Five Proposals for Discovering the Joy of the Bible
I’ve lately been puzzling over the Bible. Not the Bible itself but the joylessness of its readers. Or would be readers. In the minds of many the Bible is a forbidding and severe book, a book of thou-shalt-nots. For others, an ancient self-help book that doesn’t quite deliver on its promises. And for still others—an increasing number in our time—a book not opened, an artifact of an obsolete religiosity. I’ve been wondering how to bring back the joy of reading of the Bible. Can the Bible still be read with joy?
I hope so. I love the Bible. What’s more, I believe that the Bible has much to contribute to contemporary culture. A joyous reading of the Bible would bring to this benighted age much-needed perspective, a way of seeing the world that pries us out of the transactional perspective that dominates our culture and especially our politics. Calvin was right: the Bible offers a set of eyeglasses with which to see what otherwise would be invisible to us. With that in mind, I’ve drawn up a small list of suggestions for how to read the Bible with brio—a first five of these. Having thought of these, more have come to mind, but for now, start with these:
1. Assume you can—read the Bible, that is. The Reformation has bequeathed to us two contrary legacies with respect to the Bible. One is the notion that everyone who can read competently can read the Bible. You don’t need to know the Hebrew or the Greek. You can read it as it lies on the page, even in translation. The term of theological art for this idea is “perspicuity”: the Bible is perspicuous, open; it requires no special ecclesiastical training. You don’t have to be ordained or be a biblical scholar or even a believer to read it.
But we’ve also been given a second legacy from the Reformation: the notion that when you do read the Bible, it’s of utmost importance that you get it right. This notion goes with the idea that the Bible is the ultimate authority in matters of doctrine and life. The Reformers set the Bible up in opposition to church and tradition. In this view, the Bible speaks for God, and if it speaks for God, it’s vitally important to get it right. The first legacy of the Reformation tells us that we can read it; this second legacy cautions us to want for the experts.
And this second notion makes people nervous about reading the Bible. They are afraid that they are likely to get it wrong or not have a clue about what it means. And preachers—I plead guilty here—often promote this sort of nervousness in their congregants. A much-used sermon trope begins, “Our translation says such and so, but in the Hebrew (or Greek) it’s actually thus.” This has the intended effect of embellishing the authority of the preacher. Take it with a grain of salt.
And begin here, with the idea that you can read the Bible. You may think you know little about the Bible and that it’s a daunting book. But you can do it. Don’t allow preachers or the pious or experts in the biblical arts to scare you away from plunging in and enjoying what these ancient writers wrote. They wrote it for you.
2. Don’t read commentaries. Not at the beginning. Maybe not at the end. Not that commentaries are useless; there are many great Bible commentaries. But if you read the commentaries, you won’t read the Bible. Or you will read it, but only through the eyes of the commentator you chose. It won’t be Ephesians; it will be N.T. Wright’s Ephesians. Wright is a compelling scholar, but before you get to Wright, get to Ephesians.
What’s often missed in commentaries is the literary skill of biblical writers, their delight in language and story. And with it, the humor. Take one of my favorites stories, Genesis 28, the story of Jacob’s ladder (really a ziggurat, but oh, well). It’s flat out funny. I suspect it’s a send-up of a story told about Jacob recited at the ancient temple in Bethel. Whether that’s true or not the commentaries I’ve read, quite a passel of them, seem all to miss the humor entirely, and in missing the humor, they miss the story.
In short, the Bible is literature, often of a high order. This is why a writer like the novelist Marilynne Robinson sees in Genesis what theological commentators have often missed, that it is a story of God not doing what everyone expects God to do: bring down judgment on the heads of his creatures. (Apropos this, I just received a notice from the New York Review of Books that Marilynne Robinson is conducting a series of online seminars on the Bible, available here.)
Perhaps the best training for reading the Bible is reading good literature. This also works in reverse: the best training for reading good literature is to steep oneself in the font of literature, the Old Testament. The Old Testament writers taught us to write. I always keep a novel or two open. I’ve just finished Susan Choi’s latest, Flashlight, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Awards. In the conclusion to the book, she writes of memory and story and family in a way that would provide material for a master class on biblical interpretation. You can read the Bible without the commentaries, but you can’t read the Bible well without cultivating a delight in words and story.
3. Find out what you can. Start with reading, but as you read, find out what you can about the material you are reading (even checking the commentaries, if necessary). It helps to know, for example, that the Torah (Genesis – Deuteronomy) was put together after the fall of Jerusalem, late in the history of ancient Israel, after the kingdom was gone. As a consequence, exile is written all over the Torah. The writers have one eye for what happened in the ancient (from their point of view) past and one eye for what was happening as they wrote and edited the text.
And not just Torah. It matters that much of Isaiah was also written from the perspective of Babylon. Or to move to the New Testament, it matters that Matthew seems to be a rewriting of Mark with some corrections along the way, and that Matthew and Luke share material not found in Mark but use it differently. It matters that the letters of Paul are early, and that Luke’s account of Paul in Acts comes later. These things matter because perspective matters. The time in which something is written leaks through even if what’s written is an account of something that happened long ago. We tell the story of the Civil War differently today than it was told in the 19th century or that we learned in the middle of the 20th century.
I could go on. It helps to know about all sorts of things about the text. It informs your reading. But pay attention to the order here: start with the reading, not with the research. It’s out of the reading that questions come: When was this written? Who wrote it? What were they up to? And when the questions come, you can see what you can find out.
Once you go looking, you will soon discover that there are various opinions about almost everything biblical, including all the claims I set out so boldly above. I said that the Torah (as we have it) is late; there are still those who think Moses wrote the Pentateuch (except for the account of his death, of course) some 600 hundred or more years earlier. Or that all of Isaiah comes from the 8th century. Or that the gospels can be harmonized with each other. You will have to decide what’s credible and what’s not. But it will be easier to decide if you have read the material not just carefully but creatively, always expecting the unexpected.
What’s most important at this stage, if you want to read the Bible joyfully, is not to read it as Bible. Don’t read it the way you (and I) were taught to read it. We were taught to read it as if it were always straight. If it tells a story, it must have happened just that way. If it gives a moral rule, it must be a divine rule for all time. No imaginative meanderings allowed. What comes to mind is W.H. Auden’s advice to poets about critics:
Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever,
And do not listen to those critics ever
Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books
Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks. . . (“The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning”)
Those who want to control what the Bible says (and thereby rob it of its native joy) are, like Auden’s critics, those who crave “plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.” They want the Bible to mean one thing, and one thing only. But often the Bible is instead, as Auden has it, “subtle, various, ornamental, clever.” So enjoy. Delight in the language and poetry of the Bible. Let the stories play in your imagination. Read it as you once learned it as a child. Read it first not for a moral or theological point. Read it for its many delights.
4. And then argue with it. Dispute what you read. This has long been the way of good Bible reading. The rabbis have historically read it in this way. This may seem wrong to you. We’ve been taught a view of the Bible that requires submission. If the Bible says it, we should obey it. And, indeed, as I will say in the next section, we ought to read the Bible in the expectation that it is powerful, word of God. I’ll come to that in the next section. But first, argue with it; the Bible comes alive when you dispute the text, when, having read it, you ask, is that true? Or, is it still true? Or, how is it true?
In doing so, you engage the text at a different level. Often we skim over biblical texts, assuming that since they are Bible, we can’t challenge them. What we do is worse: we ignore them. We put awkward texts in the category of things the Bible says that we wish it hadn’t said, and we move on, a bit embarrassed by skipping over them but seeing no alternative. But engaging these pages, actively disputing them, takes them seriously. It forces us to understand why a difficult passage is there, not to agree with it, but to bring it into conversation with other biblical passages and with whatever wisdom we have gained since the time of the Bible.
The biblical writers saw the world through the eyes of their own age. How could they not? When Paul uses Greco-Roman upper-class swing-both-ways sexuality to pillory the dominant culture of his time (Romans 1:18-32), it’s appropriate to ask whether his argument (its actually just his premise) still holds up. Do we regard what he says about the sexuality of his age true for our own age? Or have we come to different perspectives on sexuality, ones worth defending? And if we have, how would we reconstruct the flow of Paul’s argument for our own time?
My point is not to do the work this approach require here but to give you permission to do it yourself. Bring your 21stcentury self to the text. Argue with it, if you need to, always listening to what is being said, not just on the surface, but under the surface. In disputing with the text we may discover that the biblical writers are not what we took them to be. They are not “plain cooks.” Often they are “subtle, various, ornamental, clever.” They expect argument. They invite our engagement with them. They are not offended by disagreement.
There’s a moment in Paul’s gracious letter to the church in Philippi when he says as much. Having laid out his own view of the Christian life with great passion, he pauses and says, “If you think differently, also this God will open up to you” (3:15). Come to the Bible with your whole self, with what you know and what you don’t know, with what you think and what you don’t think. Honor the Bible by taking both the Bible and yourself seriously.
5. Expect in reading the Bible to hear God’s voice. With this last comment (last for this post; there will be more of these suggestions to come), I turn from what makes the Bible great human literature to what makes it divine. The theologians who came along after the generation of the Reformers wanted to nail this down. They formulated their answer in terms of a revealed system of doctrine and life. Parse the Bible correctly, they said, and you will discover a divinely revealed theological and moral system.
In this way of thinking, it’s the system, not the text of the Bible that matters. Much of the Bible can be thrown away as the husk that hides the theological truth. Not that they would admit that they are throwing anything away. It’s all Bible, they say; everything counts. But it doesn’t. They want you to take what Ecclesiastes says with a grain of salt, but what Paul says in Romans with utmost seriousness. Where a text agrees with the system, they want you to consider it crucial; where it doesn’t, they will tell you to interpret it in the light of the texts that do.
Not much room in this way of reading the Bible for literary fun. Or for disagreement, one part of the Bible disputing another part of the Bible. Or for our having a rousing good argument with Paul. It’s the system that matters. Biblical interpretation is a treasure hunt for eternal truth in a time-bound document.
But this way of reading the Bible doesn’t work. There’s no underlying system. If the goal of the writers of the Bible was to deliver a theological and moral system, the Bible would look different. What we find in the Bible instead are testimonies, people across a long history testifying to the call and presence of God, to what they have seen and heard.
There is continuity to these testimonies. They are caught up with the history of an ancient people, Israel. The God to which these people testify in the pages of Scripture has a name, Yhwh, and a history. And we Christians claim that history through our inclusion in Christ.
Reading the Bible is a kind of overhearing. When we listen in to those who have gone before us, we hope to catch a bit of the sound of the voice that called them, to see something of what they saw. We recognize that they have not always heard the voice correctly, that often it’s garbled by the noise of the age in which they lived. But we too live in such an age that garbles our hearing. Hearing what they heard helps correct what we hear.
And we listen not only to the primary witnesses in the scriptures but to those who came later. We listen for how they listened to the testimonies. They instruct us how to hear, again sometimes getting it right and sometimes not. We live in this world of testimony, and when we hear the voice of God, we testify too.
I realize that what I’ve just said is wholly inadequate, but let me leave it for now. I’ll come back to it in subsequent posts. For now, let me encourage you to read the scriptures. In an age of screens, reading itself is counter cultural. Reading the Bible is doubly so. Reading the Bible with joy, almost unimaginable. But in this reading, we will perhaps find what we seem to have lost, the strange, wonderful world of the Bible, and finding it, find ourselves.
Clay