The power of Scripture III

ii Suspicion of Scripture as a discourse of Power

To the Enlightenment critique of the text of the Bible is now added a postmodern protest against its operation as a discourse of power. This ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ suspects that naïve reading of the Bible allows a system of power to develop in human communities that is detrimental to the flowering of individual selves in their full self-determining authenticity. We offer some examples: Elizabeth Castelli is one biblical scholar who has taken Foucault’s power analysis and applied it to the New Testament, and especially to the writings of Paul. She writes in her book Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power that:

[T]he thesis of this study is that the notion of mimesis functions in Paul’s letters as a strategy of power. That is, it articulates and rationalizes as true and natural a particular set of power relations within the social formation of early Christian communities.[1]

Reading those Pauline texts which enjoin his readers to imitation – 1 Thess 1:6, 2:14; Phil 3:17; 1 Cor 4:16, 11:1 – Castelli seeks to demonstrate that in doing this Paul is not benignly calling the churches to emulate a laudable ethical model, but rather inscribing in the early communities a hierarchical ‘economy of sameness’, resulting in a (sinister) ‘erasure of difference’. Paul’s rhetoric is not a rational argument, but a subtle assertion of power that needs to be exposed and resisted. These are wizard-words. Castelli writes:

Discourse is never innocent, it discloses the incapacity of any rhetoric to convey the truth.[2]

This betrays her suspicion that Paul is up to no good:

Paul’s discourse of power may be read as a complex fiction whereby he asserts the conditions of proper power relations in the Christian community at Corinth as truth… His attempts to reduce what to him is the cacophonous discord of many voices result in his own bellowing tones filling the stage.[3]

That is to say, when it comes to this scriptural author at least, we see him forming in his language – by his powerful metaphors and by his rhetorical stratagems – the conditions under which power will operate within the Christian community. But he doesn’t do this innocently, for Castelli: he does it to suppress diversity and shore up his own authority.[4]
Castelli is not alone. In his study of religious rhetoric, David Jasper writes:

Paul…leaves little space for mutuality or a real relationship between himself and the Thessalonians apart from that of their utter dependence upon him.[5]

He goes on:

Paul’s doctrine, it seems, cannot be distinguished from the political and personal moves of his writing, or the uneasiness of his relation to his readers. The assertion of authority and the exercise of personal power are dominant themes of these letters.[6]

Jasper’s deconstruction is not limited to Paul: he makes a case, following Frank Kermode’s analysis in his book The Genesis of Secrecy,[7] that Mark’s gospel can also be read as a dissembling book of secrets and suspicions, teasing and entrancing its readers with the covert aim of rendering them docile. Once again, the Scriptures are not here critiqued for their flawed textuality as such (which is generally assumed but set aside as irrelevant), but for their deployment of power.[8]

OK: so what seems to be the trouble? To summarize, the power-critics see Scripture – the text of texts[9] – as an attempt at wielding what we have called wizard-power. This is held to be an inappropriate and illegitimate use of human language. To misquote Oscar Wilde, rhetorical language is rarely pure and never simple; and the Bible is a celebrated case of this in action. The claim for the Bible that it is divinely inspired - or for any sort of authority - surely withers if it is as morally suspect as its critics hold. The criticism has two related features: first, that the Bible and its authors offer a totalizing world-view, a ‘view from nowhere’ that squashes heteronomy and allows no space for human freedom. To the postmodern mind this universal perspective inevitably leads to violence: the clash of the civilizations is rooted in their refusal of plurality: and the great religions of the book are held to be the cause of this implacable belligerence. The second side of the coin is that the Bible is an abusive form of power-language, inscribing its stories and words into human consciousness and invalidly authorizing the hegemony of patriarchal religious individuals and structures. In particular, feminist critics (like Castelli and Trible) have fought to uncover the suppressed and hidden voices of women marginalized by the phallo-centric biblical text.

[1] E. Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power (Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), p.15
[2] Ibid.
[3] E. Castelli, "Interpretations of Power in 1 Corinthians," in Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience, ed. J.Bernauer and J.Carrette (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 34-5
[4] We may say further that for Castelli, Foucault’s works have become Holy Writ. She is, it turns out, gormlessly uncritical of him while being super-suspicious of Paul. Why doesn’t she do a Pauline reading of Foucault?
[5] D. Jasper, Rhetoric, Power and Community (Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), p. 42
[6] Ibid.
[7] F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979)
[8] Other power-critics exercising the hermeneutics of suspicion include G. Shaw, The Cost of Authority – Manipulation and Freedom in the New Testament (London: SCM, 1983); and, from a feminist perspective P. Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). See also Bible and Culture Collective., The Postmodern Bible (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1995).
[9] Since the study of literary criticism is a direct descendent of biblical interpretation, protest against textual authority inevitably entails a protest against the Bible.