Reading the Bible with Joy

Authority in Crisis

We face a crisis of authority. Or, rather, crises of authority. Some of these are in matters of faith. My most recent post on reading the Bible ended with a question about biblical authority: When does the Bible say to the church: “Thus says the Lord”? When are we called to bow in obedience to the scriptures, argument over? When does the Bible settle things, once and for all? In this post, I will address these questions.

But these questions of the Bible and the church do not stand alone. The more immediate and terrifying crisis of authority is in our national life, where the structure of the government seems about to collapse. The president, enabled by the Supreme Court and unrestrained by Congress, has claimed the authority to do as he pleases, enriching himself and impoverishing the country. Lately, he has proposed nationalizing elections, which, if effected, would allow him to control who gets elected and who doesn’t. 

The crises of authority in scriptural matters and the crisis of authority in our national life are not as disparate as it may seem. It was out of a crisis in the authorities of the time that our commonly held Reformation view of biblical authority arose. The parallels are inexact of course, but the early Reformers believed themselves to be confronted in the church, as we are now in our national life, with a combination of tyranny and corruption. Luther’s initial protest, the “Ninety-five Theses,” were written against corruption in the church, and when that initial statement brought down on Luther the condemnation of church officials, he and the other Reformers were forced to rethink how authority works in the church.

The question was what to set against the power of the pope. The answer was, in short, the Bible. Not just the Bible but the Bible, first of all. The slogan became sola scriptura, which meant, in part, not the pope. The Bible was for Luther and those who followed him a sort of constitutional document, a manual of the Word of God, against which no pope could speak. 

It’s not that simple, of course. Luther was a great reader of scripture. He understood that the Bible was not really a legal document. It didn’t function like a constitution. But those who came after him, as the Reformation was consolidated into an orthodoxy, were not as circumspect. They believed that the Bible, if read properly, could and should rule the church. It’s that idea about the Bible, the Bible as a rule for the church (and much else), that we who grew up in Reformation churches have inherited. When we ask about the authority of the Bible, it’s about this that we are asking: when does the Bible speak authoritatively? When does the Bible settle things? When does the Bible act, as it were, constitutionally? 

Traps

The answer is that it doesn’t. Not in the way that has been assumed in Reformation churches. This way of thinking about the Bible falls into two traps. The first is that it disguises what actually happens in churches that call themselves biblical. It’s not unlike what happens with the US Constitution. The Constitution is a document. It has to be read and its provisions enforced. Like any document it can be read in more than one way. Power lies in interpretation and enforcement: how it is decided by courts, enacted by the executive branch, and worked out by the Congress. Often the claim that something is constitutional or unconstitutional says more about the person making the claim than about the Constitution itself.

The church’s use of the Bible is like this. What the Bible effectually means is decided by pastors and councils and synods and long custom. When church officials claim that something is biblical, it often means, “This is what I think about the issue.” I have witnessed and participated in long synodical arguments in which everyone claimed the Bible for their side but seldom actually cited it. The first trap into which churches with this “constitutional” idea of how the Bible should function fall is the way it promotes the illusion that a decision was made for biblical reasons when in fact it was made for reasons that have little to do with the Bible. It’s a way that the church fools itself.

The second trap is that this view of the Bible prevents the church and faithful church members from seeing and reading the Bible for what it actually is: less a legal document and more a conversation, a long, deep challenging conversation over more than a thousand years. This conversation is weighty, important, challenging, and infused with the Spirit of God. Making it into law obscures what the Bible actually is.

Is there a better way to think about this, about the Bible and biblical authority? I believe there is, and that these ways to think about the Bible are older and more traditional than the way we have been working with the Bible in our Reformation churches. For this essay, I’ll let me propose two such ways to think about biblical authority: I’ll call the first sacramental and the second, evangelical (in the original sense of the word, not as a name for fundamentalists).

Sacramental Authority

Start with sacramental authority. In an earlier draft of this essay, I called it canonical. It’s the authority of the canon, the Bible as a collected whole. In the Reformation, a controversy broke out about what constituted the Bible: which books should be included and which not included. Part of the controversy had to do with how the canon was decided. Did the Church (with a capital C) make the decision about which books were in and which were not, in which case, the Bible could be said to have been formed by the Church, or did the Church merely acquiesce in what was already a fait accompli? The church hierarchy claimed the first, and the Reformers claimed the second. 

On this Calvin and other reformers were probably right. The (New Testament) canon was created mostly by usage. The books that were accepted were those that churches everywhere had already recognized in worship as scripture, as books having the honor and weight of the Word of God. 

The agreement was not complete, of course: what was in one church’s box of scrolls was not always in another church’s box of scrolls. Some books were not as widely recognized as others. 2^nd Peter, for example, seems to have had a particularly tough time getting in.  The churches of the world still do not entirely agree on the list of books. Protestants favor a short list; Roman Catholics a somewhat longer list; Orthodox churches a longer list still. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is this canonical way of thinking about the authority of the scriptures.

In this, the authority of a scripture emerges in its use. It’s in the reading of a scriptural book in worship that the community of faith hears in it the voice of God. This kind of scriptural authority is sacramental (on this, see Hans Boersma, Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church, 2017). The scriptures, gifts from the hands of the prophets and apostles, like the water of baptism and the bread and wine of the Eucharist, become in the reading of them, transubstantiated into voice of God. At the end of the reading, the reader declares it so: “The word of the Lord.” And we respond, “Thanks be to God.” And so it is. But everything needs to be there: the word read, the community at worship, and the transformative power of the Spirit.

Rather than argue this theologically, allow me one example, as example on which I wrote a recent post. Just weeks ago, in the Christmas season, the gospel reading was the story that Matthew tells about Herod and the magi, the story that ends in the slaughter of the innocents and flight of the holy family to Egypt. As the story was read on this occasion, with its narrative about a narcissistic and cruel king who drives the holy family into exile and who slaughters innocent children to maintain his power, you could sense the Spirit in the room. The reading spoke from its far distance of time and space directly to what is happening in our own time and place. Word, Spirit, and community came together in a sacramental way. We come to church for this, do we not? Expecting the Word to take on a sacramental presence among us.

The idea of the sacramental authority of the scriptures rescues the Bible from the abstract ideas about inspiration and authority that one finds in older Reformed theology. Those older theologies try to find authority in the Bible apart from the church, apart from worship, as if the Bible were a self-contained object, as if you could hold in your hands the Word of God. But that idea of the Bible is intrinsically docetic, as if the human words of the Bible were merely a cloak for the divine Word. It robs the Bible of its humanity while at the same denying it the true power of God. It does not work theologically or in any other way.

Evangelical Authority

So, first, the authority of the Bible is canonical and sacramental: it’s in the reading of it (and reflecting on it) in worship in the community of faith that the Spirit speaks to us. It’s there and in that way that we hear, “Thus says the Lord.” There’s a second, related, way to think of the authority of the Bible. I’m calling it “evangelical,” not for the name we now give to fundamentalists (evangelicals), but for the root meaning of evangel, from which we get “evangelical,” “good news,” “gospel.”

Biblical authority is the authority of gospel. This is where I ended my previous post. There I said that getting the Bible right requires us to get God right. I spoke of the Voice of God, Hebrew, qōl yhwh, the Voice that calls the human race to become what it still is not. This puts creation not at the beginning of time but at its end. Genesis 1 is best understood with Gregory of Nyssa as eschatological: not what has been created but what will be created in the end.

In other posts I have introduced my inelegant way to get the view of God implicit in this: the God who pulls. Most of our ideas about creation feature the God who pushes, who commands, and perhaps we need that view of God. We need the push at the beginning of time. But we also need another way to think about God as the God who summons us, who calls, the Voice on the far horizon of time who says, “Come. See what I have for you.” 

Reading It Twice

But how to hear this voice? That was the question at the end of my previous post. There are many voices in the world summoning us. Which of these is Voice of God? It’s to this that the Bible speaks, but to hear this Voice, to discern this path, one must read it not once but twice.

Again, this is not new. It’s not some modern theology, sprung upon the unsuspecting faithful. It’s ancient, more ancient that the Reformation view. It’s the way the early church approached the Bible. It’s only later, with the Reformation, that we were told that the Bible requires only one kind of reading. The early church taught that the Bible required two.

They had names for these two readings. The first they called historia, which means reading for the plain sense of the Bible. They took this seriously. At this level, they argued about words and grammar, about the sense of the text. The Reformation gave a great boost to this way of reading the Bible, claimed it, in fact, for its own. Along with Luther and Calvin and other writers, you have Erasmus (Roman Catholic) putting together the first critical edition of the Greek text of the New Testament. They wanted to get the words right. They thought this way of reading the Bible the only one you needed.

Despite its origins in the Reformation, the effort to get the words right grew away from the church into academic biblical scholarship. Grammar, philology, history, archaeology, literary studies: these are all part of reading the Bible for its plain sense. The field has burgeoned into a long list of specialized studies. 

What’s crucial here is that this sort of study is from the words up. You start with the words and whatever you can learn of them, and you try to understand what a given biblical passage means and what it meant in the past. It helps to know when it was written, how it interacts with other scriptures and with other writings outside of the scriptures, and how it hangs together. This way of reading is important, crucial even, but it’s not enough. We were taught that it was enough, that all you needed to get the meaning of the Bible was a good lexicon and a working knowledge of Hebrew and Greek grammar (with a little Aramaic thrown in). 

We were taught that a given biblical text has one meaning and only one. Get it right, and you have the Word of God. But the early church knew that wasn’t the case. (Read Origen already in the 3^rd century.) You need another way of reading. For this kind of reading the early church gave many names, “allegory,” “anagogy,” “tropology,” and more. I like the name Gregory of Nyssa used for it, theoria, which means not “theory,” which indeed we get from theoria, but rather “contemplation.” 

Theoria is to read the scriptures for the good news, for the evangel, the gospel. I think of it as finding a path through the Bible, a path that holds it together, a way of seeing God. For Christians that path, that way through the Bible that holds it together, that way of seeing God, is the way of Jesus Christ. No, more than that, the way is Jesus the Christ.

Already the Jesus of John’s gospel says this. Asked by Thomas, standing in for us, how to follow him, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). It’s this way, truth, and life that we find not only in the New Testament but in the Old. As Jesus says to the religious authorities of his day, again in John’s gospel, “If you believed in Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me” (John 5:46). The Bible “breathes”—Paul’s word—the divine presence.

But how to grasp this gospel? The long controversy in the early church about the Trinity was one such attempt. Not just to grasp it in an intellectual, theological sense, but to grasp the implications of this gospel, what it requires of us, where it leads us. To do so is to hear the Voice. The better we grasp it, the more we hear the Voice. And always it leads in the direction of unknowing, of what is ultimately ungraspable.

This, this theoria, is a process for grasping the divine in the scriptures, coming each time to recognize what we have not grasped, and reaching toward the truth again in the hope of better understanding what we have not until now understood. The measure of our grasp of the scriptures remains always the same: the fullness of Christ, for in the fullness of Christ lies the fullness of the Father.

In this process, failure is as important as success. Reading the Bible in this way leads in the direction of a fuller realization of what we do not and cannot know. It’s not so much knowledge that one can put in books as a way of life, a path, a seeking. This is what we should be up to in church. Too often the older Reformation way of thinking about the Bible attempts to put theological knowledge into a can, seal it, and label it: Certainty.” But when we open the can, what we find is just air. God cannot be so contained.

The Constitution in the Soul

In this evangelical view of biblical authority, the Word of God resides not just on the page of the scriptures or in the dictates of the church but in the hearts of those who have heard the Voice and believed. I began with the crisis of authority in our national life. Who or what will stand up to tyranny? When federal agents run amuck in the streets of Minneapolis, who or what will restrain them? What we are discovering is that it’s not enough to have the Constitution on paper; what’s required is to have citizens who have the Constitution in their souls. Resistance arises from the same font that spawned our originating documents: the desire for a politics that protects the weak from the strong, that honors difference, and that builds community. 

The life of the church is not different. Biblical authority is not top-down. It’s not what synods declare. It’s sacramental and evangelical, a vision—sometimes gotten right and often gotten wrong—of what it means to be a follower of Jesus, which, when all is said and done, is simply what it means to be human.

Clay