Confronting a Challenge
This page offers some general thoughts and resources about studying the Bible. As Christians, we treat the Bible as “scripture.” This means we believe the Bible is a text that is somehow special, inspired by God, and authoritative for our lives. But as soon as we open the Bible and begin reading, we also realize that it is thoroughly human — and not only is it human, it’s ancient and often strange. We wonder how God speaks to us today in these ancient texts.
For us as modern people, these concerns seem particularly difficult. We know a great deal more about the natural world than anyone in ancient times, so we’re confused by parts of the Bible that seem to be contradicted by modern science. We have access to linguistic and archaeological information that suggests the Bible is not a straightforwardly historical text. We live in a more egalitarian culture than the Bible seems to depict.
In fact, the “distance” between the world of the Bible and the world of the reader is not entirely a new phenomenon. The Church Fathers — the early Christian theologians who began to shape what we think of as Christian theology today — already recognized in the first few centuries after Christ that the Bible’s function as scripture must be more complicated than a simple, “literal” reading might suggest. They began to develop interpretive methods that depended heavily on finding a spiritual or allegorical meaning in troubling or obscure texts, and they argued among themselves about what the different sense of scripture might mean. The Church, particularly in the Roman West, began to emphasize the role of Church authorities, including the Pope and councils of Bishops, in providing authoritative interpretations of key Biblical themes.
In the Fifteenth Century, the Reformers — Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others — reemphasized the Biblical text over authoritative Church tradition. The Reformation slogan “sola scriptura” — “scripture alone” — captures this dynamic. It’s a mistake, however, to think that the Reformers refused to consult tradition at all, or ignored other sources of theological authority such as reason or experience. Their point was that Church tradition could not give the final answer for Biblical interpretation, because the Bible itself was the final, dynamic source of authority. It’s also a mistake to picture the Reformers merely as naive Biblical literalists. It’s true that, by today’s scholarly standards, some of their interpretations do sometimes seem naively literalistic, but in fact they were influenced by the new linguistic and philosophical perspectives and methods of Renaissance humanism. They were trying to reform medieval interpretive practices that, by their time, had grown crusty and tired.
By the Nineteenth Century, new methods of textual and historical criticism and new archaeological and scientific discoveries, together with a general cultural shift away from a “supernatural” worldview, led some scholars to suggest that the Bible might not really be special after all. In the United States, by the early Twentieth Century, this led to what Church historians call the “Fundamentalist-Modernist” split. Fundamentalists began to insist that the Bible was in all respects literally, historically, and scientifically accurate, while Modernists began to seek the meaning of faith more in human experience than in the Bible itself. This split still deeply affects our church cultures today. It’s why there is a twenty-five million dollar museum in Kentucky based on the premise that the pillars of modern science are false, the Earth is only ten or fifteen thousand years old, and at one time a literal Adam and Eve lived with dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden. It’s also why, in some liberal churches, the Bible seems to take a back seat as a source of authority.
Today there is a new energy behind specifically Christian approaches to scripture that are neither naively literalistic nor hostile to the Bible’s unique role as a vehicle of God’s revelation. This way of approaching scripture often goes by the name “theological interpretation.” In many ways, it’s an effort to recapture the Church Fathers’ insight that the Bible is a multi-layered set of texts. We can even speak of coming back to the text with a kind of “second naivetee,” a recognition that, while we can’t go back to a time before modern scientific and critical knowledge, we can allow that knowledge to help bring us back to a place of wonder and receptivity at God’s way of speaking in and through these texts. Of course, “theological interpretation” is not the only way to approach the Bible; there is more than one way to “do” theological interpretation; and many scholars from historical-critical perspectives think theological interpretation is at best an unnecessary distraction and at worst misleading. But in my view, some method of theological interpretation does seem most consistent with approaches to the Bible as scripture that have born fruit in the Christian tradition from the early centuries, through the Reformation, and today.
An Approach to Theological Interpretation
Here is one way to think about approaching the Bible as scripture through the lens of “theological interpretation.” We want to understand three “worlds” around whatever Biblical text we’re studying: (1) the world behind the text; (2) the world within the text; and (3) the world in front of the text. As we work on these three “worlds” of the text, we also want to keep in mind a basic Christian theological claim that supplies an overarching interpretive principle: Jesus Christ is the culmination of God’s revelation, and as such, the Bible’s principal function as scripture is to bear witness to Jesus Christ.
The World Behind the Text
The world behind the text is about what the text was doing in its original historical context. The work of Biblical scholars engaged in various kinds of critical work is important here, as is information from related fields such as history and archaeology. We want to have a sense of the circumstances under which the text was composed, through what kinds of stages or processes it may have been redacted (edited), to whom it originally was addressed, what it may have been seeking to accomplish, and how it came to us in the form that we now possess it. A focus on the world behind the text helps keep our interpretive efforts grounded in the text, so that we’re not only using the text to justify our own preconceptions.
The World Within the Text
The world within the text is the text’s language, literary genre(s) and structure, and other literary features. Most of us lack the ability to read the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek languages of the original Biblical texts, but we at least need to understand something about what it means that our English Bibles are translations, and we need to consult commentaries prepared by scholars with real expertise in the original languages. We also need to realize that, rather than a single unitary book, the Bible is in fact a “library” of many different kinds of texts. There are prose narratives, poems, parables, songs, philosophical meditations, letters, polemical invectives, political commentaries, and many other genres of documents in the Biblical canon. We also need to try to notice different styles and tools the writers and redactors employed — things like acrostics, or chiastic structures, word repetitions, allusions to other scriptural texts, cultural idioms, and shifting narrative points of view. A focus on the world within the text helps us notice things about the purpose and aesthetics of the text we might otherwise miss.
The World In Front Of the Text
The World in front of the text is the cultural and historical circumstance the text is speaking into at the moment and place of its reception. For us today, the world in front of the text is our world. Our world is not the world of Second Temple Judaism in the first century, or the world of the Babylonian Conquest in the Sixth Century B.C., or the world of the ancient near east, or any of the other varied ancient worlds from which the Biblical texts first arose. Even our world is not one simple, univocal, context. It’s in many ways a different world in the Global North and Global South, in the cities and in the country, for women and man, black and white, queer and straight, and across other differences in experience. I will not hear the Biblical texts in exactly the same way as a first century Roman Jew; and I will not likely hear the Biblical texts in exactly the same way as you, even if we both live in New Jersey in the Twenty-First Century. If the Bible really is scripture for the whole Church throughout history, then it must speak beyond any one context.
This is often one of the most difficult and contentious aspects of Biblical interpretation. The world behind the text is largely the domain of academic experts. They argue, sometimes vociferously, among themselves, and we as readers usually try to reap the benefits of their efforts without becoming too invested in their disagreements. The world within the text is more directly accessible to the average reader, at least as we begin to understand the strengths and limits of different Bible translations. We still rely on experts to parse the original languages and to point out literary and grammatical features we might otherwise miss, and, again, when the experts disagree we’re mostly content to let them argue among themselves. But we know our world in front of the text because we live it. We know and care deeply about what’s at stake in these debates because they concern how we live our lives.
There is no simple formula or shortcut here. The “fundamentalist” wing often argues that there is one and only one correct interpretation of any Biblical passage, based on “original meaning,” and the question is simply one of obedience. The “liberal” wing often argues that Bible’s meaning is merely subjective and hortatory at best. Neither approach is true to the text itself or to the text’s role as scripture for the Christian community. Ultimately theological interpretation is a kind of spiritual discipline, always connected with related disciplines of prayer and worship, and carried out not only by a solitary mind but in and with the community of God’s people, the Church. There is no guarantee of “getting it right” every time, but the Holy Spirit’s presence guarantees that God’s voice will be heard.