Archive as a Context for Teaching the Bible

Axiomatic in my teaching of the Bible is the notion that all texts are produced in a context.

For most of my beginning students, healing such a notion poses little threat to their faith convictions. Even the “more controversial” claim of non-Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch wanes in intensity after a few lectures on redaction history.

Their uneasiness, there however, ambulance lingers not with arguments on a text’s particular historical context but with the claim that all readings of the biblical text are the outcome of historical processes. Said differently, no reading, informed or uninformed, takes place in a social vacuum.

Struggling to Learn

For some entering seminarians, conceding to the idea that objective unbiased readings of the biblical text are unattainable comes without a struggle. Although, I find that, if harnessed creatively, their struggle can lead to a new context for learning.

Exposing biases in modern interpretations of the biblical text, especially oppressive, is, in my experience, better learned hands-on. The goal is less the development of a hermeneutic of suspicion than a skill in contextualization.

Praxis of Contextualization

To contextualize interpreters of the Bible require a historical savvy that not all seminarians initially possess. Rather than immerse students in a sea of critical theory, I have them look to the archive as a place for learning a praxis of contextualization.

Underlying the modern archive are departmental structures and organizing procedures that work to situate human subjects within their particular contexts. As Nicholas B. Dirks writes, “the monumentality of the archive is enshrined in a set of assumptions about truth that are fundamental both to the discipline of history and to the national foundations of history” (2002, 48). Within the modern archive, contextualization is instantiated at every level.

My Archive Story

Preparation

The course was titled “Exegesis and Sermon Design.” It was my first time teaching a two-week intensive DMin elective course. In the course description, I stated that “this course focuses on the perspectival and contextual nature of biblical interpretation and sermon production.” For my first class, I arranged in advance to meet in Austin Seminary’s archive. In preparation for this visit, seminary archivist Kristi Sorensen sent beforehand  introductions to archives and archival research to each class member.

Tour

Having assured the students that they were in the correct course, class commenced with a brief tour of the archive’s office and research space. Students were given a description of the archive’s collections and procedures for using them. Set out for the students were some seminary “treasures”, which included early seminary photographs, the Apollo XIV Mission microform Bible, and 18^th century British and Irish communion coins.

During the tour, I had the students consider the relationship between the production of historical knowledge and the archive’s identity. How does the archive’s geographical and social context inform the archive’s selection process?

Roundable

After the tour, the archivist invited us to a roundtable discussion about the course’s final paper. For this assignment, students were instructed to write an academic paper, contextualizing an early 20^th century (1900-1920) sermon preached on an Old Testament text by a prominent Texas Protestant minister. The sermon was to be selected from the Austin Seminary archival collection. Their primary mode of inquiry had to be one of critical interrogation of the underlying values, biases, and assumptions (e.g. Manifest Destiny, Black Legend, Protestant ethic, Orientalism, Social Darwinism) undergirding the sermon’s interpretation of the biblical text and its application.

At the table, each student was given a box of 20^th century sermons to wade through. During this process, I had them observe the different ways in which each box arranged its sermons. Some sermons were ordered by biblical book and others by date and location. Rather than impose a normative order on the sermons, archival practice recommends that the designated order reflect the creator’s initial design. Yet if an original order is indecipherable, the owning repository is forced to impose its own ordering logic onto the collection (2006, 122).

In their contextualization, students were asked to be attentive to the sermon’s rhetoric. Issues to be brought to the fore in their papers were to include information about the social, religious, and political loyalties of the preacher.

Assignment

In the paper, students were to give specific examples in the sermon that explicitly reinforced Western binary divisions, such as West/East, civilized/savage, superior/inferior, and male-public/female-private. Beside the actual sermon, students had to include other materials from the period, such as commentaries, essays on biblical interpretation, denominational writings, biographies, letter correspondence and diaries.

Indeed our discussion about different ordering systems led effortlessly to concerns about the politics of the archive, assumptions about truth, and the currency of archived sources in Western society.  We also talked about the connections between their assumptions about knowledge and the system of arrangement of their own sermons.

Outcomes

Throughout the two weeks of the course, the archive served as a constant point of reference. From our discussions about archive in the archive, I discovered that students had lesser difficulty understanding subsequent concepts like the politics and ethics of biblical interpretation.

 

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