Raamatun puhuttelussa: Teksti, kokemus ja vuorovaikutus adventistien raamatuntutkistelussa

Abstract

Uskonnollisissa yhteisöissä pidetään yleensä itsestään selvänä, että Raamattu puhuttelee lukijaansa. Tässä tutkimuksessa analysoidaan autenttisia raamatuntutkimistilanteita, adventistien raamatuntutkisteluja, ja eksplikoitu niitä keinoja, joilla tutkistelujen osallistujat löytävät Raamatusta kertomuksista niiden puhuttelevuuden. Ensisijaisena metodina on etnometodologinen keskustelunanalyysi, joka perustuu vuorovaikutuksen yksityiskohtaiseen analyysiin.

Raamatuntutkistelu on institutionaalinen tilanne, jossa osallistujat lukevat Raamatun tekstejä, keskustelevat Raamatussa kerrotuista tapahtumista ja pyrkivät soveltamaan niitä omaan elämäänsä. Tutkimuksessa havaittiin, että Raamatun puhuttelevuutta rakennetaan sekä silloin, kun puhutaan Raamatun kertomuksista, että silloin, kun puhutaan osallistujien elämästä.

Päähuomio kohdistuu siihen, miten osallistujat puhuvat Raamatun tapahtumista. Ensinnäkin he kiinnittävät kertomuksissa huomioita seikkoihin, jotka ovat heille potentiaalisesti relevantteja. Toiseksi he tekevät päätelmiä kertomusten henkilöiden tunteista, motiiveista, henkilökohtaisista ominaisuuksista ja tapahtumien olosuhteista. Kolmanneksi he tekevät yleistyksiä, esittävät kertomuksen henkilöt, heidän toimintansa, sanansa tms. yleisempien kategorioiden edustajina. Neljänneksi he käyttävät Raamatun kertomuksista puhuessaan oman elämänsä kannalta relevantteja sanoja ja ilmauksia.

Omista kokemuksistaan puhuessaan raamatuntutkistelun osallistujat tekevät niistä samanlaisia kuin Raamatun henkilöiden kokemuksista. He nimeävät niitä samoin kuin Raamatun henkilöiden kokemuksia, käyttävät Raamatusta lainattuja sanoja niitä kuvatessaan, ja esittävät itsensä samanlaisissa rooleissa kuin Raamatun henkilöt.

Raamatuntutkistelussa keskustelua ohjailee opettaja, ja vuorovaikutus perustuu pitkälti opettajan kysymyksiin ja tutkistelijoiden vastauksiin. Opettajan ja osallistujan mahdollisuudet osallistua keskusteluun ovatkin yhtäältä epäsymmetriset, toisaalta puhuttelevuuden löytäminen Raamatun teksteistä on kuitenkin yhteistyötä, johon sekä opettaja että tutkistelijat osallistuvat.

Tutkimus on ensisijaisesti analyysi yhdestä erityisestä institutionaalisesta tilanteesta ja uskonnollisesta toiminnasta, mutta tuloksia pohditaan myös yleisempien kysymysten kannalta. Näitä ovat maallikkoeksegetiikan ja tieteellisen eksegetiikan välinen suhde, teksteistä puhuminen, opettamisen konventiot, vuorovaikutuksen ja kieliopin välinen suhde sekä kulttuuristen resurssien käyttö vuorovaikutuksessa.

The aim of this dissertation is to describe the Seventh-day Adventist Bible study as situated action. The methodology is based on ethnomethodological conversation analysis. The data consists of audio-recordings of Bible study interaction in Tampere, Finland.

The Bible study in an institution with a history of almost 150 years, and it is part of the weekly worship service in the Seventh-day Adventist church. It is based on an international study book that includes the texts that should be studied and some comments on them. It is chaired by a pre-assigned teacher. These teachers are often lay people, but they are in charge of the interaction in the Bible study. The interaction consists mainly of the reading of Bible texts, teachers monologues and question­answer­comment sequences. The turn-taking is close to that of formal classroom interaction.

It is common sense in most Christian circles that the Bible speaks to the one who studies it. This study is about how this speaking is accomplished, how the participants of the Bible study make Bible stories relevant to themselves so that the Bible can speak to them. They usually do it in two phases that alternate with each other during the Bible study. First they discuss the Bible story. In this phase they implicitly apply the story to their own life in various ways. In the second phase they explicitly talk about their own life world: about personal experience, about the state of the church or the surrounding world etc. The main focus of the study is on the first phase, the implicit application of the story.

Four different ways the participants use to make the Bible story speak to them have been analyzed. First, they draw attention to those aspects of the story that are potentially relevant to them. They can draw attention to a single word or expression, to an activity in the story or to recurrent tendencies in a longer stretch of the story.

Second, the participants make inferences. They infer the feelings, motives, character traits etc. of the characters of the story, or causes and effects of events in the story. They place the events and the actions of the characters in a network of conventional causality. Thus they breath real life into the stories and make them relevant to themselves: even though they haven t experienced the events of the story, they might have had similar conventional feelings, motives or character traits, or events in their lives might have had similar conventional causes and effects.

Third, the participants decontextualize the stories, for example by using the present tense instead of the past tense of the original story. When the story is decontextualized, the whole story or an aspect of it is made into an example of a type or a category. A character in the story can be made into an example of certain type of a person, an action in the story can be made into an example of a type of an action, words uttered in the story can be generalized so that the group of recipients is understood to be wider than in the original story. A whole event can also be made into an instance of a general type of an event. Thus the story is made relevant to the participants, if they can recognize persons, actions or events belonging to the same type in their own lives, or if they can understand themselves as recipients of words uttered in the story.

Fourth, the participants use recontextualizing words and expressions when they talk about the events of the Bible story. These words and expressions are not mentioned in the Bible and they are recognizably foreign to the biblical context. Instead they point to the world of the participants, either to the secular world or the religious world. Thus, while explicitly speaking about the Bible story, they implicitly talk about their own world.

In the second phase, when the participants, particularly the teacher, explicitly talk about their own world, they often make use of the ways they have talked about the Bible stories. The clearest examples of this are cases where the participants circulate the same expression when talking about the Bible story and their own world. In one example the teacher has talked about how the identity of the Israelites is lost; later he asks the participants to characterize the identity of their own church. Some sequences where the Bible stories are applied to the life of the participants have been analyzed in more detail. In these instances the teacher asks the participants to talk about their personal experiences in the context of the Bible story. In these sequences the participants answer the questions accordingly and make their experiences similar to the experiences of the biblical characters. They name their experiences according to the Bible story, as interpreted in the teacher s question, they use biblical words and expressions to describe their experiences, and they present themselves in similar roles as the characters of the Bible story. This means also that they make their experiences sharable. In their comments the teachers confirm the sharability of the experience.

The participants thus orient to the relevance of the Bible story to them, to the story speaking to them, both when they talk about the Bible story and when they talk about their own lives. They talk about the Bible story in the context of their lives and about their lives in the context of the Bible story. Finding how the Bible can speak to them is a joint accomplishment of the participants. This becomes especially clear in the analysis of question­answer­comment sequences. When the teacher orients to the relevance of the story to the participants in her/his question, the answerer must display her/his understanding of the implications of the question. And in the comment the teacher has a possibility to evaluate the success of the answer.

The study brings into focus the use of cultural resources, both by the participants and by the researcher. The use of cultural knowledge is especially recognizable in a context such as the Seventh-day Adventist Bible study that is situated within a partly isolated subculture. The participants draw on many secular cultural resources that can be understood by any member of the Finnish culture, but in some cases understanding the interaction is dependent on knowledge specific to the subculture. It is important to note, however, that cultural resources are used in a situated way. When a participant, for example, answers a question, it is not enough for her/him to produce a culturally right answer, he/she must produce a sequentially right answer.

The main aim of the study is to describe the interaction in one specific institutional situation, but it has implications for many other issues. It is an analysis of a type of lay exegesis, and the results could be of use in discussions between lay people and professional Bible scholars. It is also relevant in discussions about the relationship of text and talk, as the Bible study is an example of a situation where the participants discuss the meaning of a text. It is also a type of a teaching situation, which can be compared with other teaching situations. It is especially interesting to see how the teacher handles the participants experiences. Some sections of the study concern the use of grammatical forms such as particles and adverbs, and the results offer some insights about the relationship between grammar and interaction. And finally, the study invites the possibility of a conversation analytic treatment of various kind of religious practices.