Seized by Truth: Reading the Bible as Scripture

By Prof. Joel B. Green

We read the Bible and interpret Scripture in order to live in grace-filled relation to God's divine purpose.When we approach the Bible as Scripture author, Joel Green, takes seriously the faith statement that the Bible is our Book; these scriptures are our Scripture. We are not reading someone else's mail--as though reading the Bible had to do foremost with recovering an ancient meaning intended for someone else and then translating its principles for use in our own lives. When we recall that we are the people of God to whom the Bible is addressed as Scripture, we realize that the fundamental transformation is not the transformation of an ancient message into a contemporary meaning, bur rather the transformation of our lives by means of God's Word. This means that reading the Bible as Scripture has less to do with what tools we bring to the task, however important these may be, and more to do with our own dispositions as we come to our engagement with Scripture. We come not so much to retrieve facts or to gain information, but to be formed and ultimately, transformed. Scripture does not present us with texts to be mastered but with a Word, God's Word, intent on mastering us, on shaping our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781426724367

Prof. Joel B. Green

Joel B. Green is Provost, Dean of the School of Theology, and Professor of New Testament Interpretation of the School of Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. Author of many books, he is also a General Editor of the Wesley Study Bible and the Common English Bible.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

READING THE BIBLE, READING SCRIPTURE

At one time people knew what it meant to read a text as scripture, but we no longer do, because this way of reading has, since the late medieval and reformation periods, been dislocated and obscured.¹

For those of us who read the Bible from within the church these are astonishing words. True, there are many places where the Bible might be read quite apart from its religious significance. A statement published jointly by The Bible Literacy Project, Inc., and the First Amendment Center—endorsed by organizations as diverse as the People for the American Way Foundation, the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, and the Society of Biblical Literature—notes that educators widely agree that study about the Bible can be an important part of a complete education in courses such as literature and history. Knowledge of biblical stories and concepts contributes to our understanding of literature, history, law, art, and contemporary society.² Encouraging study about the Bible in public schools, this document sketches possibilities for curriculum related to the Bible and literature, the Bible and history, and the Bible and world religions. As important as this project might be on its own terms, this is not reading the Bible as Scripture.

The case I want to make in this chapter is that the slogan that has driven critical study of the biblical materials—Read the Bible as you would read any other book—however helpful and well-intentioned, cannot on its own promote a reading of the Bible as Scripture. This way of engaging the Bible cannot sustain the people of God. This motto, I will urge, is not so much inappropriate as it is inadequate. It is not even the most important, first step to be taken.

An image may help. Most of us have woken too early, dressed in too little light, and found our blouse or shirt out of alignment: buttons in the wrong buttonholes. We did everything right, used good technique, placed each button carefully into and through the hole provided, but we started in the wrong place and therefore achieved an unwanted result. Attention to genre, the structure of an argument, the meaning of words and phrases, social background—we will turn to these concerns in due course, but they do not constitute first things. What it means to embrace the Bible as Scripture and the nature of human formation and practices—these are first things. Coming at the question from several vantage points—including theological considerations, teaching and learning, reflections on history and historicism, and multidisciplinary perspectives on human formation—I will urge that we need to attend better to what we bring with us when we bring ourselves to the task of reading the Bible.

This Is the Word of God?

Reading the Bible is not necessarily the same thing as reading Scripture. More specifically, when we read the Bible we are not necessarily reading the Bible as Scripture. In some ways, this is an obvious truth, but we may still be surprised by it. At one level, this is the experience of many ordinary Christians who take up the Bible and read its words, then walk away unchanged, uninspired, and uncertain. This is the Word of God? What does it mean? Who can make sense of these words? Yet, millions of Americans gather week after week in homes, workplaces, and coffee shops to accomplish this very thing, to make sense of these words, to hear the voice of God speaking to them.³ And, like annuals in the flower bed, new study Bibles and Bible study tools, promising clarity, wisdom, and inspiration, appear each summer in local bookshops.

Reading the Bible is not necessarily the same thing as reading Scripture.

Ordinary Christians might be stunned to discover it, but it is no less true that the seminary-trained and the scholar share this common experience of dryness in the journey through the pages of the Bible. In fact, for those apprenticed in the ways of biblical scholarship during the last two centuries, the experience of distance between ancient text and faithful life is often even more pronounced. The arsenal available to those trained in the science of biblical scholarship may burgeon with a wider array of skills and critical methods, well-honed tools, and promising techniques, but these do not ensure that God’s word will be any more near, or that it will be any more reverenced or observed. To many of us, this may seem counterintuitive. Why would greater skill not lead to greater understanding?

Our problems are several, but most debilitating are the traditions of knowing and learning that many of us take for granted. Yale University professor Robert J. Sternberg has observed, Traditional education, and the intellectual and academic skills it provides, furnishes little protection against evil-doing or, for that matter, plain foolishness.⁴ By traditional, Sternberg refers to educational practices developed especially in the last century. These, he insists, are the educational goals that need revamping. However necessary academic skills may be, he observes, they are insufficient for persons committed to using their intelligence to seek a common good. Rather, he writes, we easily succumb to the temptation to confuse learning practical skills with gaining knowledge and mistake the amassing of facts with learning. How could we know so much and be so lacking in wisdom? Is it not because there is no simple line from the accumulation of data to the formation of a person?

In the same way, the exercise of reading the Bible, even reading according to accredited protocols and conventional procedures, need have no particular relationship to reading Scripture, even though both have to do with reading the same texts, the same pages. To refer to Scripture rather than Bible introduces a category difference in assumptions and aims, making it entirely possible, nowadays perhaps even probable, that a reading of the Bible will not be a reading of Scripture. From wildly diverse perspectives, the biblical scholar Robert Morgan and the theologian David Kelsey document what is at stake. Observing the competing interests occupying those who engage in interpreting the biblical materials, Morgan concludes that what we take the biblical texts to mean does not depend simply on the character of those texts, or on the nature of the methods we bring to the work of reading those texts. Interpretation depends more on the interests of the interpreters, he claims, before observing that the aims of biblical historians [i.e., scholars in the field of biblical studies] seem quite remote from those of Jews and Christians who interpret the Bible in the expectation of religious insight.⁵ For his part, Kelsey writes, To take biblical writings simply as ‘texts’ is, notoriously, not necessarily to take them as ‘Christian scripture.’ To take biblical texts as Scripture has to do with the aim of Scripture, which, he insists, is to shape persons’ identities so decisively as to transform them.⁶

In short, the Bible is Scripture is first and foremost a theological statement.

In short, the Bible is Scripture is first and foremost a theological statement. It draws attention to the origin, role, and aim of these texts in God’s self-communication. It locates persons and a community of people, those who read the Bible as Scripture, on a particular textual map, a location possessing its own assumptions, values, and norms for guiding and animating particular beliefs, dispositions, and practices that together constitute that people. Because of its priority in the generation and sustenance of the world it supports, Scripture also holds the potential for confirming or for reconfiguring the beliefs and commitments that orient our lives in the world.⁷

Knowing, Doing, Trusting

We cannot . . . confuse expertise in the game of Bible trivia with the kind of tacit knowledge that marks faithfulness to Christian Scripture.

How, then, might we read the Bible as Scripture? It almost goes without saying that the solution would not be a dismissal of knowing the stuff of the Old and New Testaments. The solution to traditional education, to recall Sternberg’s words, is not to evacuate knowledge of the Bible’s contents from our philosophies and practices of teaching and learning. Who among us would ever say that our problem is that too many of us know the Bible too well? We would more likely be tempted to join the choir of voices decrying biblical illiteracy. It comes as no surprise to most of us that Robert Wuthnow, one of our leading cultural analysts, has found that a sizeable segment of the American public has moved away from the Bible as a source of spiritual insight.⁸ Even so, even more troubling may be the inability of practicing Christians to answer basic questions about the Bible’s contents. Name the twelve tribes of Israel. Name the twelve apostles. Name the prophets that together make up the Book of the Twelve. There is something to be said for simply expanding our knowledge base concerning data from and about the Bible. Nevertheless, we cannot and must not confuse expertise in the game of Bible trivia with the kind of tacit knowledge that marks faithfulness to Christian Scripture.

Nor would the way forward be marked by the absence of methods and procedures for engaging biblical texts. Discipline in our work with these ancient books should not be discounted, since the biblical books, like any other writing we encounter, confront us with interpretive obstacles that must be negotiated in our quest for understanding. Some of these obstacles are so simple, so endemic to communication of all kinds, that we might overlook them:

• Language is linear. In the case of a painting by Van Gogh, for example, or Renoir, we experience the whole at once. This is not so with texts, whose whole is revealed to us one bit at a time, progressively, as we read from left to right (as in English, say, or Greek) or right to left (as in Hebrew). Were we to describe to someone else what we saw when we viewed Van Gogh’s The Church at Auvers, we could do so only by introducing linearity into our experience of the painting: What to say first? Second? Similarly, narrative texts such as Exodus or Acts unveil the mighty acts of God not all at once, but in an ordered fashion. Reading further in a text, our insider knowledge expands, setting the stage for our understanding what will follow, at the same time that reading further clarifies in retrospect what seemed ambiguous early on. Reading the whole text and reading the text as a whole, together with attention to sequence, thus become nonnegotiable protocols for the competent interpreter.

• Language is selective. The less said, the more required of the interpreter, who must fill in the gaps. Writers today, say, a biographer or novelist, can go on and on, and often do, producing hundreds of pages by way of making the first president of the United States seem more like a living friend than a figure of the past, or by way of introducing us to the smells and sounds of a great battle in the Civil War. In such cases, readers are carried along for the ride. Caught in the cascade of interpretive detail, interpretive reflection on the part of the reader seems unnecessary. When the production of even a relatively short document such as Paul’s Letter to the Galatians might take days, pass through repeated drafts, and in today’s economy cost more than seven hundred dollars,⁹ though, we might not be surprised that frugality of words was more the norm, with more work to be done by the interpreter. For letters in Roman antiquity, an authorized, lettercarrying emissary might perform the letter, reading it with gestures and changes of intonation to make clear how it was to be heard, and be otherwise counted on to assist with interpretive detail. With copies made and circulated more widely, however, communities of reading and hearing would need to expend more and more energy to make sense. Of course, many gaps occur because of shared assumptions between the writer and the authorial audience, creating even more interpretive obstacles for the twenty-first-century audience who is not so intimate with the first-century world.

• Language is ambiguous. Words and phrases typically carry multiple possible meanings, and these give rise to more uncertainties. Native English speakers are unlikely to confuse the dual meaning of blue in references to a blue mood and a blue sky, but persons for whom English is a second or third language may need some help. So we might be forgiven for wondering how the kosmos (world) that God so loved (John 3:16) could also be the kosmos (world) in this phrase: Whoever desires to befriend the world proves to be God’s enemy (James 4:4, my translation). We need some work in lexical semantics to help us here.

• Language is culturally embedded. The Old Testament is in Hebrew (with a little Aramaic); the New Testament is in Greek. We know this, but the ease with which we accept these statements masks an important problem. With such an array of modern translations in English, the words of the Bible are readily accessible to us, so much so that we might and often do simply assume that its words, familiar to us in translation, also carry commonplace meaning from our world. Reading the Bible today in English, we imagine without a second thought that people in the ancient Mediterranean world experienced life much as we do. Too readily, we stumble over the reality that every reading of the Bible today is in some important sense an exercise in cross-cultural communication and understanding. The result is that we naturally recruit biblical texts in support of our own interests and practices.

More could be said, but hopefully enough has been said to show why procedures and protocols in interpretation are necessary.

The best methods rightly used guarantee neither a Christian interpretation of the Bible nor a reading of the Bible as Christian Scripture.

But they are not enough. The best methods rightly used guarantee neither a Christian interpretation of the Bible nor a reading of the Bible as Christian Scripture. Paradoxically, they might even get in the way of a Christian interpretation of the Bible or a reading of the Bible as Scripture. Employing them as meaning-making machines, we might struggle with how so much hard work can result in so little payoff. This is especially true in a world such as ours that first divorces the practical from the theoretical and then elevates the practical (Here’s how . . .) and demonizes theory (merely academic); in a world such as ours that has had a century-long love affair with technique, that prioritizes form over formation. In such a world, we move quickly to method when there is something even more basic.

What is this something? Writing of understanding in her fantasy novel The Telling, Ursula K. LeGuin observes:

One of the historians of Darranda said: To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune.

A yielding, an obedience, a willingness to accept these notes as the right notes, this pattern as the true pattern, is the essential gesture of performance, translation, and understanding. The gesture need not be permanent, a lasting posture of the mind or heart; yet it is not false. It is more than the suspension of disbelief needed to