and of narrative and narrativity, especially in the invitations they offer to be read scripturally. I do not think that only biblical texts have the capacity to make contact with matters structural to a person’s or group’s identity and way of being in the world, but I do think that biblical texts have that capacity noticeably and ask to be read in that way. This book, then, ends by advocating reading the Bible not only as an interesting, complex, and engaging set of ancient texts but also as a set of texts that invite being read as scripture, that is, as addressing the locations readers occupy in their own textually conditioned worlds and as addressing those locations in order to question, alter, or replace them.

INTRODUCTION

I’ll begin by recounting what was for me a quite poignant moment. It occurred during one of the meetings the pastor of our church was directing on the Bible and how to read it. He approached the topic with an advanced knowledge of biblical languages and history, having taught at the seminary level. During this session his attention was focused on some intriguing textual configurations in passages from Isaiah. His interests were analytic and technical. When it came time toward the end of the session for feedback, a woman raised her hand and expressed uncertainty about her question’s relevance to the pastor’s presentation. Assured by him that any concern she had would be relevant, she asked, Does this mean that the Bible is really only a collection of stories and other things that ancient people shared around their campfires? Rather than address her question, he affirmed that the kind of thing he had been talking about greatly increased his regard for biblical texts. He seemed not to understand that the questioner’s point was not about the intriguing intricacies of biblical texts but about the religious standing and role of