The Cut and Thrust of Question and Answer
The encounter between biblical text and modern man is characterized by a double movement. We bring our questions and our own situation to the text and the text brings its questions and its statements to us. We read the text and the text “reads” us. But how can this encounter between the text and our life become an authentic dialogue? Here we must see the reciprocal interaction between question and answer. In principle there are three possibilities:
(a) The church provides the answer—but it is not an answer to people’s questions. This is the one-way model: The church proclaims its message but without listening to the real questions posed by today’s people. We meet this form of communication when for instance we see emblems with statements like: “Christ is the answer, God’s answer.” In such cases we have to find out to whom the answer is given. What is the benefit of answering if no one is putting a question? It is in fact a problem if the church has the ultimate and final answers, while at the same time the religious and theological questions are situated in different contexts and are asked in a different language and in conditions that differ from the answer.
(b) The Bible does not answer. The Bible in many cases is a strange text. It deals with a number of issues that do not seem relevant in our part of the world, nor does it address issues that we would like to know about, such as abortion, gene technology, and nuclear weapons. We are asking too much of the Bible here; it cannot answer such questions directly. But it does answer the first Christians directly, so we can gain a better understanding of them—and then we shall discover that they often struggled with the basic problems that we face—and even from our presuppositions.
From a methodological point of view we have to go into reverse. We must start with the answers in the text and work backwards through them to find the questions. Using the methods of biblical research we can clarify the meaning of the text with a certain assurance, that is a historical reading, and afterwards we may ask what the text means for us today, that is an actual reading.
Here a distinction is made between a text’s meaning (“Sinn”) and its significance (“Bedeutung”).14 A given text has only one meaning, which is the author’s meaning (what the author intended to say), but it can have many significances. The significance is the result of the application and appropriation of the text in a new situation. From this it follows that it is as important to establish what the text means today (its significance) as it is to find out what it meant in the first century.
To conclude, the interplay between question and answer cannot allow Christians to deliver their answers without knowing the questions, nor can it turn to the Bible alone for a simplified solving of a problem.
(c) The authentic dialogue. Here the starting-point is an analysis of the concrete questions of our times with the intention of coming to a better understanding of these questions and finding the Christian answer.15 According to Johannes Aagaard, the Christian answer is given as a reply to the ancient search of humanity: “This means that we learn more about the answer of the Christian faith by having a fuller understanding of man’s religious request. For instance, we do not understand the cosmic significance of the resurrection, if we do not know the concept of samsara (transmigration of souls) as a cosmic theory. We do not understand the essence of grace if we do not know the idea of karma. Likewise we do not understand the necessity of the theology of creation if we do not see the result of seeing the world as maya. And last, but not least we do not perceive who Jesus was and is, before we have realized that he refused to be a guru for the people.”16
Mutual Critical Correlation
In recent times biblical studies have been marked by a shift of attention from the relationship between author and text to the interaction between text and reader.17 A new model of interpretation has emerged, based on the belief that deep insight and relevance lie neither in the original meaning of the Bible alone nor in the contemporary context, but in the cut and thrust of question and answer between them. This model is that of a conversation.
The relation between text and context can be seen as a fusion between two horizons.18 The text represents the first horizon, and the context of its readers is the second horizon. The ultimate goal of this model of “interpretation as conversation” is to fuse these horizons in a way that is true to the past and relevant to the present. In the fusion of the readers’ world with the world of the text both are transformed. When readers enter the world of the text it transforms them by providing a new way of seeing and being; it offers them new possibilities. When the readers’ world is brought to the text it transforms the text by allowing a plurality of possible meanings not perceived in the past to be appropriated by them in the present; it offers the text a new way of speaking.19
Any reading of the Bible will start with certain specific questions. We cannot take up some privileged place of neutrality or complete objectivity; it is from within our “life-worlds” that we engage in the reading task. This raises certain questions, however.20 If our own life-worlds are the starting point for reading the Bible, will we not find in its pages only what we are looking for? Can we as readers be open to the challenge of the biblical text? Any use of Scripture must face the risk that the text becomes no more than a mirror reflecting what we want it to say. Some way of reading must be employed which allows the text to speak to us, and to serve as a window through which we see something besides our own thoughts.21 This relation between the biblical text and our actual request may also be explained by means of the concept of “correlation.” To understand this, reference is often made to Paul Tillich’s “method of correlation,” that is, the ideal of an interaction between God and humankind. Theology provides analyses of the human situation that provoke existential questions, and it demonstrates how the symbols in the Christian message answer these questions.
The work of theology can be compared to an ellipse with two foci: the existential question, and the Christian answer. For we have a double starting point: on the one hand an analysis of our present condition, on the other the statement of the biblical text. This question-answer correlation may of course result in a simplification, as there is a latent risk we will try to find opportune answers to our questions. Instead the relationship between the text and the interpreter should be seen as a mutual challenge. Sandra Schneiders notes that “for the dialogue between text and reader to be genuine, the text must maintain its identity, its ‘strangeness’, which both gifts and challenges the reader. It must be allowed to say what it says, regardless of whether this is comfortable or assimilable to the reader.”22
What is the theological basis for this method of correlation? Any correlation presupposes that the biblical texts deal with the same basic questions asked by contemporary readers—about blessings, good fortune, sorrow, anxiety, hope, suffering etc. But the relation is not just that we ask the questions and the Bible provides the answers. The simple scheme of question and answer