Gordon Oliver examines the difficulties and opportunities that arise in using the Bible in conjunction with contemporary pastoral practice and modern scripture studies, and in doing so opens up new possibilities for interpreting the Bible as practical theology. He guides the reader through the various approaches and perspectives that will enrich and renew their approach to using the Bible in pastoral practice. An excellent book for anyone who wants to take the Bible seriously.
171 pp. To purchase this book online, go to www.darton-longman-todd.co.uk
CONTENTS
Series Preface
Foreword by Derek Tidball
Introduction: Come and See
Notes
Bibliography
Index
CHAPTER ONE
WHAT IS A BIBLE?
Surprises
Christians call the Bible ‘the Word of God’. They hear such clear echoes between the Bible and their experience that time itself seems to be bypassed as God’s truth becomes present, attractive, demanding. There are two surprises about this. First that this book, written between two and three thousand years ago in contexts of languages and cultures as far removed from twenty-first century Britain and America as you could imagine, is still in regular use. The Bible is a more ‘open book’ than ever. The complete text has been translated into around 400 languages, and sections of it into a huge number of languages and local dialects. People sing its words in worship, pray its prayers and seek inspiration, guidance, challenge, comfort and spiritual renewal through what they find in it. It is not surprising that in a world where everything is changing all the time people want a ‘word’ they can trust. What is surprising is that they find it here and that they call it ‘the word of the Lord’.
The second surprise is that many Christians appear not to be surprised at all by what they read in the Bible. This is probably due to the association of the Bible with the Church. For centuries in the West ‘church’ has been almost synonymous in the popular imagination with cultural conformity and conservatism. This means the Bible is read with the expectation that it will support the cultural ways of being Christian that the churches commend. But the Scriptures are much more like a caged animal, restless to be set free to disrupt and challenge the assumptions of its hearers and readers, than like a pet animal that has become a kind of lifestyle accessory for Christians who happen to value it. To press the illustration, when it became caged the restless animal lost its ability to communicate. When it is set free a transformation occurs. This ‘animal’ can talk after all. When the Bible talks, and you get used to its languages and accents, you begin to recognise the disturbing, attracting speaking of God.
When we consider what the Bible is and the kinds of questions pastoral practice makes us ask about it, wild and disruptive responses of honesty and openness and of wilful or accidental suppression are never far away. For example, it is commonplace among Christians in Britain and the United States to assume that academic biblical scholars are living in one interpretive world and that preachers and congregations are living in another. During their seminary training pastors commonly encounter huge difficulties in holding together the outcomes of critical biblical scholarship and their own faith commitment to treating the Bible as the word of God. The standard way of resolving this issue is to decide in favour of the ‘faith option’ rather than the ‘scholarship option’ and to leave congregations in ignorance of the questions raised by biblical scholarship. The assumption of such pastors is that congregations would be likely to find issues raised by historical criticism too complicated and disturbing. There may be some truth in this, though I think there is at least an element of the pastors projecting their own fears too. What is clear, however, is that the implications for how congregations relate to the Bible are enormous. Before we explore these issues, we will visit some ordinary Christians who are trying to make sense of what .the Bible is for themselves.
Quiet Time
A teenager lies on the floor in front of the TV. Scattered around are videos, homework books and a packet of sweets. The soap she is halfwatching shows teens struggling with their parents, their love life, their ambitions. She has her Bible open and is poring over a passage in Matthew – something about serving God and mammon. She looks from the Bible to the screen and then to her Bible reading notes. She scribbles something in the margin of her Bible. She prays at the end of her ‘quiet time’. We might think she would be better off trying to pray in a quieter place, and that would probably be true. But here is a young woman using the Bible, seeking to discern God’s voice speaking through Scripture among the many other voices around her. Texts between two and three thousand years old are being used in a twentyfirst century room in front of the Tv. The expectation is that as God spoke in ancient times God can speak his word through the Scriptures now. This seeking to hear God’s voice in Scripture as one among the many other voices speaking about values, lifestyles and vocations has become a completely normal part of spirituality for many Christians.
‘This is the Gospel of Christ’
In the cathedral the organ blasts out a fanfare as the deacon, holding the Gospel Book high above her head, is led in procession by crossbearer and acolytes up to the middle of the aisle. As the Gospel is announced and incense billows upwards everybody turns to face the reader. She reads the passage from Luke about how much more difficult it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to get through the eye of a needle. At the end of the reading she holds the book aloft crying out, ‘This is the Gospel of Christ’ and the choir bursts into song, ‘Praise to Christ our Lord’. Here are ancient texts being read in a deeply-rooted historical context and held up as nothing less than the words of Jesus Christ himself spoken today.
Home group
David was made redundant by the company where he worked for 25 years. He misses the routine of going to work, his friends and colleagues. He feels out of place at home all day. He doesn’t know what to do with himself. The loneliness and pointlessness are crushing him. Nobody seems to have anything useful to say. His pastor gives him odd jobs to do around the church, but doesn’t really seem to listen to him. In his home group David hears somebody reading from Psalm 139: ‘O Lord, you have searched me and known me, you know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. . .’ The passage rings bells for him and he begins to share his feelings with the other members of the group. His new openness enables others to share from their experience. Here a group of friends discover that an ancient prayer from the Bible can become their prayer too. It resonates with their experience and opens the way for them to share what really matters to them. Ancient Scripture has become literally a word of life now.
Biblical Christians?
Ian has been vicar of St Peter’s for five years. The congregation have responded warmly to his style of preaching and many people have transferred into St Peter’s from other parishes. Ian is regarded as a leader of evangelical opinion in the area. He is dismayed by what he regards as the liberal line taken by the Bishop on gay issues and goes to challenge him about the matter. The Bishop listens as Ian expounds the biblical teaching from Leviticus and Romans about homosexuality, then tries to take the conversation forward by suggesting that a more open engagement with Bible texts might be helpful. He offers texts about welcoming strangers and treating them with hospitality and respect and commends a more theological than textual approach to the interpretation of Scripture. At the end they agree to talk again about these things, but privately both of them believe that the other one is not really a biblical Christian. Here are people engaging with a present-day pastoral and ethical issue. Both seek to root their position in Scripture, but both take quite different approaches to understanding the status of texts as the basis of guidance about moral living.
Community protest
The residents of a small town are up in arms because the government plans to build an international airport that will mean the demolition of most of their homes and businesses and environmental destruction on a grand scale. When they understand the size of investment by building companies that will be involved, they feel powerless and depressed. However some residents decide to form an action group to plan a protest campaign. Churches encourage their members to join in, and organise prayer and Bible study groups to consider the issues. These groups draw encouragement from their reflections about God’s justice being worked out by and through vulnerable people.
One day Geoff tells the members of his Bible study group that he has been talking with two of his neighbours about the airport plans. One of them is a Sikh and the other a Muslim. They had said they had been discussing at the Gudwarah and at the Mosque how they could learn from their Scriptures to respond to the proposals. Here we have Christians seeking guidance in the Bible to help them play their part in responding to an urgent social and political issue. But other faith groups in the same place are doing the same thing – more than one ‘Bible’ is involved. As they try to identify scriptural foundations for their protest, Geoff and his home group may ask themselves what is distinctive about the Christian Scriptures.
New Testament Class
Susan is a New Testament tutor in a seminary. She wants her students to explore the issues involved in interpreting the themes of law and grace in the letters of Paul. She tries to open a discussion on whether you can read the Letter to the Romans without considering how Protestant theological thinking in the twenty-first century about law and grace has been influenced by the theology and politics of the sixteenth-century Reformation. She is frustrated in this because her students think the contrast between law (= negative) and grace (= positive) is completely clear, and they just want to get on and ‘preach the good news’.
Experience first
In five of these six stories concerns about the context, authorship, original purpose and history of interpretation of biblical texts are invisible or well in the background. The main criterion for Scripture interpretation here is directly reflected experience. In technical terms, the hermeneutical method is one of parallel correlation. The present experience of the Bible reader and the text of Scripture are held together in parallel and the correlations and dissonances between them constitute the learning that becomes available. The proposed encounter with the Scriptures is immediate. The interpretation arises directly from the concerns and the spirituality of the people involved. The academic world of textual analysis, critical studies, history of interpretation and other disciplines of biblical studies is simply not relevant. The Bible has leap-frogged from its origins in the past straight into the present and is available for immediate interpretation. The tools for interpretation consist of the experiences and questions of the Scripture readers. And, as we might say, since God, being eternally present, is our contemporary, we experience here and now the presence of the Holy Spirit to enlighten and guide us in the ways of Jesus Christ as we read the Scriptures that witness to him.
This way of engaging with Scripture has some important advantages as well as some obvious limitations. The main advantage is that provided the people concerned are committed to seeking God’s will and to hearing what God might want to say; and provided that they have good readable translations of the Bible, anybody can do it. You just say a prayer and get on with it. You discover what God has to say and consider what kind of action is needed by way of response. There is the possibility that the word of God will truly prove to be ‘living and active’. At its best this approach can lead to a refreshing encounter with Scripture that opens up new resources for practical Christian living.
The limitations include the strong possibility that personal agendas or unspoken norms of group behaviour will lead to favoured passages of Scripture being used often, while other more challenging texts are ignored. In effect, Scripture takes on the role of a mirror in which the readers discern their own reflections disguised as God’s guidance, rather than of an open window though which God’s voice is calling them to come outside and join him. This limitation is compounded when we consider the fact that many Christian groups are gatherings of culturally like-minded people who have an unspoken agreement not to challenge each other’s views. The concern is to respect each person present as an individual so each person’s contribution has to be affirmed as equally valid. This can lead to a well-mannered pooling of ignorance rather than to genuine growth in the knowledge and love of God. Although the purpose is that Scripture will speak with freshness and directness, in effect the ‘animal’ becomes domesticated as interpretations become increasingly conventional and less likely to challenge community norms.
I have said that in these pictures the fruits of biblical scholarship are invisible or even regarded as irrelevant. They are unlikely, however to be completely absent. For example, the writer of the Bible study notes used by the teenager will have engaged in critical biblical study. The cathedral congregation cannot but be aware of the historical feel of their environment – it has a substantial role in bringing them together. Ian and his Bishop will have read their Bible commentaries and studied the Scripture texts with care. The spiritual leaders supporting the people affected by the airport development will have studied their Scriptures and considered issues of interpreting them. But we are still forced to the conclusion that the major engagement with the text of the Bible for Christians today, like most of their forebears, can be described as ‘pre-critical’ rather than ‘critically aware’.
It is important at this point to notice that the expression ‘pre-critical’ in relation to Scripture interpretation is commonly used in two ways, because our understanding of these distinctions affects what sort of thing we think the Bible is.
First, engaging with the Bible in a pre-critical way means reading its stories and sayings as if they are directly about now as well as about the time when they were written. It means reading the Bible often in a quite literal way, taking the text at its face value. ‘Pre-critical’ readers have few problems with the parts of Scripture where God is described as speaking directly to people and acting in miraculous ways. Since God is consistent and communicates clearly there is no reason why the God who spoke and acted in the Bible should not speak and act in similar ways today. This can lead to the Bible being treated as a kind of treasury of oracles and promises to be claimed by the readers, rather than as whole texts that need to be allowed to have their own distinctive voices.
Certainly, most ‘pre-critical’ readings will recognise the different genres of literature in the Bible, but there will be a specially strong commitment to the ‘happenedness’ of the sections regarded as historical. This has implications for how the Bible as a whole is read, but is especially important for how Christians understand the Old Testament. There can be a reluctance to grant a primarily theologically- or symbolically- rather than historically-driven significance to some Old Testament ‘writings’ such as Job, Jonah and Daniel. The prophetic books, especially Isaiah (and in particular chapter 53), are seen as directly pointing to Christ rather than being allowed primary significance for their own time. Indeed, the Old Testament gets to be seen as a Christian book that prepares the way for the coming of Christ rather than as a collection of Jewish books that has taken on new significance because of Christ. The failure to recognise as a key principle that Christian interpretation of the Old Testament often involves reading back from the New Testament to the Old Testament, rather than the other way round, leads to marginalisation, or even rejection, of the Jewish roots of the Christian faith. There is only a short step from this to unintentionally developing a kind of creeping anti-Semitism in Christian engagement with Scripture.
But there can be other pastoral and political implications too. This kind of ‘pre-critical’ interpretation is often coupled with highly selective readings of the text, that lead to overemphasis on one issue while others are completely ignored, without any conscious rationale as to why this happens. Two basic examples will illustrate why this may be pastorally and politically dangerous. First, the Pentateuchal law codes comment on lending money with interest just as often as they refer to homosexuality. But the call to stand against the latter is elevated in some churches to almost the level of an Article of the Faith, whilst theological critique of the former is virtually absent from Christian discourse. Second, the call to God’s people in the Old Testament to visit destruction on the peoples of the land and to live separately from any that remain (e.g. Joshua 3:7-10; 8:18-29) – in twenty-first century terms, ethnic cleansing – can be read without any reference to other biblical injunctions to love neighbour and even enemy. It is easy to see how some ‘pre-critical’ reading of the Bible can lead to social and political exclusion going unchallenged or unreflected on by some Christian groups.
The problem with this kind of pre-critical reading of Scripture is that it puts the interests, needs, and presuppositions of the reader at the centre of the process. On some hilltops in the north of England are remains of ancient ‘map-stones’. These are circular, indicating that to see the surrounding countryside clearly you have to put yourself at the centre of the map. Everything is seen from that point of view. Applied to the Bible, this can lead to a consumerist way of reading the Bible – a look at the text will confirm my opinions and do me good.
However, it is a mistake to imagine that all of the outcomes of ‘pre-critical’ reading of this kind are necessarily negative. If people do take Scripture at face value and act on it, this will have clear results for how they live in families, deal with money, honour parents, relate to neighbours, respond to sickness, overcome their sins and weaknesses, face their deaths, bear witness to their faith, seek justice in the world, and live in confidence as people saved through Christ. At its best, this approach can issue in encounters with holy Scripture that lead to holy living. Indeed, is better to characterise this kind of reading at its best as ‘naive’ in the technical sense: innocent, fresh, unaffected. (1)
Engagement with Scripture may be ‘pre-critical’ in this first sense of the term, but if it is to be allowed as one kind of Christian engagement it cannot claim to be uncritical. People encountering Scripture have context and inheritance as well as their present circumstances and needs. The role of the person who leads people in Bible reading will often be to bring this context and inheritance into the open so that the encounter with Scripture can be enriched and deepened.
The second meaning of ‘pre-critical’ refers to how Scripture was interpreted before the arrival of historical critical studies with their modernist commitment to analysis of the forms, sources, language and editing of the text. In these earlier periods (roughly up to the seventeenth century CE), there were many formalised ways of interpreting the Bible. These were driven by spiritual and theological commitment. David Steinmetz (2) has explored how ‘pre-critical’ engagement with Scripture was carried on for centuries using formal rules or methods of interpretation. He highlights the ‘fourfold sense of Scripture’ that was taken as a norm by the Church in the West from the time of John Cassian (340-435 CE) to the Reformation and beyond.
1. The literal sense was the first and preferred means of fulfilling the purpose of Scripture – to call Christians to demonstrate the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. However, when the literal sense was insufficient, for example in relation to texts judged to be in some sense sub-Christian, because they commended violence, hatred of enemies, or eroticism, three other strategies could be applied.
2. The allegorical sense taught about the Church and what it should believe. It corresponded to the virtue of faith.
3. The tropological sense taught about individuals and what they should do. It corresponded to the virtue of love.
4. The analogical sense pointed to the future and wakened expectation. It corresponded to the virtue of hope.
In spite of the strange (to modern ears) results sometimes produced by this kind of formal system of interpretation, it would be more accurate to describe it as a kind of ‘theological-critical’ process rather than using the dismissive-sounding expression ‘pre-critical’. In plain language this kind of interpretation is motivated by the life of faith and the mission of the Church. It is easy to forget that most of the greatest Bible interpreters from the early church until well after the Reformation were pastors, evangelists, missionaries and monks and that their work of Bible interpretation was directed to the purposes that went with those circumstances. They were people of passionate faith, deep prayer and determined witness. The theological-critical methods of reading the Bible that they used operated according to highly refined rules of evidence and interpretation, which were often the subject of vigorous dispute, as much as modern historical critical approaches. Their methods depended for their effectiveness on the Bible interpreters being rooted in the Church, but at the same time being critical of the Church and seeking its renewal.
Their purpose was to make the whole of Scripture wholly available to the whole of the Church as it did theology in the forms of worship, prayer, mission, politics, economics, art, etc. They achieved this by enabling Scripture to speak with a number of different tones and accents simultaneously as the theological virtues found their voices through the text of the Bible. One advantage of this approach was that it took seriously some of the parts of Scripture, mostly in the Old Testament, that are deeply unpalatable to Christian tastes. Steinmetz offers an entertaining example of the importance of this multiaccented approach.
How was a French parish priest in 1150 to understand Psalm 137, which bemoans captivity in Babylon, makes rude remarks about Edomites, expresses an ineradicable longing for a glimpse of Jerusalem, and pronounces a blessing on anyone who avenges the destruction of the Temple by dashing Babylonian children against a rock? The priest lives in Concale, not Babylon, has no personal quarrel with Edomites, cherishes no am bitions to visit Jerusalem (though he might fancy a holiday in Paris) and is expressly forbidden by Jesus to avenge himself on his enemies. Unless Psalm 137 has more than one possible meaning, it cannot be used as a prayer by the Church and must be rejected as a lament belonging exclusively to the piety of ancient Israel’ (3)
Figurative or symbolic readings of Scripture have their roots within the Bible itself. For example, Paul offers typological interpretations of the Old Testament text, which he then develops in new directions to press his argument about the nature and work of Christ. Two straightforward examples are his use of contrasting typology to discuss the resurrection of believers in 1 Corinthians 15:21-22 ‘as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive’; and his interpretation of the role of the law as ‘a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ’ in Galatians 3:24. (4) His allegorical use of the stories of the sons of Hagar and Sarah which we find in Galatians 4:21-26 is much more difficult to appreciate in the twenty-first century: ‘Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children.’ I wonder whether, if Paul was writing in the twentyfirst century, he would be regarded as a liberal or as an evangelical in his use of Scripture?
It is clear that the use of the Old Testament (5) by New Testament writers is generally ‘pre-critical’ in the second sense of the term as I have used it. That is, the lead factor in the use of the Old Testament Scripture passages is the determination of the New Testament writer to make a particular theological or missiological point. The New Testament writers were almost all Jews and saw themselves as inheritors of the Jewish Scriptures, so the followers of Jesus stand in continuity with those Scriptures. The most obvious example of this is the many times Matthew’s Gospel records some action or event in relation to Jesus as taking place ‘that the Scriptures might be fulfilled’. The New Testament writers appear to have no hesitation in reading backwards from their experience of Jesus and their encounters in mission, and using the Scriptures to interpret that experience.
One feature of these two kinds of ‘pre-critical’ reading is common to them both. The direct approach of the first method and the more mediated approach of the second one take seriously the genre of the whole Bible as ‘Holy Scripture’. Even before it is opened the Bible is believed by the readers to be the ‘word of God’. The expectation is that through encounter with Scripture God will make his will known. Reading the scripture will lead directly to a renewed call to walk in the ways of God. The connection between encountering holy Scripture and engaging in holy living is assumed. On this reckoning the bible is unlike any other kind of literature.
Having considered two meanings of ‘pre-critical’ in relation to Bible interpretation we will look briefly at what it means to read the Bible critically. Then we will consider how these different approaches to reading Scripture relate to our question, ‘What is the Bible?’
Reading the Bible ‘critically means taking careful account of the historical background, the source documents, the possible authors and their motivations, the way the text has been edited and translated, and how it has been interpreted by other Christians in the past. This involves treating the Bible as if it is like any other set of ancient texts. On this reckoning, right interpretation for a critical Christian reader means seeking to discern God’s calling as much through the way the text has appeared to change over time, as through the main content of the text itself. It means subjecting it to critical scrutiny using the best tools that scholarship can provide. The history of this process is well written up and evaluated elsewhere. (6) Here we need only to note some key features of this general approach.
First, in order to engage in this kind of biblical study two provisional, but decisive separations have to be made. First, the question ‘In what sense is the Bible the word of God?’ has to be separated from the questions raised by careful analysis of the text and its background. Second, the interpretation of the Bible has to be separated from the vested interests of the churches and from the spiritual interests of believers, The purpose is to clear away inherited spiritual and ecclesiastical baggage that can get in the way of getting the clearest view of the text itself, by the use of the best methods that a scientific approach can achieve. This is what is meant by a ‘modernist’ approach. It also meas that there can be tensions between the interpretations of critical scholars and those from more ‘pre-critical’ approaches.
Near the beginning of the modernist approach to the natural sciences m Europe, Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) (re-)discovered that the earth orbits around the sun and not the other way round. This
Posed a major challenge not only to the established view about autronomy, but also to the way the Bible, with its earth-centred emphasis, was to be interpreted. (7) This serves to illustrate the enormous differences between the precritical readings on the one hand and the historical-critical readings on the other. Pre-critical readings see the work of God, revealing his will and his ways to humankind. Critical readings see the Bible as the works of people who are trying to respond to their understanding of ‘God’ within all the limitations of their times, contexts and capabilities. This means that when they interpret the Bible, readers using a critical approach must use a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ – an interpretive framework that is prepared to question the nature and meaning of the text and to question also the cultural baggage that has given rise to earlier interpretations.
The historical-critical approaches offer several advantages. I will highlight five of them.
1. Careful study of the biblical languages and the many manuscripts through which the Bible has come down to us means that we are much better able to be clear about what the text actually says. (8)
2. Technical studies of the forms of the texts and the ways they were edited open up possibilities for richer meanings to be discerned. For example, discoveries that have provisionally associated the major editing of parts of the Pentateuch with the period of the Babylonian Exile have provoked fresh thinking about the theological and pastoral motivations that may be behind the way texts such as the early chapters of Genesis are expressed.
3. Sociological studies of the contexts of the biblical communities have enabled a clearer understanding of their challenges and opportunities and give clues about their perceptions of God’s calling to them. A key example of this is how the sociological and textual studies that were stimulated by the discovery in 1946 of the Dead Sea Scrolls enabled a greater understanding of the Jewish contexts of the Old Testament and New Testament communities, which in turn led to renewed interest in reading the Gospels and Epistles as historically-rooted texts.
4. Literary studies of the genres, linguistic conventions and idioms of the Bible have opened up possible ways of interpretating of texts that would otherwise have remained obscure and inaccessible (and therefore open to projections of fantasy!). For example, locating the later editing of the Book of Daniel in the context of the huge political and religious crisis of the second century BCE, ‘invites us to treat [the] visions typologically and to refer them beyond their context to further oppressors such as Rome and our own oppressors rather than discarding them as failed prophecy. (9)
5. Studies of the grammar and rhetoric used by biblical writers have opened new ways for understanding the nature of the Gospels. Richard Burridge has shown, against the previously accepted convention that the Gospels were not written as biographies of Jesus, that in some key respects they are closely akin to biographical forms used in relation to leading political figures in the early Christian period. (10)
The separation of Scripture from its essential commitment to being the word of God and to being the closely-guarded property of established churches means that people can stand back from the inherited commitments they bring to the text in order to see more clearly what is there. The purpose, then, of historical-critical studies is to rescue the Bible from its ecclesiastical captivity in order to allow the biblical writers to have their own voices and be heard speaking in their own accents. By getting as close as possible to the original text, genre, and sociological and theological context, critical biblical study aims to place Scripture prior in time to the Church and to the doctrines of the Church. When Scripture is allowed its own authentic voices it becomes necessary for the Church to have an adult relationship with an adult Bible instead of the Church speaking on Scripture’s behalf like a parent on behalf of an inarticulate child. (11)
Having achieved, for working purposes, the two separations I have described, the next step is to bring close together the things that have been separated. This involves taking stock of what is being learned and seeing how this can speak to the claims of the Bible as God’s word and to the ways it can be used in the worship, life and mission of the church. However, this commitment to putting back together what has been separated out for study purposes is not on the agenda of many academic biblical scholars. In any case, academic scholars are as prone to bringing their own prior commitments to their studies as church people are. This has led to calls for the Bible to be rescued from its academic captivity so that it can speak in fresh ways to the concerns of ordinary people. A renewed respect for the kinds of ‘pre-critical’ approaches I outlined earlier is emerging. While historical-critical studies can recognise and illuminate the literary genres of parts of the
Bible as religious literature, they are not so capable of evaluating the genre of the Bible as ‘Holy Scripture‘. Seeing the Bible as literature is a means of engaging with it using technical and cultural tools of interpretation. Seeing the Bible as Scripture means reading it with the commitments of faith.
Interpreting the Bible with spiritual and theological integrity involves holding together the findings of historical-critical studies and the faith commitments that are part and parcel of what it means to be people of God. For example, Anthony Thiselton, a leading Christian thinker in Britain, has made it his life’s work to combine exacting analysis of New Testament text and detailed study of the philosophy of interpretive methods, with a strong commitment to Christian teaching, preaching and leadership (12) In the mid -1990s Walter Brueggemann took on a task that would have been regarded with deep suspicion by some scholars of the previous decades, of writing a ‘Theology of the Old Testament’ (13) It should be obvious by now that one of the questions pastoral practice must ask concerns how the Bible can be taken seriously both as the writings of communities of people in the distant past and as holy Scripture.
Scripture as Canon
The most important of the questions that came out of the expanding mission and pastoral practices of the early church was how to maintain the true foundation witness to Jesus Christ. With the church expanding fast, questions were bound to come up about which parts of the Jewish inheritance of Jesus and the first Christians must be held firmly onto and which bits could be left behind. An example of this process at work is seen in the ‘Council of Jerusalem’ in Acts 15. Here the question of what disciplines should be required of Gentile converts to what was still a deeply Jewish gospel is considered by the leaders of the first generation church. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the decision they took. If the decision had gone the other way Christianity would have remained a Jewish sect and probably fizzled out. As it was, the Christian way was opened to anybody, whether Jewish or not. This decision made the Gentile converts one with the Jewish Christians in their commitment to Jesus Christ, and in a real sense the inheritors of the Hebrew Scriptures as they were at that time. The question of how to reinterpret the Scriptures in the light of the coming of Christ and the gospel mission across boundaries of ethnic and religious cultures became inescapable.
When they took on the task of interpreting Scripture in the light of their new mission, Christian preachers and thinkers came slap up against the problem that some of the contents of the Old Testament seems light years away from the values of Jesus Christ. What for instance are Christians to make of the story of God staying silent while Jephthah carries out the human sacrifice of his only child? (Judges 11:29). This was too much for Marcion, a leader of Gentile Christians in mid-second century Rome. He took the view that the Old Testament, as the product of some lower level spiritual being, has been superseded by the greatly superior revelation that came through Jesus, so most of it could be abandoned. (14)
The stakes were high and this accounts for the heat and passion that were such a feature of the Councils of the early Church whose deliberations leave us generally unruffled today. The quest to establish what could properly be called ‘Holy Scripture’ and what could properly be called ‘Christian’ came directly out of the experiences of mission and the marginality of dispersed communities of Christians during the first three centuries CE. Reaching agreement on the texts of what have become known as the catholic Creeds and agreeing the boundaries of the Canon of Scripture were among the most urgent tasks facing the Councils of the early church. The hard question of how to relate gospel, culture and Scripture was as lively an issue in the early church as it is in Britain and North America today. Maintaining the authenticity of the Church’s witness literally depended on resolving this issue.
Alongside the catholic Creeds the Canon of Scripture (15) establishes the base for what counts as the authentic foundation for the worship, preaching, ethics, witness and practice of the Church for all Christians for all time. This seems to lay down the law and demand absolute conformity as the cost of being Christian. That would be as terrible as it is unnecessary. For Christian pastoral practice today I suggest that the notion of the Canon of Scripture needs to develop a conected but much livelier purpose – that of disruption. To open up this sense of disruption I want to suggest three roles the Canon of Scripture has to play for twenty-first century Christians.
Connecting Believers of Bible Times with Believers Today
First, the Canon offers a living conection between the faith and witness of Christians today and the women and men whose conversations, actions and struggles we read about in the Old and the New Testament. The story of the Aqqeda, the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22:lff), connects us to people whose thought forms and values are strange, confusing, disturbing. The story of the rejection of Hagar (Genesis 21:9ff) leaves us revolted by the thought that there could be any serious link between the call of God and Abraham’s rejection of the woman who gave him his first born son. Scripture conects us to a World of compromise and double–think in which we fear to accept that we are ourselves involved. The account of the disciples in the upper room after Jesus has died (John 20:19ff) connects us to our own closed in-ness and our need for the word of peace from the risen Lord. The words to the angel of the church at Laodicea (Revelation 3:14ff) connects us to the insipidness of the spirituality of many who claim to have a living faith in Christ. The stories, sayings, prayers and visions that make up the Bible are stories that connect me to communities that I belong to. There is a familiarity and a strangeness here that makes for disruption.
This is well captured by Rowan Williams:
We do not know how to deal properly with Paul in his most rampantly masculine moods; we do not know how to deal with some texts on sexuality; we do not know how to cope with the violence of so much of Hebrew Scripture. We say the psalms. . . and quite often find ourselves wishing unspeakable plagues on our enemies. All the time we need to remember what kind of humanity it is in which, to which and through which God speaks: a broken humanity, a humanity badly equipped to receive God’s liberty. (16)
Connecting Believers Today
Second, the Canon forms a connection between communities of believers in the present. This is an obvious point that I will explore more fully in chapter 6. Across the millions of Christian communities, speaking thousands of different languages, set in different cultural, political and economic circumstances, the Bible is in principle common to all. Christians presuppose that because the message of salvation through Jesus Christ is universal in its scope, the Bible is universal in its relevance and application. But this universality of Scripture has to be held together with the rootedness of Scripture in locality. Although there are substantial collections of texts in the Bible without any time or place reference, most of the Bible stories and sayings are linked with particular people and tied in with particular places and times. Granted that these connections are often difficult to link with corroborative evidence from elsewhere, the intention is clear enough. It is to confirm that the God deals with real people in real places in real time. The different communities of Christians are as different from each other as chalk and cheese, so they read the same Bible differently. There is a world of difference between engaging with the Bible in the structured context of a church service in a wealthy neighbourhood and reading the same Bible in a group in a barrio where all the people present are out of work and hungry. Because it connects present-day Christians with each other as well as with Jews and Christians of the past, the Bible opens the way for a belonging that transcends not only differences of culture and language, but also historical time. Here again, there is a familiarity and a strangeness that makes for disruption.
Canon as Gift
Third, the Canon serves to confront Christians with questions of who they are, what they stand for and how they live in relation to other people and to God. This is because the Bible comes to us as something that is given. This was brought home to me when a Muslim friend gave me an Arabic Bible for Christmas. He inscribed in it, ‘I thought the best present for a man of God are the words of God. . .’. I can neither read nor speak Arabic. I held this precious book with its moving and challenging inscription, but its script is utterly foreign to me. This quality of the Canon of Scripture as something both given and foreign that confronts and threatens to disrupt our thinking, lifestyle and motivations is probably the most important factor in Christians’ inheritance of the Bible. The Bible looks us in the face and challenges us to understand what word God wants us to hear and receive today. We are not free to invent our own Bibles to suit ourselves. We are simply faced with the Bible we have got.
This givenness of Scripture is reinforced in churches that use lectionaries and other systematic reading schemes. Whatever the worshipper’s state of mind or faith they are simply presented with Scripture as it stands. This is a significant feature of church services and it provokes a range of reactions in both readers and hearers. In response to the generality of Bible readings in church, it is not all that difficult when the reader says, ‘This is the Word of the Lord’ to respond, ‘Thanks be to God’. However when a particularly tough passage is read out – Jesus saying that you can’t be fit for the kingdom of heaven if you don’t hate your father and mother and sister and brother – it can be hard for the reader not to inflect the words differently – ‘This is the Word of the Lord?’ and for the hearers to respond with a puzzled, ‘Oh well, Thanks be to God.’ This givenness of the Canon also has the familiarity and strangeness that makes for disruption.
For some Christians the fact that the Bible exists as a Canon with fixed boundaries leads to the expectation that it can be encountered as a monolithic whole so that it should be possible to discover a harmonisation of spirituality and doctrine across the range of its different parts. The logic works like this: God is consistent in his speaking and acting, and since the Bible was written through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, we should expect the message of the Bible to be clear and unambiguous. Scripture speaks with one voice, the voice of God and this is heard most clearly through Jesus who is the Word of God. Readers of Scripture who seek to be close to God and open to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit will be able to hear clearly God’s will and God’s call.
This position is seductively clear. Until, that is, we put another question that pastoral practice asks of the Bible. This concerns the contexts and attitudes of the people who actually wrote it. They brought to their task their roots in their culture, their fallibilities, the axes they wanted to grind, as well as their faith in God. This presents a problem for people who want to propose that the Bible is without error. How can Scripture – the word of God who is infallible – be also the fallible words of people? One solution was proposed in the first and second centuries CE by both Philo and Athenagoras. They suggested that God breathed through the writers of Scripture as a flute player breathes through his flute. But this idea causes more problems than it solves. Moule quotes John Zeisler:
It is not that God controls or supersedes my decisions and so on, so that I think they are mine though they are really being manipulated by God, but that my genuine freedom, my character, my personality, and all my decisions are mine only because God enables them to be so. . . God. . . does not threaten man’s humanness or freedom or integrity – he guarantees them!
Moule continues, ‘Thus a conception of inspiration as the mechanica prevention of error is not only an illegitimate stretching of the meaning of the word; it is a sub-personal, sub-theistic conception of God: least of all is it compatible with a fully Christian understanding of the Word made flesh. (17)
And then there is the Bible’s unawareness of its own completed existence. A simple illustration may help make clear what I mean. As an evangelical pastor I had grown used to thinking of the Bible
something that is whole, complete, coherent when a rather na¿ve and totally obvious thought occurred to me with, real force. Nobody whose name appears in the Bible ever read it whole. Most of them never even read the stories that describe their experience, so they didn’t know the end of the story while it was still in process. What the Bible offers is reflections, testimonies, prayers, poems and chronicles of people’s experiences of the presence, the silence, the speaking, the grace, holiness, sternness, gentleness and deliverance of God. It is also directly the record of their perceptions of their personal and community histories, present circumstances and future hopes. The Bible gives a sense of communities and persons being open to the discovery of who God is and what God is doing. This means that attempts at harmonisation between parts of the Bible that are saying different things are not only doomed to failure, but are actually a denial of the character of Scripture as open, searching, welcoming and challenging.
Certainly there is already awareness in the Bible of the idea and importance of Scripture. We see this in the beginning of the reforms led by Josiah (2 Chronicles 34:14ff); the reading of the prophets (Luke 4:16ff), the struggles of the disciples to discern the relationship between the human Jesus and the source of his teaching (Matthew 13:53); the repeated assertion that in the actions of Jesus the Scriptures were being fulfilled; the hint by Paul of the importance of his parchments (2 Timothy 4:13). But the lasting impression is of writings that were regarded as fresh, relevant, open to discussion and discernment, and – certainly in the New Testament – still incomplete. In other words the voices of what was accepted as Scripture and the voices of the present were involved in a series of conversations designed to discern, celebrate and question claims about the actions of people in response to the call of God. This essential liveliness of Scripture means that the disruptive givenness of the Bible must be received as the call to explore the mystery of life with God rather than merely as ground-rules for well-behaved believers.
Canon and Conversation
Having a Canon of Scripture is deeply paradoxical. One the one hand the Canon of Scripture is fixed and unalterable. (18) The fixing of the Canon was the work of the Church. To this extent the Church comes before the Bible and is the controller of the boundaries of Scripture. On the other hand, Scripture comes before the Church in the sense that it arose directly out of the inheritance the faith and the mission of the first Christians. Scripture both illuminates and challenges the claims Christians make about themselves, so the relationship between the Bible and the Church must be more like an inspiring and argumentative tussle than a pious status quo. The journey towards fixing the Canon involved testimonies, debates, passionate disputes. What is on offer for twenty-first century Christians from Scripture is the call to conversations with the people whose experiences, concerns, questions, hopes and confusions gave rise to the writings in the first place. Scripture as Canon, then, is both a means of defending what counts as authentic apostolic witness, and a provocation to conversations that can lead somewhere.
The Canon of Scripture is likely to be challenging as a conversation partner. For the same Canon that contains the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15); the hymn of the humility of Christ (Philippians 2: Sff) and Psalm 23 also contains ‘Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal’ (1 Samuel 15:33) and the murder of Sisera with a tent peg by Jael in Judges 4:21. It is not surprising therefore, that Christians have tended to develop their own ‘canon within a canon’. For example, evangelicals tend to prefer the Pauline Epistles to other parts of the New Testament because of the emphasis on justification by grace through faith in Romans and Galatians. Some liberals prefer the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. Some liberation theologians prefer Exodus and texts related to the Babylonian exile. So it is important, when considering our question ‘What is a Bible?’, to recognise that one of the results of Scripture coming to us as a fixed Canon is that it comes to us whole. This is enormously significant. Just as one of the cliches of religious debate concerns the tendency of people to make God in their own image, there is a similar tendency among Christians to remake Scripture in their own images. Further, the fact that Scripture speaks with many voices means that engaging with Scripture is much more like engaging in conversation than making use of a ‘thing’ like some kind of tool.
As well as the Canon two other things are ‘given’. These are today’s hearers and readers with their experiences, opinions, values and preferences; and Bible readers in the past who have left us the legacies of their ways of reading Scripture. So when the Bible is being read there are not just one or two voices to be heard, but many. In one place where I worked there was a strike of coal miners that caused deep bitterness in our community. A bishop came to help us work with the people on both sides. After days of very difficult meetings he said, ‘We’ve spent the whole week listening – we’ve been sweating with listening.’ Really listening to Scripture is as committed and as serious as that. This careful listening is a lot more than developing an openminded piety within Christian communities. Real commitment to treating the Bible as God’s genuinely open book has profound effects on how we relate to neighbours who share our faith, but in another part of the Christian tradition; have no faith at all; or are followers of another world faith.
Why Is a Bible Necessary?
It is possible to have something approaching religious faith without reference to any holy Scriptures, but the followers of the three Semitic world faiths are ‘people of the book’. Christians share with Jews roots in the Hebrew Scriptures. Muslims find one of the five pillars of their faith in the Holy Qur’an. To put it simply, holy Scripture and holy living belong together in the same ‘conversation’, In other words, accepting the Bible as foundational for faith and witness is basic to the identity of Christians as Christians. Talk about ‘foundations’ suggests something solid and immovable, but as we have seen this particular foundation is much more open, dynamic, lively, multi-vocal as it : speaks of the one God and the things of God.
There are a number of markers for the assessing the genuineness of Christian faith as Christian faith. These include: baptism in the name of the holy Trinity; accepting the Bible as foundational for the life of faith lived in community with the people of God; sharing belief in the ‘catholic’ Creeds as the agreed summaries of faith; and participation in the worship, life and witness of the Church. If you take anyone of these four ‘table legs’ away, the table may stay a table but it will be harder to share dinner at it. The fact that Christians universally agree that the Bible should be translated into local vernaculars, (19) gives the clue to the openness to interpretation that is the hall-mark of how they are to relate to Scripture.
Not in Front of the Children?
I referred earlier to the tendency of pastors to keep what they have learned from historical-critical studies of the Bible away from their congregations. When challenged about this, they tend to speak about protecting their congregations from unnecessary detail that would be too difficult for them to grasp. It is not the role of the pastor to foist irrelevant academic detail on to hard-pressed congregations, but we do need to ask what it is that congregations are being protected from
by this rather patronising approach. Suppressing or concealing realites about Scripture from the congregation, so that readings are compelled to remain in conformity with established conventions of piety, seems to risk making the Bible increasingly inaccessible and irrelevant to the realities of practical living. Who is defending whom from what? ‘Faithfully guarding the word of truth’ is a far cry from concealing the truth about the word in the first place. This approach risks limiting the fuller engagement with the Bible that could come from honest exploration of questions that are raised by the forms and changes as well as by the contents of the text.
Christians engage in source and form criticism every time they take their mail to the kitchen table. They can tell even before they open them which of the packages is likely to contain an electricity bill, a holiday brochure, a letter from Aunt Margaret, the answer to a legal query or news that they have just won a cash prize. They engage in redaction criticism every time they watch two TV news channels or read two newspapers reporting the same event. They engage with different genres of communication every time they channel-hop using the remote control. Moreover, when Christians listen to the reading of Scripture or preaching and teaching, especially in settings where they keep silent while the pastor speaks, they engage in processes of often subconscious discrimination about which bits of what they hear scratch where they itch and which parts they can safely leave alone.
The issue of how best to address congregations’ questions about the content, development and interpretation of Scripture is really about honesty and the politics of disclosure. It is not a uniquely twenty-first century issue as the history of the suppression of the Bible in English during the early Reformation period indicates. At bottom it is a question about who the Bible belongs to and who has the authority to interpret it. In other words it is a question about the politics of knowledge and church order. The question of who ‘owns’ the Bible will be the subject of chapter 3, but first we must ask how the Bible relates to the Word of God.
Notes Chapter 1: What Is a Bible?
1. The Concise Oxford Dictionary, ninth edition (Oxford: OUP, 1995).
2. David C. Steinmetz, ‘The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis’ in Stephen E.
Fowl (ed.), The Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 29.
3. Ibid., p. 28.
4. AV; ‘the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came’, NRSV.
5. Of course, we need to recognise that the Canon of the Old Testament was
still not fixed by the first century CE, and that the range of texts regarded then as ‘Scripture’ or ‘almost Scripture’ was wider than the present Canon.
6. A highly critical brief survey is in Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), pp. 1-56. For a good readable
brief survey of types of New Testament criticism see Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1996), pp. 20-47.
7. For the view that Calvin rejected the conclusions of Copernicus’s study, see Bernard Cottret, Calvin (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000), pp. 285-6; for a contrary view, see Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 141-3.
8. An entertaining discussion of the results and limitations of historical-critical approaches to the Bible is provided in John A. T. Robinson, Can We Trust the New Testament? (London: Mowbray, 1977). See especially pp. 30-44.
9. John Goldingay, Models for Interpretation of Scripture (Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 1995) pp. 128-
10. Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (Cambridge: Cup, 1992).
11. For an accessible discussion of the positive role of critical biblical studies see James Dunn, ‘The Bible and Scholarship: On Bridging the Gap between the Academy and the Church’, Anvil, vol. 19, no. 2, 2002, pp. 109-18.
12, Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: The New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).
13. Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 1997.
14. Christopher Rowland, Christian Origins (London: SPCK, 1985), pp. 3, 296f.
15. For a useful summary article on the formation of the Canon see Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (eds), The Oxford Companion to the Bible (Oxford: OUP, 1993), pp. 98-104.
16. Rowan Williams, Open to Judgement (London: DLT, 1994), p. 160.
17. C. F. D. Moule, Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Biblical and Theological Essays (London: SPCK, 1998), p. 214.
18. This point still applies in spite of the fact that there are variations of opinion between major churches about which books are to be regarded as canonical, as is seen in the Roman Catholic Church’s acceptance of the Apocrypha.
19. For a very readable account of the Reformation’s struggles to get the Bible translated into English see David Daniel, William Tyndale, A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
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