These are tough times for Bible reading in the mainline Protestant church. A former colleague of mine once said there are basically two groups of people who read the Bible: those of us who make it say whatever they want, and those of us who make it say nothing at all.
Richard Topping, senior minister at St. Andrew and St. Paul, Montreal, and part-time lecturer in theology and ministry at The Presbyterian College, has written a very fine academic treatment of Bible reading in the church today. He focuses on three 20th century thinkers who have looked at how the Bible may be “soundly and adequately interpreted” for the church: James Barr (who, incidentally, began his academic career as a professor of Bible at The Presbyterian College in the late 1940s), Paul Ricoeur (who gave the first Roberts Lectures at the Presbyterian College in the 1950s), and Yale theologian Hans Frei.
Each one of these scholars represents an important trend in Bible reading as they wrestle with the meaning and truth of scripture. According to Topping, the Scottish Presbyterian theologian James Barr finds the meaning of the Bible in the historical context of the author. If we can just get “behind the text” of the Bible to the circumstances within which it was written, we'll get at the essential meaning. Historical critical scholarship helps us do this, Barr argues, and therefore it should be privileged in the way we read the Bible.
The French philosopher and Reformed theologian Paul Ricoeur has, as Topping describes it, a quite different strategy: the meaning of a biblical passage is located “in front of the text.” If we can just understand how texts function and how readers read from their own perspective, we'll enter into the world of meaning created by the interplay between the Bible and its readers. Philosophical understandings of interpretation – what scholars call “hermeneutics,” should therefore be privileged in the way we read the Bible.
The third approach is represented by the American post-liberal theologian Hans Frei. He believes, Topping argues, that the meaning of the Bible is set “within the text” and understood as the Christian community engages in reading practices informed by the nature of the text itself and by the reading conventions (i.e. tradition) of the church. Christian theology, centered in Jesus Christ, and set out in the history of the church, should therefore be privileged in the way we read the Bible.
Topping helpfully points out how each of these strategies is intended to help the church read the Bible critically, i.e. to prevent us from reading the Bible in ways that make it say whatever we want it to say. Historical criticism, philosophical hermeneutics and ecclesial practices, rightly employed, should provide a check against this. Critical reading does not mean we are free to read into the Bible whatever we wish from our own experience, notwithstanding the fact that a good deal of recent popular biblical scholarship tends to do exactly that (see John Spong or Tom Harpur for striking examples).
But Topping also notes that each of these three thinkers, as helpful as they may be, falls short in an important way. Barr, Ricoeur and Frei each provide a natural account of Bible reading, but they all fail to account adequately for God's involvement in how the Bible came to be written, in what the Bible is all about, and in how the Bible is to be read and interpreted. “Talk of God,” Topping argues, “is eclipsed by the terminal consideration of human realities.”
Mining the legacy of his own Reformed tradition, especially as found in the theologies of John Calvin and Karl Barth, Topping suggests that we need to recover a theological understanding of the Bible for the life of the church. Such an understanding, he believes, begins with an acknowledgment that in scripture we meet the God whose word the Bible is, namely the Triune God of grace revealed in Jesus Christ. Historical, hermeneutical and ecclesial considerations are important, but not at the expense of theological considerations. Readers of the Bible must always be reminded that this is about God and that God's action in revelation and salvation makes it possible for us to hear scripture as the voice of the living God. The really critical element in reading the Bible comes when we realize that God creates, accosts and sustains the church by means of scripture.
This book is important for at least two reasons. First, it reminds us that we are a people of the Book, a community of the Word. It challenges us to think about what we believe about the Bible. It encourages us to think about what we do when we read the Bible. It calls into question our tendency to read the Bible without reference to God. In short, it reminds us of what we confess about the Bible in Living Faith, namely that scripture “is the standard of all doctrine by which we must test any word that comes to us from church, world, or inner experience.”
Secondly, Topping's book signals something of a continuing theological renaissance among Canadian Presbyterian ministers and teachers. In recent years a number of important books have been published by Canadian Presbyterian scholars, including parish ministers. At a time when the Presbyterian Church seems to be preoccupied with its own problems and in pursuit of pragmatic solutions, it is encouraging to know that among our leaders are those who take theology seriously; that there are, among us, those who think critically about the faith and life of the church in light of scripture rather than in terms of the latest market-tested trends; that there are – and this is perhaps most important of all – those who believe it's time once again to turn to God.
