Unvarnished Truth of the World
Americans, and we as SAR compatriots, have long likened their Constitution to the Bible, an analogy usually intended to cultivate a reverence for the former by imbuing it with the sacred authority of the latter. George Washington, for instance, cherished the hope that “the free constitution” would “be sacredly maintained,” while James Madison counseled his fellow citizens to look upon their national charter as “political scriptures” and to guard them “with holy zeal” against “every attempt to add to or diminish from them.” The similarities have been underscored ever since, and perhaps we too, focusing as we do on the American Revolution, should honor them today. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black - who was raised in one of Christianity’s most thoroughly bibliocentric traditions, the Primitive Baptist Church - once proclaimed the Constitution his “legal bible,” which he treasured “every word of... from the first to the last.” Ronald Reagan summed up the Declaration, Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as “a gift from a loving God.”
My concern for our time is that ‘more and more’ we accept other
standards which are far more liberal and loosely stated, and apply them to
that which we should see in comparison as uniquely authoritative. As we,
historically founded in the SAR, self-consciously define ourselves with
reference to the Bible, so do American citizens with reference to the
Constitution. Yet the act of
self-definition requires constant recourse to the text, engaging the written
word in order to extract its relevant meaning.
Words convey ideas, as Publius explained in Federalist
37, but their meaning is inexorably “rendered dim and doubtful by
the cloudy medium through which it is communicated.”
The process is rendered all he more difficult “according to the
complexity and novelty of the objects defined,” and their true sense
is only to be ascertained through “a series of particular discussions
and adjudications.”
Jaroslav Pelikan delves into just such a series of scriptural discussions and constitutional adjudications in his new book, Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution. In it, he compares the ways in which specific authorities have employed various strategies to resolve perceived textual ambiguities. He offers a “history of constructions that have been promulgated by those who bear official responsibility for binding interpretation.”
Pelikan brings enormous erudition to the task.
He is perhaps the most respected living authority on the history of
Christian theology; his many academic honors include a Sterling
professorship (emeritus) at
So why should we in 2006, as SAR compatriots, be interested in this matter or even in a scholar named Pelikan? Mainly because Pelikan would write a book on biblical interpretation. What may perhaps be surprising is that he brings scriptural exegesis (* - see below) into conversation with constitutional interpretation. Having long labored at the “unfashionable enterprise” of studying “creeds, confessions, and biblical exegesis”, Pelikan sees a line of “direct continuity” between the two hermeneutical (** - see below) projects which all individuals of prior, meaningful historical times, should investigate. Hence, us.
Both texts assume rather than argue for their authority, yet they are received as familiar and venerable. Each is the project of many authors, and has aroused among its many readers intense argument over its proper exegesis. Each has been lovingly studied, line by line, word by word, yet each is also understood, to varying degrees, by significant points of doctrine elaborated outside the document itself: Christians and many other people read the Bible daily or weekly in light of the trinitarian and Christological doctrines promulgated by the early ecumenical councils, while Americans (and others) read the Constitution through the natural right principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence which effect “our behavior and conduct” as responsible people. Each acknowledges the reality of its own internal self-correction - testaments on the one hand, amendments on the other. Yet even beyond such internal mechanisms, each assumes itself to be even applicable to the endlessly shifting conditions of later (and former) generations.
Both therefore constitute a “great
Code,” a normative text, the meaning of which must be constantly applied
to changing circumstances of our time. Easier
said than done, of course, as various passages from either text give rise to
the difficulty Pelikan calls a “crux interpretum”: a
cluster of words and concepts so dense with significance as to engender
multiple, possibly contradictory, readings.
(One mentioned surrounds
the four little words “due process of law,” or the biblical “this is
my body.”) The interpretive
task is further compounded by the fact that neither document identifies
relevant proof texts nor explicitly prescribes a correct method for its own
interpretation. In both cases
there is a hierarchy of interpreters - from the entire community at the
lowest point, through professional, up to the towering institutions (or
headquarters) of the interpretative elite - notwithstanding the fact that
neither text identifies which specific person, group, or institution has the
final authority to bind or loose its meaning.
But for all that shared ambiguity, Pelikan observes, in neither case
should the sudden eruption of violent conflict among interpreters obscure
the much longer periods of silent consensus.
Should we, also, “reevaluate” some of our SAR four little words phrases: “honest and prudent manner;” ”for fidelity and loyalty;” “the responsibility to administer;” “full accountability and disclosure;” or “steadfast dedication to ideals?”
Disputes do, however, mark the history of both reading communities (as well as ours). Of particular difficulty in both cases is the perennial program of the spirit and the letter of the law, the one which liveth, and the other which giveth death. But, as mankind and Americans alike have learned, a spirit unconstrained by the letter gives rise to its own gnostic tendencies. Justice William O. Douglas, no less than the second-century heresiarch Valentinus, claimed for himself a mysterious enlightenment, capable of discerning penumbral meanings invisibly emanating from any page.
If interpretation is to be credibly tethered to the text, some consistent study/background research must be applied. Etymology, grammar, philology, natural law, analogy, precedent, history - all manner of interpretative techniques have been deployed to resolve contested constructions. Among these methods, the invocation of original intent has been particularly privileged for both the Bible and the Constitution. Recourse to intent derives its power in both communities from a widespread veneration of the authors, from a sense that special deference is owed to those who bore witness in the beginning. Peliken, however, retains an ambivalence about originalist assumptions and methods, arguing that they “run the constant danger of substituting pedantry for living experience...” and perhaps so should we.
One may perhaps attribute any suspicion of originalism to long and fruitful study. The Bible, after all, is vastly more complex than the Constitution. Its internal narratives, its lyrical poetry and thundering prophecy, its layers upon layers on meaning, all serve to distance it from the Constitution. If the latter expresses the structure of government resulting from the reflection and choice of “we the people,” the former attempts to bear faithful witness to man’s encounter with an ineffably mysterious reality. Moreover, the Christian scriptures are widely thought to consist of both letter and spirit, law and gospel, whereas the letter of the Constitution is incomplete without being animated by the spirit of the Declaration.
My concluding point is that whether
we take into account the Pelikan book, the Bible, or the Constitution -
aren’t we governed by the logic of the text itself?
Or is that merely proof-text interpretation?
As we have become familiar with history, an emerging professional
class by the close of the 19th century said that style of strategy utterly
failed to appreciate historical particularity, and altogether lacked a sense
of the vast chasm separating the past from the present.
We must give way to modern expectations, and good progressive
evaluation may allow us to read any text with scissors in hand, ready to
excise all that challenges the wisdom of the moment. Thus pruned of presumed
deadwood, any text is able to live and breathe.
My contention is remarkably how closely the emergence of such
historical assumptions in each field tracked one another,
and how deeply they altered the study of both the Bible and the
Constitution.
It is indeed unfair to criticize
Pelikan and his book, Biblical scholars,
historical reviewers of the Constitution over time, or any of our
framers or enforcers of our SAR guidelines and creeds.
But I sense that new ground can be identified to explore, providing a
characteristically original conceptual overview.
Maybe we are such a generation of men who need to read what we hold
dear - and interpret.
State
Chaplain,
January,
2006
** webmaster's note: hermeneutics means: 'The theory and methodology of interpretation, especially of scriptural text.'