The Beginning of Wisdom: On the Postliberal Interpretation of Scripture

This essay sketches a postliberal account of scriptural interpretation as a process of formation in wisdom. Building on Lindbeck's claim that scripture constitutes exemplary utterances of Christian language, it argues that the sort of theological hermeneutics that results from this model depends upon one's philosophy of language. Against the conventionalist assumption that a community's norms for using language are distinct from the rules of rationality, it argues that linguistic and rational norms are intertwined, exemplified by the Biblical wisdom tradition and developed by contemporary philosophers like Peter Ochs and Robert Brandom. It suggests that reading scripture forms wisdom by correcting common sense. To make this process explicit, it examines how the book of Proverbs trains its readers, as beginners in the pursuit of wisdom, to learn to use proverbs by performing a reading of the proverb as “wounds from a friend can be trusted” and reflecting on the role of reasoning implicit in that process. It then draws on Brandom's inferential semantics and Grice's pragmatic theory of implicature to make this reasoning process explicit. Finally, it suggests that for theological readers of scripture, there can be no bounds to the process of reasoning: the full meaning of scripture can only be exhausted by one with complete knowledge and a perfect capacity to draw inferences.