Response to Ron Hendel

Abstract

A scientific interpretation of world ... might therefore still be one of most stupid of possible interpretations of world, meaning that it would be one of poorest in meaning.... We cannot reject possibility that it [the world] may include infinite interpretations.1Ron Hendel's article, Mind Gap: Modern and Postmodern in Biblical Studies, is a response to our coauthored JBL article An Elephant in Room: Historical-Critical and Postmodern Interpretations of Bible, as well as to book by Stephen D. Moore and Yvonne Sherwood, The Invention of Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto. In addition, Hendel discusses The Postmodern Bible.2 The article is a thoughtful attempt to further conversation that we called for in our article and for that we are grateful. We are happy to find points of agreement with Hendel.However, he attempts to extend conversation and to bridge gap between and postmodern biblical studies by making a distinction between strong and weak forms of postmodernism.3 His distinction recognizes varied meanings of word a matter we acknowledged in An Elephant.4 We rarely use term ourselves, except as a catch-all for a variety of approaches that are suspicious of the modern or modernism. As Hendel does, we use to acknowledge (an often squabbling) family of practices. For us this diversity is not a problem. Rather, it is a matter to celebrate.In contrast, Hendel finds this diversity a problem inherent in postmodernisms tendency to eschew fixed meaning. Then minor problem escalates into issue of how much diversity is acceptable in biblical studies. The impetus seems to be to rule out unacceptable diversity. This trajectory differs markedly from our own.Further, Hendel leaves postmodernisms bewildering diversity behind and begins to assert more commonality in postmodernism than we would. After acknowledging that his discussion of postmodernism is indebted to works of Seyla Benhabib, Thomas McCarthy, and others, Hendel cites Benhabib, If there is one which unites postmodernists from Foucault to Derrida to Lyotard it is critique of western rationality from perspective of margins.5 Hendel unpacks this commitment and orders his article using three categories offered by Benhabib: (1) illusion of a self-transparent and self-grounding reason; (2) illusion of a disembedded and disembodied subject; and (3) illusion of an Archimedean standpoint, situated beyond historical and cultural contingency. This describes three French philosophers as though they embody postmodernism, but there are many differences in works of these three. These thinkers and other postmodernists do critique Western rationality, but from this it does not follow that they reject power of reason, and one would have a hard time making a case that any of them does.Hendel depicts strong postmodernism as marked by radicalism, by all or nothing and either/or statements. He cites Foucaults article Nietzsche, Genealogy, Knowledge:The historical analysis of this rancorous to knowledge reveals that knowledge rests upon injustice (that there is no right, not even in act of knowing, to truth or a foundation for truth) and that instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous, opposed to happiness of mankind).6For Hendel, this example typifies all-or-nothing postmodernism, which he constructs as rejecting rational practices. However, Foucault's words do not seek to dispense with will to knowledge, but to assert that it is not benevolent. Foucault's essay describes power inherent in uses of reason, and it criticizes ideal (suggested by Hendel) of any rational methodology as a gradual accumulation of self-correcting truths.Hendel's weak postmodernism acknowledges reason's cultural embeddedness, entanglements with power and interest, and embodied, practical nature. …