Conclusion
Ps 119:160 (referring to the Torah): “The sum of your word is truth, and all your just verdicts are eternal”
John 17:17 (referring to Jesus’s message): “Consecrate them in the truth; your message is truth”
2 Cor 4:2 (referring to the apostolic message): “. . . not distorting God’s message, but by open declaration of the truth recommending ourselves to everyone’s conscience in God’s sight”
2 Thess 2:10 (referring to the apostolic message): “. . . and with all the deceit of unrighteousness to those who are perishing, who did not accept the practice of loving the truth, so as to be saved”
Such passages invite us to heed the divine message that we now find embodied most fully (textually speaking) in Scripture. One might also survey similar passages, usually referring to the gospel message, that speak of the “word of truth,” passages such as 2 Cor 6:7; Col 1:5; 2 Tim 2:15; Jas 1:18 (cf. Ps 119:43).
God’s Word invites more than acknowledgment and passing interest. Indeed, Scripture invites us to arrange our thoughts around and devote our entire life in light of its message:
Deut 6:6–7: “These words that I myself am commanding you today shall be on your hearts. Teach them diligently to your children. Speak about them when you are sitting at home and when you are going along a path, and when you lie down and when you get up.”
Josh 1:8: “This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall recite/meditate in it day and night, so that you may watch out to live according to all that is written in it; for then you will succeed in your path, and then you will have insight/success.”
Ps 1:1–2: “How wonderful it will be for anyone . . . whose pleasure is in the law of the LORD, and who recites/meditates in his law day and night”
Reading the biblical narrative with faith means reading it as true. 1 What this means is that the boundaries between the narrative world and our own world become permeable. The God of the Bible is our God; the Jesus of the Gospels is our risen Lord; the sorts of angels and demons that inhabit the New Testament exist in our world; and the Bible’s verdict on human moral failure is what we see reflected around us continually. The theological message of the text remains applicable to our world, and we can expect the biblical God today to act in the surprising ways, at various times and places, that he acted in Scripture. We see ourselves and our world in the Bible.
Historically, Christians have read the Bible this way (though also usually taking for granted also some extrabiblical traditions that they wrongly assume are in the Bible). This perspective of reading the Bible as true for themselves clearly characterized early Pentecostals, who saw themselves as living in the continuation of “Bible days.” 2 Many of their contemporaries made excuses for why tongues, prophecy, and other gifts did not seem to exist in their circles, at least in the West. (Some of these phenomena had appeared in revivals elsewhere. 3 Healing had already begun to make a comeback even among many evangelicals in the West, 4 though even today I as a charismatic sometimes find myself tempted to make excuses for why it does not happen here more frequently.) 5 Pentecostals, by contrast, believed that these gifts depicted as part of normal church life in the New Testament could be normal for church life today. They read Scripture with faith that it was true for them and took the initiative to ask God to let them live in the light of that reality.
When we approach the Bible simply to prove what we already believe, we are not beginning with the fear of the Lord. Loyalty to Scripture means valuing its teaching above any other doctrinal commitments that may not actually flow from that. 6 Sola Scriptura in the best sense means that we evaluate our other doctrinal commitments by Scripture; Scripture is not simply one doctrinal commitment meant to be harmonized somehow with the others.
The Lord is faithful to the humble even when they do not understand all the details; since none of us understand all the details, and some of what we suppose we understand may be wrong, humility indeed befits us all. There is enough that we do know to continue challenging us in how to live and honor the Lord. When, by contrast, we defend ideas that are not genuinely true just to win a doctrinal argument or support inherited beliefs, we are not seeking truth.
Affirming God’s Word as truth means submitting our lives to it more than it means the sorts of issues that Christian scholars sometimes divide over. The truth of God does not rest on doctrinal distinctives or on our dating or authorship of biblical books. At the same time, neither does it come from following the culture’s sometimes skeptical fashions or superstitious fascinations. As followers of Christ, we are to follow God’s word and thus not be moved by the ways of the nations (Josh 23:6–7; cf. Matt 5:47; 6:7; Rom 12:2; Eph 4:14, 17; 1 Thess 4:5). Simply following received beliefs of one’s church to remain acceptable there, or popular scholarly opinions to remain acceptable in the academy, or popular clichés that are known to arouse hearers’ emotional responses, is not loyalty to God’s word. Starting with the fear of the Lord, we must seek God’s truth. Paul warns that God will judge those who never embraced love for the truth of his gospel (2 Thess 2:10, 12); more generally, this principle shows how God values loving truth and expects us to value it also.
Some argue that for Pentecostals what should matter is not a text’s historical reliability but its message. 7 Whether a text’s narrative demands on the reader include some historical claims depends on the text’s genre, 8 but it should be noted that Pentecostals historically have nearly always taken for granted the historical reliability of the text, even beyond available historical evidence. 9 Contrary to some stereotypes of global Pentecostalism by their detractors, most Christian charismatic movements have a high view of Scripture as divinely inspired and authoritative, 10 even if to justify it many of them appeal to experience more than to inherited doctrines. 11 In this respect, most Pentecostals would agree with Calvin’s argument that the Spirit’s witness attests canonical Scripture. 12 Experience of the Spirit tends to give Pentecostals a high view of Scripture’s authority, since they often experience what they believe (rightly or wrongly) to be the Spirit’s voice in connection with reading Scripture. 13
Because of the convoluted modern history of truth claims about the Bible, I need to expend considerable space below explaining what I am not proposing. I have less to say on what I am proposing because I believe that, stripped from the implications that some may be tempted to read into my words, the proposal is fairly straightforward. It is no more and no less than what is suggested by the biblical texts with which I opened this section: we rely on God’s word.
Given the past century of debates in Western theology, the affirmation that we should hear the Bible as truth invites another caveat. 14 Claims of biblical authority are too often deployed uncritically against others who have not in fact rejected that authority. Reading the Bible as truth does not necessarily mean that all interpreters will understand it in the same way, 15 ideal though such unanimity—if based on truth—might be. Some who do not work in biblical studies criticize biblical scholars without recognizing the legitimate issues that biblical scholars often address.
Although I have not chosen to make these issues my academic focus, I, like other close readers of the text, have always noticed them. I read through the Gospels in the weeks after my conversion from unchurched atheism. Matthew gave me no trouble, but Jesus was crucified again in Mark, and by the time I reached the crucifixion in Luke I wondered how often this was going to happen! Having been told that the Bible was God’s Word, I expected it to be dictated by God in the first person; I had not anticipated multiple perspectives on the same events by different human authors. Further, my first reading also revealed differences among the accounts that troubled me; some of these were not actually the same accounts (e.g., Matthew’s wise men and Luke’s shepherds), but some apparent discrepancies were more substantive. After reading the Gospels enough, however, I understood better how they were meant to be read.
After working through a synopsis of the Gospels shortly before beginning graduate work, I briefly considered making the differences among the Gospels more central to my work, until I concluded that, in view of my calling, the overall usefulness of such a focus would be limited. (Helpful patterns do appear, but proposed theological explanations for differences sometimes remain too speculative to be informative.) Many of those issues are not central to the matter of the texts’ meaning and therefore to how Christians as believers must embrace and live the text. They are, however, real and a valid subject of interest, and as a biblical scholar I recognize and work with those issues. I thus have digressed to warn those who have never carefully examined the texts at this level of detail to avoid prematurely criticizing those who have.
Because the Bible includes books spanning a range of ancient genres, reading the Bible as true also does not require us to read it as modern history or science. Since challenges offered in the radical Enlightenment, arguments for historical reliability of our central information about Jesus and his first followers have been important. Certainly there are historical genres in the Bible that employ the literary canons of ancient forms of historiography. I have spent many years researching the latter point, and have argued at length that these sources supply us considerable accurate historical information. 16
But ancient historians also knew how to recount their stories in engaging ways, which may help account, for example, for some differences among the Gospels and their underlying traditions. Moreover, they valued their roles as moral, political or theological interpreters, so even in these texts we must listen not only for the text’s historical information but also for its message. This is all the more true for other kinds of texts (such as parables or psalms) where historical reliability cannot be a criterion of reliability at all (unless we mean reliability as “true to its cultural setting”).
We should read each biblical book or collection on its own terms; to make their messages intelligible, biblical writers necessarily utilized and adapted not only the language of their contemporaries but also contemporary signals of basic genre. As believers who follow Jesus’s perspective on prior Scripture and his authorization of key followers with his message, we recognize that God was speaking through these intelligible literary forms. Someone may draw the lines of genres differently than we do, but if they embrace the text’s message they may heed the text more than someone who merely memorizes and defends it without embracing and obeying its teaching. What is the value of affirming Scripture’s authority on history if we fail to submit to its authority for our lives?
On the basis of historical-critical epistemology, evidence is sometimes too slender to resolve given historical-critical questions. Some of these problems arise because centuries have obscured what may have once been common knowledge. Despite our own modern historical interests, we cannot force the biblical text to answer questions that it was never designed to answer. Resolving such historical questions is not a necessary precondition for trusting the text’s message. It is important to recognize that God acts in history, since this is part of the theology that the text communicates to us. But we have sufficient evidence of that reality in enough cases to encourage our trust in that theology. Trusting that theology in turn clears away the most important concerns in most other texts without us having to resolve every question that we might conceive.
It is natural for scholars to quibble over details; our job description includes trying to resolve such questions. Yet scholars who harmonize (or hail as contradictions) details of the text that ancient hearers never would have expected to be harmonized, while resisting biblical teaching about the continuing activity of the Spirit, are not really honoring Scripture in the form in which God gave it to us. If inspiration were more about the particular words than about the meaning, then the New Testament would be wrong to quote the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible (from which it sometimes diverges) 17 and to adapt, as the writers often do, even the wording of the Greek version. 18
Christians should not approach Scripture the way some Muslims approach the Qur’an, emphasizing memorization and recitation in the original language even if one does not understand it. Such reverence for sacred texts of one’s faith is praiseworthy, but the Christian approach to reverence for Scripture must emphasize careful interpretation followed by obedience (cf. Ezra 7:10). Our focus should be understanding for the purpose of obedience and faith; the message, rather than the wording, should be the emphasis. (That is, after all, why Christians invest so much effort in translating the Bible into local languages.)
Reading the Bible as relevant for today is sometimes undertaken naïvely by ignoring differences in cultural frameworks that affect how we understand what the biblical writers articulated. To use the cultural chasm to neglect a nuanced understanding, however, puts us in the position of non-faith in the message of the text. I study material about Jesus in the Gospels for historical purposes, relevant to my academic work in early Christian history. But if we as Christians read this material for exclusively historical interest, not reading it also with reference to the risen and living Lord of the universe with whom we have a relationship, we miss a crucial dynamic. Historical scholarship requires some objective distance from the text, and those of us who work as historians must do our historical work well. But when we read as Christians, we must also read with faith, celebrating that these accounts involve the same Lord to whom we pray.
In some cases interpreters debate the genre of a text more than its core message. For example, although the first three chapters of Genesis belong to a larger narrative work that includes different sorts of narratives, they also reflect the genre of creation narratives, a subject of special interest in the early second millennium BCE. 19 Pagan contemporaries probably heard such narratives aetiologically, perhaps the way we would view many folktales today.
Questions of sources aside, Genesis addresses creation from two angles consecutively, focusing on different aspects of the primeval world (its creation and humanity’s fall). Although Genesis expects us to read these adjacent narratives side by side and to learn from both, the narrative flavor of both accounts differs from that of the patriarchal narratives that follow in Genesis. Even some evangelical scholars find significant tensions in the details between these two narratives, which may warn us that the details in our present form of Genesis are not meant to be pressed too literally. 20
Today some interpreters vigorously defend their view of the first three chapters of Genesis as “literal,” insisting that this is the natural way to read them. Others, however, suggest that these interpreters are defending their own inherited hermeneutic rather than the text of Scripture. The text invites us to read it in a different way than some other parts of Scripture, a way that allows us to better hear its original message. Would ancient Israelites, accustomed to the sorts of narratives that dominated most of their tradition, have taken fully literally these introductory narratives that include a talking serpent, protagonists whose names in Hebrew are simply Man and (possibly) Life, and trees whose fruit is not of the usual edible variety but rather “knowledge of good and evil” and “life”? This is not the same sort of writing that we encounter in the Gospels, in 1 Kings, or even in Genesis’s accounts of the patriarchs.
Whether or not you agree with this conclusion, however, the question of genre need not obscure the primary points and message of the narrative, a few samples of which I may offer here. Many ancient Israelites, especially traders, scribes and civic elites, would have been exposed to the creation stories of their polytheistic neighbors, in which the world was created, for example, by deities battling other deities or (in one Egyptian account) by a deity stimulating himself sexually. By stark contrast, Genesis proclaims one God as the creator of the cosmos, the originator of fertility without his own sexual involvement, the appointing of sun and moon (elsewhere worshiped) under the only true God, and so forth.
Likewise, the opening narrative of creation declares humanity as the pinnacle of God’s creation, the object of his special love, an observation fully consistent with New Testament theology as well. 21 Indeed, humans before the fall, in their ideal state, were meant to govern and steward other life forms; they held a position as high as that assigned to fertility deities in some polytheistic narratives. We may even note that God artistically and pragmatically brought about our life-filled world progressively, rather than instantly, starting from less complex organisms and climaxing in humanity. Interestingly, theists can read the scientific record in a similar way, especially if they understand the “days” figuratively or as simply periods of time or the narrative framework of a work week. (The Hebrew term translated “day” is amorphous enough by itself to cover three different periods of time in the Genesis narrative: 1:5; 2:4.)
Whereas many readers today will enter such a world imaginatively without construing the narrative literally, most would construe differently shaped narratives such as those in 2 Kings or the Gospel of Luke very differently. In each case, though, we must hear and embrace the message of the text, even when it offends our cultural sensibilities—for example, by affirming a wise originator of the cosmos or acknowledging a divine purpose in history or challenging our vested economic interests.
When Harmonizing Details Often Misses the Point
Harmonizing and demanding precision on every detail can sometimes miss the point. 22 That is not to say that a writer is being dishonest about information; it is simply to recognize what we already noticed from relevance theory: communication uses cultural conventions, and in a given culture some expressions are simply understood, or genre conventions taken for granted, without any need for further explanation.
Matthew 8 and Luke 7 clearly speak of the same centurion, but in Matthew the centurion approaches and addresses Jesus directly whereas in Luke he does so only through intermediaries. Is this a contradiction, or merely a difference, in terms of what the writers wish to communicate? Or is it simply an ancient biographic technique that one scholar has called “spotlighting,” allowing Matthew to condense the account by omitting irrelevant intermediaries (as he also does with the messengers in Mark 5:35)? 23
Such questions are not limited to ancient sources. Take, for example, how Nabeel Qureshi explicitly articulates his literary method in his account of his coming to faith. “By its very nature, a narrative biography must take certain liberties with the story it shares.” Sometimes Dr. Qureshi had to conflate conversations, displace some accounts from actual chronology to maintain topical continuity, and (as in the example from Matt 8) omit some persons present on an occasion “for the sake of clarity. All these devices are normal for narrative biographies; they are in fact normal for human mnemonics.” 24 Because Dr. Qureshi also deals with questions of oral tradition and ancient genres, he is sensitive enough to how some of his dialogue partners could hear him to qualify his case. But as he points out, given the genre conventions, these minor issues are normally simply taken for granted.
Likewise, my wife and I have shared some of our experiences in a popular-level book called Impossible Love. 25 For this book, we could often accurately reconstruct fairly detailed scenes based on our journal entries. Nevertheless, at times the journals mentioned only that someone in a group offered advice, and so, for the sake of narration (and with the general permission of the main surviving characters), we simply named someone present as the speaker. Having cut perhaps 45 percent of the original manuscript, I left only details most relevant to the story line, having removed numerous points of explanation. We changed the names of some important characters to protect their identity, and two marginal characters because none of my sources remembered their names.
Our editor at Chosen Books, Jane Campbell, a firm inerrantist, noted this tension when people speak in nonliteral ways. “I’ll hear someone saying, ‘I built my house’ in such-and-such a way, and think, He didn’t actually build that house. ” Were this biblical language, I could well imagine a popular-level skeptic finding here a smoking gun of testimony-discrediting contradiction, and a popular-level conservative insisting that in fact there is no reason to doubt that the speaker had built the house by himself, the carpenters and electricians merely handing him the bricks and wires.
Likewise, Jane noted, “Chosen published a narrative writer years ago, in a succession of books, who could tell a story once with Coke and another time with Pepsi. This will drive me wild in writing—‘Was it Coke or was it Pepsi?’—but also set up an author for criticism that she isn’t telling the truth, when—truth to tell—that author just wasn’t a detail person.” 26 Personally, unless I wrote it down at the time, I wouldn’t know what I drank on an occasion, unless it was something special like the kunu (which included raw milk) that once made me sick in Africa, or the bissap (made from the juice of an African flower) that I find delightful. And neither I nor most readers would care; many of us simply use “Coke” and similar labels as referring to any soft drink. There is no need to harmonize—with our imaginary extreme conservative—that the narrative writer mixed Coke and Pepsi in the same glass on that occasion. (After all, it is not impossible!) Or to suggest that she must have run out of Coke and therefore added Pepsi—all speculation aside, of course.
Some twentieth-century readers in the United States tried to harmonize every detail without always taking into account the difference between ancient genres and modern ones related to them. Some circles today associate me with arguing for the historical reliability of the Gospels and Acts; and I do, with full conviction, contend that they are reliable by the standards of ancient biography and history. There is a range of variation in details (and a few cases that are unusually divergent), 27 but this is similar to what we find in some of the best cases of ancient biography. 28 Unless we artificially impose on the Gospels the standards of modern genres that did not yet exist in their day and that barely anyone expected, such variations are not problematic.
The Gospels and Acts, however, are works about recent figures, written within living memory of eyewitnesses. I cannot expect colleagues in Old Testament to handle their narratives in precisely the same way that I do the Gospels. Some parts of the Old Testament follow earlier narrative models in reciting the past, sometimes employing traditions passed on orally for much longer periods of time.
While evangelical biblical scholars are generally aware of these sorts of questions, traditional lay interpreters often are not, and some passages may raise problems for them. Since some arguments are about how to interpret silence of evidence, which often involves burden of proof and the bar of evidence expected, here I want to offer some more conspicuous cases that demand of some conservative critics more charity for biblically faithful colleagues in Old Testament. For example, after killing Goliath David brought his head to Jerusalem in 1 Sam 17:54; but Jerusalem became Israelite territory only many years later (2 Sam 5:6–9). It is unlikely that it means that David dried the head and brought it to Jerusalem years later (after carrying it around in the wilderness while he fled Saul). It is also unlikely that David impaled the head outside Jerusalem shortly after Goliath’s death as a warning that he was coming after the Jebusites later. One might suggest that Saul temporarily controlled Jerusalem at this time and the city was later overrun again by Jebusites, requiring David’s conquest; we lack, however, clear supporting information for this idea. A likelier speculation would be that David brought the head to the house of worship that was later in Jerusalem (cf. 1 Sam 21:9); yet this solution, too, might disturb the most inflexible interpreter.
Was it in Moses’s day, with the conquest of Gilead, that Jair the descendant of Manasseh captured towns there and called them Havvoth Jair (Deut 3:14; Num 32:40–41)? Or was it in the period of the judges (Judg 10:3–4)? Probably the narrator regarding Moses’s day goes on to summarize work that extended beyond Moses’s time, but even in this case the conquest and naming must come long after Moses if Judges recounts the leaders with any semblance of chronology (cf. “after him” in 10:3). Similarly, different sources agree that Jehu’s revolt led to Ahaziah’s death, but the dramatic details vary:
• When King Ahaziah of Judah saw this, he fled in the direction of Bethhaggan. Jehu pursued him, saying, “Shoot him also!” And they shot him in the chariot at the ascent to Gur, which is by Ibleam. Then he fled to Megiddo, and died there. (2 Kgs 9:27, NRSV)
• He searched for Ahaziah, who was captured while hiding in Samaria and was brought to Jehu, and put to death. They buried him, for they said, “He is the grandson of Jehoshaphat, who sought the LORD with all his heart.” And the house of Ahaziah had no one able to rule the kingdom. (2 Chr 22:9, NRSV)
It is not difficult to find agreement if our concern is with the overall story, but if we hope for precision in matters of detail it appears to elude us. If one remains concerned to harmonize all details, how best should one resolve Genesis’s lists of Esau’s three wives?
Genesis 26:34; 28:9
Genesis 36:2–3
Judith, daughter of Beeri the Hittite
Adah, daughter of Elon the Hittite
Basemath, daughter of Elon the Hittite
Oholibamah, daughter of Anah (granddaughter of Zibeon the Hivite)
Mahalath, daughter of Ishmael, sister of Nebaioth
Basemath, Ishmael’s daughter, sister of Nebaioth
Is Basemath the daughter of Elon and sister of Adah? Or is she Ishmael’s daughter and sister of Mahalath? Or perhaps someone would argue that Ishmael adopted her? Some would suggest more simply that the inspired author may have correctly recorded various available traditions without trying to harmonize them or choose between them. Are we obligated to try to harmonize those traditions? Or should we allow the first recounters and scribes of this material in Genesis the same freedom their contemporaries may have taken in recording various oral traditions?
On a popular level, an inflexible defender of traditional approaches could dismiss the matter rhetorically the way such matters are often dismissed: by simply changing the subject after denouncing me as a liberal for admitting the existence of these differences. Denouncing me as a liberal, that is, for paying inordinately close attention to the text while reading through it devotionally in Hebrew. 29
I raise these issues not to contend for a particular solution to them, nor to provide a comprehensive list of what interpreters sometimes call “problem passages.” I raise them merely as samples to suggest that fixation on resolving details to this degree may be counter to the narratives’ original purpose. Ancient Israelite hearers heard these accounts over and over, yet apparently did not find them problematic. 30 When later rabbis did try to resolve such issues, their traditions include multiple possible (as well as not a few impossible!) solutions. We may wish to grant our modern colleagues charity when they seek to grapple with such questions, just as most of us who love the book of Revelation or epistle of James grant Eusebius or Luther charity for questioning their canonicity.
What It Really Means to Have Faith in God’s Word
To have faith in God’s Word does not mean that we stand firm on our particular church’s traditions or on our theoretical presuppositions about how God should have inspired Scripture (how we would have done it ourselves, we mean, had we been infinite) rather than on careful examination of how he chose to do so. 31 It means that we trust whatever God speaks as reliable, and, because we share the view that Scripture is God-inspired (see 2 Tim 3:16; 2 Pet 1:20–21), 32 that we stand in awe of it (Ezra 10:3; Ps 119:120, 161; cf. Isa 66:2, 5), and therefore devote our most diligent interpretive effort to honestly discerning and embracing its message (Ezra 7:10). 33
In cases such as the examples offered above, what does it mean to have faith in God’s Word? Is it only those who harmonize the passages who have faith in God’s Word? Or can those who allow that many ancient writers had different interests than do modern historians also have faith in these texts? Please note that I am not denying that historical events stand behind historical narratives, but just allowing for different ways of writing history in different periods, some of which allow inference, varied traditions, or fleshing out a narrative, in how the story is narrated. Some may consider it more faithful to God’s Word to take into account the phenomena of the inspired texts as we have them rather than to try to harmonize them in a way meant to fit modern conceptions of the way God should have inspired the text.
My point is to invite all of us, whether on such questions others are more “conservative” or more “liberal” than I am, to consider the demands of faith in Scripture. Having faith in God’s Word does not dictate a specific historical method, apart from that we embrace what is elicited from us by the character of the texts themselves in their historical context (which ideally should include the expectations of the texts’ contemporaries for the sort of historical or other genre in which the passages were composed). Embracing God’s Word in faith means embracing the message it communicates. If we argue vociferously for a particular interpretive approach to the creation narratives, yet fail to respond with awe toward the genuine creator of heaven and earth, we are not embracing the message with genuine personal faith. If we argue for a particular historical approach to Ahaziah’s death, yet fail to acknowledge that God is sovereign and judges wickedness in real history and in the present, we are rejecting the message of the text.
In these terms, hard cessationism, which offers an intellectual approach to the text (not unlike that of older liberal critics), can be an unbelieving approach, though not deliberately. In its strictest form, it fails to embrace the continuing relevance of a major aspect of the biblical message—namely, that we should expect God’s continuing activity in history and in our lives. It cheapens the demand of faith because its way of believing the text raises no expectations.
Some of us—cessationist or not—may be tempted to believe that certain divine activity has ceased because it is easier for us to believe our own limited experience than to believe promises or models in God’s Word that we have not experienced. That is, we sometimes prefer to leave biblical experiences of God as foreign rather than exercise faith. Particularly if the only gift we have been trained to cultivate and expect in particular circles is grappling with Scripture’s grammar, we may think that we can handle this activity by purely natural skill, without any special divine help. (In many cases, seminary even trains us to think this way; our degree confers on us competence even if our course of study did not include spiritual maturation.) God does not do the same things in all times and places, but he certainly does more in a setting of faith than in a setting of unbelief! This may be especially true when pride in cessationist doctrine makes one arrogant about one’s reason not to need to believe.
By contrast, the genius of the traditional pentecostal hermeneutic was to live in the biblical worldview, expecting God to act. Granted, sometimes pentecostals have embraced texts in an uncritical way. Biblical narratives often highlight dramatic miracles without the authors intending to imply that such dramatic miracles happen at all times and in all places in the same way. But we should hear in such passages the reality of a God who has acted and can act in dramatic ways, challenging our frequent reliance on purely human resources.
If we approach the Bible with sound understanding, embracing it in faith means that we walk in light of God’s presence, recognizing that God may move in surprising ways. In fact, if God has granted us the light to recognize his presence in such a way, we are already living in the kind of setting where God’s activity may be expected—whether by recognizing and enduring tests of our faith or by more overtly witnessing his powerful works.
Paul’s principle of “hearing with faith” the oral message about Christ (Rom 10:17; Gal 3:2) should also apply, by extension, to how we embrace all of God’s words. Equipped with as much knowledge as possible about the world of Scripture, we need to enter its narrative world, suspend disbelief, cultural alienation and other forms of distancing, and expect to meet the living God there.
Because Scripture is textual and its largest genre is narrative, analogies from how we read other narratives are helpful. Without understanding or resolving debated historical questions about every detail of a text, we may enter its narrative world. Likewise, we must enter the narrative world of the Scriptures to hear there from the same God who inhabits that world, believing that ultimately that world theologically remains our world, a world in which God is active. Cultures and genres differ, but God, Christ and human nature remain the same.
Every human worldview, including any narrative about the world that we inherit in our culture as a given, is culturally shaped and thus ultimately subject to revision or reinterpretation. Some describe these frameworks as imaginative constructs, that is, incomplete interpretations of reality that structure data without accounting for all of it. Scripture, some argue, provides “an alternative imagination” that invites a new construction of reality. 34 It is, however, not pure subjectivity, but “an exercise in imagination that is grounded by the contextual realism” of experiencing the divine author who has spoken and speaks in the text. 35 Although Scripture samples rather than exhausts divine revelation, its story of redemption offers a skeletal metanarrative of true salvation history. 36 It can be related to what J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis called a “true myth.”
Literary critics emphasize that those who enjoy fantastic narratives suspend their disbelief to enter sympathetically into the novel’s narrative world. We likewise often suspend our cultural judgments when we enter more verisimilar narrative worlds in historical biographies, often setting aside the dissonance created by a cultural realm that is foreign to us. We can hear biblical writers most clearly when we enter their narrative world with its assumptions, suspending disbelief and judgment and coming under the authority of the text’s message.
We must marshall no less imaginative faith when we enter the biblical narrative world than when we enter others, although there are, of course, important differences in genres and, for Christians, in spiritual expectations. If I read science fiction or a Mayan myth or a Scandinavian folktale, I do not expect to hear there God’s voice (at least not regularly and in the same way). I also do not expect such stories to narrate divinely revealed truth about the real world, except perhaps in an extended sense by evoking elements of reality. When I read nonbiblical history, I might contemplate and try to understand God’s works there, but I do not ordinarily expect the historian’s interpretation of events to be authoritatively, divinely inspired. As a Christian, I approach the Bible with a different, deliberate expectation. I expect to find there a guide for life (both personally and for the people of God), even though I must carefully weigh how to take into account different biblical evidence. 37
Suspending disbelief when reading the Bible differs from suspending it with some other works, because the object of trust differs. Most believers in Christ intuitively understand the difference between different kinds of belief: children can relinquish belief in Santa Claus yet understand faith in God (or various cultural paradigms) in a different way. Engaging the imagination is valuable when we enter the biblical world, but biblical faith involves more than simply engaging the imagination. It also involves welcoming and embracing a worldview.
Ultimately we should embrace the worldview that the Scriptures communicate so as to view our own world in a different light (as opposed to primarily immersing ourselves in other narratives popular around us, such as those of current films, videogames, and political scripts of the left or the right). By this I do not mean uncritically embracing worldviews that some biblical texts simply take for granted as stage props based on assumptions shared by its original audience. These include such images as a three-story universe or rain falling from windows in the sky (cf., e.g., Gen 7:11; Mal 3:10; Exod 20:4). 38 That is, I am referring not to the cosmology or other cultural conventions that the biblical authors used to communicate, but to their message about God and his mission. (Again, distinguishing these elements sometimes can be complex in practice; that is my day job, focused on reconstructing the ancient contexts of the biblical passages.)
Instead I mean that we learn to envision a world alive with God’s activity and presence. (Some call this a “reenchanted” world; it seems theologically more precise to simply speak of it as a world where God is active.) Because one who embraces the biblical worldview in faith recognizes that God is active and present, narratives are believable on the level of divine activity and God’s employment of the human actors within the narrative world. An atheist may infer from patterns in biology and physics that nature explains itself without any need for a ghost in this machine; a Christian approaches the same scientific evidence with wonder, praising the magnificence of God’s design. 39
This is precisely the virtue of what early pentecostals and others like them brought to a church too captivated by the disenchanted worldview of modernity. 40 Instead of praying with hope that we will prove lucky, we can pray to the living God of the Bible who is not bound only by what might happen “on its own.” Even in the Bible, God did not do miracles for most individuals on a regular basis. But the God of the Bible is well able to do them, and even more regularly than we might imagine—in the Bible and today—to show us his providential work in our lives over time.
One may note, however, that it is difficult for one to enter the biblical worldview, suspending disbelief, when one’s mind is consumed instead by the world’s narratives. A biblical worldview allows one to evaluate other narratives, but a mind saturated with popular entertainment and ideologies will continue to find Scripture a dauntingly foreign book (cf. 1 Cor 2:11–15). We must immerse our minds in the world of Scripture so that it shapes and renews our thinking toward God’s perspective. Is this not part of what it means to forsake all and follow Christ?
Expectations shape how we approach any text. In terms of genre, we read science fiction, poetry, and a journalistic report with different expectations. 41 In terms of authors, we read a letter from someone we trust differently than we read a letter from someone who is always giving excuses and undermining our trust. Sometimes we discover that our trust or suspicion has been misplaced, and our reading strategy immediately shifts. In terms of information, comprehending a summary of what follows helps us catch the main points that the summarizer wants us to catch. Knowing the context that a work was addressing also shapes how we read it.
Expectations help shape our reading of Scripture. If we expect only to put in time reading merely to fulfill a duty, we may save up information for future reference (not a bad thing in itself). But if we read Scripture genuinely expecting to regularly meet God there in some insight that we find along the way, we are far more likely to hear from him.
Wrong expectations can also distort how we hear Scripture. Expecting to hear an abusive parent’s voice will falsely condition how we read God’s character. So will starting with unhealthy theological assumptions extrapolated from a few misread texts. 42 Early in my Christian experience I was fearful of the devil’s temptations, and by anticipating them I unwittingly simulated them to test myself. 43 Any bad idea that entered my creative imagination became a temptation for me to battle, and my pessimistic imagination did not always envision a favorable outcome. Once such an approach became habit, there remained much less for real external forces to do directly. How did this shape how I read Scripture? I felt guilty when merely reading about immoral characters, for once any sin had crossed my mind, I considered myself extraordinarily tempted. Intellectually I knew better, but eventually I had to also confront such habitual and misplaced guilt.
Likewise, as a young Christian I read Paul’s binary contrast between people of the Spirit and people of the flesh in such a way that any misplaced thought made me think that I had ventured into “the flesh” and thus lost my salvation. 44 My pre-Christian immersion in Plato even led me to read some of Paul in a proto-gnostic way until I learned better. These are all examples of misplaced faith, believing a false object because of reading with false expectations.
By contrast, the central Christian message about Jesus’s death and resurrection is the climactic biblical narrative, so reading in light of Jesus’s cross and triumph helps us put other matters in perspective (cf. Rom 5:6–10; 8:32; 1 Cor 15:3–4). God is trustworthy, so expecting to hear from the faithful God of Scripture will condition our reading faithfully. One should not approach this expectation legalistically, frustrated if one does not have a particular experience each time or during the entire time one is reading. We are not invited to simulate a sort of spiritual intuition at every moment; God is fully capable of making his voice clear to us when we need it. 45 But one should expect that the God who speaks by his Spirit will meet us in our study of Scripture. 46
Like biblical writers who interpreted earlier Scripture, we must interpret our lives and experience in light of Scripture; we thus must apply Scripture as well as exegete it. But we can apply it most faithfully—in a way most consistent with the texts themselves in the way that God gave them to us—when our analogies are based on the texts in their contexts. When we recognize how God worked in the past, we can live with the same sort of expectations today. That is, our experience becomes inscribed in the framework of the biblical story. 47 Expecting God to act today as he did in the Bible may be closely related to what the Bible calls “faith.”
Of course, God did not always act the same way in all the events in the Bible; there are many patterns, but one pattern is that God often accomplishes his purposes in different ways so that we look to him rather than to a predictable formula. Although we may expect that God is fully consistent in his divine character, we experience him on the human level as an exciting God of surprises. But surprises or not, a life and mind immersed in Scripture will read the world in a different way than a mind shaped more by the values of the surrounding culture. Although we cannot predict how God will act, we expect God to act, we depend on God to act, and we live always in the confidence that God is at work.
Reading the Bible as truth means reading it as a message from the one who is true, the one who may be trusted. Christians may disagree on some particulars of how this truth is expressed in terms of genre and cultural accommodation, but we should all learn to trust the God who speaks there. Embracing the Bible in faith means embracing its message for us today and living in the light of that embrace. When modern “faith teachers” summon their hearers to claim verses out of context, they are not truly honoring Scripture. To truly honor Scripture would require them to study the biblical text more carefully and faithfully. Such faith teachers exercise an insight that many of us neglect, however, when they call people to stand on God’s word as true.
In too many parts of the church we hear much of the Bible only as a historical record without building our lives on its claims. Too often Christians also compile its commands (usually quite selectively and without regard for their cultural setting) but fear to identify with the lessons in its narratives. We have barely begun to explore Scripture’s depths. But Scripture itself provides some guidelines for how we may proceed.