Joshua, Conquest and Jesus (4)

Ricoeur’s question demands some metacritical dimension to this process of suspicion. For this reason, Habermas’s socio-critical hermeneutics, an approach to texts that ‘seeks to penetrate beneath their surface-function to expose their role as instruments of power, domination, or social manipulation,’ are frequently employed in tandem with Ricoeur’s hermeneutical method.⁴⁴ Exposing the vehicles of power and control in a text may lead to both the liberation of persons and to the liberation of texts.⁴⁵

Further suspicion is levelled at the conquest narratives from an ideological perspective.⁴⁷ Robert Allen Warrior, an Osage Indian, challenges any attempt to appropriate the deliverance story of Exodus-Joshua in a liberation theology for Native Americans.⁴⁸ Dismissing the historical accuracy of Exodus-Joshua, Warrior suspiciously searches out his own specific culture in the text and argues that Native Americans can better identify with the Canaanites, both of whom were seen as objects for conversion or annihilation.⁴⁹ Confronting the conquests of Joshua as a narrative (rather than historical) problem, and employing an ideological perspective enables Warrior to show that ‘the ideology of one liberation reading has paradoxically become the dominant reading against which another liberation reading reacts,’ and he argues that belief in Yahweh the deliverer means that the world is not safe from Yahweh the conqueror.⁵⁰ Consequently, Warrior argues that if Christian theological reflection or political action is going to seek any retrieval of the conquest narratives, the Canaanites must be at the centre of the interpretive process.⁵¹ Subsequently, we must critically assess the impact that the ideas in the conquest narratives have had on Christians’ consciousness and ideology, and we must decide whether to accept the model of leadership and social change that the text proposes.⁵²