Reading The Bible

Our Feature on Living Faith
Living Faith is a declaration of faith of the Presbyterian Church. You can download it at presbyterian.ca. We suggest you read the passage being discussed each month.

Additional reading:
How to Read the Holy Bible (June 2009) and God Spoke to Me (April 2010).

I remember as a child watching a television program about a young girl caught up in a Cinderella type step-family. Unable to endure the mistreatment any longer the girl determined to run away from home. But where could she go? Her solution: she opened her Bible, closed her eyes and pointed. The result: “go to Bethlehem for there …” The direction was clear; so immediately she packed her bag and left for Bethlehem, Pennsylvania! The result, of course, was a “happy every after” ending. I remember being greatly impressed that the Bible actually spoke to people in this direct way. The title of the movie has long since left my memory but not this part of the story.

I gradually learned other not so happy endings that followed a similar approach to the Bible. The mandate to “go into all the world and make disciples, teaching them to obey …” (Mt.28:19) is a passage, which, in itself, can inspire in meaningful way. But all too often the end of this story has been an emphasis on making and obeying, resulting in conversion to a particular set of western cultural values that were often mistakenly labelled gospel values. Michael Prior, a New Testament scholar, recounts an incident that happened when Pope John Paul II visited Peru. An open letter was written by various indigenous movements indicating their intention to give the Bible back to him since in five centuries it had not given them love, peace or justice. The letter indicated that the colonizers needed its moral teaching more than did those who by force had been subject to European culture, language, religion and values. The letter went on to name the Bible as the ideological weapon of the colonial assault attacking the very soul of the colonized as the sword had attacked their bodies. (Michael Prior The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique)

Given the centrality of the Bible for Presbyterians, we need continually to discuss and clarify how we understand its significance for our belief and practice. How do we interpret Living Faith’s affirmations about the Bible, that the Bible is “given to us by the inspiration of God to be the rule of faith and life”? How do we distinguish between the Bible as the word of God and Jesus Christ as the living Word of God? Certainly, the centrality of the Bible as the standard for all doctrine is not in question nor is Living Faith’s claim that it is the way in which “we test any word that comes to us from church, world or inner experience.” Rather the hope of this short article is simply to suggest practices or perspectives that might assist us in living faithfully our statement of belief about scripture.

“For we know in part …”

Paul’s words to the factions in the Corinthian church asks the opposing sides to remember that no one owns truth. Even those who saw themselves to be spiritually mature had to understand that truth resides with God and that all who are mortal have to be content with partial truth that will be perfected when the imperfect disappears. (1 Cor. 13: 9-10) This is where I think our practice of living faithfully our doctrine of scripture needs to begin. Given that what we see now is but “a poor reflection in a mirror,” I would argue that our first practice is humility, in that, what we claim as truth is in reality a partial or mere reflection of the fullness of truth found only in the living God. Our interpretations of scripture cannot claim to know completely the mind of God.

The Living Word of God: Jesus Christ
Living Faith reminds us of the important relationship between the Bible as the word of God and Jesus Christ as the living Word of God. Where the word “word” is capitalized or not is an important aspect of our understanding. The words of the Bible bear witness to the living Word, Jesus Christ; it is to him and not to the words of the Bible that the church is bound. Semantics— no, rather a profound truth that the Scriptures are primary in terms of being “necessary, sufficient and reliable revealing Jesus Christ, the living Word.”

Yet scripture is not monolingual. The four gospels, not to mention the letters of Paul and the writings that come from the second and third generation church, reveal Jesus Christ, the living Word in somewhat different ways. In effect, we, as present day readers removed in context and time from them, are invited into their theological conversation in which we hear the questions each community is asking as it proclaims and lives out the mystery of divinity and incarnation. We hear their voices within these different contexts, voices asking different questions even as they experience different anxieties.

Reading the Bible in Two Contexts
Living Faith puts it in this way: “the writing of the Bible was conditioned by the language, thought, and setting of its time. The Bible must be read in its historical context.” (5.4) This is an important concept for interpreting the Bible faithfully in our own time. Sometimes I think we not only neglect this but also forget that we too live in an historical context and that what we see in the Bible is interpreted through the lens of our culture, history, worldview and values. In other words our statement of belief about the Bible requires us to inhabit two worlds at the same time. The diagram that follows has been helpful to me in my work of teaching biblical interpretation. (W. Randolph Tate, Biblical Interpretation: An Integrated Approach)



First we need to understand the biblical texts in their own context. To read the Bible in its historical context requires us to take seriously what it meant to live in a first century Mediterranean world with its codes of honour/shame and dyadic (communal) personality, not to mention, political and economic systems foreign to us, i.e. the empire of Rome with its patriarchal family and a patron-client economic systems, framing and informing the biblical worldview. Further, as anyone who is multi-lingual knows, language is culturally driven, reminding us that when we read the Bible on a daily or weekly basis it is already “in translation” removed from its original cultural and linguistic context, i.e. the Greek or Hebrew languages.

To inhabit the second world means “relying on the Holy Spirit” to “seek the application of God’s word for our time.” Too often this leads us to beat each other up, each of us claiming to having greater access to the Holy Spirit than those with whom we disagree. It can also prevent us from engaging in the harder work of discerning together the application of God’s word in our particular historical context.

How often do we think to ask how our cultural values, presuppositions or self-understandings might be getting in the way of greater discernment? One example that has led to deeper theological reflection among our students occurred at the May 2011 Knox Convocation. Dr Reinerio Arce, in his convocation address, challenged our students to think about unexamined assumptions in light of what they lead us to see and not see in our practice of ministry. The one he challenged was the North American assumption that “politics and religion don’t mix.” His premise given his Cuban historical context was that “not to be political is to be political.” In my teaching I observe that students find it difficult to critique at a deep level our societal context with its systems of meaning and values that operate often unconsciously both outside and within the church, meanings and values that not only impact how we interpret the Bible, but also how we live our Christian witness.

Living Faith seeks to balance an emphasis on biblical inspiration and reliance on the Holy Spirit with the fact of the embodied historical contexts within which the Old and New Testaments were written. This should lead us as Presbyterian people in a western, North American 21st century context to claim truth with humility ever mindful that our finiteness allows us to see only in part. Living Faith’s Statement of Christian Belief seeks a balance. Because both the biblical text and we, its present day readers, live in particular and distinct historical contexts, we are called to name the finiteness of all interpretations of the biblical text, while at the same time affirming that without the presence of the Holy Spirit any semblance of truthful interpretation eludes us.

Interpreting the biblical text is an awesome responsibility because of its centrality to how we conceive and live faithfully as disciples of the living Word in our own time. May our common calling to this holy task continue.