ERVIN R. STUTZMAN. Discerning God’s Will Together: Biblical Interpretation in the Free Church Tradition. Telford, Pa.: Cascadia Publishing House, 2013. Pp. 176. $16.95 (U.S.)
Reviewed by Zach Spidel
Ervin R. Stutzman’s attempt to draw upon the discernment function of free church ecclesiology in order to “aid the contemporary church in communal efforts at biblical interpretation, even amid conflict and controversy” (pp. 22) is highly informative, but ultimately falls short of an important goal the book sets for itself in its introduction. Stutzman articulates this goal by first noting the recent “significant interest in the corporate dimension of the hermeneutical task. A few authors have explored the benefits and liabilities of such communal endeavors. Rarely, however, have these authors explicated at any length the means by which such communal interpretations best emerge. This study will attempt to bridge this practical and theoretical gap in the life of the free church” (pp. 22).
This framing of the book would lead the reader to believe that what’s to follow will be focused on a kind of “nuts and bolts” description (grounded in a free church ecclesiology) of how communal interpretation and application can best function in practice. This, however, is not the book Stutzman has written.
Following the introduction, Stutzman’s second chapter provides a brief summary of free church ecclesiology before pivoting to a more focused discussion of the ways in which that ecclesiology uniquely equips churches in that tradition to practice communal discernment. The communitarian, egalitarian, and politically unattached ecclesiology of the free church, drives it to seek consensus through bottom-up decision making strategies. The biblicism of much of the free church tradition places hermeneutics in the center of those strategies. In this brief but helpful chapter, Stutzman provides short descriptions of several practical discernment processes as outlined by other scholars. For instance, his summary of John Howard Yoder’s taxonomy of agents within the discernment process (pp. 46-47), as well as his summary of George Schemel and Judith Roemer’s seven elements of successful discernment both provide useful insights to those not familiar with these authors’ work.
The third chapter of the book, however, does not effectively build on the second, but provides yet more introductory matter in the form of a bifurcated summary first of sixteenth-century Anabaptist hermeneutics and then of a diverse array of modern and postmodern hermeneutical strategies. By the end of this chapter, one is more than half way through the volume, but one feels as though the author has not yet left the tasks of introduction and summary to begin bridging the gap he helpfully identified in his opening chapter. Once again there is no shortage of interesting information on offer. The information, however, remains unsynthesized, and the chapter reads more as a chronicle of disparate hermeneutical trends than as an attempt to construct from those trends a coherent approach to communal hermeneutics and discernment for today.
The second half of the chapter in particular suffers from this defect. It tackles in quick succession the following topics, most only receiving three or four pages of attention: the socio-religious effects of modernization; the rise of historical criticism and its effects; modern developments in translation theory; growing interest in the sociology of knowledge and its applications within hermeneutics; rhetorical criticism; and various contemporary conceptualizations of the hermeneutic community. There is little that ties this section of the chapter to the first half’s investigation of sixteenth-century Anabaptist hermeneutics, and almost no constructive work is accomplished in the midst of all this summarization and review.
The book’s fourth chapter is its longest and is clearly the heart of the work. It is also the book’s most interesting and useful chapter. From the beginning of the book, Stutzman points out that discernment processes are nearly always carried out in the midst of some level of disagreement or conflict. If there were no disagreement, why would there be need for discernment? In this chapter, the author draws on his own extensive knowledge of and expertise with conflict resolution and provides a wealth of helpful insights on how to manage the inevitable and unending tension created in church life by certain enduring paradoxes and polarities (both practical and theological). All this material reminds the reader that communal hermeneutics and discernment are only possible within a community that handles these tensions well, but these insights into conflict management are not integrated with a specific model for such a communal process of hermeneutics, and thus the major goal of the book remains more or less unaddressed with only twenty pages left in which the author could accomplish the task.
In the opening paragraph of the fifth chapter, Stutzman alerts the reader that, “In this section, more than any other in this study, I will present my own perspectives and convictions” (p. 131). Here, at last, Stutzman intends to leave behind summary and attempt to build the bridge that he began the book promising to construct. Stutzman goes on to cast his “vision for discerning hermeneutic communities” (p. 132) by centering that vision around commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ as expressed in worship, community and mission. This vision occupies only eight pages and provides nothing as practically helpful to the process of communal discernment as did the previous chapter to the process of conflict management. He follows this brief vision with summary descriptions of various groups currently serving as hermeneutic communities, before moving on to a short concluding chapter that summarizes the contents of the book.
While Stutzman’s fourth chapter piqued my interest in and heightened my awareness of the role of conflict resolution strategies in the communal discernment process, and while the book provides numerous helpful summaries of topics ranging from polarity management to sixteenth-century Anabaptist hermeneutics to the sociology of knowledge, the book ultimately succumbs to the same problems Stutzman cited in his introduction as his reason for writing. He has explored a diverse range of benefits and liabilities attached to communal discernment but he has not adequately described a process by which such communal discernment can practically take place. He has, however, drawn attention to a crucial precondition for such discernment—the healthy management of the community’s inner tensions—and for those interested in communal discernment, his insights in this area are probably worth the investment in this book.