Usually the question is what the Bible says. In my denomination, for example, we have carried on a long and often acrimonious debate about what the Bible says about women and a shorter but no less acrimonious debate about sexuality. 

The standard procedure in my denomination for these kinds of questions is to appoint a study committee. When the study committee returns with its report three or four or even five years later, the synod decides the question. By a majority vote. Which when you think about it is a little crazy. Whether the Bible says X or Y or whether X or Y is true is not the sort of thing that can be decided by a majority vote. It’s not a popularity contest. But that’s the system: question, study committee, synodical vote. And then, if the synod is of batten down the hatches mind, enforcement mechanisms will be set into place to make sure that the question stays decided. 

The most recent iteration of this interpretative dance in my denomination was a study committee assigned the task of proposing “to articulate” what the Bible says about human sexuality (Agenda for Synod 2022:315).  The committee was given five years for the task, which is impressive given how little the Bible actually says about sexuality and, in particular, about same-sex relations. Given that the members of the study committee had to agree before they were appointed that same-sex marriage was wrong, it is no great surprise that they found that the Bible said the same thing. With a COVID-prompted delay, the report came to Synod 2022, which decided that indeed the Bible did say what the committee said it said, and that the question was therefore settled for all time (Acts of Synod 2022:919).

Whether this is true or not—whether the committee on human sexuality in fact said what the Bible says and whether the synod settled the question—is and remains debatable. I’ve already written a good deal about whether the synodical committee got the Bible right. I judge it did not. But here, I want to raise another question: not what the Bible says but what in cases like this the Bible does. Seeing what the Bible does may direct us toward a better understanding what the Bible says.

The distinction between what the Bible says and what it does goes to the heart of the debate between modern and postmodern readers of the Bible (and of other writing). But we need not go down that road for the point I wish to make here. What I have in mind is what David Clines calls “the effect of the text” (quoted in Matthew T. Bell, Ruled Reading and Biblical Criticism. Journal of Theological Interpretation Supplement 18. Eisenbrauns, 2019). Clines says that biblical scholarship (and I would add, churches) has paid far too little attention to the ways the text affects readers—the way the Bible functions in the world in which we live.

What the Bible does is of course not done by the Bible alone. The Bible has no power by itself. It’s an assemblage of writings edited and collected over a long period of time. It includes ancient Hebrew poetry and prose, Greek letters, Aramaic official documents (or literary productions purporting to be official Aramaic documents), and much else. Had the Bible been  recently dug up at an ancient site somewhere in the Middle East, we would find it interesting, but it would have little power to affect anything at all in our lives. It would be like reading Gilgamesh or the Iliad or even Shakespeare. What power it would have would depend entirely on it catching our imagination, and few beyond a handful of scholars would bother with reading it at all.

But the Bible is not like that. In our cultural and religious milieu, the Bible has undeniable power. Its power exists—in part, at least—because it is still widely read. And because on a weekly basis it is applied to our lives. And it comes with institutional and religious and, though this has diminished, cultural support. All of which is to say that in accounting for the power of the Bible in our religious settings (and in our cultural ones), you have to consider not only the text of the Bible but how a given reading acquires the force to impose itself on its readers and others. In my example above, the reading given the Bible by the study committee was given force by being accepted and applied by the synod.

This is the canonical sequence in Protestant Christianity. It goes from text (the Bible) to reading to meaning, where “meaning” can be defined informally as how the text hits us: how it drives us to think in certain ways and to act in certain ways—the force of the text. 

But consider what happens when you begin from the other end of the sequence, not with the text but with the force of the interpreted text as it enters community life. In the case of my denomination’s decision on sexuality what study committee and synod have is to fashion the Bible into a kind of ecclesiastical Billy club with which to bludgeon those who dissent from the synodical decision. You disagree? say those who wield the club. Then you disagree not with synod but with God.

But what if the outcome of the process, the process from text to interpretation to implementation and action, delivers a result that is transparently wrong. In the history of the church this has happened more frequently than we would like to think. Take a couple of lasting scars on the history of. the church: the long stories of Christian antisemitism and racism (white supremacy) in the Western world. For a long time, the Bible was used to justify these attitudes and practices which by now seem transparently wrong. 

If you want some sense of how this works, try watching the 2004 Mel Gibson movie, “The Passion of the Christ.” The movie was taken to be faithful to the Bible.  Evangelicals went to the movie in droves, stoked up by the violence of the story, believing what they were seeing was Bible pure and simple. But others, particularly Jews, were paying attention not to what the movie says but what the movies does. And they were appalled.

There’s a long history here, one Mel Gibson should have known. Perhaps he did. Despite the claim that the movie was biblical, it was not based on the Bible alone. Gibson made heavy use of a dubious piece of 19^thcentury German devotional writing, The Dolorous Passion of the Lord Jesus Christ by Clemens Brentano, a 19^th century bishop of Cologne. The book is based on the life and visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich. There are questions about whether the visionary material came mostly from Emmerich or from Brentano, but regardless the book is infected with the antisemitism and racism of the time. Emmerich believed, as did many others, that the Jews killed Christian babies and used their blood for their religious rituals. And she regarded black people as an inferior race.

These pervasive prejudices come to subtle expression in the movie, which portrays Pilate as rational and philosophical (and white) and the Jews as out for blood. But the important point here is not that Gibson used Brentano and Emmerich for his take on the passion of Christ but that the movie became for many who saw it a way of seeing not just a movie but the Bible. Which is what worried the Jews, who had seen this movie before throughout much of their joint history with Christianity and knew how it comes out.

What the movie does is privilege the Gospel of John, which in telling the story repeatedly describes the opponents of Jesus as “the Jews.” Of course, what John means by “the Jews” and the Jews living in a shtetl in Poland in, say, the early 20^th century are quite different entities, but the drum-like repetition in John of “the Jews” acted like a biblical Billy club to create an underlying animosity to this people living separately among the Christian populace. It only took a rumor, a spark, to prompt an outbreak of violence.

This history is everywhere in Europe. While in Lisbon this fall, Adria and I stood in the Sao Domingos square in front of the historic Sao Domingos church, from which in a crowd of worshipers poured out on April 19, 1506 to kill the “new Christians”—Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity. Perhaps as many as 4,000 Jews died in the massacre. 

It’s this history and the parallel history of white supremacist imperialism and racism that calls the church to look at not only what the Bible says but how it’s used: the Bible as blunt instrument to condemn and enslave and massacre others, however “others” is to be defined.

At the end of the day, when the text has been explored and when the interpretative apparatus has been applied, the church should always look not just at what they think the Bible says but at what it does. How it functions. Does the Bible as understood by the church steer Christians toward the central (and often counter-cultural) values of the faith or does it steer them towards the prejudices they already hold?  

In doing so, Christians need to pay attention to what non-Christians think. Sometimes the world is ahead of the church, embracing those the church still excludes. It’s this test—call it the smell test—that the synod of my denomination has consistently failed to apply.

When it still excluded women from leadership (it has since permitted women into leadership, although with restrictions in some places), friends of mine who were not in the church were incredulous. Equality for women seemed to them so transparently right that they could not understand how the church, which purports to preach the love of God, could deny women the right to serve as pastors and elders.

It made no sense to do so. But often that seemed to be the point. People in the church took the biblical prohibitions against women in church leadership (as understood at the time) as a divine test, something one did in blind faith even though it made no human sense. God’s ways were God’s ways, they said. But if secular society has a stronger sense of justice than God, what kind of God do we serve? When the text of the Bible is played off against our moral sense, then perhaps the problem isn’t our moral sense but how we are reading the Bible.

And now the same scenario is playing out with regard to LGBTQ people. The Bible is the Billy club by which to pummel into submission those who would admit married queer people into church membership and church office. But to many in and outside the church this looks not like divine love but like human prejudice. What I am saying here is that the church should take those opinions seriously.

The church, having reached the end of a study process, should be looking back and asking, did something go wrong here? Did we arrive at a faulty conclusion. The conclusion could be faulty because the study didn’t fully take into account what the Bible says or because the interpretative methods applied in the study were flawed or for other reasons. At the very least, the way the decision has been received should prompt the church to wonder if perhaps there is more to be said.

And so I submit this proviso: when settling important questions like these, questions that affect the church and its members deeply, it’s important not only to ask what does the Bible say but what, at the end of the day, does the Bible do. And if what it does looks less than loving, perhaps we should ask the question again: have we really heard what the Bible says. Or, better, ask the deeper, underlying question: is this of God or of us? 

Clay