As evangelicals we should remain steadfast in our affirmation of the primacy of Holy Scripture, but this should not be taken to imply scriptural exclusivity. We need to reason beyond the parameters of Scripture as we relate the doctrines and themes of Scripture to the new challenges to the faith posed in every succeeding generation. Just as the church came to the right conclusion regarding the two natures of Christ and the Trinity through deliberate and prolonged reflection on Scripture but also drawing upon the intellectual tools provided by the culture of that time, so the church throughout history and in our time must wrestle with the implications of the message of faith in dialogue with all other Christian communions. Yet we must never forget that church tradition can be deceptive, that again and again it is tempted to transgress the limitations imposed by Scripture, that it needs itself to be continually purified and reformed in the light of a fresh appropriation of the Holy Spirit. Church tradition can be a salutary guide to faith but only when it functions under the ruling authority of Holy Scripture.
—Donald G. Bloesch, Jesus Christ: Savior and Lord
Something strange is happening among America’s cultural elite. Small groups of the intelligentsia—novelists, neurosurgeons, staff writers for the New Yorker—are meeting with rabbis or pastors to study the Book of Job or the Gospels. People who wouldn’t have been caught dead with a Bible five years ago are poring over Scripture with the zeal of seminarians.
There have been signs of this surprising surge of Bible study for some time. One is the popularity of literary approaches to the Bible, including a whole shelf of volumes in which writers of one sort or another (not biblical scholars, that is, but creative writers), generally heterodox, take a crack at interpreting this or that chunk of the Bible. A current example is Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited,a collection of original essays edited by novelists Rick Moody and Darcey Steinke (Little, Brown, 247 pp.; $23.95, hardcover). Moody explains that “the idea for this anthology came suddenly and organically, at a dinner party, in the midst of a conversation about the contemporary hegemony of the religious right. That night, I blurted out to friends that the only way to oppose these contemporary moralizers was to engage in a debate about the meaning of the New Testament.” (For an overview of literary approaches to the Bible, see Leland Ryken’s article, “Bible Stories for Derrida’s Children.”) Another sign is the Genesis phenomenon. (Look for David Jeffrey’s survey of the bumper crop of Genesis books in a forthcoming issue of B&C.)
There’s one problem with many of these Bible studies for intellectuals: the participants feel free to discard anything in Scripture that rubs them the wrong way. For Rick Moody, that includes “the repressive, the punitive, the intolerant” image of God and morality “defined in the Old Testament, in the Book of Revelation, in some of the Pauline epistles of the New Testament.” The model for these Bible studies is a “conversation” in which God (if he exists—and you are free to assume he doesn’t) is a partner among equals. You know those people who always have to be right? God is like that. He has some interesting things to say, but at times he tends to be domineering, and at other times he’s plain confused—at which point you simply have to put him in his place.
“This radical notion—that the Bible not only isn’t factual, it’s not always right, either—may be frightening to many religious Christians, but it’s what lets participants join this ancient and ongoing conversation. We do not have to buy everything the Bible says. We just have to listen to it and to each other.” So says Ann Monroe in “Does the Bible Tell Me So?” (Mother Jones, December 1997), an excellent guide to the assumptions underlying this user-friendly mode of biblical interpretation.
Monroe quotes the poet and translator Stephen Mitchell: “If you approach the text as ‘truth,’ you can’t possibly get to a deeper place of intimacy with it. With only one pole, there’s no place to go.” So what have believers been doing all these centuries when they thought they were immersing themselves in God’s Word and experiencing intimacy with him? Mitchell explains what they missed: “Conversation is one of the deepest and subtlest ways of play and growth and intimacy, and it’s a bipolar experience.” Who’s going to tell Saint Teresa, and Martin Luther, and Chrysostom, and Saint John of the Cross?
Rick Moody is absolutely right: “Every generation interprets the Bible for itself.” And yes, that interpretation, as Donald Bloesch acknowledges, should be undertaken “in dialogue with all other Christian communions”—and with Jewish readers as well. But the “ruling authority” for each generation’s interpretation must be Scripture itself. By what authority do Moody and Steinke and Monroe and Mitchell decide what in the Bible to accept and what to reject, if not by that very “truth” they disdain? (Here we are in the upside-down world illuminated in Philip Yancey’s article in this issue.)
In Monroe’s account, “conversation” is a mantra: “To read the Bible as a conversation is to read it as a question, not an answer, a starting point, not a final declaration.” Well, questions and answers both have their place, it would seem; does one without the other make any sense? By all means, let us have “imagination and engagement,” as Monroe suggests. There are rumors that the Holy Spirit is not averse to imagination. But let us not suppose that we are the judges of Scripture, when it is Scripture that judges us.
Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & CultureMagazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
