MORE (MOSTLY SHORT) NOTES ON HOW TO READ THE BIBLE WITH JOY

A few posts back I made a few suggestions about how to read the Bible with joy and a certain confidence. Five simple suggestions:

1. Approach the Bible with the confidence that you can in fact read it. Don’t allow Bible scolds to tell you otherwise. The Bible is accessible.
2. Don’t read the commentaries (first). If you start with the commentaries, you will not read the Bible for yourself (see point 1). Commentaries have their place, but not as a substitute for the Bible itself.
3. Find out what you can. There is a huge gap between what is assumed to be true about the Bible by many of its readers and what in fact is likely to be the case. Such things as when it was written, for example, and by whom. To take a single example of such things, the books of Moses (Genesis through Deuteronomy) were not written by Moses, although they are often assumed to have been. Nor were most or any psalms written by David. 
4. Argue with the text. The Bible invites argument. The conservative Jewish scholar Benjamin D. Sommer has a brilliant book about the Exodus account of Israel at Mt Sinai (Revelation and Authority, 2015). He approaches the biblical text with the long history of rabbinic commentary on the text in mind. A key question for the rabbis was what God actually said from the mountain. Or rather, what the people heard. You can find different answers not only among the rabbis but in the biblical text itself. Did they hear God speak the whole ten words—what we call the “Ten Commandments”? Or did they hear God speak only the first line, “I am the Lord your God,” with the rest supplied by Moses? Or did they hear only thunder? Or some other possibility? The argument, an argument about how God comes to us, begins in the text itself. It has not stopped since. When we join the argument, we join with those who have gone before us.
5. Expect God. The Bible is a book of testimonies of people who meet God in various ways. In their testimony (and through the Spirit), we too meet God. This is the testimony of the church through the ages. In this surprising book, we are surprised by God’s living presence.

To those five suggestions for reading the Bible, allow me to add five more, beginning with:

1. Laugh occasionally. The Bible is mostly serious, sometimes tragically so (as in the case of the story of the woman in Judges 19, for example), but humor slips in. Once, in a proper church service, while I was reading Matthew 23, a listener sitting in the pews suddenly let out a belly laugh. I was startled initially; people don’t usually laugh during the Bible reading. But I had just read this: “

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves (Matthew 23:15). 

Harsh, biting? Perhaps. But also funny.

If you are alert to it, humor pops up in the Bible more often than you might expect. The Jacob stories are replete with it. They are grandfather stories, in which grandfather gets it wrong more often than he gets it right. Like Jacob waving peeled sticks in front of sheep to get them to produce stiped lambs (Genesis 30:37-43). Even he admits later that it wasn’t the peeled sticks that made him rich (Genesis 31:42). Or, better, the story of Jacob meeting Rachel in which he swaggers around in macho style, throwing a heavy stone off a well (after dissing the other shepherds) so he can make a show of watering her sheep, and then, as the sensitive soul he is, rushing up to her with tears running down his face and kissing her. What a guy!

2. Avoid homogenizing the text. “Homogenizing” is my word; the theological term of art is “harmonizing.” At the beginning, the church was faced with a dilemma: the story of Jesus came not in one version but in four. Or, actually, in more than four (see, for example, the Gospel of Thomas). What to do? Some in the church attempted to blend the four into one, as in Tatian’s 2^nd century Diatessaron. But the prevailing wisdom was to let the four gospels stand as they are, telling the story in different ways. 

The decision to let the four gospels stand as four separate books is of a piece with the frequent decisions of the editors of the earlier testament to let different accounts of what appear to be the same stories stand in the text. So, we have not one but three accounts of a patriarch passing off his wife as his sister (Genesis 12,20, and 26). And in the Joseph story we have both Reuben and Judah trying to save Joseph’s life, and both Ishmaelites and Midianites carrying him away (Genesis 37). In Genesis and Judges, we have two versions of the story about the men of city surrounding a house and demanding that the owner of the house throw out a male visitor so they can rape him (Genesis 19 and Judges 19). In broader terms, we have two versions of the history of the Judean kingdom (Kings and Chronicles). There are many other examples of this sort of thing.

Despite the decision of the church to keep the four gospels as four separate books, the long tendency of interpreters has been to homogenize the text into a single narrative. And not just for stories. The long tendency has been for interpreters of the Bible to premise their interpretation on the idea that the Bible everywhere and always says the same thing. Giving up this idea, the idea that there is a single underlying biblical theology, is the first and most important step towards reading the Bible for what it is, not for what someone thinks it should be.

The Bible is a long conversation, in which the conversation partners sometimes disagree with each other. Reading the Bible well requires us to allow each biblical voice its own say. We should avoid mashing the voices together. Think of the Bible as a community of voices rather than as a single voice. Avoid the idea that the Bible as a whole says this or that. The unity of the Bible—I’ll come to that next—is not to be found in homogenization.

3. Avoid reducing the Bible to a single plotline. It’s popular in Reformed circles to suggest that the Bible can be reduced to a four-part plot: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation. This is an odd reading of the Bible. The first two movements in the plot occupy (mostly) only three biblical chapters (Genesis 1-3). The third spreads across most of the rest of the Bible (with huge omissions), beginning with Abraham and ending with Jesus, and the reflections on Jesus in the New Testament epistles. The last movement is mostly the book of Revelation, with contributions from other apocalyptic passages.

In this account, the Fall is an especially problematic category. Genesis 3, taken as the sole biblical account of the Fall, is not actually a fall story in the sense it has been given in conventional Christian theology. It’s an integral part of the creation story which concludes, more or less, with Noah emerging from the ark and Yhwh setting new conditions for the human race (Genesis 9). Human life, as we now know it, emerges from there into the brave new post-diluvian world. 

Nor is Paul’s interpretation of the Genesis story in Romans 5 (and 1 Corinthians 15), influenced as it is by 2^ndTemple theology, exactly a fall story. Again, it’s a story of the emergence of the human race into a tragedy of evil and death—the tragedy we know and live everyday—and the call to a new life in Christ. This needs more comment, but that is for another time. The point here is that the Bible can’t be reduced to a single plotline. It’s not a primer in Christian (Reformed) theology.

So if the Bible does not hang together on a single plotline, is there anything that holds it together at all? It was in answer to that question that in a recent post I presented an idea borrowed from the early church: the Bible needs two readings. The first reading is what I have been talking about in this post: reading the Bible for all its variety and differences. Proverbs is not like 2^nd Kings. John is not like Mark. Isaiah is not the same as Amos. And Song of Songs is not like anything else in the Bible, nor is Ecclesiastes. 

But the Bible also requires a second reading. How are we to understand it in the light of what we know of God? Who is the God we meet in the Bible? Whom we meet in Jesus? For these questions, we need a different reading. For Christians, this reading is always through the lens of the life, cross, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. All such readings are provisional: they are the best we can do given what we know of the universe in the light of the testimony of the Scriptures and in tradition of the church as it has come down to us—all three are important: life as we know it, the scriptures, and the apostolic tradition.

In the churches I attend, we customarily read four passages from the scriptures: one each from the Old Testament, the New Testament epistles, the Psalms, and the Gospels. The pastor reflects on these readings. And then we stand and recite the Nicene Creed. The Creed is a second reading of the scriptures in the sense I’m giving it. It’s a way of telling the story, put together after long reflection. It stands in conversation with the scriptural readings. It’s not the same thing. It’s wrong to think that the creed in some sense replaces or adequately sums up the scriptures. We need both in conversation with each other.

This is not enough. The 3^rd century theology, Origen, proposed three readings for the scriptures. The first two are those I’ve already named: reading the scriptures in all their variety and specificity (biblical studies) and reading the scriptures for our best understanding of God and the gospel (theology). The third reading is reading the Bible for the way it elevates us morally and spiritually. It’s to this third reading that I turn next.

4. Read the Bible as a mirror of the soul. Many people do this naturally; it’s more difficult for Bible scholars and preachers. We are often too worried about the proper meaning of the text to allow the Bible to speak to us, as it does to those who read it without the baggage of theological training.

The Bible is a strange book. I’ve already said that, but here I mean it in a different sense. It presents a world and a word that we encounter, most of us, nowhere else. To plunge into the Bible is to plunge into a world that has an uncanny depth and height. We live mostly on a single plane, the world we encounter day-to-day. We look little farther than our appointment book. Reading the Bible requires us to enter a different world.

It requires us, first, to actually read something longer than a tweet, something that many people no longer do. Perhaps better and more biblical, it requires us to listen—to be read to. The Bible was originally oral. When Paul sent a letter to one of his churches, most people in the congregation did not read it in manuscript; they listened to it as it was read aloud in community. Our culture tips excessively toward seeing. Screens are the medium of the day. The Bible comes from a culture of hearing. Already, by being required to read we are called out of our daily lives into a different world.

The Bible also calls us to ponder. A Hebrew word that we meet in the psalms, often translated “meditate,” as in Psalm 1:2, means “mutter.” “Mutter,” I suppose, in the sense of thinking out loud, as if to get it you have to say it. Psalm 1:2:

In the Instruction of Yhwh is [the wise person’s] delight;
[The wise person] mutters the Instruction day and night. 

“Instruction” in this passage is torah. To read the Bible this way is to have it on your mind, to be brought up short by what it says, to talk it out, and to consider how the strange world of the Bible relates to the world in which we daily live. It’s not a matter of prescription so much as reconsideration. A matter of muttering.

And the Bible calls us into prayer. It’s in prayer that we bring our lives into conversation with the eternal. In this practice of reading, pondering, and praying, that we come to be different. We are called to be what the New Testament declares us to be, children of God.

For the early church, for Origen, for Gregory of Nyssa, for Augustine, the delight of the Bible was to be found principally in this: in the way the Bible elevates us from what we would be if we had never turned to it.

5. And, last (for this time), resist using the Bible to club others or, for that matter, to club yourself over the head.

The Bible is not a club. Most of the time. Just yesterday a window jammed in our Tucson condo. I couldn’t get it to budge. I needed something heavy to hit it with. As it happened, on my desk was an old copy of The Jerusalem Bible, a mid-20^th century Catholic translation. It worked perfectly. One tap, and the window was free. Oh, and the Jerusalem Bible was unharmed.

But it’s not windows that the Bible is usually used to slam; it’s people. It’s amazing to me that denominations claiming to profess a theology of grace rather than law often turn the Bible into a law book. In a subsequent post, I’ll have more to say about this. The whole theology is mistaken. Torah (see above on Psalm 1:2) is not law in our sense; it’s instruction. It’s a guide to practice. Christian theology too often has devolved from a Way to a set of prohibitions. It’s not what you do but what you don’t do.

Or, rather, what other people should not do, like women preaching or gay people getting married. The Bible is a complicated, wonderfully various book. To reduce it to a few rules and a single, mostly 20^th century, fundamentalist theology is to lose the Bible altogether. In using it to club others, we lose it for ourselves. Better to use it to open windows than to close them.

What we lose far too often is the path, the Way, the Way that leads in the direction of eternity. The wonder of the Bible, this unruly book, is that it, in quite unexpected ways, opens for us a path to new life. So the church has long testified. And do has been my own experience.

Clay