I really like studying the Bible. I am one of that small number of liberal Protestants who do enjoy it. Or maybe I think the number is small only because I have had a lot of trouble finding others. On this Page, I want to look at just why that might be and to give a quick introduction to how I approach it. My way of looking at scripture isn’t for everybody, so this introduction can serve simultaneously as a warning and an invitation.
I was raised in a religious context that took the Bible as supremely important. The idea that what the Bible says is important has been around as a political device since Martin Luther’s sola scriptura served as his rebuttal to the Roman hierarchs. Where I grew up it was a lot more personal. The power of scripture is multiplied—and not in a good way—by understanding it as literally true and as significant even in meaningless fragments. As an example of the first I offer Jesus’s observation that the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds; of the second, a sermon I once heard where “anchored until daybreak” a clip from Paul’s missionary narrative, was presented as meaningful in itself. This is a common background for Christians who venerate the Bible but don’t read it or who read it and don’t enjoy it.
Having a background like that has given me two chances to enjoy studying the Bible. The first is the “escape from misunderstanding” feeling; the second the “understand what that text means” feeling. Plus the added advantages of never having gone to seminary where, by the common account, very well educated people try to remove those kinds of experiences from your reach.
I don’t have a clear view of the inspiration of scripture. I accept it; I just don’t know what it means. I moved from questions of inspiration to questions of authority of scripture. I accept that too, as I define it, but it doesn’t mean as much to me as it did. I have come to a third emphasis, which means more to me these days, but I am sure I will run out of years before I run out of objections. Before looking as that third emphasis, I’d like to touch briefly on the first two.
“Inspiration” is a source metaphor. God “breathed” (the Latin spiro = “breathe” ) into the text, giving it “life” as His breathing into Adam gave him, and all of us, life. Inspiration rules out a happenstance origin, but it doesn’t help us know what a text means. “Authority’ is a consequence metaphor. For those who acknowledge the “authority” of scripture, failing to comply is a serious breach, as continually complying is an intimate joy. But neither “inspiration” nor “authority” helps understand the meaning of a text, or, more fundamentally, what “meaning” means.
The third emphasis is closer to “narrative” than it is to inspiration or authority. I ask two kinds of questions. Question one is, “What did the author (final redactor) mean by giving this text to its intended hearers?” That helps a great deal. The parable of the mustard seed, in Matthew’s telling of it, for instance, “means,” “Be patient. You can’t always tell right away if it’s working.” Question two is, “What does this teaching mean for “us,” placing the question for contemporary Christianity, and for “me?” These are really good questions.
If “we Christians” are bedeviled by the failure of our proclamation of the Kingdom of God to yield immediate results, we can just put this teaching right into the vein and make of it the use Matthew’s church made. I don’t know anyone like that, but maybe I ought to get out more. On the other hand, most of the churches I know are desperately in need of Jesus’s teaching on the risk of preparing a house and leaving it vacant. I’m thinking of the story in Matthew 12. The devil abhors a vacuum, apparently, just as “nature” does. That’s a teaching we need as much as the original recipients and that is one meaning of “meaning.”
Here is another. Nelson Mandela, in the wonderful movie Invictus, gives the captain of the South African rugby team a copy of a poem that meant a great deal to him during his nearly 30 years in prison. The poem is “Invictus,” a poem I have always disliked. Of the poem, Mandela says, “Just words.. But it helped me to stand when all I wanted to do was to lie down.” A Christian who can say that about a biblical text, however remote or obscure I think its meaning is, has established a kind of “meaning” I don’t want to tamper with. I don’t care if it is no more than “anchored till daybreak;” if it helps us stand, I’m all for it.
A good way to illustrate the pleasure I have been finding in studying the Bible is to tell about Matthew’s and Luke’s birth narratives. This falls more squarely than anything above into “affirming the narrative.” Raymond Brown’s book The Birth of the Messiah is neatly divided into halves: one for Matthew and one for Luke, those being the only accounts we have. For many years now, I have been studying only Matthew one year and only Luke the next.
The result is that the birth narratives, which I have always “affirmed” in the limited sense of not rejecting them, have become intriguing and meaningful to me. Even powerful. They have helped me to stand when all I wanted to do was lie down. Or, really, to think when all I wanted to do was whine. The power and clarity of the Matthean narrative are wonderful to behold. They are solidly political and following that clue, they draw meaning from deep in the past and shine a light far into the future. The discoveries are delightful…once you disentangle the story from Luke’s account. Luke’s account is just as wonderful, but only when you disentangle it from Matthew’s account. You get the idea.
So, a liberal Protestant well into my 70s, I keep and treasure an approach to scripture that matters to me greatly. I have a Bible I no longer claim to understand in any comprehensive way, but I can live in the founding stories of my people and be guided, in that way, by narratives that have sustained the church through eras even more ignorant than ours.
