The Bible in English
Readers of the Bible are confronted by a sometimes dizzying array of challenges. Biblical texts originated in times distant from us, refer to places and persons personally unknown to us, and represent forms of communication increasingly alien to us. Although we possess no meaning-making machine or interpretive technique guaranteed to bring clarity for readers of Scripture, we cannot escape the reality that these books are our Scripture, that our understanding of God and his purpose are tied to how we interpret Scripture. The task of reading the Bible and making sense of it belongs to us.
Undoubtedly, for those genuinely interested in interpreting the Bible, the single most important practice to adopt is to get involved in reading the Bible with others who take its message seriously and who meet regularly to discern its meaning for faith and life. The best interpreters of the Bible are those who are actively engaged in communities of biblical interpretation. If such a group is multigenerational and multicultural, this is even better. There are two reasons for this. First, the books of the Bible have their genesis and formation within the community of God's people; therefore, they speak most clearly and effectively from within and to communities of believers. No interpretive tool, no advanced training can substitute for active participation in a community of Bible readers.
A second reason to read the Bible with others is our inclination toward self-deception. One of the most tragic effects of Bible reading can be that we read our lives into it in such a way that we find in the pages of the Old and New Testaments divine license for those of our attitudes and practices that are more base than biblical. We are too often quick to apply challenging messages to the lives of others and to assume that the Bible supports our ways of thinking and acting. We read Scripture in order to be addressed by God and formed by his Word. Other people set on the same purpose can serve to keep us honest so that we might hear more faithfully God's voice at those moments when we are tempted to substitute our word for God's.
Beyond this starting point, how we interpret the Bible is largely dependent on the mode we adopt in our approach to Scripture. The Bible can be read profitably in various ways - especially as revealed history, as inspired literature, and as Christian Scripture - and each suggests its own conventions for faithful reading.
When we read the Bible as revealed history we take into account that much of the Old and New Testaments contains books that narrate the story of God's engagement with his people. Whether we are reading episodes related to Joseph or Hannah or Mary or Jesus, we understand that we are reading more than "just the facts" The biblical writers were not interested in recording for posterity a dispassionate chronicle of events. They select the episodes they record precisely because they see at work in these events a significance that surpasses the events themselves. They see the hand of God at work, bringing to fruition his redemptive purpose. Moreover, in narrating these episodes, the biblical writers have woven these events into the grand narrative of God's overarching purpose, which runs from creation (Genesis) to new creation (Revelation). Reading the Bible as revealed history, then, entails asking how these events, these stories, fit within the grand story of God's creation and redemption. It means taking seriously the implicit claim of historical narratives within the Bible to provide God's perspective on what historical events are most important, and why they are important.
Of course, reading the Bible as revealed history does not mean opening a great chasm between biblical times and our own. After all, we are a part of the grand story of God's work too. As we read the Bible as revealed history, we come better to understand that this story is our story. As we read the narrative of Scripture, we come to understand the events and progress of our own lives.
Historical approaches to biblical texts serve another purpose. We now understand how all aspects of communication - the words we use, the language we speak, the gestures that accompany our speech, and more - arise from and gain their particular significance in relation to particular cultural contexts. Historical study of the Bible can help to expose us to habits of communication, ways of relating, and turns of speech that we would otherwise miss in our reading of Scripture. In an important sense, we show respect to those who wrote the biblical books and to those about whom they wrote, when we take the time to hear, as well as we are able, what they would have heard and to see what they would have seen. Sometimes, our hearing and seeing are helped by reference books, such as this one, which provide background material that would otherwise be unavailable to us. At other times, our hearing and seeing are helped by bringing to the biblical texts the same sort of good listening skills and cross-cultural sensitivities we seek to develop in our everyday lives.
Some possible questions that arise from this approach to reading the Bible include:
• What purpose does this text serve when read against the backdrop of God's purpose in creation and redemption?
• What social or cultural issues does this text raise for us? What customs or practices does it mention that we need to investigate further?
• Does this text mention persons (such as King Nebuchadnezzar or Caesar Augustus), places (such as Jericho or Megiddo), institutions (such as the synagogue or temple), or religious practices (such as circumcision or the Jewish celebration of Pentecost) we might need to investigate further in order to understand better?
• What is God doing in this text?
We can also read the Bible as inspired literature. Although we refer to the Bible as a "book," it is actually a collection of books, an anthology of literature, that contains a number of different kinds of literature. Leviticus is a different sort of writing from Galatians, just as the Psalms differ from the Gospel of Matthew, and each makes its own demands on the reader.
Writers such as those who penned the biblical books chose particular literary forms as they wrote, drawing on forms already present in their cultural contexts. Forms, or genres, reflect ways of representing reality within particular cultures. "Letters;" for example, are vital in historical contexts in which persons need to be present to communicate a message but cannot be. In such instances, the letter serves as a kind of "stand-in" for its writer or writers. The choice of a particular genre, then, is like an offer of a contract on the part of the writer. This agreement is shared when readers (or hearers) recognize and take seriously the form of the work before them. Taking seriously the literary shape of the Bible requires that we learn as much as we can about the nature of each kind of writing in the Bible, so that we are able to read it in ways consistent with its own character.
Reading the Bible as literature means other things as well. It means taking seriously such elements of writing as the use of symbolism and imagery and other literary devices. It means tuning our ears to different literary styles and the use of rhetorical conventions in the Bible. It means taking note of a document's structure and how such notice may enlarge our understanding of its message. And, perhaps most importantly, it means reading each book of the Bible as a whole document, each on its own terms, allowing the particular emphases of each voice within the Bible to be heard within the choir of voices found here.
Some possible questions that arise from this approach to reading the Bible include:
• What is the literary form of this book?
• What reading conventions govern the interpretation of books such as this one?
• Can we discern a structure within the book as a whole that helps us to understand the meaning of its parts within the significance of the whole?
• Do we recognize particular literary devices or instances of symbolism that affect how we make sense of this passage?
We may also read the Bible as Christian Scripture. This means at least three things. First, we approach the Bible from an explicitly Christian position, one that affirms that the Old and New Testaments are inseparable in their witness to God the Savior and that the coming of Christ is the point of orientation that gives all biblical books their meaning as Scripture. Even if Christians have long pushed the Old Testament to the margins, the reality is that we cannot know Jesus Christ genuinely apart from the God of Jesus Christ revealed first in the Scriptures of Israel, the Old Testament. The Christ proclaimed in the New Testament cannot be grasped apart from an understanding of the God who raised Jesus from the dead, and this God is the one who revealed himself in many and various ways within ancient Israel. The Old Testament is thus more than a preface to the good news of Jesus Christ. It is the revelatory narrative of God's dealings with Israel, the story of God's saving purpose, which culminates in the advent of Jesus. The Old Testament prepares the way of the Lord, and the New Testament proclaims that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
Second, even though each book of the Bible was written to people and in places far removed from us in time and culture, when we approach the Bible as Scripture we take seriously the faith statement that this book is our Book, these Scriptures are our Scriptures. We are not reading someone else's mail - as though reading the Bible had to do foremost with recovering an ancient meaning intended for someone else and then translating its principles for use in our own lives. When we recall that we are the people of God to whom the Bible is addressed as Scripture, we realize that the fundamental transformation that must take place is not the transformation of an ancient message into a contemporary meaning but rather the transformation of our lives by means of God's word. This means, third, that reading the Bible as Scripture has less to do with what tools we bring to the task and more to do with our own dispositions as we come to our engagement with Scripture. We come not so much to retrieve facts or to gain information, but to be formed. Scripture does not present us with texts to be mastered but with a word, God's word, intent on mastering us, on shaping our lives.
Some possible questions that arise from this approach to reading the Bible include:
• What commitments as Christian believers do we bring to this text? In what ways does this text support or challenge those commitments?
• How is the message of this text set within the whole biblical story of God's engagement with his people? How does it add to or direct that story?
• Does this text cite or allude to other biblical texts that help to give it significance?
• Understood within the whole biblical story of God's engagement with his people, what does this text expect of its readers? What transformed allegiances? What behaviors? What attitudes? What practices?
JOEL B. GREEN