Interview Suzie Park
Unlocking the Text, Unlocking the Reader When you ask students to interpret a text, what are you asking them to do, exactly? I don’t spell out what interpretation is. I ask them to read the biblical story and I try to raise a question about it. Then I ask them to try to answer that question and that becomes their thesis. This doesn’t quite answer the question of what interpretation is though, which I think is a much larger question. That I don’t know; certainly in the article I say that interpretation is about trying to salvage out of the text some kind of secret, some kind of thing that’s unknown, something that’s mystical, even. Pastors interpret scripture week after week in preparing their sermons. Is there something you would want pastors to be doing interpretively that is different from what you ask students to do? Pastors bring a slightly different role to their interpretive work: they are trying to figure out how the text fits the context and needs of their community, as a member of that community who shares stories with that community. You talk a lot about prophets in your essay. Should interpreters of the Bible aim to be prophets? This is a tough question because a person should always be suspicious of his or her own interpretations. We have no problem being suspicious of other people’s interpretations, but we need to be suspicious of our own, because it’s always possible that we’re wrong even when we think we’re right. I think it’s difficult to discern what’s right and what’s wrong, especially when we’re talking about true or false interpretation. There’s an emotional aspect to all this, because you may be excited about discovering a secret in the text, work hard to relay it in a sermon, and then find out you’re wrong. It’s also emotionally hard when you find a “secret” in the text and then are unsuccessful in inviting people to share it with you. Yeah, I think it’s almost easier to write an academic paper, because you could make
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