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Joshua, Conquest and Jesus (5)

*J James Tissot, Ai is Taken by Joshua (Josh. 8:19)
Today is another installment of my Advanced Workshop essay on the place of Joshua and the conquest narratives in a Christian faith.

So far we have looked through the suspicions of Joshua from the point of view offered by Ricoeur's hermeneutics of suspicion, examining the way symbolism is used in the text to offer us a world view. We've also critiqued the text by exposing the text as an instrument of power and domination, and taken to task the ideology that the text proposes.

Today we begin on the track of retrieval, using the full power of Ricoeur's hermeneutics to look at ways of progressing from the first naïvety through the suspicions and beyond into the possibilities of retrieving the text and discovering a second naïvety.

I hope you find this discussion helpful, stimulating and enjoyable. Ricoeur is crucial for any contemporary discussion of hermeneutics, for engaging with the Bible, and for thinking about how to retain faith even though everything one believes in is questionable.

Please leave your comments and reflections.

Towards a Retrieval of the Conquest Narratives

For Ricoeur, the questions ‘Do I myself believe that? What do I make of these symbolic meanings?’ are a call to interpretation, to ‘enter into a relationship with symbols that is emotionally intense and at the same time critical … I must follow the exegete and become implicated in the life of one symbol, one myth.’53 The reader must follow the movement of the text from what it says, to what it talks about.54 Ricoeur sees this as entering into the circle of hermeneutics: you must understand in order to believe, but you must believe in order to understand.55 The second naïveté that Ricoeur seeks is only available through hermeneutics: to believe, you must interpret.56
This is the path the socio-critical and ideological observations above have allowed us to follow in interpreting Joshua. The pre-understanding of Joshua as a narrative in which God offers salvation and requires purity through ethnic cleansing has animated the interpretation and allowed us to see new connections among things.57
But, as Ricoeur says, ‘hermeneutics is not yet reflection.’58 Interpretation at this level has still not been able to draw true meaning from the text because it is still bound within the exegesis of the text. There is a third stage to understanding, which Ricoeur encapsulates in a beautiful aphorism: the symbol gives rise to thought.59 For Ricoeur, the goal of hermeneutics is to give rise to thought, to result in reflection. And this becomes a point of departure, a moment of both ‘forgetfulness of hierophanies’ and of restoration as the symbol gives rise to thought, to positing and postulation.60 Hermeneutic reflection is essentially ‘demythologizing,’ dissolving the myth as explanation in order that the myth as symbol can be restored or retrieved.61
Ricoeur notes two trapdoors in this move from symbolism to reflection. Firstly, the text can be reduced to allegory.62 But an allegory is always temporary and its intercessory function falls away as soon as the text has been understood itself.63 Therefore, ‘we must think, not behind the symbols, but from the symbols, according to the symbols.’64 The second peril is the temptation to gnosis, the temptation of a ‘dogmatic mythology’ that rationalises symbols.65 Ricoeur eschews the exteriority that this betrays. For the symbol must give rise to thought: philosophical reflection must seek to appropriate the text at hand. By appropriation Ricoeur means this:
that the interpretation of a text culminates in the self-interpretation of a subject who thenceforth understands himself (sic) better, understands himself differently, or simply begins to understand himself. … In short, in hermeneutical reflection – or in reflective hermeneutics – the constitution of the self is contemporaneous with the constitution of meaning.’66
Appropriation seeks to make ‘mine’ that from which I am separated, that which is foreign to me, that which is not or has ceased to be mine.67 Thus, hermeneutic reflection is fundamentally ethical insofar as it critiques morality and gives rise to transformation.68 It is not the text per se but the interpretation of the text that transforms.

Footnotes

53 Ricoeur, Conflict, 294.
54 Ricoeur, Interpretation, 87–88.
55 Ricoeur, Conflict, 294. This is in distinction to the hermeneutic circle as understood by Romanticist thinkers as a circle between two subjectivities (the reader’s and the author’s) or the projection of the reader’s subjectivity onto the text. Cf. Ricoeur, Reader, 315.
56 Ricoeur, Conflict, 294.
57 Ricoeur, Conflict, 295; Ricoeur, Interpretation, 67.
58 Ricoeur, Conflict, 295.
59 Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (trans. Emerson Buchanan; Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 348.
60 Ricoeur, Symbolism, 349.
61 Ricoeur, Conflict, 296; Ricoeur, Symbolism, 350.
62 Ricoeur, Conflict, 295–96.
63 Ricoeur, Symbolism, 163–64.
64 Ricoeur, Conflict, 295, italics original.
65 Ricoeur, Conflict, 295-96.
66 Ricoeur, Reader, 57, italics original.
67 Ricoeur, Freud, 35; Ricoeur, Conflict, 324.
68 Ricoeur, Conflict, 325.

Tomorrow I shall conclude the retrieval using Ricoeur's hermeneutical tools.

If you're just joining the discussion you may like to read through the rest of the essay...

See you tomorrow!

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