1 Introduction1
On October 1, 2019 farmer protests caused the largest traffic jam ever in the Netherlands. Two weeks later, military trucks in the streets of The Hague were preventing farmers from protesting at ‘Het Binnenhof,’ the political heart of the Netherlands. These protests were a response to recent discussions about reducing the emission of nitrogen. In September 2019, the Remkes commission recommended in the report that ‘not everything is possible’ and that farms situated close to nature reserves should be bought out or transformed into more environmentally friendly farms in order to reduce these emissions.2 As indicated, the farmers became furious and caused the traffic jam.
The nitrogen reduction recommendations seem to trigger an underlying feeling of ‘us-them’ amongst farmers, as expressed by Mark van den Oever, one of the protest organizers, just before the traffic jam: “We feel as if we’re being put in the dunces’ corner by city types who come and tell us how things should be in the countryside.” The ‘city type’ can appear in many forms: the activist, the politician and the journalist. According to Van den Oever, there is a sentiment among farmers that they get blamed for everything and that the city types try to bully them away. In other words, Van den Over experiences an us-them feeling between farmers on the one hand and ‘city types’ on the other.3
Earlier that year, on May 13th, there was a clear physical illustration of ‘us-them’ when one hundred animal activists from the international
The debate about the future of agriculture is related to several Sustainable Development Goals (SDG s). In the past few years, the SDG s have become the common language of governments, NGO s and business to address the most pressing development challenges for humanity and the planet, including climate change, biodiversity, poverty, and gender issues. The SDG s prescribe an agenda for sustainable development in the period 2015–2030. However, reaching the SDG s remains a major challenge. As SDG 17 notes, cooperation and partnership are required to achieve the other 16 SDG s; but such cooperation is not always self-evident. One of the main challenges is overcoming polarizing positions between parties when it comes to particular SDG s, as seen in the agricultural sector in the Netherlands.
This article explores a religious-inspired contribution to transition research. It seeks to develop an interdisciplinary contribution to the transition to circular agriculture in the Netherlands by exploring the potential role of the concept of hope. More specifically, we investigate whether the concept of hope might be able to facilitate moving beyond polarization in the transition to circular agriculture in the Netherlands. In doing so and while drawing on theology in Jewish and Christian traditions as a resource, it makes sense to take scripture itself as the point of departure. This takes place in two ways: (a) we focus on the concept of hope, derived from the biblical narrative of the Exodus, set forth by Jonathan Sacks, a British scholar and public intellectual in the tradition of Judaism; (b) we substantiate the dialogical approach to discernment that views diversity and even disagreement and conflict as a resource and catalyst for creativity rather than an obstacle that needs to be overcome or passed over by means of an appeal to canonical hermeneutics as they have been developed in the field of biblical studies and the theological reflection on the canon of the (Christian) Bible.
2 Dutch Agriculture
Having witnessed the Dutch famine at the end of the Second World War, Sicco Mansholt, Dutch Minister of Agriculture (1945–1958) and European Commissioner for Agriculture (1958–1972) was determined to ensure that Europe would be a place without hunger. Mansholt was convinced that Europe needed to become self-sufficient and that a stable supply of affordable food should be guaranteed for all inhabitants of Europe. Therefore, he set in motion a program to modernize agriculture profoundly in order to avoid future shortages and guarantee production efficiency. One of his policy measures was the rationalization and upscaling of farm productivity, which resulted among others in the application of chemical crop protection substances and technological development to save labor. From a production perspective, the Dutch agricultural sector has been highly successful. For example, according to Statistics Netherlands (CBS) and Wageningen Economic Research, the agricultural goods exports from the Netherlands amounted to an estimated 90.3 billion euros in 2018. With this export value, the small country of the Netherlands is the world’s largest exporter of agricultural goods after the United States. Agricultural commodities account for nearly one-fifth of Dutch commodity exports: 18.2 percent in 2018. Domestic production accounts for 72.4 percent of these agricultural exports.6
In September 2018 Carola Schouten, Minister of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, published the vision Agriculture, Nature and Food: Valuable and
First, cost reductions and production increases result in small and sometimes even negative profit margins, which makes the sectors vulnerable in economic terms. This leads to substantial income uncertainty for actors in the sector.
Second, intensive production has come at the expense of biodiversity, the environment, the quality of drinking water and the attractiveness of the landscape.
According to the Minister, these reasons provide an argument to make a transition to circular agriculture. Katrien Termeer, Professor of Public Administration and Policy (Wageningen University), deepens this argument by stating that there are not just two imbalances in the agricultural sector, but that there is a range of problems and challenges, among others strengthening the position of the famer in the chain, synergy between agriculture and biodiversity, adaptation to climate change, reduction of food waste, reduction of CO2 emissions, animal welfare and limited resources.8 Termeer uses the term ‘wicked problems’ to describe these problems and challenges.
3 Wicked Problems
Wicked problems were originally defined by Churchman,9 and Rittel and Webber10 as those incomprehensible and resistant to a solution. Head and
There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem;
Wicked problems have no ‘stopping rule’ (i.e., no definitive solution);
Solutions to wicked problems are not true or false, but good or bad;
There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem;
Every (attempted) solution to a wicked problem is a ‘one-shot operation’; the results cannot be readily undone, and there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error;
Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan;
Every wicked problem is essentially unique;
Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem;
The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways;
The planner has no ‘right to be wrong’ (i.e., there is no public tolerance of experiments that fail).
First, there are many parties involved in all layers of government (local, regional, national, European, global); an increasing number of policy domains (agriculture, environment, nature, health, energy, aid and trade); public and private domains (farmers, parties in the chain, service providers, governments and civil organizations) and the wider public (citizens, neighbors and consumers). These parties often have different and conflicting values and targets.
Second, and important to understanding the cause of polarization, the parties have different and often conflicting ideas of the problem at hand. This can vary from reduction of the fertility of the soil to presence of too many animals. Due to different points of view and interests, parties have divergent ideas about solutions, ranging from innovative sustainable systems in factory farming to reduction of the consumption of meat.
Third, the impossibility of giving the problem a definitive formulation. The problems change regularly in shape due to interventions and autonomous dynamics (e.g., economic growth); policy intervention (e.g., abolition of the milk quota and agreements regarding climate change); and incidents (Q fever, fipronil, drought and flooding). Most problems have a long history of policy interventions.
Fourth, every problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem. Many examples can be given of solutions that were useful in the past, but lead to problems in the present situation. The reason for this is that there was only attention to a partial problem, some effects were unforeseen or values in society have changed. For example, measures with regard to animal welfare that caused extra emission of particulates, the consequences of detailed legislation on fertilizers for soil fertility, or undesirable side-effects of several generations of Common Agricultural Policy.
Fifth, today’s solutions lead to the problems of tomorrow, including the lack of a stopping rule (to know when a problem has been resolved). Despite the ambitions and efforts of successive governments, the problems appear not to be solved once and for all.
Describing the problems and challenges in the agricultural sector as wicked problems raises at least the corner of the veil of the cause of polarization. The parties involved have often different and conflicting ideas of the problem at
4 Governance of Wicked Problems
Termeer argues that dealing with the interdependent problems and challenges in the agricultural sector demands a transition that is characterized by a shared urgency to deal with the problems and challenges involved.14 In her vision, the Minister states also that the entire supply chain, the government and consumers have a role to play.15 Or, to put it in the words of the Council for the Environment and Infrastructure (RLI): “The inescapable need to adapt our food system provides an excellent opportunity to unite farmers, the food processing industry, the retail sector and consumers in a unique coalition for sustainable and healthy food.”16
Cooperation may be required in order to stimulate a transition toward a circular agriculture, but in the introduction we have seen that there is a current tendency toward polarization. The tendency was also reflected in a large survey in 2018 showing that more than 80% of Dutch farmers want to use more environment-friendly methods. However, the survey also shows that farmers experience a big gap between farmers and consumers/citizens and society, farmers and supermarkets and farmers and their representing organizations. Interests diverge and trust is often lacking. In 2019, an extended version of this survey was done. This survey shows that there seems to be a further polarization of opinions between farmer-citizen and city-agricultural sector. At the same time, although less visible, there is a tendency toward cooperation and connection. What is striking are the more radical and extreme positions of young farmers (under the age of 40) in the debate.17
This chapter investigates a somewhat unexpected—and therefore potentially innovative—approach to support this direction of dealing with wicked problems given by Termeer and Putters. We delve more deeply into the concept of hope of the wisdom traditions of Judaism and Christianity.
5 Hope
The first sections of this article elaborated on the challenges in the Dutch agricultural sector. The next is about the challenge for the church in these situations. Here we want to highlight ‘hope’ as a promising concept for overcoming stagnation and conflict in the context of wicked problems. Hope can be considered, together with faith and love, as one of the core values in the Christian tradition (1 Cor. 13: 13). Recently, Volf and Croasmun have reminded us that religious wisdom traditions, and theology as a systematic reflection on them, are about a certain perspective of flourishing life.21 In the following we argue that, in the context of polarizing positions and resulting paralysis, there is a biblical tradition that identifies ‘hope’ as a promising concept for overcoming stagnation caused by conflict.
To move from the concept of hope to hope as a catalyst for overcoming conflict and contestations in the sector of agriculture, we look in particular at the understanding of hope set forth by Jonathan Sacks, a British scholar and public intellectual in the tradition of Judaism. The reason for this is that Sacks provides a particular view of hope that is promising in relation to the issue of decision making in situations of conflicting positions and uncertainty. Innovatively utilizing the resources of the Jewish tradition, Sacks conceptualizes, based on the narrative of the Exodus, hope as a narrative of individual and societal transformation. In this process of transformation, key stakeholders, individually and collectively, learn to open up their identities, the images—of themselves, others and the world—people live by, and to include the interest of oneself and others into a common identity.23 Therefore, hope is best expressed as a learning process that seeks to create relations of trust that teach one how to honor both the interest of oneself and others. According to Sacks, this process is supported by two institutions: covenant and public Sabbath. In the covenant, parties with often contrasting interests exchange voluntarily and each on their own terms a promise to take responsibility for a shared future. The public Sabbath has the following characteristics.24
First, the public Sabbath as Utopia Now celebrates the liberating perspective, the new ‘we,’ in the present order not to get lost in the transformation, not to forget that the present situation is no longer one’s identity and to remind people of what they are aiming at.
Third, the public Sabbath seeks to stimulate positive other-regarding behavior, especially relations of kindness and love, that seek to honor oneself and the other, especially those yet excluded. These relations can never be taken for granted and have to be developed, because they are never immune to fear, free-riding, cynicism and power games to gain influence.
Fourth, the public Sabbath is an embodied performance that can bring in the power of symbol, music, memory, narrative, poetry, prayer, ritual, art and imagination in order to create and shape a common identity. Music, for example, has the ability to imagine and dream about a different reality than the present one or to express frustration about the current state of affairs, and can thus help to make the first steps to become honest and to put a vision into practice.
Sacks considers a public Sabbath as the key to a politics of hope.25 The reason for this is that the Sabbath is a regular institution to stimulate individual and societal transformation. Nevertheless, covenant and Sabbath are two sides of the same coin. During the transformation, stimulated by a public Sabbath, the parties involved develop the willingness to exchange promises for a shared future (covenant). Several dimensions of such a public Sabbath can be found in a real-life initiative. The following section discusses an operationalization of Sacks’ concept of hope, including a public Sabbath.
6 Courageous Conversations
An example of an operationalization of hope as a transition, including a public Sabbath, can be found in the so-called Safe Space Dialogue (SSD) in South Africa. SSD is a social design approach that has been developed in the context of the transition in the mining sector in South Africa and was expressed in the initiative of ‘Courageous Conversations.’ This initiative was started by Thabo Makgoba, successor of Desmond Tutu as Archbishop of Cape Town. It consists of a series of courageous conversations between parties involved in the
The next section discusses how such an approach can be applied to the agricultural sector in the Netherlands.
Management structure of the Courageous Conversations in South Africa
We have argued that earlier initiatives for a transition in the agricultural sector started with high ambitions and a lot of energy, but got stuck and quietly died. Therefore, Termeer and Putters argue for a political and societal dialogue. Sacks’ understanding of hope provides a transition pathway in which dialogue between all relevant parties plays a key role.
During a Round Table, in May 2019, first steps were taken to explore and operationalize Sacks’ concept of hope in order to overcome polarized situations in the agricultural sector in the Netherlands, more in particular in the Food Valley.26 This Round Table was initiated by Rabobank, the municipality of Ede, and an interdisciplinary research group, including economists, theologians and political researchers of the Amsterdam Sustainability Institute of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The Round Table brought together farmers, representatives of environmental organizations, bankers, politicians (local, regional and national), clergy, policymakers and scientists. The Round Table was structured by three rounds. The first round started with challenges in the agricultural sector explored from the perspective of a farmer, the perspective of an environmental organization, and from the perspective of an Environmental Assessment Agency. This round made visible that over the years the same kind of problems come back—e.g., manure surplus, biodiversity loss and the number of animals in the sector living under poor conditions— but each time in a different form. Problems related to, e.g., phosphate and fertilizers were addressed technically. As a result, one problem was solved but two new ones emerged. During the discussion, it became clear that in the agricultural sector the problems should be considered in interdependency. But this raises questions like: Where should we start? and Who is responsible?—especially when uncontrollable international dimensions play a role as well. A topic that comes up in the discussion is the difficulty farmers face earning a decent income. Although the farmers state that it is necessary to earn a living, what they really miss is recognition for the work they are doing. The agricultural
In the second round, the perspective of hope as a contribution to overcoming the challenges identified in the first round was explored from a scientific perspective and a perspective from the region. In this round, the daily tragedies with which farmers often have to deal was mentioned, e.g., avian influenza, fipronil and/or the burning down of a stall. Where then is the hope? The question is answered by a reference to two examples in which people worked together toward a shared future. The first example refers to joined participation in courses about the fertility of the soil by farmers, civil servants, ecologists, water authorities, and so on. The second example is about the Manifesto of Salentein in which farmers and politicians explore the future of the agricultural sector. The last round explored the usefulness and necessity of next steps forward of developing hope as a catalyst for furthering responsible and broadly supported decision making in the context of the transition to circular agriculture. The focus of the third and last round is on the question of whether it is appropriate to develop further connections between the discussed concept of hope and a transition toward circular agriculture. In this round, a banker argues that the present perspective toward a circular agriculture is still too abstract to put farmers in motion. The importance is stressed of developing a shared image of the future together as has been done with the Deltaplan for Biodiversity, in line with the above-described concept of hope. In this plan, all stakeholders are involved. Although there are conflicting interests in the present, a shared image and the possibility to create more time for the transition allows stakeholders to explore steps forward in the present. Besides that, it is considered as essential to change the way parties are treating one another. The importance is stressed of creating space for one another, even or especially when there are conflicting interests. A local politician highlights the need for a new covenant between all stakeholders based on taking responsibility for a shared future. Such a covenant allows parties to go beyond a ‘we and them’ in the present. However, a key question is raised: Who should take the lead in creating such a covenant? A representative of the church states that the churches played such a role in the past, but that it is hard for the church to play this role in the present due to its changed and marginalized role in society. Recommendations are made, for example to organize the next meeting with all relevant stakeholders in order to create a shared perspective for the Food Valley.
On what basis can the above outline of a communal hermeneutics be built? A number of available—and interrelated—paradigms exist, for instance theologies that proceed from a ‘social’ understanding of the Trinity, or theologies that use a ‘liturgical,’ or more emphatically ‘eucharistic’ paradigm, or theologies that stress the hermeneutical nature of the church qua community of interpretation.27 In the context of discourse that also draws on Christian theology as a resource, it stands to reason to draw on something that is key to most forms of Christian theology: scripture itself, in particular the hermeneutics that can be seen to be implied by the formation of and the subsequent functioning of the biblical canon.28 As one building block of the argument of this essay, it will be shown here how precisely the Christian tradition’s foundational witness can be seen to embody a hermeneutics that undergirds the communal discernment of hope as discussed above.
The intensive search for a linguistically and existentially differentiable and unifying center of Christian identity and the impossibility to determine it unambiguously … [was] already an integral part of the historical existence of the Christian communities from the beginning. The tension between unity and diversity would therefore not be a problem given
only with the canon, but a fundamental and thus irrevocable fact of the historical existence of Christianity in general.33
The differentiation of the one confession into different and competing concepts of salvation including their life-world implications [must] not be understood as a loss of an original unity, but [has] been an integral part of the plausibility of the confession itself, without which the reception of the Christian message of salvation would not have been possible. What the testimony to the Christ event means in concrete terms (i.e., with which signs which meaning is ascribed to this testimony) is not fixed from the outset, but is negotiated in context-dependent processes of meaning; this is documented in the canon.35
The differences that a genealogical view reveals in the canon make it appear as a compilation of particular theologies of theologies that bear witness to the Christ event by recourse to the meaning structures of their cultural context. The differences are not faded out, but compiled within the canon. In the differences a space of interculturality is constituted … By making differences visible, the canon creates a space of interculturality in which Christian identity is negotiated; as a normatively set document, it thus standardizes it as a disparate product of intercultural processes of translation and transformation between particular theologies.37
The kind of identity and unity that becomes visible in this way in the writings of the New Testament (or even biblical) canon is one that is less conceptual in
It is precisely this understanding of the foundational witness of the Christian tradition that undergirds the project outlined in this essay. If identity, emphatically: Christian identity, is both communal and processual, meaning that a polyphony of voices—even dissonant ones!—is needed to propel it forward, then the kinds of communities of discernment as a reinvention of a public Sabbath discussed earlier can well be understood in analogy to what ‘church’ is, and the ‘hermeneutical ecclesiology’ implied by the witness of the biblical canon can serve as a source of inspiration to further, precisely for theological reasons, such undertakings in the context of endangered sustainability. On this basis, both the concept of hope, as Sacks has highlighted it and the dialogical approach to the discernment of a potentially common hope, as it has been proposed above, can be seen as continuing lines of thought present in the foremost source of Christian theology, the Bible itself. This also means that churches face the challenge to live up to the dialogical basis that they refer to as a key part of their tradition, i.e., scripture; can churches see this as a form of vocation, i.e., to become and invite others to dialogical communities of discernment, both for the good of the churches and for the common good? The round table referred to above would suggest that this is possible and also point the way. Such tables could well be understood as a further performance of the dialogical identity that is at the heart of the Christian tradition and calls for continuous, faithful and inclusive conversations that do not shun tensions, but balance them out with a desire to walk together, ecclesially and societally.
At the end of this article, it seems to be justified to ask whether the church in general, and the Protestant Church in the Netherlands (PKN) in particular, can play a role in bringing polarized parties together based on hope. To put it more strongly, based on the conference theme, is the church called to contribute to hope in times of polarization? There seems to be only one answer possible.
9 Conclusion
In this article we have explored the potential role of hope, based on the work of Jonathan Sacks, to facilitate moving beyond polarization in the transition to circular agriculture in the Netherlands. This concept seems to provide a new vantage point for enabling cooperation between the stakeholders in the agricultural sector, who hold often strongly conflicting positions. The reason for this is that this concept of hope is considered as a learning process that seeks to create relations of trust in honoring the interests of oneself and others. The institution of a public Sabbath can bring together parties with different, even conflicting, interests because it considers differences as a source of renewal instead of a source of polarization. The question is whether such a concept can also work in practice. Therefore, an operationalization of a similar concept in South Africa was highlighted. The article also presented a case study in which relevant stakeholders in the Food Valley discussed the questions in the sector at hand in relation to Sacks’ concept of hope and the operationalization in
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A special thanks for his constructive remarks to dr. Paul Koster, Department of Spatial Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
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See Jonathan Sacks, The Politics of Hope (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997); Jonathan Sacks, Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Schocken Books, 2009); Jonathan Sacks, Covenant & Conversation, Exodus: The Book of Redemption (Jerusalem: Maggid Books, 2010).
Jan Jorrit Hasselaar, “Hope in the Context of Climate Change: Jonathan Sacks’ Interpretation of the Exodus and Radical Uncertainty,” International Journal of Public Theology 14 (2020), 224–240.
Sacks, Exodus, 331.
The Food Valley is an important agro-food centre of Europe and located around municipalities like Ede, Nijkerk and Wageningen, close to the middle of the Netherlands. The reason to choose the Food Valley is twofold. First, in the Food Valley there are intensive relationships between town and country, the presence of farmers involved, global players in the primary sector, the supplying and processing industry and the knowledge and education institutions. These relationships contain the ingredients for a proper case study. Second, Minister Schouten has selected the Food Valley as one of her ‘region deals’ (Regio Deals) to face challenges as expressed in the transition to circular agriculture (Schouten, Landbouw, natuur en voedsel).
Reference to all of these paradigms is made in: Peter-Ben Smit, Traditie als Missie: 125 Jaar Unie van Utrecht—1275 jaar in de voetsporen van St. Willibrord (Tradition as mission: 125 Years of the Union of Utrecht—1275 years in the footsteps of St. Willibrord), (Amersfoort/Sliedrecht: Oud-Katholiek Boekhuis/Merweboek, 2015).
What follows has been adapted from: Peter-Ben Smit, “From Divisive Diversity to Catholic Fullness? Canon and Ecclesial Unity Reconsidered,” in Catholicity under Pressure: Proceedings of the 18th Academic Consultation of the Societas Oecumenica, Beihefte zur Ökumenischen Rundschau 105, eds. Dagmar Heller and Péter Szentpétery (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016), 391–409.
Cf. James A. Sanders, Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984) and Francis Watson, Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013). See also: Peter-Ben Smit, “Authority in the New Testament and the New Testament’s Authority,” Ecclesiology 13 (2017), 83–101.
Cf. also, e.g., Theo K. Heckel, Vom Evangelium zum viergestaltigen Evangelium (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), as well as the essays in Richard Bauckham (ed.), The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
See on this, the general argument of Watson, Gospel.
Michael Wolter, “Die Vielfalt der Schrift und die Einheit des Kanons,” in Die Einheit der Schrift und die Vielfalt des Kanons, eds. John Barton and Michael Wolter (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003), 45–68, 65; Judith Gruber, Theologie nach dem Cultural Turn: Interkulturalität als theologische Ressource (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2013), 20, 25–26; see also: Judith M. Lieu, Neither Jew nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity (London: T&T Clark, 2002), 2–3: “Texts do not simply reflect a ‘history’ going on independently of them, they are themselves part of the process by which … Christianity came into being. For it was through literature that … a self-understanding was shaped and articulated, and then mediated to and appropriated by others, and through literature that people and ideas were included or excluded. What the texts were doing is sometimes as, if not more, important than what they were saying.”
Wolter, “Vielfalt,” 52–53: “Die intensive Suche nach einer sprachlich wie existentiell ausdifferenzierbaren und einheitsstiftenden Mitte der christlichen Identität und die Unmöglichkeit, sie eindeutig … zu bestimmen, [war] bereits von Anfang an integraler Bestandteil der geschichtlichen Existenz der christlichen Gemeinden. Die Spannung zwischen Einheit und Vielfalt wäre demnach nicht ein erst mit dem Kanon gegebenes Problem, sondern eine fundamentale und damit unaufhebbare Gegebenheit der geschichtlichen Existenz des Christentums überhaupt.”
The diversity that exists concerning the text of the canonical scriptures of Christianity can be understood along the same lines.
Wolter, “Vielfalt,” 55: “Die Ausdifferenzierung des einen Bekenntnisses in unterschiedliche und miteinander konkurrierende Heilskonzepte einschließlich ihrer lebensweltlichen Implikationen [darf] nicht als Verlust einer ursprünglichen Einheit verstanden werden, sondern [ist] ein integraler Bestandteil der Plausibilität des Bekenntnisses selbst gewesen, ohne die die Rezeption der christlichen Heilsbotschaft nicht möglich gewesen wäre. Was das Zeugnis vom Christusereignis konkret bedeutet (d.h. mit welchen Zeichen diesem Zeugnis welche Bedeutung zugeschrieben wird) steht nicht von vornherein fest, sondern wird in kontextabhängigen Bedeutungsprozessen ausverhandelt; das wird im Kanon dokumentiert.”
See also the notion of the ‘epiphanic space’ opened up by the (different) ‘other,’ as underlined by Hans de Wit, My God’, She Said: ‘Ships Make Me so Crazy.’ Reflections on Empirical Hermeneutics, Interculturality and Holy Scripture (Amsterdam: VU University, 2008), 65, 87.
Gruber, Theologie nach dem Cultural Turn, 19: “Die Differenzen, die ein genealogischer Blick im Kanon offenlegt, lassen ihn als eine Kompilation von partikularen Theologien erscheinen von Theologien, die vom Christusereignis im Rückgriff auf die Bedeutungsstrukturen ihres kulturellen Kontextes Zeugnis ablegen. Die Differenzen werden nicht ausgeblendet, sondern innerhalb des Kanons zusammengestellt. In den Differenzen konstituiert sich…ein Raum der Interkulturalität. Indem der Kanon Differenzen sichtbar macht, schafft er einen Raum der Interkulturalität, in dem christliche Identität verhandelt wird; Als normativ gesetztes Dokument normiert er sie damit als disparates Produkt interkultureller Übersetzungs- und Transformationsvorgänge zwischen partikularen Theologien.”
See Gruber, Theologie, 20: “Christliche Identität geschieht hier performativ im Konflikt—gerade weil über unterschiedliche Interpretationen verhandelt wird, zerfällt christliche Identität nicht. Die im Kanon normative gesetzte konfliktive Interkulturalität weist so einen Weg zwischen einem Verständnis von christlicher Identität, das Differenzen ausblendet, und ihrer Zersplitterung entlang der im Kanon dokumentierten Bruchlinien.”