A Village Isn’t Enough

Explaining the title of his book, Singing the Ethos of God, Brian Brock offers a critique of communitarian hermeneutics:

“I have criticized the communitarian account of reading Scripture within the church in a manner that affirms their central interest in the church, but pushes it one step further by showing that perhaps they still do not take the church seriously enough as God’s people. . . . there are many ‘communities’ and only one ‘church,’ so already to call the church a ‘community’ hints at a fairly important theological danger” (Captive to Christ, Open to the World, 22).

It is not enough to break with individualistic paradigms of reading, no “recipe for generating correct readings.” Rather, “the Spirit has to open the Bible to us – we cannot force that process by rushing it or manipulating it, including ensuring that we will get it right by reading in groups – because we cannot escape reading it in groups! . . . We need the Spirit through the Bible to break in on us” (22-23).

Brock doesn’t object to the fact that communitarians want to read Scripture together in the church, but rather objects “that they are often trapped in descriptions that tend to make this reading an aspect of the process of self-formation” (23). What’s critical is how God uses Scripture “to criticize our thought and practice,” not how we use Scripture to build character.