Simply put, hermeneutical self-awareness creates anxiety. So after a chapter on hermeneutics, I turn to talk about attachment theory. Our relationship with God is experienced as an attachment bond, and in that bond we can be either securely or anxiously attached. We can trust that God is for us, even if we make a hermeneutical mistake. Or we can be fearful that God will damn us should we err. And if anxiety is affecting how you read the Bible, those fears have to be addressed. As I put it in The Book of Love, you can't read the Bible scared.
How do you deal with this attachment anxiety? That mainly involves how we view our attachment figure. Consequently, after the chapter on attachment I turn toward our views of God. When you make a mistake, is God for you or against you?
This sequence explains the three chapters of Part 1:
hermeneutics → anxiety → view of God
But the psychological flow is actually reversed:
view of God → anxiety → hermeneutics
That is to say, if you don't think God is for you, that creates anxiety, and that anxiety affects your willingness to step into a conversation about hermeneutics.
When we think about a "Book of Love for Everyone," Part 1 of The Book of Love is asymmetrical, focused upon psychological dynamics (e.g., God imagery, anxiety, self-awareness) mostly at work in conservative readers of Scripture. This is because progressive readers of Scripture tend to be more aware of their hermeneutical choices. For example, deconstruction is nothing if not a hermeneutical journey, searching for alternative ways of reading the Bible in light of science, shifting political values, and metaphysical doubts. That doesn't mean progressives read the Bible well. They don't. But they don't need much warming to admit that reading the Bible is a hermeneutical endeavor.
