The Pontifical Biblical Commission's Assessment of Contextual Approaches

Issued in 1993, the PBC frames its document as a response to the multiplicity of methods that have arisen in the field of critical biblical studies and the negative response in some quarters to critical biblical studies as hostile to the faith (Introduction, §A). Given this context, the PBC seeks “to indicate the paths most appropriate for arriving at an interpretation of the Bible as faithful as possible to its character, both human and divine,” and “to examine all the methods likely to contribute effectively to the task of making more available the riches contained in the biblical texts” (Introduction, §B).Footnote ²⁶ The ultimate aim of the document may be characterized as religious or pastoral: “that the Word of God may become more and more the spiritual nourishment of the members of the People of God, the source for them of a life of faith, of hope, and of love—and indeed a light for all humanity” (Introduction, §B).Footnote ²⁷

Accordingly, the PBC supplies a description of the methods and approaches in use in critical biblical interpretation. Each description ends with a brief evaluation of the method (§§I.A–F).Footnote ²⁸ Following this section on methods and approaches is a section on hermeneutical questions that discusses the philosophical hermeneutics of Bultmann, Gadamer, and Ricoeur in relation to biblical exegesis (§II.A) and the meaning of inspired Scripture with reference to the literal, spiritual, and fuller senses of ancient and medieval Christian exegesis (§II.B). The document then outlines characteristics of Catholic interpretation by discussing interpretation in the biblical tradition (§III.A) and in the tradition of the church (§III.B), and then delving into the task of the exegete (§III.C) and the relationship of biblical exegesis to other theological disciplines (§III.D). The document follows with a section on the interpretation of the Bible in the life of the church that treats the actualization of the biblical message (§IV.A), the dynamics between inculturation and actualization (§IV.B), and the use of the Bible in the church (§IV.C).

The final section of the document draws four conclusions.Footnote ²⁹ First, “biblical exegesis fulfills, in the Church and in the world, an indispensable task” (Conclusion).Footnote ³⁰ Second, the historical-critical method will remain a required component of biblical interpretation and must inform other methods. Third, despite the crucial role played by the historical-critical method, it “cannot lay claim to enjoying a monopoly” and must be supplemented by recourse to other methods of interpretation, developments in philosophical hermeneutics, and the traditions of interpretation within the Bible and the church (Conclusion).Footnote ³¹ Fourth, without diminishing its scholarly rigor or allowing theological apologetical commitments to hamper scholarly methodology and research, Catholic exegesis should “maintain its identity as a theological discipline, the principal aim of which is the deepening of faith” (Conclusion).Footnote ³²

The PBC's assessment of contextual approaches (§I.E) is especially relevant to our discussion. This section examines two contextual approaches, the liberationist approach and the feminist approach, and introduces the discussion of these approaches with an admission that readers always influence the interpretation of a given text, whether or not they realize it. This introduction to contextual approaches also recommends that interpreters bringing the contemporary concerns of real readers to the biblical text ought to “do so with critical discernment” (§I.E).Footnote ³³

The PBC treats the liberationist approach first (§I.E.1) before discussing the feminist approach (§I.E.2), in each case offering a succinct presentation of the approach's historical origins, a summation of its main principles, and an evaluation. With respect to the liberationist approach, the PBC considers of “undoubted value” liberationist hermeneutics’ profound awareness of God's saving presence, its emphasis on the communal dimension of faith, its call for a liberating praxis founded on justice and love, and its “fresh reading of the Bible that seeks to make the Word of God the light and the nourishment of the People of God in the midst of its struggles and hopes” (§I.E.1).Footnote ³⁴ Because of these features, liberationist hermeneutics “underlines the capacity of the inspired text to speak to the world of today” (§I.E.1).Footnote ³⁵

The PBC also formulates several reservations about the liberationist approach. Its first stated concern is the movement's general neglect of biblical texts that do not highlight oppression and inspire social change (§I.E.1).Footnote ³⁶ The PBC also expresses concerns over the tendency of some practitioners of liberationist approaches to analyze the Bible under the inspiration of materialist doctrines (such as the Marxist principle of class struggle), which the PBC deems “a practice that is very questionable” (§I.E.1).Footnote ³⁷ Finally, the PBC points out that the liberationist focus on earthly eschatology “has been to the detriment of the more transcendent dimensions of scriptural eschatology” (§I.E.1).Footnote ³⁸ Its evaluation ends with the recommendation that the liberationist movement clarify “its hermeneutical presuppositions, its methods, and its coherence with the faith and the Tradition of the Church as a whole” (§I.E.1).Footnote ³⁹

Turning to feminist biblical hermeneutics, the PBC acknowledges that “feminist exegesis has brought many benefits” (§I.E.2).Footnote ⁴⁰ Mentioned first is the increased number of women undertaking exegetical research and their success at recovering the presence and significance of women in the Bible and in Christian origins. The PBC also expresses appreciation for the fact that feminist exegesis ensures that new questions are asked of the biblical text, leading to new discoveries, and helping to “unmask and correct” tendentious but commonly accepted interpretations that justify women's oppression (§I.E.2).Footnote ⁴¹ Without explicitly explaining the role of feminist interpretation on this matter, the PBC remarks that a better understanding of the image of God in the Old Testament has emerged, one that affirms that the biblical God “is not a projection of a patriarchal mentality.”Footnote ⁴²

The PBC lists what it considers to be some pitfalls of feminist exegesis. First is a concern that, “to the extent that it proceeds from a preconceived judgment,” feminist exegesis risks “interpreting the biblical texts in a tendentious and, thus, debatable manner” (I.E.2).Footnote ⁴³ The PBC laments that the nature of the texts being studied means that feminist exegesis often has to argue from silence, which is insufficient for establishing a solid basis for its conclusions. The PBC also states that the feminist “attempt made, on the basis of fleeting indications in the text, to reconstitute a historical situation that these same texts are considered to have been designed to hide . . . does not correspond at all to the work of exegesis properly so called” (§I.E.2).Footnote ⁴⁴ According to the PBC, this strategy “entails rejecting the content of the inspired texts in preference for a hypothetical construction, quite different in nature” (§I.E.2).Footnote ⁴⁵ The evaluation of feminist approaches ends with a paragraph that was the subject of some controversy at the time of deciding its inclusion: “Feminist exegesis often raises questions of power within the Church, questions which, as is obvious, are matters of discussion and even of confrontation. In this area, feminist exegesis can be useful to the Church only to the degree that it does not fall into the very traps it denounces and that it does not lose sight of the evangelical teaching concerning power as service, a teaching addressed by Jesus to all the disciples, men and women” (§I.E.2).Footnote ⁴⁶

A few things can be said about the PBC's treatment of contextual approaches at this point in our discussion. To its credit, the PBC recognizes the value of contextual approaches, seen in the positive elements of its evaluation of liberationist and feminist approaches. The PBC also rightly acknowledges the influence readers have when they read a text. But one wonders what content lies behind the PBC's disclaimer that interpreters who “bring to their work points of view that are new and responsive to contemporary currents of thought . . . do so with critical discernment” (§I.E).Footnote ⁴⁷ What does the PBC understand “critical discernment” to be?

The critiques leveled at liberationist and feminist hermeneutics seem to indicate that, for the PBC, “critical discernment” has to do with employing contextual approaches in a manner that respects the meaning of the biblical texts in their original contexts. This concern appears to lie behind its critiques that liberationist approaches neglect biblical texts that do not advance liberationist causes, employ “materialist doctrines” external to the text to analyze the Bible, and downplay the transcendent aspects of eschatology contained in the Bible (§I.E.1).Footnote ⁴⁸ All of these criticisms amount to the charge that the text and its own worldview are not taken sufficiently into consideration. This charge is made explicit in the PBC's concern that “feminist exegesis, to the extent that it proceeds from a preconceived judgment, runs the risk of interpreting the biblical texts in a tendentious, and, thus, debatable manner” (§I.E.2).Footnote ⁴⁹ The PBC's concern that contextual approaches risk devaluing the biblical message finds further expression in its comments regarding the tendency of feminist exegesis “to reconstitute a historical situation that these same texts are considered to have been designed to hide” (§I.E.2).Footnote ⁵⁰

Finally, the last paragraph on feminist approaches perhaps adds another layer to what the PBC means by “critical discernment.” The PBC states that “feminist exegesis can be useful to the Church only to the degree that it does not fall into the very traps it denounces and that it does not lose sight of the evangelical teaching concerning power as service” (§I.E.2).Footnote ⁵¹ Much can be said about this statement, but I would like to draw attention to the phrase “useful to the Church.” Achieving what is “useful to the Church” appears to be a key factor in deciding whether contextual approaches are a valued component of Catholic biblical interpretation.Footnote ⁵²

In sum, the PBC values contextual approaches because they take seriously the fact that readers always influence interpretation. But in its evaluation of contextual approaches, the PBC betrays a concern for contextual approaches that stray too far from the biblical text and its message. Further, the PBC recommends that these approaches clarify their relationship to the church.

Yet even with such reservations about contextual approaches, the PBC leaves an important space open for their use in interpretation in §III of its document. While insisting that Catholic exegesis must attend to the historical character of biblical revelation and employ historical-critical methodology to do so, according to the PBC “sole validity” cannot be granted to the historical-critical method (§III.C.1).Footnote ⁵³ This is due to Scripture's status as the word of God, which means that exegetes “arrive at the true goal of their work only when they have explained the meaning of the biblical text as God's Word for today” (§III.C.1).Footnote ⁵⁴ In order to do this, the PBC exhorts Catholic exegetes to “take into consideration the various hermeneutical perspectives that help toward grasping the contemporary meaning of the biblical message and that make it responsive to the needs of those who read Scripture today” (§III.C.1).Footnote ⁵⁵ This last statement is significant, for it shows that contextual approaches to interpretation lie well within the scope of Catholic biblical interpretation, since interpreting biblical texts by foregrounding the needs, questions, and insights that real readers bring to the text has the potential to make Scripture responsive to the needs of people who read Scripture today.

A Japanese American Reading of Genesis 2–3

At this point it is appropriate to discuss a recent example of one such contextual approach to see how contemporary contextual approaches can fulfill the mission of Catholic biblical exegesis to “take into consideration the various hermeneutical perspectives that help toward grasping the contemporary meaning of the biblical message and that make it responsive to the needs of those who read Scripture today” (§III.C.1).Footnote ⁵⁶ Frank M. Yamada's reading of Genesis 2–3 from the perspective of Japanese American identity serves as a good text for discussion.

We are familiar with the traditional Christian reading of Genesis 2–3 as indicating the fall from grace of Adam and Eve, with its understanding that their act of disobedience is the source of “original sin.” The logic of the reading is simple: the human beings are placed by God in a lush garden where they live in harmony with God and nature, but God gives them a single command—not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil—which they break. This act of disobedience is the original sin, and it results in the human condition of life outside the garden, where paradise is lost and life is hard and painful. This traditional reading is highly theological, in particular from a Christian theological point of view, and biblical scholars using the tools and methods of historical criticism have looked past this highly theologized reading to attain a sense of what this passage meant in its original historical context, before the theology of original sin developed.Footnote ⁵⁷

According to one trajectory of historical-critical analysis of this passage, the historical context in which this story took its final shape is the period of Israel's early monarchy. Scholars who see this as the story's historical backdrop interpret Adam and Eve's eating of the fruit as symbolic of “open rebellion to the gracious deity/king,” who in the story functions as a benevolent figure who creates a space for his people, provides for them, and decrees laws with which they should comply.Footnote ⁵⁸ The implication is that not complying with the law and order established by the king is a bad thing—an act of rebellion—that will have negative consequences, as shown in the narrative by the shame, violence, and disorder that unfolds in Genesis 4–6.Footnote ⁵⁹

Other readings and historical contexts have been proposed for this passage in its history of interpretation.Footnote ⁶⁰ I point out this proposal because, even though it seeks to move past the highly theologized Christian interpretation of the story, it shares with that reading the view of God as a good or benevolent God and of Adam and Eve's disobedience as a bad or evil act on their part. For some or perhaps even many of us, it could be the case that our personal histories and identities affirm this reading. For those of us who have been taught and have accepted that God is good and that disobeying authority figures (e.g., God, our parents, the police, government authorities, church pastors) is bad, positive experiences with authority figures may have confirmed this basic conviction.

But such a scenario may not be the case for all real flesh-and-blood readers. Yamada locates himself as a third-generation Japanese American who grew up in a predominantly white, upper-middle-class suburb of southern California. In his article, he probes the implications of his particular Japanese American identity for reading Genesis 2–3. Like other Japanese immigrants on the West Coast, his family was affected by the Japanese and Japanese American internment policy that took place in the United States during World War II. In the 1940s about 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans in the western United States were displaced from their homes and relocated, and without due process were confined as prisoners in their new location for the duration of the war.Footnote ⁶¹ At the time, the war was with Japan and was situated mainly on the Japanese side of the Pacific. War hysteria in the United States led to this policy of internment of West Coast Japanese immigrants as a security measure.

Explaining how this policy affected his family, Yamada writes:

After pointing out that most of his relatives and friends in the Japanese American community are directly connected to this experience of internment, Yamada concludes that “the internment was a profoundly significant event in Japanese American history and had a decisive effect on Japanese American identity in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly for those Japanese Americans who lived on the West Coast of the United States.”Footnote ⁶³

As a Japanese American bringing this racial-ethnic identity and its formative experiences to Genesis 2–3, Yamada detects in the story of Adam and Eve's disobedience a different possible interpretation. He views God's act of placing Adam and Eve in the garden with suspicion. He correctly points out that there is no beautiful garden before the creation of the man. Rather, the picture we get in Genesis 2:5 is of a barren desert (“There was no field shrub on earth and no grass of the field had sprouted, for the Lord God had sent no rain upon the earth” NABRE).Footnote ⁶⁴ Not until after the creation of the man does God plant a garden in Eden (2:8). Yamada reads God's act of creating this garden in light of the creation of internment camps, which were located in desolate, remote desert areas that were previously uninhabited.Footnote ⁶⁵ The faraway location of these camps was a deliberate choice on the part of the War Relocation Authority, which sought “isolated, uninhabited areas in order to minimize the perceived threat of a concentrated Japanese population.”Footnote ⁶⁶

As a result of his contextualization of himself as reader, Yamada sees God in the story as an authority figure who has the power to create a place for people in a location that had previously been uninhabitable, and has the power to locate the human beings there. A hermeneutics of trust might evaluate positively God's ability to create a beautiful home for humanity, but Yamada's critical reflection of Japanese American identity leads him to question why God would do this.

Placing God's action in conversation with the Japanese American experience of internment, Yamada interprets God in the story “as a threatened deity/ruler who exercises control over the subjects in the garden by barring access to knowledge and life [symbolized by the two trees in the garden] through an arbitrary command.”Footnote ⁶⁷ God is not a benevolent ruler seeking what is best for humankind, but rather “is characterized within the Eden story as an authority figure who rules by control,” attempting “to maintain social order through an arbitrary command and, when the threat of the humans becomes too great”—that is, when they eat of the tree of knowledge and so possess knowledge that is more like God's knowledge and can become immortal like God by eating from the tree of life (3:22–24)—God “removes the couple by forceful exile.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Seeing God's actions in this way leads Yamada to read Adam and Eve's act differently than the traditional reading. The traditional reading sees the disobedience as a “sin” on the part of the humans, but Yamada argues that “the meaning and function of human rebellion in Gen 2–3 depends on the context in which obedience/disobedience is assumed.”Footnote ⁶⁹ He points out that interpreters have often taken God's side in this story, which leads them to equate the human disobedience with sin and identify it as the act that leads to the human condition of alienation from God and a life that is full of suffering.Footnote ⁷⁰

At this point Yamada asks us to consider the choices Japanese Americans had to make when faced with internment. Some chose to comply with the US government as their survival strategy, figuring that the best way out of the internment camps was to demonstrate loyalty to the United States.Footnote ⁷¹ Others opted for resistance and civil disobedience.Footnote ⁷² These different responses divided the Japanese American community, and once the internment policy ended, the affected generations responded either with silence—the experience became something that was not talked about—or with disproportionate patriotism by which they vowed to be “doubly American.”Footnote ⁷³ Whatever the choice, Yamada suggests that “all of these responses to the events surrounding the internment share a theme of survival and community preservation.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Put in an impossible situation, they developed different, conflicting ways to survive and preserve their families and community.

This historical experience leads Yamada to view the actions of the first humans as a survival mechanism as well:

So for Yamada, what Adam and Eve do is not a sin but rather a choice they make for their survival as humans. Any choice would bring consequences. The choice they make is to live as humans with knowledge rather than deny their humanity by remaining as God's imprisoned subjects in the garden.

Yamada provides a challenging reading of Genesis 2–3 that views God as an arbitrary, self-interested ruler and Adam and Eve's eating of the fruit as a choice they make for their survival in light of the way God has demonstrated authority over them. Yamada's reading stems from his theorization of his Japanese American identity, and he corroborates his reading with exegetical analysis, showing it can be supported by the passage's narrative dynamics and textual elements.Footnote ⁷⁶

Can any theological, ethical, or pastoral insight be drawn from such a reading? Yamada thinks so, and it lies in the counterintuitive interpretative move that suggests that we do not necessarily need to side with God in this drama. The historical, cultural, and religious tendency to view God as the benevolent deity/king in this story has a potentially dangerous side to it, namely, that “such interpretations produce meaning structures that function to reinforce the logic of the status quo, contributing to cultures of violence against people who are considered as other in the system. Divine authority and social order are given preference over the particularities of human experience. Disobedience is a threat to social order, and, thus, ruling authority is justified in suppressing humanity's initiative, especially in the name of state security.”Footnote ⁷⁷

In other words, reading the story of Adam and Eve in the traditional way could lead us to see challenging rules and laws that are established by a higher power—whether a political power like the government or a religious power like a church—as something that should never be done. This may be acceptable as long as laws are right and just, but what if they are problematic or unjust? The theological and ethical payoff of Yamada's reading is that the first humans demonstrate the validity of challenging suspicious or oppressive actions by higher authority figures. Indeed they do not die, as God said they would, but survive and multiply in the world outside the garden (Gen 4:1–2, 25; 5:1–32).Footnote ⁷⁸

Reader-Centered Approaches and the Pontifical Biblical Commission's The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church

This hermeneutical exercise can be repeated any number of times. The more we foreground the role of the reader in interpretation, the more we open ourselves to encountering different possible ways to understand the Bible.

Aside from the question of whether or not one finds Yamada's reading of Genesis 2–3 persuasive, what are some implications of Yamada's article for Catholic biblical interpretation as understood by the PBC? First, Yamada's reading demonstrates that interdisciplinary analysis of the experiences and identities of flesh-and-blood readers (individual or corporate) has the capacity to bring out dimensions of the text that go unnoticed when the perspective or worldview of the text or of traditional methods of interpretation is prioritized. Insofar as it sees promulgating God's word in real-world contexts, Catholic biblical interpretation must intentionally employ analytical frameworks that foreground real readers in order to gauge how real-world experiences and identities influence the reception of readings based on traditional methods of interpretation.

The PBC states that reconstructing the meaning of the text in context is not the goal of Catholic exegesis. The goal is to make God's word responsive to the needs of people today—through the other methods (§III.C.1). Methods that prioritize the sociocultural locations and racial-ethnic identities of readers demonstrate ways in which Scripture interacts with flesh-and-blood readers whose experiences bring out dimensions of the text that may not have been intended by the text's original author(s) but still have the capacity to manifest God's word in the world.

Yamada's reading tells us something about authoritarian relationships that deny the humanity of ruled persons. While God is depicted throughout the Bible as the proper object of human devotion, and human devotion is held as the proper response to God's entering into a covenantal relationship with human beings, human history has provided ample examples in which unequal distributions of power in governance led to systematic injustice and stymied human flourishing. For God's word to take hold in a life-affirming way among people on the losing end of this dynamic—like Japanese Americans whose current identity has been influenced by the internment policies of the 1940s—the interpreter must be proactive in deconstructing oppressive readings of the biblical text and in analyzing the text/reader relationship with a focus on how the text's worldview bears on real readers.

From this process of engaging and evaluating the text from the point of view of real readers standing within particular social locations, dehumanizing readings (or readings that are dehumanizing for certain groups) may be exposed, and liberating readings may be proposed. Given their training and experience, professional biblical interpreters are well positioned to analyze the text and the interplay between the text and its readers. By the logic of the PBC's document, interpreters conducting their work in their capacity as “Catholic” biblical interpreters must enter this realm of the discipline, even if it means unanticipated training in interdisciplinary scholarly frameworks.

Moreover, as the complexity of world crises increases and presses scholars to engage the world at large, Catholic biblical scholars seeking to make the text a living reality in today's world must not only engage the work of scholars foregrounding their social location and racial-ethnic and gender identities but also attempt to theorize criticism from their own standpoints.Footnote ⁷⁹ How does Irish American identity affect interpretation? What do racial constructions of “whiteness” mean for interpretation? What are the implications of “Catholic identity” for interpreting the Bible? Addressing questions like these requires interacting with scholarly disciplines outside the guild of critical biblical scholarship, such as Irish American studies, race theory, or Catholic theological studies in the case of these examples. This is hardly a simple matter or an easy task. But if Catholic biblical scholars intend to play a role in manifesting God's word in the world (as the PBC exhorts Catholic scholars to do), they must take up the task of engaging the work of scholars (from both the Global North and the Global South) who analyze and theorize the world, and bring those analyses to bear on their own work.Footnote ⁸⁰

What can be said about the relationship between historical-critical methodology, which the PBC affirms as an essential component of Catholic biblical interpretation (Conclusion), and interpretation that foregrounds real readers and their contexts?Footnote ⁸¹ Does highlighting the world in front of the text as a critical component of Catholic biblical interpretation mean that historical-critical exegesis and its results should be disregarded? Does historical-critical exegesis at least set limits on the parameters of acceptable contextual interpretation, or does “anything go”? Should we accept any reading by any person? What about arbitrary or even oppressive readings?

The first point to be made with respect to these questions is that Catholic biblical interpreters who wish to comply with the PBC document must continue to account for historical-critical exegesis in their readings. From the point of view of the PBC, historical-critical exegesis is foundational and indispensable to Catholic biblical interpretation. While the PBC document states that the goal of Catholic exegesis is to explain the meaning of the biblical text as God's word for today by taking into consideration the various hermeneutical perspectives that help achieve this aim, it nonetheless maintains that “Catholic exegetes have to pay due account to the historical character of biblical revelation” and therefore “have to make use of the historical-critical method” (§III.C.1).Footnote ⁸² The doctrine of the Incarnation provides the theological rationale for the PBC's insistence on the importance of historical-critical analysis, as seen in its comments against fundamentalist approaches.Footnote ⁸³

In seeking to incorporate hermeneutical approaches that foreground real readers in front of the text, Catholic biblical interpreters can certainly incorporate traditional historical-critical scholarship and its results into their work. Indeed, to cite two examples, the hermeneutical frameworks articulated by Blount and Segovia, who both insist on the necessity of taking real readers and their contexts into account in the interpretative task, do not eschew historical criticism.

For Blount, historical-critical approaches remain a crucial part of the interpretative task, but they can only partially grasp the text's meaning(s). Blount contends that since sociolinguistic theory has shown that social context determines meaning in language as much as does a language's internal structure, a text cannot have a single meaning.Footnote ⁸⁴ Rather, a text has “meaning potential,” an open-ended range of possible meanings that can vary and even expand according to the social context that each interpreter or set of interpreters brings to the text.Footnote ⁸⁵ Despite the extensive “meaning potential” of a text, Blount holds that this does not mean a text can mean anything we say it means, since the words and grammatical structure of the text and the ideas, concepts, and experiences encoded and signified by this text set limits on what it can mean:

In other words, textual and ideational analyses, which are the sort of analyses that are traditionally employed in biblical scholarship, establish limits on the meanings of texts and thus “guide the interpreter by unequivocally stating what the material cannot mean.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Within these limits, however, “a full range of possible meanings remains,” meanings that can just as likely be accessed interpersonally as they can through traditional textual and ideational analysis.Footnote ⁸⁸

In Segovia's hermeneutics, which he calls a “hermeneutics of otherness and engagement,” the text is viewed as an “other,” that is, as an artifact or entity conditioned by its own historical and cultural context far removed from our own.Footnote ⁸⁹ Because these methods aid in constructing the text as a socially and culturally conditioned other, Segovia still accepts historical criticism and other traditional modes of analysis as critical in the interpretive process. What Segovia does not accept is that historical criticism be positioned as a reading strategy that stands apart and unaffected by social and cultural conditioning; it must be liable to theoretical criticism and not presumed to be objective.Footnote ⁹⁰ Because the interpreter's own context and interests indelibly affect their historical-critical analysis, the method itself and its results are not neutral but rather are socially and culturally conditioned and therefore subject to analytical engagement by other (socially and culturally conditioned) readers using other (socially and culturally conditioned) reading strategies.Footnote ⁹¹ This need not lead to unrestrained relativism in the production of meaning, since interpretative claims can still be made by any reading strategy, and such claims and the reading strategies that produce them remain subject to critical evaluation and engagement.Footnote ⁹²

Segovia's hermeneutical framework stands more in tension with the PBC's understanding of historical criticism than does Blount's. Whereas the PBC positions historical criticism as essential for undergirding other methods of interpretation, Segovia holds that all methods be assessed equally without any one approach serving as a neutral arbiter of a text's meaning.Footnote ⁹³ Nevertheless, for different reasons both Blount and Segovia accept historical criticism and other traditional modes of analysis as critical in the interpretive process, because these methods either set the outermost limits of the text's meaning potential (Blount) or aid in constructing the text as a socially and culturally conditioned other (Segovia).

By returning to Yamada's article from the perspective of both Blount's and Segovia's hermeneutical frameworks, we can see that the approaches of both Blount and Segovia guard against unrestrained relativism and allow for the use of historical criticism and other traditional methods of analysis. Using Blount's hermeneutics, we can say that Yamada draws a meaning of the story that may be contained in its textual and ideational components by approaching it from a different interpersonal entry point. To the degree that Yamada successfully situates his reading within the text's textual-ideational boundary and simultaneously interacts beyond this boundary with his own interpersonal context, “the result is a conclusion that is both linguistically accurate and contextually appropriate.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Thus Yamada may have brought to light a dimension of the text's “meaning potential.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Still, one remains free to contest the degree to which Yamada successfully situates his reading within the text's textual-ideational boundary. Similarly, from the perspective of Segovia's hermeneutics, just as Yamada offers a critique of the traditional reading of Genesis 2–3 on the basis of his contextualization of Japanese American identity, so can others critique Yamada's reading on any number of grounds, including whether or not his reading successfully constructs the “otherness” of the text within its own historical and literary contexts.

A different question than whether an interpretation has successfully accessed a passage's “meaning potential” is the question of evaluation. Even if a reading accesses some facet of a passage's meaning potential, is the reading a “good” one, or is it problematic or even oppressive?

Segovia's hermeneutics help address this issue with respect to Yamada's article. For Segovia, analyzing how texts have been interpreted by others “demands critical engagement with these others—a thorough evaluation of reading strategies, theoretical orientations, social locations, as well as interpretative results, reception, and aftereffects.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Arriving at his reading by foregrounding certain aspects of Japanese American identity, Yamada sees in his reading of Genesis 2–3 pastoral relevance and social justice implications. The first humans validate the act of challenging authority when such authority uses its power to stymie human flourishing. Some may evaluate his reading strategy and its results positively, agreeing that this reading of the text is a viable one that can help the text speak to contexts that call for the questioning of authority figures. Others may evaluate his reading strategy and its results negatively on the grounds that this produces a reading that is in considerable tension, if not outright dissonance, with the original intent of the passage's redactors. Still others may evaluate Yamada's reading critically on the grounds that, as is the case with gnostic appropriations of the same text, it contains problematic anti-Jewish implications and thus potentially negative “aftereffects,” viewing as it does the God of Israel as an arbitrary ruler who seeks to repress human flourishing.Footnote ⁹⁷

However one goes about critically assessing Yamada's reading, we see that foregrounding the social locations and racial-ethnic identities of modern readers need not devolve into a state wherein all readings are uncritically accepted as equally valuable. Rather, it should lead to robust critical discussion of readings that are produced and the reading strategies used to produce them. And even as it integrates other reading strategies that foreground the world in front of the text, Catholic biblical scholarship may still use historical criticism as a reading strategy in this process of evaluating readings and reading strategies.Footnote ⁹⁸ Yamada's reading could be subject to criticisms similar to those made by the PBC toward the contextual methods discussed in its document, namely, that not enough attention has been paid to the text itself and its worldview, or that the text's worldview has not been given enough priority as a source of God's revelation. But from the point of view of interpreters like Blount and Segovia, Catholic biblical interpretation, still using historical criticism and even positioning it as essential, must also recognize that it too is a contextual approach whose development and practice have been and remain influenced by the cultural contexts under which it developed and is practiced.

Reader-Centered Approaches as Fulfilling the Aims of Catholic Biblical Interpretation

The push in biblical criticism to foreground the real reader's impact on interpretation also poses a challenge to the PBC's view that there is a stable “message” that can be “actualized” in different contexts without itself being changed (§IV.A).Footnote ⁹⁹ But should Catholic biblical interpretation resist this movement that has emerged in the guild of biblical studies? One of the hallmarks of the Catholic intellectual tradition is its understanding of the dynamic nature of revelation. For Catholics, revelation is multifaceted, with God's word hardly being contained in Scripture alone (sola scriptura). Catholic biblical interpreters thus have a theological motivation for incorporating hermeneutical approaches that foreground the sociocultural, racial-ethnic, and gender identities of real readers, since from the Catholic point of view God's word can be manifest just as much in the act of reading the biblical text as in the text itself.

The authors and editors of Genesis 2–3 likely did not intend for this story to be read in a fashion that treats the deity as the villain. One may assess Yamada's reading strategy negatively then, if the criterion by which one evaluates methodological approaches is whether or not they help us understand the text in context. But what Yamada's reading represents is the reality that messages always have the capacity to change once they become grounded in the experiences of real flesh-and-blood readers.

This is an insight that scholars working within the Catholic intellectual tradition should know very well. The Church Fathers, living in temporal and cultural contexts much closer to that of the biblical tradition than we do today, read Scripture in all sorts of dynamic ways that produced readings that may or may not cohere with the text's original meaning(s) in its original context(s). Moreover, liturgical practices of the church both past and present constitute an act of biblical interpretation as well.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ It is this tradition of real readers and of praxis in the real world that, together with the biblical witness itself, forms Catholicism.

To put it in Johnson's terms, Catholic biblical scholars are in a unique position to cultivate biblical scholarship in terms of “both/and.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ For Catholics, interpreting the Bible is both a matter of understanding biblical texts in their original contexts and engaging the multiplicity of meanings that the texts take on as they take root in other contexts where other epistemologies of reading are thrust upon them. In order for Catholic biblical interpretation to be distinctly “Catholic,” it cannot settle on the successful implementation of historical-critical exegesis as the goal of interpretation, as the PBC rightly states (§III.C.1). It must also engage the readings of real readers, both ancient and modern, analyzing how the interaction between text and reader affects the revelation of God's word. To avoid foregrounding the sociocultural locations and racial-ethnic and gender identities of real readers in the interpretive task is to jeopardize the possibility that Catholic biblical scholarship can make God's word alive today (§III.C.1) in a world that is increasingly diverse, complex, multiethnic, and racialized.

Even since the publication of The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church in 1993, a veritable explosion of methods and approaches has occurred that employ analytical frameworks that foreground real readers for biblical interpretation. Engaging them can be daunting for biblical scholars trained in more traditional historical-critical and literary-critical methods, myself included. But the time is past for viewing these developments with suspicion on the grounds that they may not tell us the “plain sense” of biblical texts. Biblical scholars who seek to interpret the Bible within the context of their identity as Catholic biblical scholars should particularly welcome such developments. To be sure, reconstructing the Bible's meanings within its ancient contexts remains a vital component of the critical task, since doing so allows biblical texts to speak in their own voices to us.Footnote ¹⁰² But the voices of real flesh-and-blood readers standing within particular social locations and representing the world's racial-ethnic and gender identities must also be part of the interpretative process. As the PBC states, Catholic exegetes must “take into consideration the various hermeneutical perspectives that help toward grasping the contemporary meaning of the biblical message and that make it responsive to the needs of those who read Scripture today” (§III.C.1).Footnote ¹⁰³ Otherwise we risk relegating the Bible's meaning to the past and fail to address how the biblical text takes on new and different meanings in the present.Footnote ¹⁰⁴