Edgework

What we have been saying about using the Old Testament in our pursuit of a deeper spirituality has a corresponding application for using the New Testament. When we approach the New Testament as an inerrant, infallible Word from the Lord, it is relatively easy to begin reading at any point with the conviction that God wants to speak to us directly through that passage. Since it is a Word directed by God to you it is natural to trust that it is true and consistent in every respect and the final revelation from God about “…all things pertaining to life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3).

That is until one begins to pick up on some discrepancies and differing points of view by different writers. When I taught Introduction to the New Testament at college to first year students I often began my survey of the gospels by asking students to write a “movie version” of the resurrection accounts in the four gospels. Most thought this would be an interesting exercise in harmonization. But invariably they came back somewhat exasperated declaring that it was an impossible assignment. Not only did they find that different writers mentioned different things but that in some cases they directly contradicted each other.

These starry-eyed, Sunday School graduates had come face-to-face with what was actually written in the gospels. For some it created a crisis of faith. “How then can we trust the Bible on anything,” they asked. My question to them was how it was that although they had grown up in church and read the Bible for themselves for a dozen years or more they were still under the illusion that the Bible was historically accurate in an absolute sense. It is not an exaggeration to say that in some cases I had to carry some of these students for a while so that they would not abandon their faith.

The fact is that, even beyond the resurrection accounts, the four gospels tell the same story in different ways to different audiences for different purposes. That there are discrepancies in timing, location, wordings, emphases and details is only a problem to those locked into the first half of life, as Richard Rohr says it, in which everything is seen in black and white terms. Once you begin to move into the second half of life these things drop off as points of concern because you are beginning to be comfortable with imprecision, paradox and mysteries. Instead of faulting the gospel writers for not agreeing on everything, you begin to ask the question as to what is important for you in the story. Moving past futile harmonization efforts, you begin to look for the deep truths hidden underneath these various and varied accounts pointing in the direction of the living Christ – the one you are seeking to know and follow better in the 21st century.

And, furthermore, once you understand that the New Testament is written to first century Jesus-followers who lived in a very specific historical and cultural context, you will stop demanding that the Bible in fact does speak clearly and directly to every possible question of faith and life we encounter in the 21st century. That does not mean there are no similarities between their world and ours. But it will ask of you to acknowledge that there are many things about faith and life to learn which are either not mentioned or given short shrift in the Bible. Jesus reminds his disciples in John 14:26 that the Holy Spirit will stand ready “to teach us all things”. That is the same Spirit that reminds us, for example, that Paul’s racist rant against the Cretans (Titus 1:12) is not an example to follow in our lives.

A favorite example I like to use is the case of slavery. When slavery was in vogue in the USA it was popular for evangelical preachers to make the case for the biblical foundation validating slavery. And at face value – simply doing their exegesis – they had a stronger argument than the abolitionists. But the abolitionists had something on their side which the literalists didn’t, and that was the “spirit” of the text. They did not argue from a list of proof texts but from the direction which Jesus and the apostles began to set in their life and writings. And it became clear to them that, taken to their logical conclusions, the trajectories that they set within the larger gospel story would ultimately end with a complete condemnation of slavery as an institution, even though the Bible doesn’t do so.

Similar things could be said about other dimensions of faith and life; for example, male and female roles at home, in church, and in society, environmental concerns, warfare and sexuality – to name a few.

This all leads me to the conclusion that biblical interpretation, also specifically when done in the process of developing a deeper spirituality, is more of an Art than a science. In other words, there is more to interpreting the Bible than doing exegetical work to determine precisely what the original author had in mind for his original audience. It is more than parsing of verbs and plumbing the depth of a particular word in the original languages.

In Inspiration and Incarnation, Peter Enns suggests that biblical interpretation “…includes such things as creativity, intuition, risk, and a profound sense of the meaningfulness of the endeavor, all centered on the commitment to proclaim that ‘Jesus is Lord'” (151). But this, claims Enns, must be a process that involves the community which together walks a path toward faithfulness. “At the end of the path is not simply the gaining of knowledge about the text, but God himself who speaks to us therein” (152).

So I keep reminding myself that the goal of all biblical reading and theologizing is to have an encounter with God today – that is to deepen my spirituality.