Loren Terveen

This thing with evangelicals trying to explain Judaism to Jews? It’s easy for E’s to believe that their hermeneutic is the only one. When I was an evangelical, I didn’t understand Reform Judaism, because I assumed how we read religious texts is how anyone reads them. I was wrong.https://twitter.com/ashleyfeinberg/status/1252945569670221824 …

This shows up in fundiegelical-Muslim relations too, all the ‘Islam is really a religion of murder’ stuff. But knowledge is socially constructed, and that includes knowledge of what religious texts mean and how to understand them. They are interpreted in community.

This also shows up just within Christian hermaneutics. In the first half-millennia of Christianity, there was debate between the Alexandrian and Antiochan schools of interpretion. Fundamentalism & evangelicalism are thoroughly Antiochan and very suspicious of Alexandria.

But here’s the kicker. The Apostle Paul, guy who wrote half the New Testament, used an Alexandrian hermeneutic when he interpreted Jewish scriptures. So, the social process rejected a mode of interpretation used by the author of the text to be interpreted.

Antiochan hermaneutics as understod variously by Protestants, Evangelicals, and fundamentalists is not the only way to read Christian scriptures, let alone those of other faiths. So Christians shouldn’t pretend to understand Judaism better than Jews. We don’t.

me: so at the end, I feel like I have epistemological whiplash. therapist: what have you been doing to process this so far? me: writing weird twitter rants no one asked for.