Defining “Sacred” and “Text:” Part I

EEK! There are too many definitions of “sacred text!” I’m confused!

Ok. That might be an overstatement. However, defining just exactly what a “sacred text” is, and more importantly, what role a sacred text plays in communities and individual faith lives, is turning out to be quite complicated. Is a sacred text divinely inspired? Inerrant? Subject to historical-critical methods? Does it contain law, revelations, information about salvation? Some or all of the above? Is it taken literally, and if so, all or which parts? And just who decides what is sacred? God? Me? The Council of Trent? And once something is deemed sacred, just what can I do with it?

Of course, it is not so much that I am seeking a one-size-fits-all definition of what constitutes a sacred text, but rather than I want to understand the how religious communities define and use “sacred” and “texts.” A large part of my research project involves looking at how sacred texts and community life interact, and so I need to spend time understand how sacred texts are defined and created. I plan to examine sacred texts in terms of origin, function, and treatment, and I am curious to see what the results of this examination will be.

In “Our Sacred Texts: Literature, Theology, and Feminism,” Heather Walton writes that feminist theologians and scholars, in their quest to understand and represent women’s spiritual experience have studied and drawn from women’s literature, and in some senses, made this literature “sacred.” Thus, something can be made sacred or used as sacred by a certain community – in this case, feminist and womanist theologians. Scholarly or literary texts can be made sacred, depending on treatment.

Walton’s article, about using literature written by women as a theological resource, addresses text function and treatment. She note that certain texts of women’s literature are becoming “sacred” to some because they allow a window into women’s spiritual lives and women’s understanding of the divine. Walton writes that theologian Alicia Ostriker states this clearly: “She claimed that in the sacred narratives of our culture, as well as in the work of contemporary women artists and writers, is to be discovered the repressed traces of women’s awareness of the female divine” (Walton 88). Walton refers to scholars and theologians who find these texts sacred because they feel that there is access to a divine being through them. The texts function as a bridge between the divine and the human. (Somewhat ironically, Walton also notes that feminist theologians of the 1970s and 1980s had a serious distaste for mystical, symbolic, and spiritual texts, preferring realistic writing. Had Julian of Norwich lived then, she might have had a tough time with feminist theologians despite her emphasis on Jesus as Mother.)

However, Walton’s use of “sacred text” is not altogether positive: her overall complaint with feminist theologians is that in reading women’s literature as sacred text, they are denying the text’s literary value, and instead co-opting them to support certain theologies. In doing so, they also limit their engagement with other scholars who read the same literature (Walton 92). For Walton, using something as a “sacred text” is inherently limiting both the function of the text and the people who use it.

Throughout Walton’s article, a ‘sacred text’ is something that is at least somewhat fixed in function and interpretation. Sacred texts can be created when people use pieces of writing in particular ways. And, importantly, scholarly and sacred are not mutually exclusive. (Remember that when I start talking about Ricouer!)

I began this blog post trying to synthesize four different sources on sacred texts, but I’ve realized that it is already rather long, so this will be Part 1 of the series of posts on defining sacred texts. Stay tuned for more!

Works Cited: Walton, Heather. "Our Sacred Texts: Literature, Theology, and Feminism." Reading Spiritualities: Constructing and Representing the Sacred. Ed. . Dawn Llewellyn and Deborah Sawyer. Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Publishing House, 2008. Print.