If the Bible is our only resource for theological reflection, and especially if we read it as a treasury of proof-texts and kitchen-calendar verses, then we will read it to support the version of Christianity we already believe. Now, there are limits to that, as anyone who’s paid attention to the remarkably frank confessions of eisegesis amongst the English bishops of the present debacle may have noticed. Some theological and ethical positions self-consciously fly in the face of the clear testimony of scripture, and their acolytes can either undertake the theological equivalent of an undersecretary to the treasury ‘answering’ a question on LBC, or else (as seems to be happening today) ‘fess up to their agenda. That’s not the kind of culturally-specific reading of scripture that I’m getting at. I am referring to something more subtle, less insidious, but still damaging.
It is a question of emphasis. Most of us will have had an experience of reading scripture that feels equivalent to gazing upon a dark and brooding sky punctuated by the odd glitter of sunlight glimmering through a break in the clouds. Take 1 Peter 3 as an example. The beginning of verse 18 is like a bolt from the blue, a clear and pithy articulation of the treasured doctrine of justification: ‘For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God’. But then it takes an unexpected turn down an abstruse path that – if we were more honest with ourselves – seems to spoil the clear summation of truth that we were just reflecting upon, or at least cast it into doubt:
…being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water.
Where has all that come from? Peter was just talking with real eloquence about the foundational doctrine of New Testament theology. Then he goes off on one about Christ talking to some imprisoned spirits. Imagine that in a sermon on penal substitutionary atonement! Dealing with this passage, most evangelical preachers would at this point remind us that ‘some things in scripture are difficult to understand’, that ‘this is a tricky passage’, but that ‘what is necessary for salvation is always clear in scripture’.
I’d be content with this idea (that God makes clear what we particularly need to know) were it not that what is ‘clear’ to us is so obviously contingent upon our particular context. In every time and culture – depending on how far away from the original context a particular reader may be – readers of scripture have had the same experience of clarity and obscurity seemingly being displayed side-by-side as they read the Bible. But what fits into the categories of each has changed dramatically. To a medieval theologian, Paul’s lengthy discussions of justification by faith would have seemed tortuous and abstruse, his commandments to obedience eminently clear; as children of the Reformation, we find our own reading experience to be inverted. To an early-modern preacher, God’s commands to Israel to ‘devote to destruction’ the Canaanite nations would have seemed to have simple (and uncontroversial) applications to modern day politics, and the Deuteronomic laws about the execution of false prophets to state suppression of heresy. To twenty-first century readers, they represent yet more ‘difficult’ passages that can be explained ‘once we bear in mind’ some principle from elsewhere in scripture.
And then there is the mere exegetical point, that it doesn’t seem to Peter, in the course of writing his letter, that he is going into something abstruse or irrelevant to the point he’s trying to make. There are no markers that his readers might struggle to understand this (e.g. Paul in Ephesians 5:32 – ‘this mystery is profound…’), and he doesn’t seem to think that extra steps in his logic (from Christ’s substitutionary atonement to the imprisoned spirits in the time of the flood) are required. That makes it clear that it’s us who are missing something.
My point is not to suggest the correct reading of what is (at least to us today!) a difficult passage. Instead, I’m trying to expose the extent to which our own cultural frameworks inform our exposition of scripture. And it’s not just in terms of how we group texts under the clear/unclear categories. It’s also about which texts we use to construct our frameworks of belief, and which we leave aside.
Cultures usually have foundational texts, be they scriptural (as in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) or merely very authoritative (Homer in Ancient Greece; Confucius in China), which provide the conceptual and linguistic building blocks of moral, political, and communal life. In Christianity, and especially in Protestant Christianity, that work is done by the Bible. But when it comes to a text of such length, we have a choice about which parts to emphasise and which to leave dormant: and this process is deeply contingent. Two particular examples have been on my mind of late. The first is about moving around. As readers of some of my previous articles may be aware, I’m not fond of the placelessness of the modern age. We live in a world that is captivated by the idea that there is something better somewhere else. Like the desperado in the Eagles’ eponymous song, whose ‘prison is walkin’ through this world all alone’, we cling to a cold, isolating freedom and convince ourselves that all our unhappiness can be overcome if we just had more choice. I understand that in the non-Christian world. But increasingly I notice it among believers too. We move from place to place, job to job, from church to church, piling up ‘friendships’ and experiences as we do so, but never building anything that lasts; never being drawn into a community with the kind of commitment that true happiness requires.
What particularly alarms me is the way this kind of behaviour is justified by recourse to the Scriptures. When I tell people of the importance of home, they often respond to the effect that we are exiles and foreigners (1 Peter 1), that the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head (Luke 9), that Jesus tells us to go wherever he needs us to go. All true, and all scriptural. But has anyone wheeling out such apparently convincing proof texts stopped to consider whether they are reading with honest exegetical concerns, or instead to justify, ex post facto, a kind of lifestyle that Jesus cannot have had in mind? Indeed, do any of those passages actually advocate the extreme placelessness of the modern age? Is there concrete proof that believers in the first century were expected to move around as frequently as is normative for us today? It seems to me that the texts in question, and the general political-theological hue of the New Testament, do teach that Christians ought to be prepared to leave behind all worldly things to follow the call of the kingdom. This is a sine qua non of trusting in Christ. But this go-anywhere-for-Christ attitude doesn’t map neatly onto the go-wherever-I-want attitude of our own age. In fact, it may be that God calls us to stay put, that rejecting the normative attitude to place and home (in Jesus’ time, staying in one’s homeland; in our own, dispersing around the globe) in favour of being where God wants us to be looks like staying in boring old Blighty. Staying put is, in our own day, a chronically underrated form of building the kingdom. But given how long it takes to build anything good, it might not be such a bad idea.
I promised one more example, but I shall try to be brief. This one concerns that great shibboleth of contemporary evangelical culture: that weakness, not strength, is what is valued in the Christian life. Again, this is biblical: God has chosen the weak things of this world to shame the strong (1 Cor. 1), and his power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12). But is that all the Bible has to say about weakness? Does it not also urge strength? The apostle John was under no illusions about the importance of strength in the Christian life: ‘I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one.’ It seems to me to be no coincidence that, at a time when masculinity is under attack, and physical and mental strength are increasingly devalued (not least because of the unprecedented physical comforts we enjoy), the church should emphasise the importance of weakness. It is difficult to conceive of 1 John 2:14 becoming a kitchen-calendar verse in times such as ours.
My point is not to lay aside the teaching around weakness: it is perfectly true that it is in our weakness that God’s grace is magnified. But God’s grace is meant to make us strong, and weakness is not something to be wallowed in. It is as we confess our weakness and put our trust in the Lord alone that he gives us strength; not strength in some abstract, ethereal sense, but real strength, strength to conquer kingdoms, enforce justice, obtain promises, and stop the mouths of lions. Strength like the saints of old.
Every generation of the church has read the bible to serve its own particular ends. It is nothing new. But it isn’t helpful; and, in a culture moving further and further away from orthodox Christianity, it is particularly dangerous. So let us be on our guard against it. We must know church history, and face up to how alien the ways of reading and understanding scripture espoused by our forebears are to us. Then, armed with the knowledge of our own fallibility, we must read, and really read. We mustn’t use the bible instrumentally, but instead must sit under it, submitting to God’s revelation, and asking that, by his grace, he would reveal himself to us. Then we might just change the world.
The Fourth Discourseman
The Four Discoursemen 