02\12\2025 - Biblical Hermeneutics: An Exercise in Social Location, The Role of Scripture, and Defining History

(The ideas and opinions expressed within these specific posts are meant to be self-reflective of my theological praxis and are in no way or form intended to be prescriptive, doctrinal, or persuasive. )

For my advanced New Testament class, our professor asked us to do a self-examination to determine our hermeneutics. In other words, we were asked to dig deep within ourselves to see how our interpretations of the Bible change depending on how we've experienced reality and the world. As many of you have assumed, my time spent in academia paints a rather large picture of my approach to interpretation, teaching, and sharing my understanding of Scripture.

However, I would offer that although my lens of reading Scripture is skewed by my time spent in critical examination of the Bible as a text, I possess enough finesse, aptitude, and self-awareness that the highly 'scientific' approach to reading one's Bible is not the primary method in this day and age; and I, by no means, am stating or declaring that the way I've been taught (in the Southern Baptist or United Methodist traditions) are the only or right ways of doing it.

This is an exercise in self-reflection. I offer this as food for thought.

Who am I?

            My social and subject positions are, by and large, embodied in hybridity.

I come from a working-poor class family. At present, my yearly income also places me within the same economic class as an adult. I learned to live without creature comforts, and developed, in many ways, a destain for luxury items and cultivated a denial of indulgences.

My gender expression within American culture is mainly male presenting. However, I’ve grown my hair long to honor my ancestors and opt to wear floral and warm fragrances- physical expressions that are common markers of femininity within the dominant American culture. I do not possess or embody many of the personality traits, interests, or mannerisms identifiable with traditional male gender markers, and have no desire to present myself as such unless it is vital to my survival. I do not give my gender expression a label, nor am I interested in identifying myself as anything other than myself.

I’m considered bi-racial within the dominant cultural paradigms but considered a “full-blood” within Cherokee Keetoowah indigenous culture. Our indigenous culture is matrilineal, and my mother’s heritage and bloodline on both sides of her family can be traced to the earliest recording of our people’s history. I take great pride in my heritage, and the ontology of my mother’s people is often in conflict with the ideological realities of Western and Eurocentric thought. As someone with a common name in the culture (Cody was the most popular male name for the year I was born), I’ve privileged this identity to blend in, operate, and survive through many of the spaces I’ve found myself in for most of my adolescence and young adulthood.

I am a citizen of the United States and the United Keetoowah Band; I hail from the American Empire and to a sovereign Indigenous nation under the protectorate of our American suzerain.

In vocation, I am clergy. This denotes me as an upper social class member with greater access to social capital. I am a Christian cleric, which creates a great deal of friction within my tribal community for newer generations of cousins, nieces, and nephews, who have eschewed or dismissed the inherited faith of our ancestors from missionaries.

I also hold multiple degrees of higher education with training in political science, criminal justice, sociology, Cherokee cultural studies, higher education leadership, and (hopefully) professional Christian ministry, placing me (un)comfortably lengths away from the classical education milestones of my home communities. Furthermore, because of my hybrid epistemologies and ontology, I find myself outside of the accepted or accommodated paradigms of the Academy, of which I’ve spent sixteen years (half) of my life operating within.

My political ideology is hard to pin down in a consumable way.

What I'm about to write down will not be popular among my colleagues in the Church nor my peers in the Academy. I anticipate being misinterpreted on either side, but I'll have to be okay with that. I understand that I should be careful about expressing my political ideologies because of my position and station (which is honestly a sad state of affairs). However, I've found that most people discuss partisan issues revolving around economics or domestic policy. I don't care to share my opinions about any of that.

However, I can say that I do not much care for the ideologies of civility politics, identity politics, true "centrism", or any sociopolitical posturing centered around the performance of progress disguised as methods of control through means of social artifice.

In other words, I do not care for the wealthy, powerful, or influential to manipulate or censor people for the sake of oppressing them. In my reading of the New Testament, in particular, many groups in the scriptures attempted to govern, control, or exert their power in religious, military, economic, and social ways.

Christ did not only resist those forces, but sought to upend them. That is the primary way that I interpret the entirety of the Holy Scripture.

Simply put, (to me) the role of the government and communities is to share resources, services, and protections for the benefit and good for all for the least harm. This puts me in conflict with the standard, modern, and common understandings of what a "liberal" or a "conservative" is.

Our priorities and visions for what the role of government, law, and policy embodies are, by and large, not harmonious and often hostile to one another, as much of contemporary American politics is based on and within accumulating power and managing violence. However, because of my sociology and political science education, I understand the “how” and “why” folks operate within their respective sociopolitical ideologies; I do not judge an individual's value for the group's actions. I have also inherited sociopolitical, ideological, and religious beliefs that I have not fully self-examined, so I extend that grace to others.

Because of these identities, I find I’m not understood or read as easily as others. This leads to a great deal of separation, ostracization, and lack of esprit de corps within the organizations, institutions, and communities I’m a part of. I’ve had to adapt my language, means of communication, and expression to blend into and operate within Indigenous, academic, and culturally dominant spaces, leading me to constantly mold myself into ways my thoughts, words, and deeds can be comfortably consumed. An example of this is shifting this specific work from an academic one to a more digestible one.

Where am I?

              I exist in the American Conservative South, the 'Liberal' Mainline Church, the Academy, and the allotted lands of my ancestors. I am constantly bombarded by each of these cultures that seek to shape and form my performance of humanity. I have learned to harness my myriad and intersectional identities and places within these environments to survive. Each space has expectations and demands of a performance that becomes schizophrenic in practice. Because each of these spaces requires idiosyncratic performances (often simultaneously), I am aware that I appear duplicitous, inauthentic, or fabricated to folks who experience me within multiple spaces.

 In many ways, I often feel out of time and out of place. This is the nature of survival for someone like me.

The Roles of Scripture and History

            As a professing United Methodist and embodying hermeneutics from the Southern Baptist tradition, the role of scripture takes a skewed shape.

I understand Scripture as both a tradition and medium- a living artifact that I interpret from various angles. From my formal training and duty as a United Methodist cleric, I am obligated to profess that the Scripture/Protestant Bible, holds all things necessary to the salvation of one’s soul and serves as the living core of the Christian faith.

This faith, as the founder of Methodism, the Reverend John Wesley, proclaimed, "is revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason".

Wesleyan hermeneutics, of which I am now invested, come from the Anglican epistemology. United Methodists draw our approach to Scripture from the Anglican church, which draws from the (Roman) Catholic Church, which draws from the sacred tradition of the early "Church Fathers", which draws on the Rabbinic/Jewish tradition.

On the other hand, I do not personally believe that divinity, God, or faith can only be represented by the Protestant Bible and can be found in life itself. The wind, water, soil, and the natural world can teach us great wisdom just as much as the Bible can- although the Bible (to me) serves as a universal experience in which a reader can come to understand Christ and His faith in the context of a shared community.

I define history as a sociological concept describing a culture's commitment to memorizing, recording, memorializing, and embracing specific sequences of shared, familiar narratives (or events) that are generally self-enforced and self-policed. History as a concept is important because a shared history galvanizes communities into distinct identities composed of shared values, traits, and characteristics of one's forebearers. However, I concede that histories between groups of people that are conflicting, skewed, or at odds with one another create environments where animosity and hostility can flourish- especially when passing down these narratives to generations of folks who do not share the same or similar values, traits, or characteristics.

Therefore, history is a living, breathing, and changing creature.

Because most of what I consider Scripture cannot be empirically verified (not that empirical evidence is the end-all-be-all), it’s not vital to my theology, the practice of my ministry, or my opinion of the weight Scripture holds in praxis. I understand that Scripture is ‘all’ many folks may have in understanding the Christian faith, and I have no issue with that. Our faith can be cultivated in many ways, but I must stress that it should ideally be done within a community for various reasons.