(The outline of McGilchrist’s thesis is here: https://jotsandscribbles.blog/2023/11/07/introduction-to-the-master-and-his-emissary/)
Fairly early in his book, McGilchrist highlights research showing how information is processed between the hemispheres. This piqued my interest as having implications for the process for interpreting the Bible.
McGilchrist suggests that the hemispheres’ distinct ways of attending to the world are brought together with a distinct pattern. The right hemisphere first broadly receives everything, then sends things to the left hemisphere for analysis, before the left hemisphere sends it back the right hemisphere for the new information to be reintegrated into a richer understanding of the whole.
How the two hemispheres contribute to the richness of experience. Essentially this is that the right hemisphere tends to ground experience; the left hemisphere then works on it to clarify, ‘unpack’ and generally render the implicit explicit; and the right hemisphere finally reintegrates what the left hemisphere has produced with its own understanding, the explicit once more receding to produce a new, now enriched whole.
So for Biblical interpretation, we first notice all sorts of details in the text, and all sorts of possible connections to other text, and in the context. This includes metaphors, which are a right hemisphere speciality: Where the right hemisphere can see that metaphor is the only way to preserve the link between language and the world it refers to, the left hemisphere sees it as either a lie (Locke, expressing enlightenment disdain, called metaphors ‘perfect cheats’) or as a distracting ornament; and connotation as a limitation, since in the interests of certainty the left hemisphere prefers single meanings.
But all the possible details and context and metaphors is too much to take in and too uncontrolled to give an agreed meaning. So the process passes to more left hemisphere analysis. We analyse the possible connections for relative strength of evidence and importance. This stage also includes a sort of simplifying, an attempt to get a summary sentence, and a basic structure to the passage. This simplified core, if done well, give us a golden thread through the passage, so that we see all the details connected to this core, and have a measure against which to decide what is important and what is less important or weighty.
Then with that summary sentence, we seek to communicate the whole passage faithfully and clearly into the present context. The simple summary must be reconnected to the whole passage, a tool in interpreting the whole and not simply extracted from the whole, as if God would have been better to give us the summary sentence. And it must be connected to the current context if it is to be communicated well. This reintegration is vital to ensure a sermon is not merely a lecture.
The right-left-right pattern seems to have some correlation with Bible interpretation. It has an even more intriguing connection to how God inspires the Bible- but that must wait for the next blogpost.
Jots and Scribbles 