Understanding the Bible.
I don’t know if you’ve had this experience yet or not, but many Christ-followers reach a point in their faith journey where they hit a critical mass of dissonance with the hyper-literal reading of Scripture we were trained in… and just have to take a break! They have to set the Bible aside for a season while they work out a new way of holding it. And sometimes this is the very best thing, the most Christian thing, we can do.
The wrathful God passages, the exclusionary passages, the wipe-out-all-the-men-women-and-children passages… At some point, we simply can’t reconcile that picture of God anymore with the picture of God incarnated in Jesus. The superficial explanations we’ve been given begin to fracture under the weight of the disparities, and our hearts tell us, There must be another way to read the Bible.
Thank God, there is!
My own experience with this inner implosion of cognitive dissonance began about five or six years ago, and I barely read the Bible for at least a year. I’m not saying this is what you should do; I’m just giving you permission if that’s what you need to do. God will understand! In fact, I think God is the most frustrated of all when it comes to the mis-reading and mis-handling of scripture. After all, God is the one who suffers the brunt of these mis-characterizations most personally. No one is more vested in revealing God’s true character than God.
It was a book called The Blue Parakeet, by Northern Seminary New Testament professor Scot McKnight, that helped me love the Bible again and return to it with increasing appetite. These days I can’t get enough of it, particularly the Red Words of Jesus, which is really where the Bible begins—not chronologically of course, but thematically. And this is also where a reoriented hermeneutic to scripture begins—a fancy theological term that simply means how we interpret the Bible.
Understanding scripture begins with understanding the manuscripts. The most conservative approaches use words like inerrant (without error) and the slightly stronger term infallible (incapable of error) to describe why the Bible is trustworthy, which it is once we learn how to read it. Both of these claims, however—infallibility and inerrancy—are limited to the original manuscripts of scripture, which for me makes this entire conversation just a little bit ridiculous because, guess what, the original manuscripts were lost millennia ago. What remains are copies of copies of copies. That doesn’t make these manuscripts irrelevant; quite the contrary. But it does make arguing over inerrancy and infallibly patently absurd.
The next thing we have to understand is how these manuscripts were actually written, and this is more of a matter of conviction. No one can prove exactly how God placed these ideas into the minds and hearts of the biblical writers, and how those ideas were processed to form words and sentences and eventually books or letters. The authors give us a few clues, though I have to wonder if they even understood themselves how this mystical process actually occurred.
Paul uses one of my favorite metaphors when he says that scripture is “God-breathed.”
Peter says that the prophets “spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
John says that “Scripture cannot be broken.”
What is clear is that both Old and New Testament believers took the scriptures very seriously as part of God’s essential communication to humans. Not God’s only communication, to be sure, because God also spoke in many other forms: through creation, directly to people, through supernatural events, and even through a donkey. But the Bible is a unique treasure once we get past the mechanistic thinking of the Industrial Age and enter back into the world of mystery and metaphor in which it was written.
And as usual, it is Jesus himself who gives us the keys necessary to a right understanding of these ancient words, starting with a powerful challenge to the Pharisees: “You pore over the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them, yet they testify about Me” (Jn. 5:39). In other words, the only way to correctly interpret scripture is to see it through the filter of Christ. We could call this a Christocentric hermeneutic. Every verse in the entire Bible is meant to be received within the larger context of the person and message of Jesus. This is a tremendous help, particularly when we run into passages that seem at odds with Christ’s life and words.
The next key Jesus offers for rightly interpreting the Bible is to watch him do it. Jesus is entirely comfortable affirming what is timeless in scripture (think about Jesus’ temptations) as well as radically revising scriptures (think of the six times in the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus says, “You’ve heard it said…” followed by “…but I say to you.”) He called it “fulfilling scripture;” Paul called it “correctly handling the word of truth;” we call it interpreting the Bible authentically.
It's hard to cover the sheer breadth of this topic is a short (or not so short) blog post, so I’ll just leave you with this final thought: The hermeneutical perspective of progressive revelation helps us understand that the biblical authors wrote within their own historical, cultural, geographical, and educational context over the course of about 1200 years.
The results of that reality are that most Christians no longer conduct genocides, take multiple wives, beat our children with rods, stone homosexuals, make slaves, or require women to wear head coverings in the church… even though all of these practices have been vigorously defended over the years from scripture. Progressive revelation calls us today to attempt, imperfectly, to filter out or reinterpret those biblical passages that are no longer relevant in the light of Christ, even in the New Testament.
Is this a slippery slope where we can simply write off any passage that makes us uncomfortable or that we don’t feel like following? In a word, yes. Should we? No. Following Christ in the way that Christ himself desires will always be contingent upon our own purity of heart and humility of surrender. As much as some faith leaders want to remove the fundamental messiness and the lack of control embedded in this truth, it is entirely consistent with a God who has granted us (for better and for worse) a scandalous and even dangerous degree of freedom. God could easily have asserted control over creation; instead, he released us to follow the bread crumb trail of Love into divine union… or not.
Yet we’re not adrift in this great invitation. We’re not left helpless in the challenging task of hearing and responding to God’s heart for us: “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things” (Jn. 14:26). Every Christ-follower has an internal, hardwired GPS called the Holy Spirit who is dedicated to helping us discern God’s voice, interpret scripture, and follow the path of Life. So, my friends, let’s encourage one another to do exactly that. Let’s listen to one another, hear a variety of perspectives, and then follow the Spirit in loving community, recognizing that there will necessarily (and perhaps redemptively) be a broad gamut of ways to hold this precious gift called the Bible.
growing the soul
Where are you encountering the person and message of Christ most powerfully in the scriptures these days?
serving the world
How do you think the mission of Christ might be advanced by exchanging a rigid, literal view of scripture for a more mystical, Christocentric view?
takeaway
God inspires. Jesus filters. The Spirit illumines.