Edgework

I had expected to explore how Jesus read his Bible in this essay, but meanwhile a new book arrived at my door which disrupted my plan. And since I am not writing a book, I am taking the liberty to expand a little more on the multivocality of the Old Testament at this point before examining the way Jesus read that ancient text.

The book that landed on my desk is one I had heard a lot about but never read. “The Bible Tells Me So…Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It,” by Peter Enns was for me somewhat of a game-changer. Just when I thought Derek Flood’s book, “Disarming Scripture,” carried enough weight to begin my second series on how we read the Bible, Enns’ book proved to be of equal value in wrestling with the challenges of modern Bible reading.

Peter Enns addresses head on the fact that if we are honest readers we have to conclude that the Bible doesn’t behave itself the way we expect most any other book to behave. Especially those who look to the Bible to be an instruction manual for life or a precise, historical handbook, inevitably come away disappointed. As we have already illustrated, the Bible speaks with more than one voice and these voices are frequently at odds with each other. And try as we might to get a movie-version of events as they unfolded, we run up against accounts of the same event that don’t agree or on the other hand find no supporting evidence in other ancient, historical records or modern archeological research.

Enns suggests we have three options to deal with a Bible that doesn’t behave itself. First we can simply ignore the parts that don’t fit the template through which we read it. This is the common approach used by those who develop church lectionaries to be read in church. Invariably they select texts that don’t contradict each other and resonate reasonably well with modern minds. And on an individual level, most of us have become masters at simply skipping over difficult passages, like for example those that advocate smashing enemy infants on rocks.

Secondly, we can push back and defend the Bible, insisting that since the Bible is God’s Word written, every piece of scripture does fit together well if we only take time to dig deeply. It seems to me that this exercise is fairly modern emerging in the context of the fundamentalist/liberal controversies of the early 19th century. In an attempt to shore up foundations, fundamentalists developed the verbal, plenary theory of inspiration which insisted that the very words of the original manuscripts were directly inspired by God thus making the Bible inerrant and infallible. The corollary principle was that if you can’t trust the Bible to be “true” in every respect then there is no basis on which to trust God either. I grew up with a combination of these two approaches to the Bible; it is inerrant, but if it doesn’t look like it, just skip over that section.

Peter Enns recommends a third option; letting go of a well-behaved Bible and trusting God who will always be greater than a perfect book. It is of interest to note that within Judaism there has always been a “wrestling” with the biblical texts that led to varying, but respected interpretations. According to Enns, “When we open the Bible and read it, we are eavesdropping on an ancient spiritual journey. That journey was recorded over a thousand year span of time, by different writers with different personalities, at different times, under different circumstances, and for different reasons. In the Bible, we read of encounters with God by ancient peoples, in their times and places, asking their questions, and expressed in language and ideas familiar to them. These encounters with God were, I believe, genuine, authentic, and real. But they were also ancient – and that explains why the Bible behaves the way it does” (23).

Modern Bible readers tend to think that God’s people of old thought pretty much like we do because they believed in the same God we do. But Enns insists we must accept the fact that Israel was shaped by the culture of its day which included the notion of tribalism; we are the good guys, all others and their gods are bad. “Israel was an ancient tribal people, and they thought and acted like one” (57).

That leads us to ask why, if God was not in fact a tribal deity, he would allow himself to be portrayed as such. Could he not have insisted from the start that he was the kind of God later revealed in Jesus? Enns explains: “The Bible – from back to front – is the story of God told from the limited point of view of real people living at a certain place and time…The Bible looks the way it does because ‘God lets his children tell the story,’ so to speak” (62-63).

I have often wondered just how all the conversations God had with people in the Old Testament happened. In many cases there was no reporter on scene to catch the sound bites. But, defenders of inerrancy have told us that God must have replayed these conversations to whoever wrote them down. Enns suggests that we should accept the fact that ancient writers “invented” dialogues they thought to be consistent with the stories they were telling. This view allows for dialogue and discernment without getting painted into a corner.

So Enns concludes: “This kind of Bible – the Bible we have – just doesn’t work well as a point-by-point exhaustive and timelessly binding list of instructions about God and the life of faith. But it does work as a model for our own spiritual journey. An inspired model, in fact.”

And, furthermore, it allows Jesus to put his own creative spin on the Old Testament text.