People of the Book: Inviting Communities into Biblical Interpretation

By T. Michael W. Halcomb and Timothy C. McNinch

We live in an era when the Bible appears to be less and less relevant to mainstream cultures. Those who do care about the Scriptures tend to derive their interpretations secondhand, from the preacher's pulpit or from generalized study guides written by complete strangers. These approaches overlook the communal and conversational nature of the Bible itself. If we hope to recover the transformative power of these ancient texts, and invite our world to reconsider their significance, we will need to engage whole communities together in the bottom-up task of interpretation. People of the Book was written to offer an organic-holistic approach to communal interpretation, an approach that can work for your community and appeal to your wider culture. Halcomb and McNinch envision the Bible as a conversation we are privileged to enter: listening, questioning, wrestling, reasoning, and responding together as authentic people of the Book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: May 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781621893547

T. Michael W. Halcomb

T. Michael W. Halcomb is a PhD candidate at Asbury Theological Seminary. He is the author of People of the Book: Inviting Communities into Biblical Interpretation, Entering the Fray: A Primer on New Testament Issues for the Church & Academy, and A Handbook of Ancient Greek Grammatical Terms: Greek-English and English-Greek.

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Preface

Will Christianity survive in this emerging cultural era? The institution of church itself is becoming more and more the artifact of a bygone age, kept sacred by an ever-shrinking population of adherents. It seems that every new major poll of American religious affiliation shows dramatic increase in the None category.¹ For some, church is simply boring and irrelevant. For others, particularly those who have experienced deep hurt in the context of a church, it is little more than a death-dealing cult. The decline in religious participation in Europe and North America over the last few decades has left many church leaders scratching their heads and scrambling for solutions.

For example, Frank Viola and Doug Pagitt have attempted to re-imagine and reconstruct the entire infrastructure of the contemporary church.² Lucy Rose, John McClure, and Wesley Allen have sought to press out a new homiletic that allows the church to become more conversational in nature.³ Others, such as Andy Stanley and Bill Donahue, have emphasized the modern church’s need to cultivate small group cultures, with special emphasis placed upon the group leader’s ability to conduct successful meetings.

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Recently, Anthony Blair has suggested that some of the church’s problems can be overcome by courting a deeper relationship with the academy.⁵ For many, however, the notion of the church leaning in on the academy is simply repelling. Thus, the divide remains between these two entities that seem to think, speak, and operate so differently. Christian academics cater to those with deep educational backgrounds while pastors write pop-literature for the laity.

If you are a pastor, prospective pastor, or church layperson picking up this book, you will soon discover that the solution we are offering (or better, part of the solution) is not very new or trendy. It is actually reaching back to an old resource for the success of churches. We are convinced that near the center of healthy and progressive Christianity rests an inductive, communal engagement with the Bible. Now, we are aware that in the quest for the new thing that will rescue modern Christianity’s downward slide, few would expect to find an answer in something as quaint as Bible study. After all, isn’t the Bible part of the religious package that the postmodern generation has rejected? An ancient book with little relevance to twenty-first-century life? A malleable text made to say whatever preachers want it to say? Isn’t the Bible part of the problem?

We want to suggest that although the Bible has indeed been mishandled and misunderstood by many communities for many generations, we will discover a significant way forward for the church by helping whole faith communities to create and own robust interpretive skills and to employ them in, yes, Bible study. Teaching communities to become better interpreters together will not only invigorate the spiritual lives of those currently in your churches, it will (perhaps counterintuitively, at first) invite a whole new generation of spiritual seekers to find the living Jesus in a way that makes cultural sense to them.

Certainly, we are not the first to emphasize the importance of approaching the Bible inductively within ecclesial settings. Authors from the InterVarsity and Navigators campus ministry movements have penned many helpful resources for inductive study groups in churches and campus groups, and Alan Stibbs’s classic Search the Scriptures has been an influential guide to inductive study of the entire Bible for over six decades.

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We are indebted to their thoughtful work. Still, those works lean toward a strong leader-focused method, when applied to group settings. Typically, leaders are encouraged to prepare lessons using inductive methods, and then to develop Socratic discussion questions that will hopefully lead their group members to the textual meaning and significance they discovered during their preparation. Indeed, the great majority of Bible study tools, especially within study group contexts, simply punt back to these types of traditional models when it comes to engaging the text.

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In our view, however, emphasis needs to be placed on the communal nature of the exegetical process itself, which carries us across the interpretive chasm separating the ancient world of the Bible from our own modern world. The emerging generations of our culture demand community, and every generation (if we are honest about our inner longings) needs it. If we intend to move forward and become more palpably communal churches, then what will that look like within the realm of Bible study? That is the question this book explores and to which we offer an answer. We hope you will find in these pages a fresh, accessible approach that will help you and your interpretive community to experience more of the depth and relevance of the Bible. Our conviction, and our own experience, is that you will also discover this to be a path to experience more of the depth and reality of God himself.

Looking ahead, in the introduction we set out some of the history and parameters of communal interpretation, making clear several of our presuppositions for what follows. The first chapter, then, invites us to conceive of the Bible as a conversation, and to envision our Bible studies as organic, holistic, interpretive conversations with many seats at the table. In the second chapter we will make a case for doing interpretation in community and explore the means by which we can faithfully engage a text in order to span ancient and modern horizons. Here again, attention will be drawn to the value of studying together.

In the third and fourth chapters, we will walk with you through the interpretive landscape and take an up-close look at the topography of six conversational movements comprising a communal-interpretive approach. These chapters are the heartbeat of the book and as such, have the potential to be life- and community-altering in so many ways. Along the way we offer a concrete example of what each movement could look like utilizing Mark’s Gospel as a sample text. Chapter five actually puts our claims to the test. This lengthy chapter details four case studies, each imbued with their own unique social and cultural dynamics, and exploring various biblical genres, where our approach has been field tested by living, breathing interpretive communities.

Chapter six contains several thoughts on leadership within interpretive communities. Our hope is to offer a healthy model where clergy and laity, or facilitators and participants, discover the integral relationship between communal interpretation and Christ-like servanthood. Finally, we synthesize our conclusions, and add several appendices with charts, tools, and resources to help you begin using a communal-interpretive approach.

Having said all this, it may prove beneficial at this point to address one more important matter. The fact is, two well-educated, white males born out of a Western context are authoring this book together. While some may suspect that this limits the effective scope of our approach in wider contexts, our hope and initial observation is that—as our case studies reveal—the suggestions being made here transcend academic, economic, ethnographic, gender, social and cultural boundaries. In short, we believe that the approach shared in this book, though given shape from within a Western context, is by no means confined to it. We are proposing an organic-holistic approach that, while having guidelines that are important to stick with, can be adapted within different communities. More will be said about this later. For now, however, we extend to you an invitation to keep reading. We ask that you would hear us out with patience and to bear in mind that we are simply two interpreters who have the utmost care and concern for the Scriptures as well as the communities that interpret them.

Lastly, we are well aware that any time new approaches are being forged, especially in a field as significant as this one, questions are inevitable. Some questions this book may answer and some it may not. Where your questions are not directly addressed, we hope that this approach equips your community to be able to explore such inquiries together. We would be glad, as well, to personally continue the conversation with you around these ideas. You may email questions or comments to us at [e-mail]. We also invite you to visit and interact at this book’s companion website, http://MichaelHalcomb.com/peopleofthebook.html.

A book like this can never be conceived in isolation. We would like to express our sincere appreciation to the interpretive communities who have gifted us with the opportunity to go deeper into life and faith with them. To those in Lexington, Kentucky and Kalamazoo, Michigan who have met in our living rooms and sanctuaries, thank you for allowing us to journey and experiment in this project with you. You have had a profound influence on our lives! Michael would like to especially thank the students at Evangelical Theological College in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as well as Dr. Fred Long and his students at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. I am indebted to you for your gracious participation and edifying feedback. We have seen firsthand that the so-called dividing line between the church and the academy can be dissolved. Timothy adds his gratitude to the various InterVarsity staff members, both mentors and colleagues, who have taught and lived a contagious love for the Scriptures, including John Natelborg, Fred Bailey, Tom Trevethan, Lindsay Olesberg, Bob Grahmann, Jim Marshall, and especially Sam Perry. Both Michael and Timothy appreciate the leaders and staff of Cedar Campus, who maintain a special place for communities of students to engage with God through the Bible.

We also want to thank our families who have encouraged us throughout the duration of this project. They have brainstormed with us, listened to us rant and complain, and have allowed us the time and space to write. In that regard, this book is dedicated to our spouses, Kristi Halcomb and