One task in literature is to formulate questions and construct counter-statements to the reigning pieties. And even when art is not oppositional, the arts gravitate toward contrariness. Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. 

–Susan Sontag, quoted from The Best American Essays 2023, edited and with an introduction by Vivian Gornick; Robert Atwan, series editor, p. ix.

The Bible is frequently like that: it frequently goes contrary to the reigning pieties, even when those pieties are said to be “biblical.” A case in point is the awful and wonderfully told story of Abraham and the binding of Isaac—in Jewish tradition, the Akedah (“the binding”). In this piece I want to do two things: consider again this iconic piece of scripture, and in the light of this scripture to consider again how to read the Bible.

Start with the story (Genesis 22). To begin with, the story has not one but two endings. The first contains the conventional pieties. An messenger angel, speaking from the sky on behalf of Yhwh, says to Abraham at the last possible second, as the old man’s hand is poised to plunge down into the boy: “Don’t lay a hand on the lad, don’t do anything to him, for now I know that you are a fearer of God and have not withheld your one and only son from me” (22:12). There, that’s it: “You have not withheld your son from me.” Faith requires everything. Even children.

But does the story perhaps issue this piety only to urge us to deny it? The statement is odd on the surface of it. Does God really need to see Abraham pick up the knife to kill his son for God to know what’s in Abraham’s heart? Isn’t God the knower of hearts? 

And even then, if God knows what in Abraham’s heart, we certainly don’t. Would the old man have brought down the knife? Is he perhaps testing God? Would he have stopped at the last instant, looked disgustedly into the sky, and thrown the knife away, his faith forever shattered? Or, as Kierkegaard has it, would Abraham have instead plunged the knife into his own heart? The story leaves these and other alternatives open to us. It invites us to ponder these alternatives.

It does so in part by how it tells the story. It dallies on that long, mostly silent walk to Moriah. At last Isaac speaks, speaks lovingly to his father: “Father of mine . . . I see fire and wood”—no mention of the knife—“but where is the sheep for the offering?” Abraham replies, “God will see to the sheep for the offering, my son.” And the two go on, again silent. In some traditions, Isaac is at this point fully grown, a man, easily able to resist his elderly father. The obedience is as much Isaac’s as Abraham’s. 

In contrasting the tenderness of the relationship with the stark divine command, the storyteller invites us to ask whether one should ever obey such a command. Can God command an action so manifestly immoral as this? Can God command murder? Has Abraham misheard the command? Or is this god not really God? The story invites us to ponder these questions.

But the story doesn’t end there; it gives us a second ending. The messenger angel speaks again from the sky and this time adds something that Yhwh did not say the first time. This time, after Yhwh says that he will bless Abraham with descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the beach, he adds: “All the nations of the earth will be blessed by your descendants because you have obeyed my voice” (22:18) “My” being Yhwh. 

But which voice? we are prompted to ask. Yhwh, at least Yhwh as Yhwh, has not spoken in the story until the moment when Abraham has the knife poised over the bound body of Isaac. At the beginning of the story, it’s not Yhwh who “tests” Abraham but “God,” Hebrew ʾelōhîm. “God” need not mean Yhwh. Does obeying the voice of Yhwh mean obeying the voice at the beginning of the story that tells Abraham to offer us his son as a burnt offering (22:2)? Or does it mean obeying the voice at the end that says don’t, don’t [ever] do it? Does the story permit us to think that the deity who speaks at the beginning is not the same as the God who speaks at the end? Are Yhwh’s words meant to say: “Of that sort of thing, the sacrifice of children, I have no need. Don’t do it, ever. Don’t do it, you or your descendants”? Is the second ending meant to clarify, perhaps modify, the first ending to the story?

There are those, of course, who deny that the Bible does any such thing. They would rule out most of my reading of the story, not for reasons based in the text—in the words themselves—but based in the theology they bring to the Bible. In their theology, the interpretation of the story is settled by Hebrews 11:17-19, where it is used as one illustration among many of faith or, better, faithfulness. In this theology, biblical stories do not raise questions about the reigning pieties of that or any other time. The Bible does not ask; it asserts. It is not conversational; it is determinative.

But where did this theology come from? It’s a theology based on deduction and necessity. The necessity was for the Bible to be able to function as the authority in all things Christian. This necessity arose in the context of reformation when many had lost confidence in the church. How does one decide between what is true and not true with regard to theology and much else? The answer, simplistically stated, is sola scriptura, “only by the Bible.” For this, one needs the Bible to say one thing and only one thing. 

The deduction comes to the same thing. If the Bible is word of God, so goes the argument, then the Bible must speak everywhere with the same voice, and since God cannot speak falsely, what it says must be everywhere true. If there are, to return to my example, two endings to the story of Abraham and the binding of Isaac, then by these lights they cannot offer alternative perspectives on the story. They cannot contradict each other. They cannot engage in conversation with each other. Or, for that matter, in conversation with Hebrews 11:17-19.

It is not accidental that these ideas about the Bible arose just when a new kind of literacy was taking root. The Protestant Reformation came early in the age of printed books. The new literacy changed not only the availability of Bibles but the expectations of readers. In the flush of the new literacy, people expected the Bible like other books to be straightforward—to say what it meant and to say it clearly. Luther spoke of the “perspicuity” of the scriptures. The Bible was readable. By anyone.

Anyone, that is, who knows the rules. The rules—these days we would call it an algorithm—include the rules I suggested above: that the Bible says the same thing everywhere and that the Bible speaks straightforwardly. This algorithm is not in fact derived from the Bible, although if you read a certain vintage of theologians, they make a valiant effort to derive the algorithm from biblical texts. 

There’s more. This way of approaching the Bible requires not only an algorithm for reading the Bible but a governing theology. Only certain theological ideas are permitted. If your reading leads in a different direction, you can be sure that you have misread the text. Or not read it in the proper hierarchical order. Some texts in this way of reading have more value than others. Some are said to be clear and therefore definitive, while others are said to be unclear, and therefore not authoritative. 

But what if the Bible is not really like this, like the algorithm and the governing theology? What happens then? We know what happens because it has happened. People stop reading the Bible. Well, they don’t entirely stop. They read the Bible, but they read through the glasses (to reverse Calvin’s metaphor) of the governing theology. If a text pops up that seems on the surface of it to go against the governing theology (say, a universalistic text like 1 John 2:2), it must be marked “unclear” or read in a way that conforms to the governing theology. 

What you lose in this is the Bible. For all the claims of this theology to teach and practice sola scriptura, it’s the text itself that often goes a glimmering. For all the claims of this theology to read the Bible literally—by the letter—it’s the letter that gets abandoned. Instead, people are told that the Bible can be reduced pretty much to a simple scheme: creation, fall, redemption, consummation. You can ignore the rest. Once you know the scheme, it all fits together.

Only it doesn’t. Not really. Everywhere in the Bible there are texts, passages, whole books that poke holes in the reigning pieties. Like, say, Ecclesiastes, Hebrew Qoheleth, the dyspeptic words of an old preacher (which is what qohelet seems to mean). The problem for those who wanted to include Qoheleth in the Hebrew canon was how to frame the book so that it could sit, as it does in our canon, side-by-side with Proverbs. The answer, as in the case of the binding of Isaac, was to add endings. This time not one additional ending, but two. (This technique is also frequently used in the gospels, where a given teaching of Jesus is followed by a series of interpretative comments.)

As a result the book ends three times. The first ending is presumably the original:

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher.

“Everything is meaningless!” (12:8; NIV)

“Meaningless,” as the NIV has it, is perhaps not the best translation of the preacher’s favorite word, Hebrew hebel, which means basically “air” or “breath,” but it gets at the thought: a lot of life seems not to make entire sense. What Proverbs offers, a world which does makes sense in which the good prosper and the evil do not, seems not to be the case in our experience. The whole book is a strong poke at reigning pieties.

So how to frame this. The first of the two added endings (12:9-12) is a rather tepid defense of the preacher. He characterizes the preacher as someone who tried to find the truth: “Qoheleth sought to find the right words so that what he wrote leads to truth” (12:10). This strikes me as faint praise. He goes on to warn about people who write books like Ecclesiastes: the “words of the wise are like pointed sticks [goads],” like “nails.” There are quite enough of them: “Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.” In other words, a little of the preacher goes a long way. Take it all with a grain of salt. Probably still good advice for what any of us says from the pulpit.

But this first added ending did not seem enough, and so, probably later, someone added another:

Now all has been said and heard;

here is the conclusion of the matter:

Fear God and keep his commandments,

for this is the duty of humankind.

This is straight Proverbs. The writer goes on to say that God will bring everything we do into judgment. This is the sort of “it will all make sense in the end” idea that we often trot out when something doesn’t seem to make sense. Despite the “here is the conclusion of the matter,” it’s not at all what Qoheleth says. 

What these endings offer are interpretative suggestions: here’s a way to take this difficult text. And by this means, we are invited in, into this small piece of a long continuous conversation among the people of God, a conversation about God and ourselves and life. We learn by engaging the conversation.

Which is why it is so contrary to the Bible when someone claims that the conversation is over. That the confessions have decided what needs deciding. Or the synod. We need not read the Bible anymore; the Bible has been interpreted. The only thing that matters is the official interpretation.

But that’s what’s happened lately in my denomination. Synods have tried not only to declare what they consider to be the biblical truth; they have tried to shut down the discussion. Which means that the word of God is no longer the Bible but whatever the latest synod says.

But here’s my problem: I love the Bible too much to stop reading it. I love the play of interpretation. I love the way the Bible blows up the reigning pieties. I love passages like the Akedah, Genesis 22. I love the conversations that passages like this initiate. I love the back-and-forth, the challenges of interpretative conversation. I love it that God has given to us not a theological system but a vast book of stories and observations and commentary and more. 

And, I should add, I love engaging with you in this conversation as a small part of a much greater conversation among God’s people. For this gift, I am always grateful. Faithfulness is not repeating the words of others; it is engaging them as honestly and graciously as possible. In that, the scriptures show us the way.

Thank you,

Clay