Gratefi¡l acknowledgrnent is made for peunission to use the following material:

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Page 253: These lines of Anna Russell comprise the thi¡d vene of “Iolly Old Sigmund Freud,” TIIE ANNA RUSSELL SONG BOOK, 1960, and are published by anangement with The Carol Publishing Group. Page 336: Excerpt from “Little Gidding” in FOUR QUARTETS, copyright 1943 by T.S. Eliot and ¡enewed l97l by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by pennission of Harcou¡t Brace & Company, and Faber and Faber Limited.

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CHAPTER I .WHA’T’S IT ALL ABOUT?

{.

l\ ,lf ANY yeers ago when I began my service as minister in Harvard’s LYltr¡emorial Church, an enonymous bJnefactor offered to present as many Bibles es were needed to fill the peJs. No particular translation was specified; and no obiections were mede to the Revised Standard Version. Before proceeding’too far along the road of this benefaction I felt it wise to take the advice of some colleagues, and I found their reection to be apprehensive, and in fact quite suspicious of the moti, vation behind the gift. “What does the benefactor want or expect?” I was asked, and warned that placing Bibles in the pews would create an invitation to steal tÈem. Further, I rvas wamed that “people will think that this ìs a fuñdamentalist church. If they see Bibles in the pews you will have an image problem.?’My colleagues and counselors meantwell, I knew, and wished only to protect the church from secular and religious zealots. These concerns notwithstanding, however, we eceepted the gift, placed the Bibles in the pews, and, happily, over the years we have lost quite a few to theft.

one orthe more ” :::,:::”:’:::::”pon which even Miss Manners and other arbiters of social etiquette have failed to provide a useful strategy, is the one in which you have more than a nodding acquaintance with sorneone. At the point of introduction you got the person’s neme, forgot it, asked it again, and forgot it again. Meanwhile you go on rneeting this person, ch:r’tting and being chatted’with, but you have cleady passed beyond the point where.you can ask for the

Published in ha¡dcover by William Monow and Company, Inc.; for information address Permissions Depa¡tment, William Mor¡ow and Company, Inc., 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New Yo¡k, New York 10019.

The William Monow edition contains the following Library of Congress Caaloging in Publication Data:

Gomes, Peter J. The good book : reading tlre Bible with mind and hea¡t / Peter J. Gomes.

p- om. l. Bible{riticism, interpretation, etc. I. Tiile.

BS5ll.2.G66 1996 220.1–4c20

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If you pwcbased this book u,itliout a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen p¡operty. It was rcport€d as ‘l¡nsold and destoyed” to the publisher, and neithe¡ Ëe autüc.nor úe publisher has received any payment for this “strip@book”

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QPMI098?654321

 

 

*q 4) OPÐNING 1’HE BIBLE name again. It is easy enough to maintain the facade of friendship until that awful moment comes when you are required to introduce your nameless friend to a third party. what to do? I have seen artfur evasions such as “Surely you two know each other?” foilowed by a discreet with- drawal while they got on with the job themselves, leaving you unex_ posed. Another stratagem is to avoid the risk of introduction altogether by declaring emphatically, “Ah! Here’s an old friendr” what we should know, pretend that we know, and wish that we knew, we don,t. Worse still, we do not know, without risk of embarrassment, how to ask about what we need to know.

This, I suggest, is the way it is with so many people and the Bible. Once, perhaps a long time ago in childhood or in early youth, or even as late as in college, you were introduced. you have a nodding acquain- tance with the Bible, or at least you feel you ought to, and you can recognize some familiar phrases, especially if they “sound” like the King |ames version of the Bible; yet, to ail intents and purposes, the Bibre remains an elusive, unknown, slightry daunting book. It is awkward to concede that you don’t know very much about the Bibre, giverqits cul- tural prominence, and it is di{ficult to figure out how to get reintroduced without conceding your illiteracy. perhaps the lament I have heard more and more frequently in recent years is the one that says, “r wish I knew more about the Bible.”

Poll after poll continues to find the Bible atop every best-seiler list, and one survey after another confirms the fact that an astonishingly high percentage of American households claims not only to own a Bible, but to read it on a regular basis. Hardry a hotel room in the world is without a copy of the Bible in the bedside iable, placed there courtesy of the Gideons; and through the unremitting efforts of the wycliffe Society the Bible has been translated into nearly every language on earth. There are Bibles for women, Bibles for children, Bibres fòr Asians, Bibles for African Americans. There are so many translations, paraphrases, revi_ sions, and editions now available, many of which are the products of the last twenty years, that the market for the Bible may well be saturated. In ihe introduction to their 1983 study of twentieth-century English ver-

whdt’s lt AII ltbout? (s

sions of the Bible, So Many VersionsT, Sakae Kubo and Walter F. Specht observe, “Some people are of the opinion that there is a ‘glut’ of trans- lations on the market today. Some feel it is time to call a halt to the work of translation for a while until we absorb the flood of recent trans- lations,”‘

Despite the ubiquity of the Good Book, it is increasingly clear that the rate of biblical literacy has gone down rather than up. A recent American poll conducted by the Barna Research Group discovered that ro percent of the sample of more than one thousand persons polled said that foan of Arc was Noah’s wife, 16 percent were convinced that the New Testament contained a book by the Apostle Thomas, and 38 per- cent were of the view that both the Old and New Testaments were written a few years after fesus’ death. These replies are worthy of the old Sunday school howler in which the epistles are defined as the wives of the apostles. The president of the polling firm commented, “Clearly, most people don’t know what to make of the Bible. Adults constantly gave us answers which contradicted or conflicted with previous replies.”” Ii is not that people lie about their knowledge of the Bible; it is that they often feel that in order to maintain their moral credibility they must reply in the affirmative when questioned by pollsters, since most believe that they ought to read it. Many of these modern Christians are much like the Emperor Charlemagne who, it is òaid, slept with a coPy of Saint Augustine’s magnum opus, Thø City of God, under his pillow in the hope that this passive proximity to a great but difficult work might be of some benefit to him.

Heøring the Word

jlq”ti”g the Bible in church presumably helps people become better – acquainted with it. In fact, hearing the Bible in church was the way in which most Christians for a thousand years became familiar with scrip- ture, and in most Christian churches today pride of place is still given to the reading of appointed passages from the Bible. In the Anglican

 

 

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6) OPENING THE BIBLE and Protestant traditions these readings are called “lessons,, because it is believed that they are not merely liturgical acts but have a moral teaching function as well. This tradition of hearing the Bible read aloud in public is as old as christian worship. when saint paul instructs the christians in the corinthian church on a suitable order for worship, he tells them: “When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let alr things be done for edification.” (I Corinthians 14:26)

In my naiveté as a pastor I thought that this tradition of edification in church was alive and well untir I once said as much to a regular churchgoer who every Sunday hears a psalm and at least two lessons, one from the old Testament and one from the New Testament, and has done so for years. Her response caught me up short. She said that listening to the lessons in church was like eavesdropping on a conver- sation in a restaurant where the parties on whom you are listening in are speaking fluent French, and you are trying to make sense of what they are saying with your badly remembered French ror. you catch a few words and are intrigued, trying to follow, but after a while you rose interest, for the effort is too great and the reward too small. That is a pretÇ vivid image of a fairly common modern dilemma, and most peo- ple find themselves too embarrassed to confess that this is their situation. It used to be said that most christian adurts live their lives off a second- rate second-grade Sunday school education, and that the more they hear of the Bible in church, the less they feel they know about it.

Many people want to do something about their biblicar iiliteracy. There is something there that they feel they ought to know about, and yet they are frustrated in their attempts to read the Bible and to make sense of it for themselves. Because it is unlike any other book, reading the Bible is an intimidating enterprise for the averageperson. To remind the reader that the Bible is not a book but a library of books, written by many people in many forms over many years for many purposes, is to further complicate the ambition and add to the frustration. Bound in its authoritative black leather and gilt-edged pages, with, in some edi- tions, the words of Jesus printed in red, the physical artifact of the Bible

Wh¿t’s It All About? (z

has a certain aura. Add to this the powers attributed to it, with its des- ignation as “holy” and therefore suitable for use in oath-taking and in sancti$ring proceedings both civil and sacred, and the Bible is much more easily reverenced than read’

Inhibitions and CornPbxrties

It is not its status as an icon or holy obiect, however, that inhibits the reading of the Bible. It is the sense as well that the Bible is a technical book, requiring a level either of piety or of knowledge not available to

the average reader. There are also admitted obsiacles. What does a per-

son who has no knowledge of the biblical languages, no formal theo- logical training, and no experience in the very technical fields of translation and interpretation do with the Bible? An ancient answer was

to submit oneself to those who did possess those qualities. The image of formative Christianity as a “Bible-centered community,” one contin-

ual scripture seminar for the faithful, is an appealing one, but totally false. Saint Augustine, for example, opposed Saint ferome’s heroic proi-

ect of translating the Greek Bible into the more accessible Latin because

making the Bible more accessible would be more likely to cultivate a

conceit on the part of those who, because they could understand the

ìanguage, would now also assume that they could understand the book.

Vernacular translations of the Bible were forbidden to those few pre-

modern Christians who could read, and English translations of the Bible

up to the time of King fames’s version of 16rr wefe generally regarded

by the rèligious establishment as doing more harm than good’

Ironically, it was the tremendous explosion in scholarship about the Bible itself, an enterprise whose highest motivation was to make sense

of the Bible and to clarify its complexities, that made it harder rather than easier for the average person to read the Bible with any degree of self-confidence. By the close of the nineteenth century, a period of un-

precedented attention to the complexity of bibtical scholarship, the frus-

tration of the average reader was rePresente.dsyio less a figure than

 

 

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8) OPENING THE BIBLE What’s It AII About? ( g ancient text into the language and life-context oflate zoth cenhrry Persons.4

Contemporary Christians tend to avoid complexity as being hazardous to their faith, and are thus unprepared to cope with complexity when it confronts them. In April 1996, for example, all three major U.S. weekly newsmagazines featured fesus as the cover story for Holy Week. What was the reason? This was hardly an outbreak of newsroom piety, but rather the “discovery” that scholars were debating yet again the relation- ship between the fesus of history and the Christ of faith, and that many of the words and actions attributed to fesus in the New Testament were in fact, in the view of much of modern scholarship, the work of writers of the early Christian movement. “Some scholars are debunking the Gospels,” ran Time’s cover headline. “Now traditionalists are fighting back. What are Christians to believe?”¡

I was asked by many sincere believers as well as by the vaguely curious what I thought of Time’s story. Would it do damage to the faith? Hardly. fu the sign in the old antique shop reads: NOTHING NEW HERE. Ques- tions about the nature of the gospels and of their place in the life of the church are as old as the gospels themselves. Questions about the resurrection are as old as the Apostle Paul’s writings on the subject. These are matters that have always belonged to the church, and always will. Time’s discovery of Christianity’s two-thousand-year-old debate sug- gests only how far Time is removed from the intellectual life of biblical scholarship. But alas, the story also revealed the large gap between the basic working assumptions of biblical scholarship long held by the schol- arly community and the conventional wisdom or general knowledge of a less and less biblically literate Christian population. To make a story there must be winners and losers. The not too subtle implication of this Holy Week Special is that what the scholars believe they know and what the believers believe they believe are seen to be at odds, and if the scholars are right, then the believers must be wrong, and the Christian faith folds like a house of cards.

Grover Cleveland. In some exasperation, the twenty_second and twenty_ fourth president of the united States said, “The Bible is good enough for me, just the old book under which I was brought ,rp. ido not want notes or criticisms or expranations about authorship or origins or even cross-references. I do not need them or understand them, and they con_ fuse me.”¡

A century later we can understand his frushation and his desire to return to what the scholars calr a precritical stage, and in fact many have attempted to do just that. After ail. we should not have to be a

“..aifi.delectrician in order to enjoy the benefits of the lightbulb. suppose, however, that that lightbulb does little io illumine the dark

places in which we find ourselves in these last days of the twentieth century? what are we to do with a Bible about which we know less and less, and which itself wourd appear to have ress and ress to say to us in language that we can understandz The question is not a new one. In 1969, in a small book with the provocative title The strange sirence of the Bible in the churcå, lames D. smart addressed the gap between trre fullness of modern biblical scholarship on the one hand, and thepoverty of biblical literacy on the other. In an America racked by thç intensities of the struggle for civil rights, the battles of the counterculture, and the depredations of the Vietnam war, the Bible seemed unequar to the morally demanding times, and its silence was deafening. How courd this be? In his Preface, Smart, a presbyterian minister and biblical scholar, attempted an answer:

Responsibility for this strange silence of the Bibre in the church does not rest upon preachers alone. Much too often they have borne the whole reproach without there being any recognition of the complex character of the dilemma in which they find them_ selves’ Rather, there had been a blindness which schorar, preacher, teacher, and layman alike have shared-a blindness to the com- plexity of the essential hermeneutical problem, which, in simple terms, is the problem of how to translate the full content of an

 

 

rc) OPENING THE BIBLE

What Are We Doin¿? What can be believed about the Bíble? What do we need to know aboirt the Bible? Can the Bible survive the efforts to interpret and understand it? Can we? Is it wrong to ask critical questions of the Bible? How do we reconcile the parts we understand, and perhaps dislike, with the parts we do not understand but which may be salutary? When we speak of the authority of scripture, as certain Protestant traditions delight in do- ing, does that rnean that we suspend all of those faculties of mind and intelligence which we apply to all other books and all other instances of our life? How indeed do we, as fames Smart suggested, “translate the full content of an ancient text into the language and life-context of late zoth century persons” without risking our intelligence or the integrity of that text?

Over the years of my ministry in a university and well beyond it, I have come to the conclusion that most sincere Christians a1e curious in these matters, unlike Grover Cleveland, and want to become better acquainted with the Bible, I am further convinced that the more im- portance one attaches to the significance of the Bible both for the self and for society, the more one is driven to a consideration of questions which in an earlier day might either have been ignored or left to the competence of the experts. As making sense has as much to do with formulating useful questions as it has to do with d.eveloping useful an- swers, the thoughful but uninformed reader will want to know how to go about doing both.

The Episcopal Church, while not known as a “Bible” church in the sense of those evangelical and free churches that advertise themselves as such, nevertheless exposes its worshipers to a great deal of scripture on Sunday mornings. There is a movement to do something about bib- lical literacy âmong what one social historian of the Episcopal Church has called “God’s frozen people.” Understanding the Sunday Scriþtures, a release of Synthesis Publications, is designed to provide help to people

What’i trt AII ltbout? (tt

who have finally reached the awareness that they need it. The Reverend Dr. H. King Oehmig, editor of the first volume in a series on the Epis copal lectionary, says of it, “The Episcopal Church has more scripture on Sunday than any other denomination in America. After listening to the desires of the people in the pews for a responsible yet inspiring study resource to prepare them to hear the Word on Sunday morning, we have produced this unique resource.”6

The United Methodist Church, America’s second-largest Protestant denomination after the Southern Baptists, is also attempting to respond to the felt needs of biblical literacy. It has produced not only a series of books and study aids but a series of films utilizing the most sophisticated of contemporary biblical scholarship.z When I asked some Methodist pastors how this worked, nearly all of them were pleased with the results in their churches. The study program is organized into small grouPs that pledge to meet during the week for nine months, and are meant as bonding fellowships as well as study groups, designed to combine the best elemenls of the old adult Sunday school class, the Methodist class meeting, ìhe preyer meeting, and the support groups that have become the local units of our secular therapeutic culture. Apparently these groups help in developing a better knowledge of the Bible, and provide an informed lay leadership which enriches the work and the life of the local congregation at the same time. As one of the pastors said to me, “The church is in bad shape when the only Person who knows anything Þ about the Bible is the pastor.”

These are clearly new initiatives taken to meet what is generally rec- ognized to be the crisis of biblical illiteracy’ We might well ask how this illiteracy came to be, given that the Bible has always had pride of place in Christian worship and particularly in American Protestantism, but any of us who have had experience of what passes for “Bible study” in recent years in most churches can enswer that question. For many the Bible served as some sort of spiritual or textual trampoline: You got onto it in order to bounce off of it as far as possible, and your only purpose in returning to it was to get away from it again. It is the iay version of what Willard Sperry, one of my predecessors in The Memorial

 

 

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n) OPENING THE BIBLE

Church, used to lampoon as “textual preaching.” The preacher who was keen to practice what he preached would follow this formula: “Take your text, depart from your text, never return to your text.”

Bible shrdies tend to follow this route. The Bible is simply the entry into a discussion about more interesting things, usually about oneself. The text is a mere pretext to other matters, and usually the routine works like this: A verse or a passage is given out, and the group or class is asked, “What does this mean to you?” The answers come thick and fast, and we are off into the life stories or personal situations of the group, and the session very quickly takes the form of Alcoholics Anonymous, Twelve-Step meetings, or other exercises in healing and therapy. I do not wish to disparage the very good and necessary work thai these groups perform, for I have seen too many good effects and have known too many beneficiaries of such encounter and support groups to diminish by one iota their benefit both to individuals and to the community. I simply wish to say that this is not Bible study, and to call it such is to perpetuate a fiction.

Bible study actually involves the study of the Bible. That.involves a certain amount of work, a certain exchange of informed intelligence, a certain amount of discipline. Bible study is certainly not iust the re- sponse of the uninformed reader to the uninterpreted text, but Bible study in most of the churches has become iust that-the blind leading the blind or, as some caustic critics of líberal Protestantism would put it, the bland leading the bland. The notion that texts have meaning and integrity, intention, contexts, and subtexts, and that they are part of an enormous history of interpretation that has long involved some of the greatest thinkers in the history of the world, is a notion often lost on those for whom the text is just one more of the many means the church provides to massage the egos of its members.

Opening ihe Bible is the easy part. What to do with it once it is opened is more difficult. At the start of Lent each year, when the time for taking up a Lenten discipline is upon us, invariably a number of people will tell me that they intend to read the Bible from cover to cover. They mean to start at Genesis r:r and stop when they get to

What’s It AII About? (rl

Revelation zz:zt. The enterprise is not as easy as it sounds, and people begin to waver in their resolve when their expectations of narrative in- spiration are not sustained by genealogies, codes of Jewish law, and ancient Jewish history. The New Testament is somewhat easier to digest, in part because it is smaller and its subject more easily identified as |esus and the early church. Nevertheless, it is not always clear what is going on in the Acts of the Apostles; the expectation that the letters of Paul provide a systematic correspondence is often disappointing; and while they find it fascinating, not many know what to make of the book of Revelation. Those who get through usually feel as if they have run a marathon, where the object of the course is to finish and not necessarily

to observe the landscape along the way. Those who do not cross the finish line often feel like moral failures who have broken their diet or fallen off the wagon and taken a forbidden drink.

The risks of discouragement notwithstanding, I think there is some- thing to be said for taking on the Bible in this way. It is a bit like total immersion in a foreign language; eventually, if you stick with it, you will get some sense of what is going on; /ou will see and feel the shapes of the language, and you will acquire a sense of those places to which you wish to return, and those places you wish to avoid. This is not a bad thing.

Tlte Construction oJ ScriPture

The Bible, however, is more than an endurance contest, and one may know bêtter how to make a useful reading of it if one has a sense of what the Bible actually is. At the risk of appearing to offend those who already know what they need to know in this regard, I begin by stressing

the fact that the Bible is not a book but a collection of books, in fact, a library ofbooks. Sixty-six separate books have been collected from the

writings of ancient Hebrews and early Christians, and by a rational ed-

itorial process have been brought together over a period of centuries to

form the book we now know aS the Bible. The first thing the reader

 

 

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4) must remember upon encountering the Bible is that it is a result or consequence of a complex process that is both human and divine. The relationship between the human and the divine in this process is an intimate one. These are writings by human beings who are themselves believed to have been inspired by God. It is further believed that it is by the inspiration of God that human agency is given the wisdom and the will to organize these books, and it is believed that through these books the divine word of God is to be communicated. Thus it is not sufficient explanation of the Bible to say simply that it is either the word of God or “merely” a human book, such as The lliad or The Odyssey. The fews who gathered together these books from a whole range of their writings and called them “scripture” did so in the firm conviction that God spoke through these human writings, and that these human writ- ings brought the people of God neerer to God. Thus, when they call the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures-known es the Penta- teuch-the Books of Moses, they mean that here Moses speaks of his understanding of God, and through Moses God speaks to his people.

Although Hebrew scriptr:re takes different forms-poetry, h(story, law, and wisdom-the subject is always the same: the relationship between God’s people and their God. The human element in this relationship is significant and important to understand, for scripture is always un- derstood to be a human response to the initiative of God. The scripture of the fewish people does not simply record historical facts, but by its interpretation of history, the fewish scripture seeks to ask and to answer the fundamental questions of human existence. Who am I? Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? What does it mean to be good? What is evil, and how do I deal with it? How do I deal with death? These are both individual questions and, with regard to the fewish people, also public and communal questions. It must never be forgotten that it is a community of people chosen, beloved, and willful, to whom the Law, for example, is given, to whom the land is promised, and to whom a future is offered. The sacred literature of the fewish people reflects this conviction, and that literature is therefore regarded as sacred because God is seen to be revealed in it. The determination, however, of what

What’s It AII About? ($

is sacred and what is scripture is a human ancl rational enterprise, and it tells us as much about the people of God as it tells us about God. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith points out in his book, What Is Scripture?, “Scripture is a human, and an historical fact. We may say: it is a human, and therein an historical, fact intimately involved with the movement, the unceasingly changing specificity of historical process, its grandeur and its folly.”s

Thus the narrative history of Genesis, the legislative tedium of Levit- icus, the books of history Samuel, Chronicles, and Kings-the lyrical book of Psalms, the salacious, to some, Song of Solomon, the saga of |ob, the wisdom of Proverbs, and the salutary story of Esther are all regarded as authoritative and inspired because each in its own way has been proven useful in the people’s attempt to understand themselves and their relationship to God. The Hebrew Bible is not merely a book of history or a book of devotion but a library of writings of proven worth, self-consciously composed, collected, and presewed as the repository of wisdom both human and divine. These writings reveal both the nature of the people who wrote and collected them, and the nature of their God. These writings are of course not God, and the writings themselves are not substitutes for God. That would be a violation of the first com- mandment, which forbids idolatry and false gods.

The Hebrew Bible is organized somewhat differently from what Christians call the Old Testament. The first five books are called The Law. The Prophets are divided into The Former Prophets, which in- clude foshua, )udges, Samuel, and Kings, The Latter Prophets, com- posed of Isaiah, )eremiah, and Ezekiel, and those prophets called The Twelve, comprising Ho¡ea, foel, Amos, Obadiah, fonah, Micah, Nahum, Flabakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. The third and final section of the Hebrew Bible is called simply The Wril ings, and includes Psalms, Proverbs, fob, the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles. This authoritative listing is referred to as a canon and evolved between A.D. 7o and r35 into its present form by a process of rabbinical councils. When fesus refers to the Scripture, and New Tes-

OPENING THE BIBLE

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ó) OPENING THE BIBLE tament )ewish Christians speak of the Law and the Prophets, it is this Bible of which they speak.

The Cbrßtians’Book

When the early Christians, many of whom were fewish, ceme to un- derstand the Hebrew Bible as the necessary anticipation of their own Gospel, they reorganized the Hebrew Bible into four large categories: History, Poetry, the Major Prophets, and the Minor Prophets. Thus the elements of the Hebrew Bible were reconfigured into an “old” testa- ment, which together with the authoritative Chrístian writings, the “new” testament, comprised the Christian Bible. The Christian scrip- tures were chosen from a wide range of early Christian writings, and the final product, the present canon, represents the consensus of usage and dignity confirmed by the earliest churches in A.D. 367. The New Testament is not arranged in chronological order. For example, all of the epistles of Saint Paul are older than any of the gospels. Recent scholarship places the Epistle of fames as first by date, followed by I Thessalonians. To read the New Testament in chronological order is not necessarily superior to reading it in its canonical order, but it does allow us to follow the construction of the New Testament, and it re- minds us once again that the New Testament is also the product of a self-conscious, human, and rational set of decisions. The canonical structure of the New Testament consists of History, which contains the four gospels and the Book of Acts; the Epistles of Paul, both those by him and those attributed to him; the General Epistles; and in a category all by itself, the Apocalypse, or the Revelation of fohn.

The Apocrypha is a category of books that tends to confuse most Protestants unfamiliar with the construction of the Bible and the politi- cal implications of its various translations and editions. The books in the Apocrypha are those books and fragments that do not appear in the Hebrew Bible but which were placed into the Latin Vulgate as part of the Old Testament. These books were to be found in the Septuagint,

What’s It AII About? (‘l the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, but did not end up in the Hebrew canon. The Roman Catholic tradition regards these books as part of the canon, and since ¡,46, by decree of the Council of Trent, anathematizes anyone who says otherwise. Luther placed the Apocrypha between the two Testaments, and the English translations, while ac- knowledging that the apocryphal books were extra-canonical, found them to be useful and instructive. The Puritans decided that the Apoc- rypha was not inspired and thus removed it from their Bibles, and most modern editions of the King fames Version, following the Puritan influ- ence, exclude the Apocrypha, as do most of the newer English versions. The New English Bible, however, and of course versions approved for use by Roman Catholics, include it.

The place of the Bible in Christian theology is a subject of some complexiÇ and goes back to the earliest debates of the forming Christian churches as to whether scripture or tradition took precedence in the determination of faith and practice. The dominance of the Bible in the Protestant traditions, particularly that part of Protestantism known as the Reformed Tradition, and in more modern times, the Evangelical branch of Protestantism, has generated what is generaìly known as a “high view” of scripture. This view has generated a number of slogans, which them- selves are decidedly nonbiblical but which nevertheless convey certain doctrinal convictions by which the Bible is understood. The most fa- mous of these is Luther’s sola scríptura, which means “by scripture alone.” Under this view, scripture itself is the sole sufficient rule of conduct and belief for the Christian. Another principle, which is derived from this one, is the “authority of scripture,” and it is to that authority that the church and its members must submit. The scripture in this context is viewed very much like the federal Constitution of the United States, except, of course, that it cannot be amended.

Various other slogans designed to affirm the primacy of scripture ac- tually in some câses make it harder to take scripture seriously. For ex- ample, in order to defend the integrity of scripture, some will say that either ø/l is true, or all is false. This is meant to discourage picking and choosing from scripture the things that we like as opposed to the things

 

 

r*Fl” i. ,8) OPENING THE BIBLE

that we dislike, but it strains credulity, and indeed the function of scrip- ture, to argue that the Ten commandments must be received in exactly the same fashion as the Song of solomon, or that the Levitical Holiness code is for christians of the same order as the Beatitudes from fesus’ Sermon on the Mount. critics of the Bible are quick to point to the implausible parts, the petty anthropology attributed to the Hebrew God, for example, or fonah and the fish, or the dubious morality by modern standards of certain of the patriarchs and kings of Israel, and on this basis argue that the morality of the Bible and its claims to authority are either suspect or irrelevant. The “all true or all false” argument works both to defend scripture and to defame it, and as a principle of inter- pretation probably does more harm than good.

In ihe next chapter we will discuss in more detail the question of interpretation. what we suggest now, however, are some broad princi- ples which the reader of the Bible ought to bear in mind in becoming more familiar with the shape and content of scripture. These have to do with the character of the Bible, which is public, dynamic, and in- clusive.

A Publtc Book When I say that the Bible is public, I mean to say that it is a treasure that is held in common, it belongs to the community of believers and not to any one individual or to any one part of the community of be- lievers. The Bible may have its private uses, and it may be used privately and as a source of great strength in private devotion, but its fundamental identity is as a resource, a treasure for the people, In the sacramental sense which Christians recognize from the Communion Sewice, the Bible too is the “gift of God for the people of God.” It is a very public record of the relationship between these people and their God, meant to be heard, understood, and remembered. When we realize the oral origins of scripture, and the fact that in the days before general literacy the only way that people became acquainted with the Bible was to hear

(rq

it in the company of others, read aloud by one who could do so, then we realize that like the ancient tales of Homer and the histories of Greece and Rome, these were public stories that communicated public huths in the most public of ways. Even today in the churches of Chris- tendom pride of place in the public liturgy is given to the public reading and hearing of the Bible.s

The internal architecture of sacred space says it all. There is nearly always a splendid lectern upon which th’e book is placed, not simply for efficiency but for display as well. On the altar the gospel book is given a place of great honor, and in certain liturgical traditions the reading of the gospel is made all the more public and grand by a ceremonial procession of the book so that it can be read in the body of the church, and all turn toward it as it passes in procession. The pulpit itself is meant to be the place in which the public nature of the Bible is given its most explicit expression. A sermon that does not attempt to address the Bible is in fact not a sermon.

The public nature of the Bible is meant to have an impact upon public life. Again, it is not a secret of private vocation but a public proclamation of what can be discerned of God’s intentions for the cre- ation from the witness and testimony of scripture. People should not be surprised, therefore, that Christians always want to translate their un- derstanding of scripture and its demands into the public lives that Chris- tians lead. The Bible is meant to play a role in society, as are Christians. This public dimension of the Bible invariably produces confict, even in allegedly homogeneous Christian societies, and certainly in secular and pluralistic societies. This, however, is a conflict responsible Chris- tians cannot avoid, and the working out of the proper relationship be- tween the public dimensions of one’s biblical faith and one’s citizenship in a community that does not necessarily share or appreciate that faith is part of the inevitable and uneasy burden that every responsible Chris- tian must shoulder. The early Christian martyrs would have lived to ripe

. old ages had they not found it necessary to proclaim their biblical con- victions in public. To try to create a “Christian society” where there is no risk to the public nature of the Bible and the fáith that cherishes it

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is a form of arrogant escapism. The Bible is a public book, and as such will always give offense. Christians who take the Bible and themselves seriously have to be prepared for that.

A Livin¿ Text The second thing to be remembered about the Bible, as we proceed in our thinking about it, is that it is dynamic, living, alive, lively. “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than a two-edged sword, pierc- ing to the division of soul and spirit, or joint and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:rz) This means that behind the letter of the text is the spirit that animates it, the force that gave it and gives it life. Thus there is something always elusive about the Bible. This fixed text has a life of its own, which the reader cannot by some simple process of reading capture as his or her own. The dynamic quality of scripture has to do with the fact that while the text itself does not change, we who read that text do change;.it is not that we adapt ourselves to the world of the Bible and play at re-creating it as in a pageant or tableau “long ago and far away.” Rather, it is that the text actually adapts itself to our capacity to hear it. Thus we hear not as first-century Christians, nor even as eighteenth-century Christians, but as men and women alive here and now. We hear the same texts that our ancestors heard but we hear them not necessarily as they heard them, but as only we can. Thus the reading and the hearing of scripture are for Christians in each generation a Pentecostal experience. That experience is described in the Book of Acts as the great moment when the Holy Spirit descended upon the great and diverse crowd of believers in ferusalem. The writer of Acts goes to great lengths to describe the diversity of that crowd, people from all over the known world who had little in common but ferusalem as the obiect of the pilgrimage. They all were filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in tongues.

Now often the emphasis here,is placed on the ecstatic utterance, the Spirit-filled glossolalia, the exotic sounds of people under an extraordi-

What’s lt AII About? (“, nary spell. Anyone who has ever experienced an outbreaking ofspeaking in tongues knows the exotic nature of that experience. What must be emphasized, however, and what is in fact the point of the writer of Acts, is that the people unde’rstood what was going on, and even more to the point, they understood in their own languages: not a paraphrase, not a delayed interpretation, not even a translation; they understood in their own languages. “We hear them telling in our own tongues,” says the writer of Acts in Chapter 2, verse u, “the mighty works of God.”

The dynamic aspect of the Bible has to do with this quality of com- munication-not simply out of context or beyond context, but within our own singular and unique context-of the timeless and the timely messâge of the Bible. Christians believe that this dynamic quality is attributable directly to the power of the Holy Spirit, the agent of Pen- tecost. In other words, all our scholarship and research, our linguistic and philological skills, the tools of every form of criticism available to us, are merely means by which the living spirit of the text is taken from one context and appropriated totally into ours. The history of interpre- tation, perhaps the most useful field in which to study the dynamic dimension of scripture, bears witness to this in every age. In this sense, then, scripture is both transformed and transformative; that is to say, our understanding of what it says and means evolves, and so too do we as a result. This transformation does not always repudiate what was before, but it does always transcend it. The Buddhists say, “Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; rather, seek what they sought.” To understand the dynamic aspect of scripture, we must appreciate the fact that “what they soughl” seeks us, and in fact, “what they sought” is apprehendable to us in terms and times that we can best understand. So in the Bible we handle lively things, which means that we must be subtle, supple, and modest, all at the same time.

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An Inclusive Word The third and final landmark for those on this pilgrimage, in which we try to make sense of the Bible, is the fact that in addition to being both public and dynamic, the Bible is also inclusive. That is to say, it has the power to draw all people unto itself. Historically, we see the ever- widening circle of the Bible’s appeal, and we can perhaps explain that by the cultural developments that moved out and beyond the provincial Mediterranean origins of the Bible into the Greco-Roman world, and then into the West, and then throughout the whole world. That, how- ever, is simply a map maker’s view of the matter. What is more signif- icant to obsewe, and indeed more profound, is the fact that people and cultures foreign to the people and cultures of the Bible find themselves drawn to the Bible and understand it not as somebody else’s book made available to them as an act of chariÇ, conquest, or missionary endeavor, but as their own book, theirs legitimately and on their own {erms. In the story of the fewish patriarchs, non-fews see themselves. In Godrs particular activity in ]esus Christ, people beyond the little world of prim- itive fewish Christianity see themselves and their story íncluded in God’s activity. When in fohn’s gospel (fohn ro:16)Jesus says, “And I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd,” this is a great mandate for inclusivity which these “other sheep” recognize. fu fesus himself included among his own companions winebibbers, pros- titutes, men and women of low degree, people who by who they were, by what they did, or from where they were excluded, so too does the Bible claim these very people as its own.

It is one of the unbecoming but unavoidable ironies of Christianity that Gentile Christians, who were excluded from the fewish churches, and who in the times of the Roman persecution were themselves ex- cluded from all hope in this life, should themselves become the arch practitioners of exclusion. Even centuries of Christian exclusivism, how:

Wh¿t’s It ‘\ll About? (‘l ever, extending into our very own day, cannot diminish the inclusive mandate of the Bible, and the particular words of fesus when he says, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are healy laden, and I will give you rest.” What Roman Catholic social theory teaches as the church’s “preferential option for the poor,” to the annoyance of Christians rich in the things of this world, is the same principle that extends the hos- pitality of the Bible, indeed preferential hospitality, to those who have in fact been previously and deliberately excluded. So the Bible’s inclu- sivity is claimed by the poor, the discriminated against, persons of color, homosexuals, women, and all persons beyond the conventional defini- tions of Western civilization.

The Bible is not inclusive simply in the abstract and in principle. It is inclusive in particular. Your story is written here, your sins and fears addressed, your hopes confirmed, your experiences validated, and your name known to God. The most reassuring conviction of the witness of scripture is that we are known by our own names. In Hebrew’s z:rz, |esus says, “I will proclaim thy name to my brethren,” and the most telling moment of fohn’s account of the resurrection is when the risen Christ aìldresses the distraught and confused Mary Magdalene by her own name, and in hearing her name called, she discovers who the risen one rs.

One of the great paradoxes of race in America is the fact that the religion of the oppressor, Christianity, became the religion of the op- pressed and the means of their liberation. Black Muslims ask incredu- lously how any black person in America could possibly be a Christian, given the legacy of white Christianity. The answer, of course, is that if Christianity in America depended upon white Christiairs, there would be no right-minded black Christians. What is the case is that Christi- anity, and the Bible in particular, did not depend upon Christians for its gospel of inclusion, but upon God. Thus black Arnerican Christians do not regard their Christianity as the hand-me-down religion of their masters, or an unnatural culture imposed upon them and thus a sign of their continuing servitude. Nol They understand themselves to be Christians in their own right because the Gospel, the good news out of

OPENING THE BIBLE

I

 

 

24) OPENINC THE BIBLE

which the Bible comes, includes them and is in fact meant for them. We will find that when we look at the life of the Bible, and the life of the world in which it is to be found, we discover that the heart of its public dimension, and indeed the source of its dynamism, is this prin- ciple of inclusion by which all of the exclusive divisions of this world ere transcended and transformed.

In thinking about the Bible-its public nature, its dynamic, living qualities, and its inclusivity-as we try to make sense of ít with mind and heart, we would do well to remember these three principal char- acteristics. They sewe as landmarks, points of departure and of return, and they wiìl guide us even as we seek guidance in opening the Bible.

—_— —-r Orthodox parliamentarians. Despite what the Bible says, the rabbis have declared that King David was holy, “end,” said one very prominent

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CHAPTER 2 A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION

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-f O read is to interpret. When one is reading the Bible, interpre- I tation is as risky as it is unavoidable, and it is not just trendy

theologians or liberal Christian bishops who get into trouble over its interpretation. In a debate in the Israeli Parliament in December 1995, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said that he disapproved of some of the practices of King David, particularly of his conquest of other peoples, and his seduction of a married woman, Bathsheba, whose husband, Uriah the Hittite, David sent to his death. In I Kings r5:5, it is written that David “did what was right in the sight of Yah- weh and did not turn aside from anything that he commanded him all the days of his life, except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite.” Ac- cording to an account ín The Ì’lew York Times of December rr, tgg1, outraged Orthodox rabbis screamed at the foreign minister to “shut up.” Another shouted, “You will not give out grades to King David!” A third man flew into such a rage of apoplexy that he had to be treated for hypertension in the parliamentary infirurary, and a motion was introduced condemning the government for having besmirched the “sweet psalmist of Israel.”

Earlier in the year the same rabbis had been outraged, and again over remarks about King David’s sexual activity, but this time their fury was directed at a female member of Parliament, the daughter of the late Moshe Dayan, who read from II Samuel rz6, in which David says of Jonathan, the son of Saul, “Very pleasant hast thou been unto me. Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of a woman.” The homo- sexual implication was clear, and even more clearly denounced by the Orthodox parliamentarians. Despite what the Bible says, the rabbis have declared that King David was holy, “and,” said one very prominent

Gomes, Peter J.’-fn” go.a m* : reading the Bible with mind and heart / Feter J’ Gomes’

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‘6) rabbi, head of the Education Ministry’s Torah culture Department, “whoever says that King David sinned does nothing but err.,”

To read is to interpret. This is neither an esoteric nor a subtle point, but when it comes to the reading and interpretation of the Bible it is a point that cannot be made too often or too clearly. A text may have a life of its own, but that life depends upon the author who gave it life, investing it with an intention, a purpose, and a meaning. The text therefore already participates in something other than itself; it partici- pates in, and at least initially gives expression to, the intent of the author. To tease out the relationship of the text and its author is a responsible task, but that of course is not the only task of reading, for there is also whatever the reader brings to and finds in the text, and eventually takes from the text. This relationship among author, text, and reader is known in the literary trade as the “interpretive triangle,” and since readers sel- dom read in isolatio’, and since texts, especially sacred or religious texts, are generally held in community, the interpretive triangle itself has a context, a set of circumstances that surround it and to which it responds. This context we call the “community of interpretation.” Were we to visualize what we have just described, we would have a triangle within a circle within a squåre, a strangeJooking device, which,.like the sym- bols in mathematics, allows us to represent a process that itself is invis- ible and so fundamental as almost to be missed.

For most people, and despite centuries of sophisticated biblical schol- arship, the precritical view of the Bible remains: a book in two parts, or testaments, old and new, which is meant to be, in the argot of the late twentieth century, “an owner’s manual” for living the Christian life. It is of the same character as any of the other basic reference books avail- able to us, and to be used in much the same way as we would use dictionaries, encyclopedias, telephone books, and other helpful com- pendia designed to get us through life. What The OId Farmer’s Alman- dck was to nineteenth-century Yankee farmers, and The Sears Roebuck Catalog to their far-western cousins on the plains, the Bible was to the Christian. Often, in households where there were few books to be found, the Bible and one of these two would constitute the family’s library.

A Matter of Interþretation (rt Many will say, “What’s wrong with that?,” and we can make for our- selves many arguments in favor of the simple virtues and values that issued forth from such households. These were the books, perhaps along with Bunyan’sThe Pilgrim’s Progress, that made our country great. When the pastor of my boyhood church in Plymouth, Massachusetts, described himself as “preaching from the book that the Pilgrims brought” in the Mayflower, he didn’t mean a commentary or a concordance or a volume of criticism, he meant the Bible, and in the Geneva translation.’ It is an interesting facI, and plentifully documented, that the Pilgrims brought many books with them in addition to the Bible, and many of these were in fact commentaries and books of biblical criticism and interpretation. As we shall see, the English Protestants loved their Bible, but they also loved books about their Bible, which tale we will defer to another place in this study.

Do We Realþ Need to Know All TIis¿ Biblical criticism has a very bad name. The very lerm critícism implies a clinical disrespect and disregard for something of worth and value.¡ Criticism means finding fault, taking apart, destroying. Whoever heard of a film critic who liked what he saw, or a book of criticism that edified anyone other than the critics? The critic sets himself up as an arbiter and expert, and from his lofty perch tells people either what they should think or that what they do think really isn’t so. Criticism undermines our conñdence in the thing criticized and, even more, our confidence in our own judgments and tastes.

Second only to lawyers we despise the critic, and our literature is filled with invective against them and their trade. Henry Fielding, the eighteenth-century novelist and author of the bawdy Tom /onøs, must have got some bad reviews, for he said, “In reality, the world have played too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.”

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Alfred, Lord Tennyson, called the critic a “louse in the locks of lit- erature”; Ernest Hemingway called them “eunuchs of literature.”

The criticism of criticism and of critics is a rich field. Although critics could be left to do their worst in the pastures of high culture, rvhen they applied their methods and opinions to that which by right belonged to the people, to the Bible, they invited a violent negative reaction which true popular piety made legitimate.+ When after years of study and re- search the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was issued in 1953- the product, as it was believed by many critical of it, of a century or more of the higher criticism-itwas said by those who believed in an infallible iext that fallible men, the revisers, were not competent to alter an infallible text: the King |ames Version.

Even an infallible text requires interpretation, however. One of the most helpful new books in the field of biblical interpretation is Infro- duction to Biblical lnterþretation, written in ry93 by William Klein, Craig Blomberg, and Robert Hubbard, all three of whom are professors in Denver Seminary and from an evangelical tradition. They believe the “Bible to be God’s written revelation to his people,” and that “it records in human words what God desires.” Their work is endorsed by an im- pressive list of scholars who share many of their theological and inter- pretive presuppositions about the role of the Bible in the life of the church. One of these says, “Discovering what God really means is a matter of life and death. . . . Understanding what the Bible says to us at the end of the twentieth century will be easier because of their Work.”5

The authors acknowledge the difficulty of the task before them. How can one interpret a Bible “full of alien genealogies, barbaric practices, strange prophecies, and eccentric epistles”? While we might like a Bible that is simpler to deal with, perhaps a list of principles, or a straightfor- ward narrative, or a collection of aphorisms, we are stuck-my word, not theirs-with the Bible as it is.

“As it is,” however, presents some significant tensions, if not out and out problems, in reading and interpretation. Citing Moises Silva’s H¿s the Church Misread the Bible?, they face the problem:

A Matter of Interþretation (“9

The Bible is divine, yet it has come to us in human form. The commands of God are absolute, yet the historic context of the writ- ings appears to relativize certain elements. The divine message must be clear, yet many passages seem ambiguous.’We are de- pendent only on ihe Spirit for instruction, yet scholarship is surely necessary. The Scriptures seem to presuppose a literal and his- torical reading, yet we are also confronted by the figurative and nonhistorical, e.g., parables. Proper interpretation requires the in- terpreter’s personal freedom, yet some degree of external, corporate authority appears imperative. The objectivity of the biblical mes- sage is essential, yet our presuppositions seem to iniect a degree of subjectivity into the interpretive process.6

These issues reflect the history of the interpretation of the Bible’ Hør- meneutícs is the technical term for the discipline of interpretation, and the history of interpretation is how people in various ages and from various traditions have come to terms,with the complexities that these assumptions and concerns represent. If we are going to attempt to un- derstand the Bible ‘ras it is,” we are going to have to make the effort to understand how it came to be “as it is.”

lTlho Needs Interpretation?

We do. It is impossible to avoid. The earliest Christians were forced to engage in an act of interpretation of colossal importance when they had to figure out how to reconcile their scriptures, the Hebrew Bible, with the most significant event that had happened to them, the resurrection of Jesus. For orthodox fews, the resurrection of Jesus was an event out- side of scripture and impossible to reconcile with scriph:re as they read it. Those who followed fesus and believed him to be resurrected f¡om the dead were regarded as discontinuous with scripture, and indeed as blasphemers and heretics. The debate in Paul’s letter to the Romans is

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not so much about whether the fews can be saved under the cross, but about whether lews who believed in fesus were Jews at all, and heirs of the promises to Abraham. Thus, when in the writings of the early Chris- tians scripture is mentioned, that scripture is of course the Hebrew scrip- ture, the only Bible that fesus, Paul, and the earliest disciples and apostles would have known. The first hermeneutical task, therefore, was to reconcile the transforming event of fesus’ resurrection with the body of scripture and with those who interpreted it.

There were two options available. One was to regard fesus and his teaching, now seen through the experience of the resurrection, as dis- continuous with the Hebrew scripture. A new order of reality had been created which was out of harmony with, and therefore superior to, the old. To be a follower of Jesus was to repudiate Moses. The other option was to see in |esus the fulfillment of all that had been promised and expected in Hebrew scripture and fewish prophecy. Thus fesus is not antithetical to Moses; he is the successor to Moses and to all of the prophets, and it is therefore through the apparent discontinuity of the experience of Jesus that we are able to make sense both of fesug and of Hebrew scripture. The “formed” or “formal” scripture, as we can at this time call Hebrew scripture, is reconciled to the new experience of fesus in the minds of those for whom that experience has become definitive, and their writings on this subject, what we may begin to call the “form- ing” scriptures, become the New Testament. To make this point more clear, it is fair to describe the New Testament as a Christian commentary on the Old Testament, a commentary that does not simply reconcile one to the other but appropriates the Old as its own. Thus, to the ques- tion about that body of scriphrre known as the Hebrew Bible-“Whose Bible is it, anyway?”-the Christian anstver becomes an emphatic “Ours!” It is Augustine who puts it most succinctly: “What was con- cealed in the Old is revealed in the New.” The New Testament itself is the product of an early and radical hermeneutic.

This may sound too technical and too polemical at first blush, but most Christians have for so long adapted to this phenomenon of the appropriation of Hebrew scripture as our own that only when the litur-

A Matter of Interþretation (t, gical fashion of just a few years began to refer to the OId Testament as Hebrew scripture, or the Hebrew Bible, did we begin to ask if it was theirs or ours, and how it could be both. When I asked my students this question-“Whose book is it, anyway?”-referring to the Old Testa- ment, I got blank stares; and then I asked the class to listen to excerpts from perhaps the most famous piece of choral music in the world, the Messiah of George Frideric Handel. Immediately they got a very clear picture of prophecy and fulfillment, which is what Handel’s librettist, Charles Jennens, intended. It is virtually impossible to dislodge the prophecies of Isaiah from the fulfillments of the Gospel; and for some, even the notion is heretical that one could consider such a possibility. Yet that fusion, that construction, if you wilÌ, is indeed a matter of interpretation.

There are many devout and sincere Christians for whom the notion of interpretation in scripture is anathema. They argue that scripture has a clear and plain meaning. To interpret is either to intrude upon that meaning with a view of one’s own, or to otherwise confuse or confound. Interpretation is either to add or to subtract from what is already there; it amounts to a form of vandalism, and it is to be prevented at all costs. Those who hold to this view are fond of the aphorism “The Bible says what it means and means what it says.” For example, in Matthew 8:rz, the outer darkness into which the wicked are cast is described as a place where “men will weep and gnash their teeth.” A toothless reprobate asked his hellfire-preaching pastor what would happen to those who had no teeth to gnash: “Teeth will be provided” was his answer.

fu far as scripture is concerned, interpretation almost always implies that human meanings are being imposed upon divine words. That point of view, however, I wish to argue, is itself unscriptural. Scripture is filled with an attempt to interpret, to make sense of the things of which it speaks. In fact, ]esus’ first sermon, in his hometown, was a reading from the prophet Isaiah upon which he expounded in good rabbinic fashion. For an account of this, see Luke 4lÇ7o. This is what teachers did: They took a text and drew their listeners into the interpretive triangle. Sometimes the interpretation was pleasing to the

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