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Gratefi¡l acknowledgrnent is made for peunission to use the following material:

Page 253: These lines of Anna Russell comprise the thi¡d vene of "Iolly Old Sigmund Freud," TIIE ANNA RUSSELL SONG BOOK, 1960, and are published by anangement with The Carol Publishing Group. Page 336: Excerpt from "Little Gidding" in FOUR QUARTETS, copyright 1943 by T.S. Eliot and ¡enewed l97l by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by pennission of Harcou¡t Brace & Company, and Faber and Faber Limited.

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CHAPTER I .WHA'T'S IT ALL ABOUT?

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l\ ,lf ANY yeers ago when I began my service as minister in Harvard's LYltr¡emorial Church, an enonymous bJnefactor offered to present as many Bibles es were needed to fill the peJs. No particular translation was specified; and no obiections were mede to the Revised Standard Version. Before proceeding'too far along the road of this benefaction I felt it wise to take the advice of some colleagues, and I found their reection to be apprehensive, and in fact quite suspicious of the moti, vation behind the gift. "What does the benefactor want or expect?" I was asked, and warned that placing Bibles in the pews would create an invitation to steal tÈem. Further, I rvas wamed that "people will think that this ìs a fuñdamentalist church. If they see Bibles in the pews you will have an image problem.?'My colleagues and counselors meantwell, I knew, and wished only to protect the church from secular and religious zealots. These concerns notwithstanding, however, we eceepted the gift, placed the Bibles in the pews, and, happily, over the years we have lost quite a few to theft.

one orthe more " :::,:::":':::::"pon which even Miss Manners and other arbiters of social etiquette have failed to provide a useful strategy, is the one in which you have more than a nodding acquaintance with sorneone. At the point of introduction you got the person's neme, forgot it, asked it again, and forgot it again. Meanwhile you go on rneeting this person, ch:r'tting and being chatted'with, but you have cleady passed beyond the point where.you can ask for the

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The William Monow edition contains the following Library of Congress Caaloging in Publication Data:

Gomes, Peter J. The good book : reading tlre Bible with mind and hea¡t / Peter J. Gomes.

p- om. l. Bible{riticism, interpretation, etc. I. Tiile.

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*q 4) OPÐNING 1'HE BIBLE name again. It is easy enough to maintain the facade of friendship until that awful moment comes when you are required to introduce your nameless friend to a third party. what to do? I have seen artfur evasions such as "Surely you two know each other?" foilowed by a discreet with- drawal while they got on with the job themselves, leaving you unex_ posed. Another stratagem is to avoid the risk of introduction altogether by declaring emphatically, "Ah! Here's an old friendr" what we should know, pretend that we know, and wish that we knew, we don,t. Worse still, we do not know, without risk of embarrassment, how to ask about what we need to know.

This, I suggest, is the way it is with so many people and the Bible. Once, perhaps a long time ago in childhood or in early youth, or even as late as in college, you were introduced. you have a nodding acquain- tance with the Bible, or at least you feel you ought to, and you can recognize some familiar phrases, especially if they "sound" like the King |ames version of the Bible; yet, to ail intents and purposes, the Bibre remains an elusive, unknown, slightry daunting book. It is awkward to concede that you don't know very much about the Bibre, giverqits cul- tural prominence, and it is di{ficult to figure out how to get reintroduced without conceding your illiteracy. perhaps the lament I have heard more and more frequently in recent years is the one that says, "r wish I knew more about the Bible."

Poll after poll continues to find the Bible atop every best-seiler list, and one survey after another confirms the fact that an astonishingly high percentage of American households claims not only to own a Bible, but to read it on a regular basis. Hardry a hotel room in the world is without a copy of the Bible in the bedside iable, placed there courtesy of the Gideons; and through the unremitting efforts of the wycliffe Society the Bible has been translated into nearly every language on earth. There are Bibles for women, Bibles for children, Bibres fòr Asians, Bibles for African Americans. There are so many translations, paraphrases, revi_ sions, and editions now available, many of which are the products of the last twenty years, that the market for the Bible may well be saturated. In ihe introduction to their 1983 study of twentieth-century English ver-

whdt's lt AII ltbout? (s

sions of the Bible, So Many VersionsT, Sakae Kubo and Walter F. Specht observe, "Some people are of the opinion that there is a 'glut' of trans- lations on the market today. Some feel it is time to call a halt to the work of translation for a while until we absorb the flood of recent trans- lations,"'

Despite the ubiquity of the Good Book, it is increasingly clear that the rate of biblical literacy has gone down rather than up. A recent American poll conducted by the Barna Research Group discovered that ro percent of the sample of more than one thousand persons polled said that foan of Arc was Noah's wife, 16 percent were convinced that the New Testament contained a book by the Apostle Thomas, and 38 per- cent were of the view that both the Old and New Testaments were written a few years after fesus' death. These replies are worthy of the old Sunday school howler in which the epistles are defined as the wives of the apostles. The president of the polling firm commented, "Clearly, most people don't know what to make of the Bible. Adults constantly gave us answers which contradicted or conflicted with previous replies."" Ii is not that people lie about their knowledge of the Bible; it is that they often feel that in order to maintain their moral credibility they must reply in the affirmative when questioned by pollsters, since most believe that they ought to read it. Many of these modern Christians are much like the Emperor Charlemagne who, it is òaid, slept with a coPy of Saint Augustine's magnum opus, Thø City of God, under his pillow in the hope that this passive proximity to a great but difficult work might be of some benefit to him.

Heøring the Word

jlq"ti"g the Bible in church presumably helps people become better - acquainted with it. In fact, hearing the Bible in church was the way in which most Christians for a thousand years became familiar with scrip- ture, and in most Christian churches today pride of place is still given to the reading of appointed passages from the Bible. In the Anglican

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6) OPENING THE BIBLE and Protestant traditions these readings are called "lessons,, because it is believed that they are not merely liturgical acts but have a moral teaching function as well. This tradition of hearing the Bible read aloud in public is as old as christian worship. when saint paul instructs the christians in the corinthian church on a suitable order for worship, he tells them: "When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let alr things be done for edification." (I Corinthians 14:26)

In my naiveté as a pastor I thought that this tradition of edification in church was alive and well untir I once said as much to a regular churchgoer who every Sunday hears a psalm and at least two lessons, one from the old Testament and one from the New Testament, and has done so for years. Her response caught me up short. She said that listening to the lessons in church was like eavesdropping on a conver- sation in a restaurant where the parties on whom you are listening in are speaking fluent French, and you are trying to make sense of what they are saying with your badly remembered French ror. you catch a few words and are intrigued, trying to follow, but after a while you rose interest, for the effort is too great and the reward too small. That is a pretÇ vivid image of a fairly common modern dilemma, and most peo- ple find themselves too embarrassed to confess that this is their situation. It used to be said that most christian adurts live their lives off a second- rate second-grade Sunday school education, and that the more they hear of the Bible in church, the less they feel they know about it.

Many people want to do something about their biblicar iiliteracy. There is something there that they feel they ought to know about, and yet they are frustrated in their attempts to read the Bible and to make sense of it for themselves. Because it is unlike any other book, reading the Bible is an intimidating enterprise for the averageperson. To remind the reader that the Bible is not a book but a library of books, written by many people in many forms over many years for many purposes, is to further complicate the ambition and add to the frustration. Bound in its authoritative black leather and gilt-edged pages, with, in some edi- tions, the words of Jesus printed in red, the physical artifact of the Bible

Wh¿t's It All About? (z

has a certain aura. Add to this the powers attributed to it, with its des- ignation as "holy" and therefore suitable for use in oath-taking and in sancti$ring proceedings both civil and sacred, and the Bible is much more easily reverenced than read'

Inhibitions and CornPbxrties

It is not its status as an icon or holy obiect, however, that inhibits the reading of the Bible. It is the sense as well that the Bible is a technical book, requiring a level either of piety or of knowledge not available to

the average reader. There are also admitted obsiacles. What does a per-

son who has no knowledge of the biblical languages, no formal theo- logical training, and no experience in the very technical fields of translation and interpretation do with the Bible? An ancient answer was

to submit oneself to those who did possess those qualities. The image of formative Christianity as a "Bible-centered community," one contin-

ual scripture seminar for the faithful, is an appealing one, but totally false. Saint Augustine, for example, opposed Saint ferome's heroic proi-

ect of translating the Greek Bible into the more accessible Latin because

making the Bible more accessible would be more likely to cultivate a

conceit on the part of those who, because they could understand the

ìanguage, would now also assume that they could understand the book.

Vernacular translations of the Bible were forbidden to those few pre-

modern Christians who could read, and English translations of the Bible

up to the time of King fames's version of 16rr wefe generally regarded

by the rèligious establishment as doing more harm than good'

Ironically, it was the tremendous explosion in scholarship about the Bible itself, an enterprise whose highest motivation was to make sense

of the Bible and to clarify its complexities, that made it harder rather than easier for the average person to read the Bible with any degree of self-confidence. By the close of the nineteenth century, a period of un-

precedented attention to the complexity of bibtical scholarship, the frus-

tration of the average reader was rePresente.dsyio less a figure than

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8) OPENING THE BIBLE What's It AII About? ( g ancient text into the language and life-context oflate zoth cenhrry Persons.4

Contemporary Christians tend to avoid complexity as being hazardous to their faith, and are thus unprepared to cope with complexity when it confronts them. In April 1996, for example, all three major U.S. weekly newsmagazines featured fesus as the cover story for Holy Week. What was the reason? This was hardly an outbreak of newsroom piety, but rather the "discovery" that scholars were debating yet again the relation- ship between the fesus of history and the Christ of faith, and that many of the words and actions attributed to fesus in the New Testament were in fact, in the view of much of modern scholarship, the work of writers of the early Christian movement. "Some scholars are debunking the Gospels," ran Time's cover headline. "Now traditionalists are fighting back. What are Christians to believe?"¡

I was asked by many sincere believers as well as by the vaguely curious what I thought of Time's story. Would it do damage to the faith? Hardly. fu the sign in the old antique shop reads: NOTHING NEW HERE. Ques- tions about the nature of the gospels and of their place in the life of the church are as old as the gospels themselves. Questions about the resurrection are as old as the Apostle Paul's writings on the subject. These are matters that have always belonged to the church, and always will. Time's discovery of Christianity's two-thousand-year-old debate sug- gests only how far Time is removed from the intellectual life of biblical scholarship. But alas, the story also revealed the large gap between the basic working assumptions of biblical scholarship long held by the schol- arly community and the conventional wisdom or general knowledge of a less and less biblically literate Christian population. To make a story there must be winners and losers. The not too subtle implication of this Holy Week Special is that what the scholars believe they know and what the believers believe they believe are seen to be at odds, and if the scholars are right, then the believers must be wrong, and the Christian faith folds like a house of cards.

Grover Cleveland. In some exasperation, the twenty_second and twenty_ fourth president of the united States said, "The Bible is good enough for me, just the old book under which I was brought ,rp. ido not want notes or criticisms or expranations about authorship or origins or even cross-references. I do not need them or understand them, and they con_ fuse me."¡

A century later we can understand his frushation and his desire to return to what the scholars calr a precritical stage, and in fact many have attempted to do just that. After ail. we should not have to be a

"..aifi.delectrician in order to enjoy the benefits of the lightbulb. suppose, however, that that lightbulb does little io illumine the dark

places in which we find ourselves in these last days of the twentieth century? what are we to do with a Bible about which we know less and less, and which itself wourd appear to have ress and ress to say to us in language that we can understandz The question is not a new one. In 1969, in a small book with the provocative title The strange sirence of the Bible in the churcå, lames D. smart addressed the gap between trre fullness of modern biblical scholarship on the one hand, and thepoverty of biblical literacy on the other. In an America racked by thç intensities of the struggle for civil rights, the battles of the counterculture, and the depredations of the Vietnam war, the Bible seemed unequar to the morally demanding times, and its silence was deafening. How courd this be? In his Preface, Smart, a presbyterian minister and biblical scholar, attempted an answer:

Responsibility for this strange silence of the Bibre in the church does not rest upon preachers alone. Much too often they have borne the whole reproach without there being any recognition of the complex character of the dilemma in which they find them_ selves' Rather, there had been a blindness which schorar, preacher, teacher, and layman alike have shared-a blindness to the com- plexity of the essential hermeneutical problem, which, in simple terms, is the problem of how to translate the full content of an

rc) OPENING THE BIBLE

What Are We Doin¿? What can be believed about the Bíble? What do we need to know aboirt the Bible? Can the Bible survive the efforts to interpret and understand it? Can we? Is it wrong to ask critical questions of the Bible? How do we reconcile the parts we understand, and perhaps dislike, with the parts we do not understand but which may be salutary? When we speak of the authority of scripture, as certain Protestant traditions delight in do- ing, does that rnean that we suspend all of those faculties of mind and intelligence which we apply to all other books and all other instances of our life? How indeed do we, as fames Smart suggested, "translate the full content of an ancient text into the language and life-context of late zoth century persons" without risking our intelligence or the integrity of that text?

Over the years of my ministry in a university and well beyond it, I have come to the conclusion that most sincere Christians a1e curious in these matters, unlike Grover Cleveland, and want to become better acquainted with the Bible, I am further convinced that the more im- portance one attaches to the significance of the Bible both for the self and for society, the more one is driven to a consideration of questions which in an earlier day might either have been ignored or left to the competence of the experts. As making sense has as much to do with formulating useful questions as it has to do with d.eveloping useful an- swers, the thoughful but uninformed reader will want to know how to go about doing both.

The Episcopal Church, while not known as a "Bible" church in the sense of those evangelical and free churches that advertise themselves as such, nevertheless exposes its worshipers to a great deal of scripture on Sunday mornings. There is a movement to do something about bib- lical literacy âmong what one social historian of the Episcopal Church has called "God's frozen people." Understanding the Sunday Scriþtures, a release of Synthesis Publications, is designed to provide help to people

What'i trt AII ltbout? (tt

who have finally reached the awareness that they need it. The Reverend Dr. H. King Oehmig, editor of the first volume in a series on the Epis copal lectionary, says of it, "The Episcopal Church has more scripture on Sunday than any other denomination in America. After listening to the desires of the people in the pews for a responsible yet inspiring study resource to prepare them to hear the Word on Sunday morning, we have produced this unique resource."6

The United Methodist Church, America's second-largest Protestant denomination after the Southern Baptists, is also attempting to respond to the felt needs of biblical literacy. It has produced not only a series of books and study aids but a series of films utilizing the most sophisticated of contemporary biblical scholarship.z When I asked some Methodist pastors how this worked, nearly all of them were pleased with the results in their churches. The study program is organized into small grouPs that pledge to meet during the week for nine months, and are meant as bonding fellowships as well as study groups, designed to combine the best elemenls of the old adult Sunday school class, the Methodist class meeting, ìhe preyer meeting, and the support groups that have become the local units of our secular therapeutic culture. Apparently these groups help in developing a better knowledge of the Bible, and provide an informed lay leadership which enriches the work and the life of the local congregation at the same time. As one of the pastors said to me, "The church is in bad shape when the only Person who knows anything Þ about the Bible is the pastor."

These are clearly new initiatives taken to meet what is generally rec- ognized to be the crisis of biblical illiteracy' We might well ask how this illiteracy came to be, given that the Bible has always had pride of place in Christian worship and particularly in American Protestantism, but any of us who have had experience of what passes for "Bible study" in recent years in most churches can enswer that question. For many the Bible served as some sort of spiritual or textual trampoline: You got onto it in order to bounce off of it as far as possible, and your only purpose in returning to it was to get away from it again. It is the iay version of what Willard Sperry, one of my predecessors in The Memorial

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n) OPENING THE BIBLE

Church, used to lampoon as "textual preaching." The preacher who was keen to practice what he preached would follow this formula: "Take your text, depart from your text, never return to your text."

Bible shrdies tend to follow this route. The Bible is simply the entry into a discussion about more interesting things, usually about oneself. The text is a mere pretext to other matters, and usually the routine works like this: A verse or a passage is given out, and the group or class is asked, "What does this mean to you?" The answers come thick and fast, and we are off into the life stories or personal situations of the group, and the session very quickly takes the form of Alcoholics Anonymous, Twelve-Step meetings, or other exercises in healing and therapy. I do not wish to disparage the very good and necessary work thai these groups perform, for I have seen too many good effects and have known too many beneficiaries of such encounter and support groups to diminish by one iota their benefit both to individuals and to the community. I simply wish to say that this is not Bible study, and to call it such is to perpetuate a fiction.

Bible study actually involves the study of the Bible. That.involves a certain amount of work, a certain exchange of informed intelligence, a certain amount of discipline. Bible study is certainly not iust the re- sponse of the uninformed reader to the uninterpreted text, but Bible study in most of the churches has become iust that-the blind leading the blind or, as some caustic critics of líberal Protestantism would put it, the bland leading the bland. The notion that texts have meaning and integrity, intention, contexts, and subtexts, and that they are part of an enormous history of interpretation that has long involved some of the greatest thinkers in the history of the world, is a notion often lost on those for whom the text is just one more of the many means the church provides to massage the egos of its members.

Opening ihe Bible is the easy part. What to do with it once it is opened is more difficult. At the start of Lent each year, when the time for taking up a Lenten discipline is upon us, invariably a number of people will tell me that they intend to read the Bible from cover to cover. They mean to start at Genesis r:r and stop when they get to

What's It AII About? (rl

Revelation zz:zt. The enterprise is not as easy as it sounds, and people begin to waver in their resolve when their expectations of narrative in- spiration are not sustained by genealogies, codes of Jewish law, and ancient Jewish history. The New Testament is somewhat easier to digest, in part because it is smaller and its subject more easily identified as |esus and the early church. Nevertheless, it is not always clear what is going on in the Acts of the Apostles; the expectation that the letters of Paul provide a systematic correspondence is often disappointing; and while they find it fascinating, not many know what to make of the book of Revelation. Those who get through usually feel as if they have run a marathon, where the object of the course is to finish and not necessarily

to observe the landscape along the way. Those who do not cross the finish line often feel like moral failures who have broken their diet or fallen off the wagon and taken a forbidden drink.

The risks of discouragement notwithstanding, I think there is some- thing to be said for taking on the Bible in this way. It is a bit like total immersion in a foreign language; eventually, if you stick with it, you will get some sense of what is going on; /ou will see and feel the shapes of the language, and you will acquire a sense of those places to which you wish to return, and those places you wish to avoid. This is not a bad thing.

Tlte Construction oJ ScriPture

The Bible, however, is more than an endurance contest, and one may know bêtter how to make a useful reading of it if one has a sense of what the Bible actually is. At the risk of appearing to offend those who already know what they need to know in this regard, I begin by stressing

the fact that the Bible is not a book but a collection of books, in fact, a library ofbooks. Sixty-six separate books have been collected from the

writings of ancient Hebrews and early Christians, and by a rational ed-

itorial process have been brought together over a period of centuries to

form the book we now know aS the Bible. The first thing the reader

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4) must remember upon encountering the Bible is that it is a result or consequence of a complex process that is both human and divine. The relationship between the human and the divine in this process is an intimate one. These are writings by human beings who are themselves believed to have been inspired by God. It is further believed that it is by the inspiration of God that human agency is given the wisdom and the will to organize these books, and it is believed that through these books the divine word of God is to be communicated. Thus it is not sufficient explanation of the Bible to say simply that it is either the word of God or "merely" a human book, such as The lliad or The Odyssey. The fews who gathered together these books from a whole range of their writings and called them "scripture" did so in the firm conviction that God spoke through these human writings, and that these human writ- ings brought the people of God neerer to God. Thus, when they call the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures-known es the Penta- teuch-the Books of Moses, they mean that here Moses speaks of his understanding of God, and through Moses God speaks to his people.

Although Hebrew scriptr:re takes different forms-poetry, h(story, law, and wisdom-the subject is always the same: the relationship between God's people and their God. The human element in this relationship is significant and important to understand, for scripture is always un- derstood to be a human response to the initiative of God. The scripture of the fewish people does not simply record historical facts, but by its interpretation of history, the fewish scripture seeks to ask and to answer the fundamental questions of human existence. Who am I? Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? What does it mean to be good? What is evil, and how do I deal with it? How do I deal with death? These are both individual questions and, with regard to the fewish people, also public and communal questions. It must never be forgotten that it is a community of people chosen, beloved, and willful, to whom the Law, for example, is given, to whom the land is promised, and to whom a future is offered. The sacred literature of the fewish people reflects this conviction, and that literature is therefore regarded as sacred because God is seen to be revealed in it. The determination, however, of what

What's It AII About? ($

is sacred and what is scripture is a human ancl rational enterprise, and it tells us as much about the people of God as it tells us about God. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith points out in his book, What Is Scripture?, "Scripture is a human, and an historical fact. We may say: it is a human, and therein an historical, fact intimately involved with the movement, the unceasingly changing specificity of historical process, its grandeur and its folly."s

Thus the narrative history of Genesis, the legislative tedium of Levit- icus, the books of history Samuel, Chronicles, and Kings-the lyrical book of Psalms, the salacious, to some, Song of Solomon, the saga of |ob, the wisdom of Proverbs, and the salutary story of Esther are all regarded as authoritative and inspired because each in its own way has been proven useful in the people's attempt to understand themselves and their relationship to God. The Hebrew Bible is not merely a book of history or a book of devotion but a library of writings of proven worth, self-consciously composed, collected, and presewed as the repository of wisdom both human and divine. These writings reveal both the nature of the people who wrote and collected them, and the nature of their God. These writings are of course not God, and the writings themselves are not substitutes for God. That would be a violation of the first com- mandment, which forbids idolatry and false gods.

The Hebrew Bible is organized somewhat differently from what Christians call the Old Testament. The first five books are called The Law. The Prophets are divided into The Former Prophets, which in- clude foshua, )udges, Samuel, and Kings, The Latter Prophets, com- posed of Isaiah, )eremiah, and Ezekiel, and those prophets called The Twelve, comprising Ho¡ea, foel, Amos, Obadiah, fonah, Micah, Nahum, Flabakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. The third and final section of the Hebrew Bible is called simply The Wril ings, and includes Psalms, Proverbs, fob, the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles. This authoritative listing is referred to as a canon and evolved between A.D. 7o and r35 into its present form by a process of rabbinical councils. When fesus refers to the Scripture, and New Tes-

OPENING THE BIBLE

I I

!-F r'!

ó) OPENING THE BIBLE tament )ewish Christians speak of the Law and the Prophets, it is this Bible of which they speak.

The Cbrßtians'Book

When the early Christians, many of whom were fewish, ceme to un- derstand the Hebrew Bible as the necessary anticipation of their own Gospel, they reorganized the Hebrew Bible into four large categories: History, Poetry, the Major Prophets, and the Minor Prophets. Thus the elements of the Hebrew Bible were reconfigured into an "old" testa- ment, which together with the authoritative Chrístian writings, the "new" testament, comprised the Christian Bible. The Christian scrip- tures were chosen from a wide range of early Christian writings, and the final product, the present canon, represents the consensus of usage and dignity confirmed by the earliest churches in A.D. 367. The New Testament is not arranged in chronological order. For example, all of the epistles of Saint Paul are older than any of the gospels. Recent scholarship places the Epistle of fames as first by date, followed by I Thessalonians. To read the New Testament in chronological order is not necessarily superior to reading it in its canonical order, but it does allow us to follow the construction of the New Testament, and it re- minds us once again that the New Testament is also the product of a self-conscious, human, and rational set of decisions. The canonical structure of the New Testament consists of History, which contains the four gospels and the Book of Acts; the Epistles of Paul, both those by him and those attributed to him; the General Epistles; and in a category all by itself, the Apocalypse, or the Revelation of fohn.

The Apocrypha is a category of books that tends to confuse most Protestants unfamiliar with the construction of the Bible and the politi- cal implications of its various translations and editions. The books in the Apocrypha are those books and fragments that do not appear in the Hebrew Bible but which were placed into the Latin Vulgate as part of the Old Testament. These books were to be found in the Septuagint,

What's It AII About? ('l the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, but did not end up in the Hebrew canon. The Roman Catholic tradition regards these books as part of the canon, and since ¡,46, by decree of the Council of Trent, anathematizes anyone who says otherwise. Luther placed the Apocrypha between the two Testaments, and the English translations, while ac- knowledging that the apocryphal books were extra-canonical, found them to be useful and instructive. The Puritans decided that the Apoc- rypha was not inspired and thus removed it from their Bibles, and most modern editions of the King fames Version, following the Puritan influ- ence, exclude the Apocrypha, as do most of the newer English versions. The New English Bible, however, and of course versions approved for use by Roman Catholics, include it.

The place of the Bible in Christian theology is a subject of some complexiÇ and goes back to the earliest debates of the forming Christian churches as to whether scripture or tradition took precedence in the determination of faith and practice. The dominance of the Bible in the Protestant traditions, particularly that part of Protestantism known as the Reformed Tradition, and in more modern times, the Evangelical branch of Protestantism, has generated what is generaìly known as a "high view" of scripture. This view has generated a number of slogans, which them- selves are decidedly nonbiblical but which nevertheless convey certain doctrinal convictions by which the Bible is understood. The most fa- mous of these is Luther's sola scríptura, which means "by scripture alone." Under this view, scripture itself is the sole sufficient rule of conduct and belief for the Christian. Another principle, which is derived from this one, is the "authority of scripture," and it is to that authority that the church and its members must submit. The scripture in this context is viewed very much like the federal Constitution of the United States, except, of course, that it cannot be amended.

Various other slogans designed to affirm the primacy of scripture ac- tually in some câses make it harder to take scripture seriously. For ex- ample, in order to defend the integrity of scripture, some will say that either ø/l is true, or all is false. This is meant to discourage picking and choosing from scripture the things that we like as opposed to the things

r*Fl" i. ,8) OPENING THE BIBLE

that we dislike, but it strains credulity, and indeed the function of scrip- ture, to argue that the Ten commandments must be received in exactly the same fashion as the Song of solomon, or that the Levitical Holiness code is for christians of the same order as the Beatitudes from fesus' Sermon on the Mount. critics of the Bible are quick to point to the implausible parts, the petty anthropology attributed to the Hebrew God, for example, or fonah and the fish, or the dubious morality by modern standards of certain of the patriarchs and kings of Israel, and on this basis argue that the morality of the Bible and its claims to authority are either suspect or irrelevant. The "all true or all false" argument works both to defend scripture and to defame it, and as a principle of inter- pretation probably does more harm than good.

In ihe next chapter we will discuss in more detail the question of interpretation. what we suggest now, however, are some broad princi- ples which the reader of the Bible ought to bear in mind in becoming more familiar with the shape and content of scripture. These have to do with the character of the Bible, which is public, dynamic, and in- clusive.

A Publtc Book When I say that the Bible is public, I mean to say that it is a treasure that is held in common, it belongs to the community of believers and not to any one individual or to any one part of the community of be- lievers. The Bible may have its private uses, and it may be used privately and as a source of great strength in private devotion, but its fundamental identity is as a resource, a treasure for the people, In the sacramental sense which Christians recognize from the Communion Sewice, the Bible too is the "gift of God for the people of God." It is a very public record of the relationship between these people and their God, meant to be heard, understood, and remembered. When we realize the oral origins of scripture, and the fact that in the days before general literacy the only way that people became acquainted with the Bible was to hear

(rq

it in the company of others, read aloud by one who could do so, then we realize that like the ancient tales of Homer and the histories of Greece and Rome, these were public stories that communicated public huths in the most public of ways. Even today in the churches of Chris- tendom pride of place in the public liturgy is given to the public reading and hearing of the Bible.s

The internal architecture of sacred space says it all. There is nearly always a splendid lectern upon which th'e book is placed, not simply for efficiency but for display as well. On the altar the gospel book is given a place of great honor, and in certain liturgical traditions the reading of the gospel is made all the more public and grand by a ceremonial procession of the book so that it can be read in the body of the church, and all turn toward it as it passes in procession. The pulpit itself is meant to be the place in which the public nature of the Bible is given its most explicit expression. A sermon that does not attempt to address the Bible is in fact not a sermon.

The public nature of the Bible is meant to have an impact upon public life. Again, it is not a secret of private vocation but a public proclamation of what can be discerned of God's intentions for the cre- ation from the witness and testimony of scripture. People should not be surprised, therefore, that Christians always want to translate their un- derstanding of scripture and its demands into the public lives that Chris- tians lead. The Bible is meant to play a role in society, as are Christians. This public dimension of the Bible invariably produces confict, even in allegedly homogeneous Christian societies, and certainly in secular and pluralistic societies. This, however, is a conflict responsible Chris- tians cannot avoid, and the working out of the proper relationship be- tween the public dimensions of one's biblical faith and one's citizenship in a community that does not necessarily share or appreciate that faith is part of the inevitable and uneasy burden that every responsible Chris- tian must shoulder. The early Christian martyrs would have lived to ripe

. old ages had they not found it necessary to proclaim their biblical con- victions in public. To try to create a "Christian society" where there is no risk to the public nature of the Bible and the fáith that cherishes it

What's lt AII ltbout?

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is a form of arrogant escapism. The Bible is a public book, and as such will always give offense. Christians who take the Bible and themselves seriously have to be prepared for that.

A Livin¿ Text The second thing to be remembered about the Bible, as we proceed in our thinking about it, is that it is dynamic, living, alive, lively. "For the word of God is living and active, sharper than a two-edged sword, pierc- ing to the division of soul and spirit, or joint and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart." (Hebrews 4:rz) This means that behind the letter of the text is the spirit that animates it, the force that gave it and gives it life. Thus there is something always elusive about the Bible. This fixed text has a life of its own, which the reader cannot by some simple process of reading capture as his or her own. The dynamic quality of scripture has to do with the fact that while the text itself does not change, we who read that text do change;.it is not that we adapt ourselves to the world of the Bible and play at re-creating it as in a pageant or tableau "long ago and far away." Rather, it is that the text actually adapts itself to our capacity to hear it. Thus we hear not as first-century Christians, nor even as eighteenth-century Christians, but as men and women alive here and now. We hear the same texts that our ancestors heard but we hear them not necessarily as they heard them, but as only we can. Thus the reading and the hearing of scripture are for Christians in each generation a Pentecostal experience. That experience is described in the Book of Acts as the great moment when the Holy Spirit descended upon the great and diverse crowd of believers in ferusalem. The writer of Acts goes to great lengths to describe the diversity of that crowd, people from all over the known world who had little in common but ferusalem as the obiect of the pilgrimage. They all were filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in tongues.

Now often the emphasis here,is placed on the ecstatic utterance, the Spirit-filled glossolalia, the exotic sounds of people under an extraordi-

What's lt AII About? (", nary spell. Anyone who has ever experienced an outbreaking ofspeaking in tongues knows the exotic nature of that experience. What must be emphasized, however, and what is in fact the point of the writer of Acts, is that the people unde'rstood what was going on, and even more to the point, they understood in their own languages: not a paraphrase, not a delayed interpretation, not even a translation; they understood in their own languages. "We hear them telling in our own tongues," says the writer of Acts in Chapter 2, verse u, "the mighty works of God."

The dynamic aspect of the Bible has to do with this quality of com- munication-not simply out of context or beyond context, but within our own singular and unique context-of the timeless and the timely messâge of the Bible. Christians believe that this dynamic quality is attributable directly to the power of the Holy Spirit, the agent of Pen- tecost. In other words, all our scholarship and research, our linguistic and philological skills, the tools of every form of criticism available to us, are merely means by which the living spirit of the text is taken from one context and appropriated totally into ours. The history of interpre- tation, perhaps the most useful field in which to study the dynamic dimension of scripture, bears witness to this in every age. In this sense, then, scripture is both transformed and transformative; that is to say, our understanding of what it says and means evolves, and so too do we as a result. This transformation does not always repudiate what was before, but it does always transcend it. The Buddhists say, "Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; rather, seek what they sought." To understand the dynamic aspect of scripture, we must appreciate the fact that "what they soughl" seeks us, and in fact, "what they sought" is apprehendable to us in terms and times that we can best understand. So in the Bible we handle lively things, which means that we must be subtle, supple, and modest, all at the same time.

OPENING THE BIBLE

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An Inclusive Word The third and final landmark for those on this pilgrimage, in which we try to make sense of the Bible, is the fact that in addition to being both public and dynamic, the Bible is also inclusive. That is to say, it has the power to draw all people unto itself. Historically, we see the ever- widening circle of the Bible's appeal, and we can perhaps explain that by the cultural developments that moved out and beyond the provincial Mediterranean origins of the Bible into the Greco-Roman world, and then into the West, and then throughout the whole world. That, how- ever, is simply a map maker's view of the matter. What is more signif- icant to obsewe, and indeed more profound, is the fact that people and cultures foreign to the people and cultures of the Bible find themselves drawn to the Bible and understand it not as somebody else's book made available to them as an act of chariÇ, conquest, or missionary endeavor, but as their own book, theirs legitimately and on their own {erms. In the story of the fewish patriarchs, non-fews see themselves. In Godrs particular activity in ]esus Christ, people beyond the little world of prim- itive fewish Christianity see themselves and their story íncluded in God's activity. When in fohn's gospel (fohn ro:16)Jesus says, "And I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd," this is a great mandate for inclusivity which these "other sheep" recognize. fu fesus himself included among his own companions winebibbers, pros- titutes, men and women of low degree, people who by who they were, by what they did, or from where they were excluded, so too does the Bible claim these very people as its own.

It is one of the unbecoming but unavoidable ironies of Christianity that Gentile Christians, who were excluded from the fewish churches, and who in the times of the Roman persecution were themselves ex- cluded from all hope in this life, should themselves become the arch practitioners of exclusion. Even centuries of Christian exclusivism, how:

Wh¿t's It '\ll About? ('l ever, extending into our very own day, cannot diminish the inclusive mandate of the Bible, and the particular words of fesus when he says, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are healy laden, and I will give you rest." What Roman Catholic social theory teaches as the church's "preferential option for the poor," to the annoyance of Christians rich in the things of this world, is the same principle that extends the hos- pitality of the Bible, indeed preferential hospitality, to those who have in fact been previously and deliberately excluded. So the Bible's inclu- sivity is claimed by the poor, the discriminated against, persons of color, homosexuals, women, and all persons beyond the conventional defini- tions of Western civilization.

The Bible is not inclusive simply in the abstract and in principle. It is inclusive in particular. Your story is written here, your sins and fears addressed, your hopes confirmed, your experiences validated, and your name known to God. The most reassuring conviction of the witness of scripture is that we are known by our own names. In Hebrew's z:rz, |esus says, "I will proclaim thy name to my brethren," and the most telling moment of fohn's account of the resurrection is when the risen Christ aìldresses the distraught and confused Mary Magdalene by her own name, and in hearing her name called, she discovers who the risen one rs.

One of the great paradoxes of race in America is the fact that the religion of the oppressor, Christianity, became the religion of the op- pressed and the means of their liberation. Black Muslims ask incredu- lously how any black person in America could possibly be a Christian, given the legacy of white Christianity. The answer, of course, is that if Christianity in America depended upon white Christiairs, there would be no right-minded black Christians. What is the case is that Christi- anity, and the Bible in particular, did not depend upon Christians for its gospel of inclusion, but upon God. Thus black Arnerican Christians do not regard their Christianity as the hand-me-down religion of their masters, or an unnatural culture imposed upon them and thus a sign of their continuing servitude. Nol They understand themselves to be Christians in their own right because the Gospel, the good news out of

OPENING THE BIBLE

I

24) OPENINC THE BIBLE

which the Bible comes, includes them and is in fact meant for them. We will find that when we look at the life of the Bible, and the life of the world in which it is to be found, we discover that the heart of its public dimension, and indeed the source of its dynamism, is this prin- ciple of inclusion by which all of the exclusive divisions of this world ere transcended and transformed.

In thinking about the Bible-its public nature, its dynamic, living qualities, and its inclusivity-as we try to make sense of ít with mind and heart, we would do well to remember these three principal char- acteristics. They sewe as landmarks, points of departure and of return, and they wiìl guide us even as we seek guidance in opening the Bible.

---_--- ----r Orthodox parliamentarians. Despite what the Bible says, the rabbis have declared that King David was holy, "end," said one very prominent

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CHAPTER 2 A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION

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-f O read is to interpret. When one is reading the Bible, interpre- I tation is as risky as it is unavoidable, and it is not just trendy

theologians or liberal Christian bishops who get into trouble over its interpretation. In a debate in the Israeli Parliament in December 1995, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said that he disapproved of some of the practices of King David, particularly of his conquest of other peoples, and his seduction of a married woman, Bathsheba, whose husband, Uriah the Hittite, David sent to his death. In I Kings r5:5, it is written that David "did what was right in the sight of Yah- weh and did not turn aside from anything that he commanded him all the days of his life, except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite." Ac- cording to an account ín The Ì'lew York Times of December rr, tgg1, outraged Orthodox rabbis screamed at the foreign minister to "shut up." Another shouted, "You will not give out grades to King David!" A third man flew into such a rage of apoplexy that he had to be treated for hypertension in the parliamentary infirurary, and a motion was introduced condemning the government for having besmirched the "sweet psalmist of Israel."

Earlier in the year the same rabbis had been outraged, and again over remarks about King David's sexual activity, but this time their fury was directed at a female member of Parliament, the daughter of the late Moshe Dayan, who read from II Samuel rz6, in which David says of Jonathan, the son of Saul, "Very pleasant hast thou been unto me. Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of a woman." The homo- sexual implication was clear, and even more clearly denounced by the Orthodox parliamentarians. Despite what the Bible says, the rabbis have declared that King David was holy, "and," said one very prominent

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'6) rabbi, head of the Education Ministry's Torah culture Department, "whoever says that King David sinned does nothing but err.,"

To read is to interpret. This is neither an esoteric nor a subtle point, but when it comes to the reading and interpretation of the Bible it is a point that cannot be made too often or too clearly. A text may have a life of its own, but that life depends upon the author who gave it life, investing it with an intention, a purpose, and a meaning. The text therefore already participates in something other than itself; it partici- pates in, and at least initially gives expression to, the intent of the author. To tease out the relationship of the text and its author is a responsible task, but that of course is not the only task of reading, for there is also whatever the reader brings to and finds in the text, and eventually takes from the text. This relationship among author, text, and reader is known in the literary trade as the "interpretive triangle," and since readers sel- dom read in isolatio', and since texts, especially sacred or religious texts, are generally held in community, the interpretive triangle itself has a context, a set of circumstances that surround it and to which it responds. This context we call the "community of interpretation." Were we to visualize what we have just described, we would have a triangle within a circle within a squåre, a strangeJooking device, which,.like the sym- bols in mathematics, allows us to represent a process that itself is invis- ible and so fundamental as almost to be missed.

For most people, and despite centuries of sophisticated biblical schol- arship, the precritical view of the Bible remains: a book in two parts, or testaments, old and new, which is meant to be, in the argot of the late twentieth century, "an owner's manual" for living the Christian life. It is of the same character as any of the other basic reference books avail- able to us, and to be used in much the same way as we would use dictionaries, encyclopedias, telephone books, and other helpful com- pendia designed to get us through life. What The OId Farmer's Alman- dck was to nineteenth-century Yankee farmers, and The Sears Roebuck Catalog to their far-western cousins on the plains, the Bible was to the Christian. Often, in households where there were few books to be found, the Bible and one of these two would constitute the family's library.

A Matter of Interþretation (rt Many will say, "What's wrong with that?," and we can make for our- selves many arguments in favor of the simple virtues and values that issued forth from such households. These were the books, perhaps along with Bunyan'sThe Pilgrim's Progress, that made our country great. When the pastor of my boyhood church in Plymouth, Massachusetts, described himself as "preaching from the book that the Pilgrims brought" in the Mayflower, he didn't mean a commentary or a concordance or a volume of criticism, he meant the Bible, and in the Geneva translation.' It is an interesting facI, and plentifully documented, that the Pilgrims brought many books with them in addition to the Bible, and many of these were in fact commentaries and books of biblical criticism and interpretation. As we shall see, the English Protestants loved their Bible, but they also loved books about their Bible, which tale we will defer to another place in this study.

Do We Realþ Need to Know All TIis¿ Biblical criticism has a very bad name. The very lerm critícism implies a clinical disrespect and disregard for something of worth and value.¡ Criticism means finding fault, taking apart, destroying. Whoever heard of a film critic who liked what he saw, or a book of criticism that edified anyone other than the critics? The critic sets himself up as an arbiter and expert, and from his lofty perch tells people either what they should think or that what they do think really isn't so. Criticism undermines our conñdence in the thing criticized and, even more, our confidence in our own judgments and tastes.

Second only to lawyers we despise the critic, and our literature is filled with invective against them and their trade. Henry Fielding, the eighteenth-century novelist and author of the bawdy Tom /onøs, must have got some bad reviews, for he said, "In reality, the world have played too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are."

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Alfred, Lord Tennyson, called the critic a "louse in the locks of lit- erature"; Ernest Hemingway called them "eunuchs of literature."

The criticism of criticism and of critics is a rich field. Although critics could be left to do their worst in the pastures of high culture, rvhen they applied their methods and opinions to that which by right belonged to the people, to the Bible, they invited a violent negative reaction which true popular piety made legitimate.+ When after years of study and re- search the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was issued in 1953- the product, as it was believed by many critical of it, of a century or more of the higher criticism-itwas said by those who believed in an infallible iext that fallible men, the revisers, were not competent to alter an infallible text: the King |ames Version.

Even an infallible text requires interpretation, however. One of the most helpful new books in the field of biblical interpretation is Infro- duction to Biblical lnterþretation, written in ry93 by William Klein, Craig Blomberg, and Robert Hubbard, all three of whom are professors in Denver Seminary and from an evangelical tradition. They believe the "Bible to be God's written revelation to his people," and that "it records in human words what God desires." Their work is endorsed by an im- pressive list of scholars who share many of their theological and inter- pretive presuppositions about the role of the Bible in the life of the church. One of these says, "Discovering what God really means is a matter of life and death. . . . Understanding what the Bible says to us at the end of the twentieth century will be easier because of their Work."5

The authors acknowledge the difficulty of the task before them. How can one interpret a Bible "full of alien genealogies, barbaric practices, strange prophecies, and eccentric epistles"? While we might like a Bible that is simpler to deal with, perhaps a list of principles, or a straightfor- ward narrative, or a collection of aphorisms, we are stuck-my word, not theirs-with the Bible as it is.

"As it is," however, presents some significant tensions, if not out and out problems, in reading and interpretation. Citing Moises Silva's H¿s the Church Misread the Bible?, they face the problem:

A Matter of Interþretation ("9

The Bible is divine, yet it has come to us in human form. The commands of God are absolute, yet the historic context of the writ- ings appears to relativize certain elements. The divine message must be clear, yet many passages seem ambiguous.'We are de- pendent only on ihe Spirit for instruction, yet scholarship is surely necessary. The Scriptures seem to presuppose a literal and his- torical reading, yet we are also confronted by the figurative and nonhistorical, e.g., parables. Proper interpretation requires the in- terpreter's personal freedom, yet some degree of external, corporate authority appears imperative. The objectivity of the biblical mes- sage is essential, yet our presuppositions seem to iniect a degree of subjectivity into the interpretive process.6

These issues reflect the history of the interpretation of the Bible' Hør- meneutícs is the technical term for the discipline of interpretation, and the history of interpretation is how people in various ages and from various traditions have come to terms,with the complexities that these assumptions and concerns represent. If we are going to attempt to un- derstand the Bible 'ras it is," we are going to have to make the effort to understand how it came to be "as it is."

lTlho Needs Interpretation?

We do. It is impossible to avoid. The earliest Christians were forced to engage in an act of interpretation of colossal importance when they had to figure out how to reconcile their scriptures, the Hebrew Bible, with the most significant event that had happened to them, the resurrection of Jesus. For orthodox fews, the resurrection of Jesus was an event out- side of scripture and impossible to reconcile with scriph:re as they read it. Those who followed fesus and believed him to be resurrected f¡om the dead were regarded as discontinuous with scripture, and indeed as blasphemers and heretics. The debate in Paul's letter to the Romans is

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not so much about whether the fews can be saved under the cross, but about whether lews who believed in fesus were Jews at all, and heirs of the promises to Abraham. Thus, when in the writings of the early Chris- tians scripture is mentioned, that scripture is of course the Hebrew scrip- ture, the only Bible that fesus, Paul, and the earliest disciples and apostles would have known. The first hermeneutical task, therefore, was to reconcile the transforming event of fesus' resurrection with the body of scripture and with those who interpreted it.

There were two options available. One was to regard fesus and his teaching, now seen through the experience of the resurrection, as dis- continuous with the Hebrew scripture. A new order of reality had been created which was out of harmony with, and therefore superior to, the old. To be a follower of Jesus was to repudiate Moses. The other option was to see in |esus the fulfillment of all that had been promised and expected in Hebrew scripture and fewish prophecy. Thus fesus is not antithetical to Moses; he is the successor to Moses and to all of the prophets, and it is therefore through the apparent discontinuity of the experience of Jesus that we are able to make sense both of fesug and of Hebrew scripture. The "formed" or "formal" scripture, as we can at this time call Hebrew scripture, is reconciled to the new experience of fesus in the minds of those for whom that experience has become definitive, and their writings on this subject, what we may begin to call the "form- ing" scriptures, become the New Testament. To make this point more clear, it is fair to describe the New Testament as a Christian commentary on the Old Testament, a commentary that does not simply reconcile one to the other but appropriates the Old as its own. Thus, to the ques- tion about that body of scriphrre known as the Hebrew Bible-"Whose Bible is it, anyway?"-the Christian anstver becomes an emphatic "Ours!" It is Augustine who puts it most succinctly: "What was con- cealed in the Old is revealed in the New." The New Testament itself is the product of an early and radical hermeneutic.

This may sound too technical and too polemical at first blush, but most Christians have for so long adapted to this phenomenon of the appropriation of Hebrew scripture as our own that only when the litur-

A Matter of Interþretation (t, gical fashion of just a few years began to refer to the OId Testament as Hebrew scripture, or the Hebrew Bible, did we begin to ask if it was theirs or ours, and how it could be both. When I asked my students this question-"Whose book is it, anyway?"-referring to the Old Testa- ment, I got blank stares; and then I asked the class to listen to excerpts from perhaps the most famous piece of choral music in the world, the Messiah of George Frideric Handel. Immediately they got a very clear picture of prophecy and fulfillment, which is what Handel's librettist, Charles Jennens, intended. It is virtually impossible to dislodge the prophecies of Isaiah from the fulfillments of the Gospel; and for some, even the notion is heretical that one could consider such a possibility. Yet that fusion, that construction, if you wilÌ, is indeed a matter of interpretation.

There are many devout and sincere Christians for whom the notion of interpretation in scripture is anathema. They argue that scripture has a clear and plain meaning. To interpret is either to intrude upon that meaning with a view of one's own, or to otherwise confuse or confound. Interpretation is either to add or to subtract from what is already there; it amounts to a form of vandalism, and it is to be prevented at all costs. Those who hold to this view are fond of the aphorism "The Bible says what it means and means what it says." For example, in Matthew 8:rz, the outer darkness into which the wicked are cast is described as a place where "men will weep and gnash their teeth." A toothless reprobate asked his hellfire-preaching pastor what would happen to those who had no teeth to gnash: "Teeth will be provided" was his answer.

fu far as scripture is concerned, interpretation almost always implies that human meanings are being imposed upon divine words. That point of view, however, I wish to argue, is itself unscriptural. Scripture is filled with an attempt to interpret, to make sense of the things of which it speaks. In fact, ]esus' first sermon, in his hometown, was a reading from the prophet Isaiah upon which he expounded in good rabbinic fashion. For an account of this, see Luke 4lÇ7o. This is what teachers did: They took a text and drew their listeners into the interpretive triangle. Sometimes the interpretation was pleasing to the

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people, and sometimes, as in the case of Jesus' debut, the people were not at all pleased with the interpretation. |esus' congregation sought to kill him, an extreme reaction. Today the congregation would simply fire the preacher.

fesus himself is not always the clearest teacher, if his audience of disciples is to be believed. His parables were meant to amplifi points or to make clearer points of moral teaching, but his closest listeners, the apostles, never seemed to get it. The parables, however, and indeed, the miracles and the healings, are all teaching devices, exercises in inter- preting the larger principles of scripture that Jesus was intending to convey. The Sermon on the Mount, beginning in Matthew !, is one extended interpretive discourse on what it means to live in the kingdom of God, to be a full human being under the divine plan for society. The Sermon on the Mount is the sermon fesus might have gil'en in his hometown, for it is a consummate commentary and interpretation on what the fews would call "all the law and the prophets."

One of the most vivid instances of the function of interpretation with regard to the interpretation of scripture is recorded in Acts. 8:26-4o, where the Apostle Philip encounters an Ethiopian eunuch on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. The eunuch, a minister of state of the queen of the Ethiopians, and her treasurer, is, we are meant to understand, a man of parts. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was on his way home; and seated in his chariot, he was reading a scroll from the prophet Isaiah. The writer of Acts tells us that the spirit moved Philip to run up to the Ethiopian, and when he heard him reading aloud from the prophet, he asked, "Do you understand what you are reading?" The Ethiopian replied, "How can I, unless someone guides me?" He invited Philip into his chariot, and then, "Philip opened his mouth and begin- r-ring with this scripture he iold him the good news of fesus." The Ethi- opian was so impressed that he asked to be baptized, and Philip baptized him on the spot.

"Do you understand what you are reading?" "How can I, unless someone guides me?"

A Nlatter of Interþretation (r Philip asks the right question of the reader of scripture, and the Ethi-

opian gives the right answer as the reader who begins with the premise that help is needed. Full credit is due the Ethiopian, but credit must also be given to Philip, who used his proximity and his gift of interpre- tation to such good effect. He was, we learn from Acts, sent by the Spirit to accomplish this purpose. This is an example of what Paul means when in Romans he asks, "But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher? And how can men preach unless they be sent?" He answers his own questions: "So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ." (Romans rct4-q)

Interpretation is the ftrel that drives understanding. The making of meaning is what scripture is all about, the effort by every possible device to make sense of the divine in search of the human, and the human in search of the divine, the joy of discovery, the sorrow of loss. If scripture is about anything in all of its splendid diversity, it is about this, and so it is not really about whether there is or is not interpretation in the reading of scriptr-rre. Of course there is interpretation. The question is, what kind of interpretation? What do we bring to the text to discern what the text intends for us to find? For some it may well be a matter of technique, those technical skills that one tnust bring to get the most possible from the reading. All of us are not skilled linguists' however, able to read the OId Testament in Hebrew, the New Testament in Greek, and to supplement those linguistic skills with an array of theo- logical, historical, philosophical, philological, and analytical skills such as will make us masters of the fields of translation and interpretation. Few clergy, and, alas, even fewer laity, now Possess sufficient of these skills to be reliant upon themselves alone.

If not technique, perhaps chance is the best way to take the measure of the scriptures. There are many who still practice the random reading of verses once popular in certain Bible-minded communities. The the- ory is this: In that all of scripture is equally inspired and is therefore equally ir.rstructive in all matters, any verse, and any sequence of verses,

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34) OPENING THE BIBLE

is sufficient for guidance provided you are guided to them not by chance but by the Spirit. Theologian Robert McÆee Brown tells us of the de- vout practitioner of this method, who, in search of guidance, opened the Bible and put his finger at random on â verse. It was "And fudas went out and hanged himself." (Matthew z7:5) -frying again, this time he happened upon Luke ro:37, "Go and do likewise.,' To read the Bible as one would a chinese fortune cookie or some book of chance is to fail to understand what scripture is or what it demands or how one ought to seek its message. Scripture is not passive, and neither should those who read it be passive. As we read in proverbs 4:7,"-fhe beginning of wisdom is this: get wisdom, and whatever you get, get understanding."

If interpretation is not simply a matter of technique, and is too im- portant to be left merely to chance, perhaps, at least at the beginning, it is a matter of trust. In the teaching of preaching I try to communicate this aspect of trust and interpretation to my students. I do this by asking them to do four things: Trust the text. Trust themselves. Trust the peo- ple. Trust the Spirit. The idea here is that the text has something to say and that we may in fact be able to hear what that is in terms that we can understand and appropriate. our listeners trust that we *itt t.tp them in their process of discovery and discernment, and both preacher and listener are guided by the Spirit into a lively encounter with the text.

The element of trust enters into the art of interpretation of scripture when we understand that the Bible comes to us as a trust both from God and from the people of God. It is the record of holy encounters between people and God, encounters that have been reckoned to be decisive and compelling, and that have been preserved from generation to generation because they remind each generation of the presence of God in their lives and the search for God when the divine absence is felt. when we consider the sweeping themes wiih which the Bible is concerned, the fundamental questions that its protagonists ask, the por- traits of God and of men and women that it paints, the dilemmas that it describes and the hope that it offers, we can trust the Bible to be a window into the complexity of the human and of the divine. These

A Matter of Interpretation (ts

words are trustworthy and tue not because they correspond to verifiable but because spe.ak with a perceptive, truth-

fsl_esçurasy-pf*thp*-hparjr-an d " mi lds of men and wome-n very much ves. We trust the text not because it is "true" in the sense of

fact, but because in its infinite varieÇ it points to the truth and com- municates truth because it comes from the truth which we call God.

The Danger oJ Interpretation

One of the greatest ironies available to people who take the Bible seri- ously is that they may be tempted to take it, and themselves, so seriously that God and the truths of God to which the Bible points may be ob- scured, perverted, or lost entirely. The temptation to see in the Bible only the Bible, and to see no further than our own understanding of what we see, has frequently led to an idolatry of scripture as dangerous and pewerse âs any blandishment of Satan in the Garden or in the wilderness. This dangerous perversion of scripture is as old as scripture itself, and it is a result of temptation so subtle that we may not even recognize that we are being tempted. Such temptation flourishes at ihe point where the Bibìe is most relevant to us and where we feel the I strongest in our understanding of it. We acknowledge the power of the Bible, which we understand as the word of God, and at the same time we want that power for ourselves, to order our lives by it and to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves. So we seek to possess what the church calls the "true and lively word," and to invest God's word with our meaning. The results have often been disastrous, and the problem is as old as the effort to interpret scripture.

The temptations of interpretation take three forms, all related and equally dangerous. These temptations are a form of idolatry. They vio- late the first commandment, and they violate the believer iust as Adam and Eve were violated, and just as Satan would have violated )esus in the wilderness if he could have. When we read the Bible, and by doing so interpret it, we should be mindful of these three temptations:

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36) OPENING,I'HE BIBLE A Matter of Interþretation

me of a similar incident, this one, however, even more vivid. The preacher of her experience stood up and read his lesson from his Bible. He then closed the book and threw it out of the nearby open chancel window, and said, "'Well, there goes your god." He was of course making a point about idolatry, and he was illustrating it with an attack upon bibliolatry, or the worship of the Bible.

In the absence of a visible God, the temptation is always near to make a god of whatever is visible and related in some proximate way to the real thing. At its best we call this symbolism, the appropriation of qual- ities and signs that we can and do see and assigning them a function in behalf of the ultimate thing that we cannot see. In the state we do this through, for example, the symbol of the flag, which represents for us the substance of the state. In ChristianiÇ we do this with the cross. Liturgically, we recognize this process in what we call "sacraments," which are, in the language of the English catechism, "the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." Statues of saints and mar- tyrs, holy relics, even the architecture of buildings devoted to holy pur- poses, such as cathedrals, are all part of our human need to "see" the invisible, to vest what we cannot see but what we truly believe in some- thing that represents that belief to the naked eye. Such signs and symbols are means to direct our senses and our spirits to the realm of invisible spiritual realities.

This symbolism has always been a difficult concept for people of faith, for faith ought not to depend for its veracity upon what people can see.

/ The inherent risk in symbolism is that the symbol becomes a substitute for what it is meant to represent.'T'h. *.rn, becomes an end in itself, and the worship and devotion which the end requires, when devoted merely to the means, become a form of idolatry and an exercise in fraud.

The history of belief is, in the West, replete with instances of this con- flict. Early on in the Bible, the golden calf discussed in Exodus 3z is an instance of this dangerous substitution. Moses had gone up to Mount Sinai to receive the tablets of the law from God, and while he was away his brother, Aaron, was Ieft to contend with a people restless for some tangible sign of God's favor, and for a deity who could compete with

(y r' The worship of the Bible, rnaking of it an object of veneration and

ascribing to it the glory due to God z. The worship of the text, in which the letter is given an inappro_

priate superiority over the spirit 3' The worship of the culture, in which the Bibre is forced to conform

to the norms of.the prevailing culture

we may call these three tempt ations bíbrioratry, riterarísm, and cur-turism: Each plays its subtle part in interpreting the Bible.

Btbliokrry Years ago, in the days of compursory attendance at chaper in the col- leges across America, a preacher would have to go very far indeed tocapture the attention of a faded congregation worshiping under com_pulsion and the watchfur eyes of -*ito^ taking attendance. I reca,one of my own experiences in the chapel of Bates College, when, tothe consternation of the congregation, orr. _o.rri.rg t'e preacher of theday, a young and somewhat iconocrastic assistant professor of rerigion, took from beneath the folds of his gown a carved wooden African idol of some fertirity deity, took it to the altar, and placed it square in front of the cross' He then tord us that this was his god, and that there were lots more where this came from, and that as far as he knew they workedjust as well, and perhaps even better, than the one in whose name the chapel had been built. wet, this was strong stuff even for the pew- hardened undergraduates of nearly forty years ago. The dean and the presiden! both pious Baptists, were lost for words but their faces spoke volumes. our young professor had wanted to get our attention and he had got it; and for days afterward we talked of what we had seen and heard in the chapel. One had to work hard to remember that his tex! forgotten in the excitement of his heresy, was Exodus zo:3, .,Thou shalt have no other god before me.,'

A colleague who went to a sma' christian coìrege in the South told

ry : 38) OPENING TI{E BIBLE

tire Egyptian fertility gods whom they had known in their slavery. Aaron thereupon fashioned a golden calf from the gathered-up earrings of the Israelites, which they proceeded to worship.

The creation of the calf can be read as a longing after God, and the calf as a surrogate for the distant Moses whose absence distressed the people. Neither Moses nor God, however, took a benign view of what the people had done, and the golden calf and the worship and sacrifice that went with it were denounced as rank idolatry. God called the people a "stiff-necked people," and intended to destroy them for their ingrati- tude, but they were spared by the intercessions of Moses, who himself was furious at their behavior. Upon his return to the people he smashed the tablets of the law, and destroyed the calf. Idolatry was not to be tolerated. Throughout Hebrew scripture one of the corporate besetting sins is cultic idolatry, which we may take to represent in part a moral impatience and a desire to possess as one's very own the word and works of God.

What we see, and what we taste, and what we touch all have the illusion of reality, and thus does an image or a statue or a token or a book appear to be much more real than what the image, statue, token, or book represents. A picture ls worth a thousand words both in adver- tising and in religion, even when in religion those words are the words of God, but the appearance of reality, which the image is meant to represent, is illusory. Plato's famous dialogue on the shadows on the walls of the cave, and whether they were or were not reality', is an an- cient formulation of the problem. The question of image and reality is one to which Saint Paul turned in one of his most famous passages when in II Corinthians 4:r7-r8 he writes, "For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all com- parison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal."

In Christian culture the idolatry debate has usually associated itself with the notion of graven images. The early church was concerned with the question of whether or not the icons used in devotion, particularly

A Matter of Interþretation (zs

in the Eastern Church, were a violation of the prohibition against graven images as set out in Exodus zo. Those people against idols-the icon- oclasts-saw the reverence paid them as idolatry; those in favor argued for the pedagogical benefits for the faithful. The controversy was settled by the Council of Nicaea in 787, which permitted the placement of icons in churches as aids to devotion but made the useful distinction between authentic worship, which belonged only to God, and the rev- erence that could be accorded images, noting that the reverence paid to images was really reverence to that which the image represented.

Protestantism, with its Calvinist and Puritan inheritance, has always been nervous about representational figures, and the accounts of Oliver Cromwell's army and its desecration of stahrary in English cathedrals and parish churches are all too familiar instances of Protestant icono- clasm. Calvin, we know, was much against the use of graven images, as he felt that such use encouraged the unlettered in superstition and the temptations of idolatry. He took consolation in the hope that Christians, as a result of the reforms of his day, would be able to read the scriptures for themselves, and therefore would not have to depend upon images and representation for the word of God. It never occurred to him that the Bible, now available to all who could read, could easily itself become an object of veneration, an idol as dangerous as any statue or mural.

It was Martin Luther, however, whose reformation slogan, sola scnþ- tura, "by scripture alone," gave rise to the greatest temptation yet, which' was to make of the Bible a domesticated substitute for the authority of God. Luther challenged the authority of the pope. The teaching tradi- tion of the Roman Church, with the authority it conferred upon its bishops and priests, and most especially upon the pope, made the Bible a book that could not be understood outside the teachings of the Roman Church. The Bible, in a tongue foreign to the people, and mediated by a church whose clergy had a monopoly upon the interpretation of scrip- ture, was thus an inaccessible book, its truths and riches unavailable to the average Christian. Through Luther's challenge, the authority of the Bible was substituted for the authority of the pope and the Roman Church, and by this, for Martin Luther, both Bible and people were

40) OPENINC'IHE BIBLE

liberated. Nothing was to be interposed between the people of God and the word of God in the Bible.

Historically, the Roman Catholic Church has seen this quite differ- ently, and has been fearful of what it called "the shifting sands of private judgment." A popular Roman Catholic commentary on scripture has this view of the Reformation and the doctrine of sola scriþtura:

Through Luther, although Calvin seems to have been the first to announce Monobiblicism clearly, the Bible became the arm of the Protestant revolt. A dumb and difficult book was substituted for the living voice of the Church, in order that each one should be able to make for himself a religion which suited his feelings. And the Bible, open before every literate man and woman to interpret for themselves, was the attractive bait used to win adherents. Not the solid rock of truth but the shifting sand of private judgment is the foundation upon which Protestantism was built.z

Such a harsh judgment is not a cornpletely jr-rst representabion of the situation, but there is within this characterization of Protestantism a painfully familiar glimmer of truth. When the Catholic critics speak of the Bible as a "dumb and difficult book," they are, of course, not calling the Bible stupid, nor are they debasing it in any way. Thev speak of it as "dumb" in the sense of silent, that is to say, not in itself capable of explaining itself; and "difficult" because it is not, contrary to popular Protestant piety, clear and revelatory to anyone who chooses to read it. To give such a book the reverence due God, and to submit the Bible to the sovereignÇ of one's own reading of it, is to come dangerously close to the kind of idolatry that caused God to despair and Moses to lose his temper in a fit of tablet smashing. The Bible is not God, nor is it a substitute for God, and to treat it as if it were God or a surrogate of God is to treat it in the very way that it itself condemns over and over again. This first danger, giving to the Bible what belongs to God, while an understandable temptation on the part of the faithftrl, is nevertheless profoundly dangerous. In the name of Cod, and in the pursuit of good,

A Matter of Interþretatíon (+,

this danger will cause many to do much harm. We will see just how much harm in the other dangers and temptations associated with the interpretation of scripture: literalism and culturism.

Literalism

"The Bible says what it means and means what it says." This is a popular defense of the authority of scripture, and it is as dangerous and wrong as it is simple and memorable. We should always be suspicious when a proposition that involves anything as complex as the scriptures is re- duced to a mere bumper sticker. We can certainly say that the Bible says what it means, but that presupposes that we know what it says, and, as well, that we understand what it means when it says it. But we must remember, in English-speaking Christendom, that the Bible was written not in English nor by a single literary hand but in an ancient form of Hebrew, in which the lewish scriptures speak, and in a corrupted form of Greek, in wliich much of the New Testanrent is found. Moteover, these languages therrselves were translated first into Latin, and then back again, and only thereafter into now very archaic forms of English from which our contemporary translations are descended. So we must approach this question of what the Bible says and what it'means with a certain amount of modesty unfamiliar and uncongenial to most Chris- tians who describe themselves as "Bible-believing."

At the time of the Protestant Reforrnation it was politically incorrect to suggest that the Bible was too complex and difficult for the average untutored believer to interpret at will. In order to break the interpretive monopoly of the Rbman Catholic Church with its doctrines of the pa- pacy, colrncils, and the exalted role of tradition as the context for un- derstanding the Bible, the reformers had to argue that meaning was accessible and democratic, that anyone who could read could interpret. To place the Bible in the hands of the people was to place the people in charge of the Bible, or so they thought. True, the Holy Spirit was to mediate meaning to the individual reader, but authority was now re-

42) OPENINC THE BIBLE

moved from the community of the church to the conscience and mind of the reader. Since experts lvere no longer needed, every reader became an expert.

What then would prevent spiritual anarchy and as many readings of scriptural truth as there were readers to read them? A new authority had to be created in the place of the deposed papal authority and the dis- credited reign of experts. That authority, a phenomenon of a Protes- tantism carried to its logical conclusion, was not the authority of the individual reader but rather the authority of the literal text to which the reader submitted himself. Literalism offered to the reader the securiÇ that numbers offer to the numerate: a reliable and fixed content and meaning. One does not have to be a nuclear physicist to know that zlz:4. That fact is democratically available to all who knol it, and it is always so. Thus, if we can find out what words say, and hence what they mean, we as readers will be able once and for all, aided by the Holy Spirit but on our own, to know what scripture says and means. The words are absolute and fixed. Literalism thus becomes a means of liberation from the Çranny of a churchly and intellectual elite.

By the eighteenth century this power of the ordinary believer to read and understand the scriptures at their only significant level of meaning, the literal sense, would be called "common sense," and would appeal to the humanistic ambitions of Protestant believers unavoidably influ- enced by the principles of the Enlightenment. The great irony of the Enlightenment, now so much disparaged by the cultural revisionists of our own age, is that while it did celebrate secular culture and appear to dethrone pieÇ in favor of reason, it, at the same time,.made it possible for the pious to be liberated from the tyranny of their intellectual and spiritual overlords. Indeed, common sense was the coin of the realm for the common man. The secular principles of the Enlightenment enfran- chised the pious and gave them the ultimate sense,of self-confidence that made that "dumb and difficult book" available to the most ordinary of them. Literalism was the key to this newfound freedom; the sover- eignty of words now replaced the sovereignty of the church's interpre- tation of scripture.

A Matter of lnterþretation (+z

In late-twentieth-century America the vast majority of those Chris- tians who would define themselves as Bible-believing, largely drawn from the evangelical and fundamentalist movements of Protestantism, actually believe that they believe in a literal reading of the Bible. In fact, they are not literalist, at least not wholly or consistently literalists, but they espouse literalism because they believe that it liberates them and the text from obscurantism and secret knowledge not readily acces- sible to any believer, by the use of common sense. Why the literalists are not really literalists I will address later on, but the appeal of lite¡al- ism and its contention with other means of interpretation are as old as scripture itself.

Literalism is not meant to be a source of license or of liberty. Para- doxically, it is meant to be a source of authority to safeguard both the text and the reader from error, and even modern literalists believe that they are protecting scripture from the ruination of false interpretation and the individual reader from error. For the literalist, what counts is not what the reader brings to the text but rather what the reader dis- covers that the author brought to the text. Americans will recognize this intellectual principle in the doctrine of original intent, as it applies to the federal Constitution. The issue, framed in American constitutional discourse, is not what you and I might think the Constitution means; nor is it what the Supreme Court, at any given point, thinks it means. The only valid line of inquiry, according to the doctrine of original intent, is what the authors, the framers, had in their minds when they wrote what they wrote. It is the business of the courtí to interpret the Constitution on that basis, and the business of the legislature to legislate with that intent clearly in mind. It is no small point of cultural coin- cidence in contemporary America that those who find security in the authority of the text and its authors' intent in scripture, will be equally anxious to submit themselves and others to the same authority in con- stitutional discourse.

The fact that the Constitution of the United States was written in English a mere two hundrecl years ago by men of whom we know a great deal and whose political philosophy and worldviews are familia¡

44) OPENINC THE BIBLE

to us, does not mean, despite that proximity, that our constitutional process has been any easier to understand. We know, for example and fact, that the framers took no constitutional cognizance of women de- spite Abigail Adams's plea to fohn to "remember the ladies." We also know full well iheir view concerning the African-American slaves. Most of us would not want to reconform our country's civilization to these original intents, even though we know what they are.

In biblical interpretation, however, it is the combined fear of errors and experts that gives literalism its claim to legitimate authority on the part of those who would take the scriptures seriously. "We don't need experts to tell us what God wants us to hear" is a familiar and impas- sioned cry in favor of the accessibility of the scriptures, yet there is an equally passionate desire to make sure that what we hear, or read, is in fact what God intends. If we cannot be certain of the fact, then not only is there an intellectual problem, but of even greater sigrrificance, there is a moral problem, for how can we do God's will if we are not certain what it is?

Among the most public and bitter moral debates of our time is the debate over abortion. The Bible is silent about abortion, Þut the reli- gious zeal of the protestors at abortion clinics is basecl upon what they believe to be the plain and clear meaning of Exodus 20:13, where in many English translations the familiar commandment says, "Thou shalt not kill." The moral energy of the anti-abortion movement is fueled in large part by this clear and unambiguous commandment, which it claims is violated with impunity every time an abortion is performed. One has only to listen to the chilling justificaiion of his action by Paul Hill, the minister convicted of first-degree murder at a Pensacola abor- tion clinic, to sense the depth of conviction based upon the moral force of this commandment. The English is clear and unmistakable, but what the English says is not precisely what the Hebrew says or means. The olde¡ translators got it better when they translated the Hebrew ratsach in Exodus 20:13 as "Thou shalt do no murder," and the distinction between murder and killing is not a small one. Murder, in the Hebrew

A Matter of Interþretation (+s

language and culture, refers to the premeditated taking of a life outside the womb; killing had to do with the ritual slaughter of animals for sacrifice. The words are not interchangeable because the concepts to which they refer are quite distinct. Not only is the Bible therefore silent on the question of abortion, but the one text used to justify opposition to it is wrongly construed in English. There are strongly held moral opinions on abortion, and there are many valid and moral extra-biblical grounds for an opposition to abortion, but the literal, and commonsense, reading of Exodus zo:r3 renders a weak and inadequate proof text against it.

Literalism is dangerous for two reasons. First, it indulges the reader in the fanciful notion that by virtue of natural intelligence the text is apprehensible and therefore sensible. Despite genuflections to the no- tion of original or authorial intent, meaning is determined by what the reader takes out of the text, and this meaning the reader attributes to the author. Thus, what the reader thinks is there becomes not merely the reader's opinion, but the will of God, with all the moral conse- quences and authority that that implies. When Paul Hill and other zeal- ots murder in the name of God, this terrible danger becomes incarnate.

The second danger of literalism is that the power of private judgment may well obscure the meaning of a text by paying attention only to what it says. Literalism thinks that it is freeing the text from layers of early Christian antiquity and medieval exegesis. Allegories, typologies, and symbolic interpretations are to be avoided in favor of the pure and un- corrupted word. Literalism does not want the text held hostage to these devices, but literalism itself is hostage to the eighteenth-century illusion that truth and meaning are the same thing, and that they are fixed and discernible by the application of the faculties of reason and common sense.

The debate between what words mean and what we think they mean is as old as language itself. The positions are clearly depicted in the colloquy between Humpty-Dumpty and Alice, in Through the Looking- G/ass:

46) OPENING THE BIBLE

"I don't know what you mean by'glory,'Alice said. HumpÇ-Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don,t-

'til I tell you." "I meant 'There's a nice knock-down argument,',' Alice ob-

jected. "When I use a word," Humpty-Dumpty said in a rather scornful

tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less."

"The question is," ,said Alice, "whether you ccm make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty-Dumpty, "which is to be mas- ter - that's all."8

They argue on, although each confesses to much confusion. Humpty uses the word impenetrability, and Alice, no longer sure of English, asks him what it means, and really what does he mean when he uses it. Humpty gives such an impossible answer that Alice replies, "That,s a great deal to make one word mearì," and Humpty-Dumpty says, "When I make a word do a lot of work like that, I always pay it extra."

Language is not an end but a meens, and the end is communication with meaning and significance. The language of the Bible is meant always to point us to a truth beyond the text, a meaning that transcends the particular and imperfectly understood context of the original writers, and our own prejúdices and parochialisms that we bring to the text, Literalism is not part of the solution to this problem-literalism is the problem.

Culturßm

How can one not live in one's own time? How can one not be a part of the culture that frames one's experience? It is almost impossible to transcend one's own particular place in the world and in time, for we are who we are and where we are, Culture is the world in which we

þ--

A Matter of Interþretation ( +l find ourselves, and out of which we make meaning for ourselves. chris- tians have an inherited culture problem, however, for we are called to tr¿nscend this culture in which we live for one to which we belong by virtue of our baptism and our faith, but which has not yet established itself among us. fesus is understood as the one who was to introduce the new age, a new and radically different culture from the one in which he lived and died, and his resurrection was the unambiguous sign that the new age had begun. All who followed him were citizens of that new culture. Saint Paul tells us as much, when in Romans rz he writes that we ere not to be conformed to this world, but "be ye transformed by the renewal of your mind." Earlier, we have cited Paul's invocation of the superiority of things that are unseen over things that are seen, for "the things that are seen are temporary, but the things ihat are unseen ere eternal." Saint Augustine's enormous classic, The City of Cod, is an account of how the Christian is to live in two worlds at the same time, the visible and the invisible, coping with the one while hoping for the other. That tension between what is and what is to be is an unavoidable one in a Christian faith that takes seriously Old Testament prophecy and New Testament experience.

This is a problem, but it is not the problem of culturism, and it is to that problem and its relationship to scripture io which we now turn. Culturism-I confess to its coinage for purposes of this discussion-is the notion, more often unacknowledged than not, that we ,read scripture not only in the light of our own culture but as a means of defining and defending that very culture over and against which scripture by its very nature is meant to stand. In other words, scripture is invariably used to support the status quo, no matter what the status quo, and despite the revolutionary origins and implications of scripture itself. Under the ru- bric of culturism, scripture, rather than a critique of culture or a vision of another way and day, is chiefly understood as the iustification for what has been and what is, a divinely inspired apologist for whatever presently obtains. An early twentieth-century African proverb puts it well: "When the missionaries came," it says, "they had the Bible and we h'ad the land. Now we have the Bible and they have the land."

48) OP!]NINc I IIEì I]IBI,L]

C Þ

I I I I ¡

In reading and interpreting the Bible, the great temptation is to use it as the n-roral sanction for our owrì culture. In making an idol of the culture we seduce the Bible into its service, and reduce the will and word of God to a mere artifact of things as we know them. American Christians for most of the twentieth century were pleased to describe the Soviet Union as an oppressive system because it was ruled by godless atheists. These same Christians, however, were not so quick to point out that one of the most conspicuously Christian cottntries on earth, South Africa, justified its oppressive regime of apartheid, and the brutality nec- essary to sustain it, as the work of the Bible-believing Christians who were simply fulfilling God's will.

This understanding of scripture as a force for the preservation of the existing culture is not foreign to the Llnited States; indeed, we might say that such a hermeneutical principle is as American as apple pie. It does not take any effort to find at nearly every instance of our national history scriptural justification for whatever it was we wished to do. When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in the winter of 16zo and found both cleared cornfields and the local Native Americans enfeebled by sickness and plague, they saw all of this as an act of divine providence, likening themselves to the children of Israel entering into the Promised Land, which inconveniently had been previously occupied. The Indian wars of the next two centuries were sanctioned on not much more exegesis of scripture than this. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the notion that it was the will of God that America should civilize the continent from sea to shining sea, is a reading both of scripture and of history in over- whelming favor of the nationalist appetite for territory.

The niost vivid instance of the appeal to scripture in support of the culture, however, is in America's racial policies and its struggle, not yet by any means ended, between rights and right. Bçth slavery, and then segregation, were supported on the moral grounds of the Bible. Slavery, and then segregation, were not inadvertent in America; they were part of the divine plan. Many have wondered how southern Christians, far more fervent in the faith and visible in their Christian civility than others, could reconcile the apparent contradiction between their ardent

ç

A Matter of Interþretation

profession of faith and their vigorous support of sìavery and segregation. One must understand that southern Christians, by and large, saw no such contradiction at all, for it was all in the Bible. The southern way of life, and the "peculiar institution" of slavery, were divinely approved. More, perhaps, than any other charge laid against them, southern whites resented the charge that they were un-christian and hypocritical be- cause of their treatment of Ærican Americans.

They knew their Bible, and they knew that the basis of the subjuga- tion of the Ærican was to be found in Genesis g:r8-27. This is the account of the debauchery of Noah, and the indiscreet discovery of his naked drunkenness by his son Ham. Ham told his brothers of their father's condition, but they, averting their eyes from the humiliating sight, did not see what Ham had seen, and were therefore spared the curse that Noah laid upon Ham and his descendants. The curse on Canaan, Ham's son, found in Genesis 9125, was this: "Cursed be Ca- naan: a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers." The Talmudic schol- ars from ancient times have wondered what it was that Ham had done to provoke so vicious a curse upon his posterity, and there are many speculations: that Ham had engaged in immoral sexual conduct on the Ark; that he had sodomized his drunken father; even that he had cas- trated Noah so that there could be no more heirs from his father's loins. In various literatures Ham's son Canaan is the father of the Philistines, the progenitor of cultic bestial and fertility rites, and the ancestor of all Africa. Fo¡ tlre sin of his father, Canaan and his descendants are cursed to serve other races, are themselves to be regarded as suspect, and in ïe-nral-¡ä¿ttèis are to be restrained, as they are by nature potent and ldscivious.

in the American South, as in South Africa, the two greatest fears of the white Christian population had to do with rebellion and the uprising of the sons of Canaan fueled by a long-standing thirst for revenge, and a sexual revolution in which the fabled potency of the black male would be used to seduce and overcome sexually unsatisfied white womanhood. These two fears, cultural phobias, we might well call them, were suffi- cient to keep the white Chrístian civilizations who shared them in a

ffi

q

(o OPENING THE BIBLE

state of perpetual and militant vigilance against the black populations in their midst. It is only when we understand these phobias and their biblical basis that we can begin to understand the brutality to which the

¡,,.|_r-itl"sgbiected the blacks, and to which they subiected themselves. The sanctions of scripture made it all bearable, and thus they need not wonder about their own morality or humanity, or about the values of the culture that they regarded as steadfastly Christian. In the American South in particular, it was Bible-reading, churchgoing Christians, chiefly Protestants and largely Baptist, who could and would lynch, castrate, and horribly mutilate errant black men on Saturday night, and pray and praise all day in church on Sunday, without a hint of schizophrenia or even of guilt. How could they sustain such a culture for so long? The Bible told them so..

The African-American theologian Howard Thurman wrote about his grandmother, who in her girlhood had been a slave, in his autobiogra- phy. She had been taught to read and write, and she had been taught the Bible, and she knew most of it by heart. It was she who had taught her grandson the scriptures. When he got to theological school he noted that his grandmother had never mentioned an1'thing about Saint Paul. He asked her why. She replied that when she was a girl the black slave preacher always preached about Moses and fesus, but that when the white preacher came once a month to preach, he always preached from Ephesians 6,5, where Saint Paul says, "Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ." When she learned to read the scriptures for herself she took her scissors and cut out all of Paul's writings from the New Tes- tament, on the grounds that they were inconsistent with rvhat Jesus taught, and that they therefore had no place in the Bible.

Farther on in this book we will examine in some detail case studies of America's use and abuse of scripture, and the relationship between the Bible, which remâins the same yesterday, today, and forever, and a culture that is forever changing and evolving. There we will see the dangerous consequences, both to culture and to the integrity of the Bible, of culturism as a means, however inadvertent, of sustaining and

A M¿tter of Interþretation (.5,

validating in the name of God the prejudices of a parochial human community. Of the three dangers and temptations to which I have re- ferred in this chapter, this one is by far the greatest. Why it is so can be explained through an old aphorism that I learned from a friend who had first heard it many years ago, and could not remember its source.

"A surplus of virtue," it says, "is more dangerous than a surplus of vice."

"'Why?" we ask naturally. "Because a surplus of virtue is not subject to the constraints of

conscience."

That is the powerful danger of culturism. In the American South of slavery and segregation, at least until the time of Martin Luther King, Jr., most people could not be appealed to on the basis of the constraints of conscience because they understood themselves to be good and faith- ful peopie who were simply doing God's will. They read the Bible, they heard their preachers, they said their prayers, and they knew in their hearts that they were right and justified by the Bible in the cause that they sought to uphold by any and every means necessary. Yet the very gospel they used to maintain the status quo would eventually destroy that status quo, and that is the story that remains to be told.

Modestl, Feør, and Trembling

When we read the Bible we âre looking at the result of a set of as- sumptions and ambitions which themselves are not necessarily made explicit or systematic, but which contribute to the construction of the Bible "as it is." In fact, what makes the Bible "run," or "tick," if you will, are these assumptions and expectations with which it is constructed. We do not know all that we need to know. We do not know all that "they" knew. We do know, however, that what we have is what they have left to us, and that translating that treasure from their time into

52) OPENING THE BIBLE

ours and back again is an enterprise that cails for patience, endurance, diligence, skill, and perhaps above all, humility. Açæaqççjn,*çadigg

-thcse,texts.is,pe.rhaps, a4 çyqn greate¡ sin .than unbelief, and,,for,that- a¡'oga$cc that cr'owds o*t the spirit of God; christia,ns will be helá to a sfuict account at the final judgment: sinse diseerning what God, in the Bible, means for us to hear and to do is a matter of life and death, we must approach the interpretetion of scripture as we do ,our own salvation, working it out in fear and hembling.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to use the following material:

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by T'S' Eliot and

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CHAPTER 3 THE BIBLE IN AMERICA

.:.

T verylittlel-t ) Their vr_sio eal to the vision of the Bible to sustain their own vision, and both rcgardthe Bible as the moral plaÉorm upon which the well-being of the republic ought to be reconstructed. Buchanan argues that we once had that biblical basis for a civil society and have since lost it; and his goal is to revive a lost ideal. fackson agrees that biblical ideals make for the best of civil society, arguing that we have not yet achieved those ideals, however, and that change, not revival, ought to be the order of the day.

Conflicting visions for America arising from differing interpretations of the Bible are nothing new; that conflict is inherent in the very nature of America and its historic intimacy with the Bible as America's own book. Indeed, the first book printed in New England on the seventeenth- century press of Harvard College wâs the Bible. Our presidents are sworn into office on the Bible, and oaths in court are taken on them. In the culture wars we argue about the place of the Bible in our civic society, and politicians quote from the Bible in justification of their policy positions on moral questions. The ubiquity of the Bible in Amer- ican public life has long been an object of comment on the part of observers of the American scene.

The Citl Set on a Hill The process began early. The English Puritans who settled the eastern seaboard did not suffer from modesty but saw themselves as the New

j

;- i li

54) OPENING THE BIBLE

Israel, heirs of God's promíses to the Jews of the old Testament, and their leaders as reincarnations of the biblical patriarchs and prophets. They saw the New world as their own New canaan into which they would enter from slavery in England, or .,Egypt,,, by means of the ,.Red Sea," otherwise known as the Atlantic ocean. Armed with these self- enabling metaphors, these English puritans entered upon their destinies. The native inhabitants of the land also fit well into the biblical meta- phor. They were the equivalent of the philistines and the canaanites, whose destruction at the hands of the Israelites is the substance of the early books of the biblical narrative

when in 163o the Puritan armada reached the outer waters of Boston Harbor, fohn Winthrop, leader of the colony and a lay preacher, deliv_ ered a sermon aboard the lead ship Arbelra, which he titled "A New Modell for christian charity." The ambition of ihe sermon was to es- tablish the Christian basis for the new civilization to be established in what was then thought to be the "howling wilderness." The basis of this socieÇ was to be christian charity, where, on the basis of those prin- ciples enunciated in the Bible, particularly in the sermon .on the Mount, the strong would bear with the weak, the rich would relieve the necessities of the poor, and all would strive to construct an exemplary socieÇ that would be like a city set upon a hill. This was not meant to be only for the comfort and consolation of the inhabitants but a beacon to the whole world, to prove to the old and tottering kingdoms of Europe that it was possible to construct a christian society that would work. New England was not to be a retreat from the world, it was to be an example to the world; and of the three hills upon which the ciÇ of Boston was built, the principal one was named Beacon Hill, for not only would the light on its summit guide ships into the harbor, but that light would illumine the christian world. "The eyes of the world will be upon us," 'Winthrop said. If the colony succeeded, the credit and glory would go, of course, to God. If, however, the colony and its christian mandate failed, "Then," said Winthrop, "we shall be a by-word among the nations," a laughing-stock, another failed utopia.

The vivid and expl.icitly religious sensibility in this founding metaphor

The Bible in America ()5 has incorporated itself into the American sense of itsel! and in various forms and transformations it has been at the heari of much of our psy- chic ideniity ever since. our wars, including the Indian wars, the Rev- olutionary war, most certainly the civil war, and the two world wars of the twentieth century, are all in some sense Holy wars, fought with God on our side, and in behalf of a divine mission. our physical ex- pansion across the continent in the nineteenth century, from sea to shining sea, was described as our Manifest Destiny, a mandate from heaven. America believes in God at a higher proportion of the popu- Iation than does any other country in the west, and what is even more striking is that Americans believe that God believes in them! The literary critic Harold Bloom has written, "The united states is a religion-mad country. It has been inflamed in this regard for about two centuries now," and he calls America's intoxication with religion "the poetry, not the opiate, of the masses."'

An American Book? Is the Bible, then, an American book? Does it "belong" to us in the same way thaf The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, Cone With the Wind, and The Creat Gatsby belong to us? If the Bible does belong to the American experience and defines and is defined by that experience, is there then an American way of reading the Bible? These are inter- related questions. One can argue that the Bible is an American book because it defines the American experience, and one can also argue that the American experience is biblical because only an understanding of the place of the Bible in the American culture will help in trying to understand that culture.

To fail to understand or to appreciate the religious dimension of the American culture is io be unable to read that culture or its nuances in any effective way. Religion in America is not a hobby or merely a private pursuit-it never has been-and the religious dimensions of our culture are not likely to diminish in the foreseeable future. To imagine that as

r 56) OPENING THE BIBLE our American culture matures and grows old and sophisticated, diverse and pluralistic, we will grow "out of" oÍ "away from" religion, as, for example, France did after the Enlightenment and its revolution, or as we imagined that Russia did after its revolution and embrace of com- munism, is to be as wrong as wrong can be.

Seventy years ago, after the public relations disaster ofthe Scopes trial for conservative Christian religion in America, the considered opinion of the pundits was that fundamentalism was dead or was living in exile in the hill country of the Bible Belt. Fewer than forty years ago, at the high noon of the countercultural revolution of the r96os, these same pundits opined that the secular age was upon us and was here to stay. The "God Is Dead" theologians spoke of an age after God, Time mag- azine had as its 1967 Good Friday cover story "The Death of God," and the Beatles announced that they were more popular than )esus Christ.

Now, in the trvilight of this century and millennium, these predictions seem rather out-of-date. We find ourselves in a social, political, and cultural environment where religion is not only an issue, but iT is the issue; and our struggles, which used to be defined in America al battles for the "minds and hearts" of the people are today culture wars fought for the "soul" of America, and for the souls of Americans. This is not simply a shift in vocabulary, an appropriation of a new metaphor; it is a struggle for the reformation of our national character, a reformation as complex, ambitious, and destabilizing as any of those reformations that traumatized sixteenth-century Germany and seventeenth-century England. Marx thought that religion was the opiate of the masses: Harold Bloom sees religion as the poetry rather than the opiate of the American people; For so many Americans who feel dispossessed, disem- 7 powered, and victimized by the forces of change that intimidate them and seem beyond their control, religion is neither opiate nor poetry, it is fuel, a form of cultural adrenaline that gives would-be victims the courage to fight back, to reclaim what they believe to be a lost religious inheritance, and to insist upon much more than mere toleration. They want affirmation, recognition, and indeed restoration of what they be- lieve was once their place in the cultural sun.

The Bible in Ameríca (sz

Chan¿e and Continuitl

It is into this wellspring of frustrated, spiritually denied Christians ihat Pat Buchanan tapped in both his r99z Republican Culture Wars address, and in his 1996 presidential campaign. The secular establishment, with its values-neutral morality, its distrust of religion as fundamentally divi- sive, and in consequence, its segregation of religion into the private sphere, has managed to do what a generation of revivalist preachers and evangelists could not do. It has fired up Christian America and sent it marching into the voting booths of the nation. First the Moral MajoriÇ, and now the Christian Coalition, command the allegiance of millions of frustrated American Christians who feel that not only their religion, but the country which their religion built and sustained, have been taken away from them. With nowhere to go they have determined to fight to retrieve what is for them the lost ideal of a Christian state, an ideal that is decidedly "conservative." What we might call nostalgia with an attitude.

For many of the Christians who enlist in the current cuÌture war, the struggle began with what they believe to be the secularists' sustained attack upon prayer and Bible reading in the public schools. The sepa- ration of Church and State, they rightly point out, historically was de- signed to protect the vitality and integrity of the churches from either the favoritism or the hostility of the state. A nation whose chief legisla- tu¡e and highest court are opened with prayer, where the president is sworn into office on a Bible, and whose currency bears the motto In God We Trust can hardly be described as a secular state. Thus, to remove the symbols cif public pieÇ, and, we might add, the historic Protestant hegemony, from the civic culture of the schools was to betray an inheritance and offer an affront not only to God but to millions of believers in God and in God's special relationship with the United States.

The symbolic potency of the Bible as an "American book," that is to

Y

5B OPENING THE BIBLE

say, a book upon which Americans had a special claim and which had a special claim for America, cannot be overestimated. The present re- ligious activism in America on the part of those who feel themselves estranged from their own culture is essentially the response, at a distance of three decades, to that cultural wound inflicted by the removal of prayer and Bible reading from the public schools. fust as historians now think of wo¡ld wars I and II as but two episodes of one great twentieth- century conflict with a brief interlude of an illusory peace, so may we regard the current culture war as a continuation of that post-r945 Amer- ican domestic struggle to redefine the culture.

For those who hold to the intimate relationship between the Bible and the culture, the Bible often becomes an icon of that culture. The culture sees itself mirrored in the Bible, the Bible is understood to be the norm by which the culture is defined, and this often results in the Bible's use as a textbook for the status quo. Nearly every motion for social change in America has been resisted on biblical grounds-to change is to go against the Bible. What is, is what is mandated by the Bible. what is not, is not because the Bible either forbids it or does not endorse or require it. Thus, change is not simply tinkering with the culture, it is tinkering with the Bible, and therefore tinkering with God. This sort of view was expressed by the middle-aged Englishwoman of a generation ago, who said, "If God had intended man to fly, He would not have given us the railroads." Every reform movement in America, every movement for social or political or cultural change, has had to encounter an argument of this sort, and the ultimate resistance of ap- peals to fidelity to scripture. The example was set by |ohn Winthrop in 163o, and we have not departed from it.

This appeal to scripture has ironically also been made in behalf of wide-ranging and comprehensive change in American life. The Bible that to many seems an icon of the cultural status quo is seen by many others as an agent for social change, much of it radical. The arguments from scripture for and against slavery, for example, come to mind, and we shall examine these and other hard texts and changing times in the second portion of this book. Here, however, we shotrld look at a pow-

The Bible in Ameica

erful movement of our own time, itself a part of the renovation of the American cultural household after World War II: the movement for civil rights.

.' Many will argue that the history of civil rights in twentieth-century 'America is a history of the law and public policy. Others will argue that the achievement of civil rights for Æ¡ican Americans was one of the great social inevitabilities of our nation, an idea whose time had to come. Still others will see it as merely the last battle of the Civil

,,War. It may be any or all of these, but I think that it is important for " us to understand the civil rights movement as a religious movement

based upon a particular reading not only of the national documents of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, but of the Bi- ble. The civil rights movement was a moral ctusade, and the content of that morality was determined by a sense of biblical iustice and eq- uity before God.

It is the fashion to remember Martin Luther King, Ir', as the master orator and strategist of the movement, and its ultimate martyr; he was, for many, the conscience of twentieth-century America. It is also a part of the fashion, however, to forget that he was first and foremost a Chris-

tian minister whose thought and cadence were framed by an understand-

ing of the Bible as a way of understanding God's design for human beings. He was a Christian preacher before he was any.thing else. Re-

visionist historians who minimize this dimension of Dr. King and the movement he led diminish that movement and are incapable of seeing

it whole, or of understanding its motivation or its impact. The trouble with Martin Luther King, Ir., is that he believed more

in America and in America's God than America did. He actually be- lieved that the nation wished to be a nation under God, that it wished to live up to the moral ambition of its founding documents, that it wished to find a way to do right and to be right. Historians of the movement and biographers of King all emphasize his reliance upon the

strategy of Gandhi and the principles of passive resistance, and that that

strategy was only part of a much larger one, which was to shame America

into being what it pretended to be. He did not invite America to revo-

r 6o) OPENING THE BIBLE lution or to fundamental change, much to the annoyance of his more radical critics both white and black; his case was to urge America, and to shame it if he had to, into upholding its own first principles, to affirming its own myths and metaphors, to becoming the very "city set upon a hill" that the very white John Winthrop had so long before invoked as a vision of the New World.

For King, the Bible hardly read as a textbook of the status quo, for it was full of change from Genesis to Revelation. Adam and Eve are not permitted to abide in eternal felicity in the Garden of Eden. They must move on. Moses leads his people, often against their will, out of the stability of slavery in Egypt and into the vividly vague uncertainties of the promised land. The prophets of Israel are always warning the powers- that-be against complacency and against taking too much for granted. King would have known with delight and urgency the words of the prophet Amos, "Woe to those who are at ease inZíon, and to those who feel secure on the mountain of Samaria, the notable men of the first of the nations, to whom the house of Israel come!" (Amos 6:r)

In the Bible, kings are upended, kingdoms totter and fall, thpse who have power lose it, those who have none gain it. The New Testament is no easier: Jesus' very existence is a threat to any and every status quo, and his resurrection even overturns the rule of nature. The Christians of Paul's era reject the blandishments and power of this world; the Book of Hebrews celebrates a kingdom unlike those of this world, one that cannot be shaken; Paul seeks a peace that this world can neither give nor take away, that passeth understanding; and the Revelation of John is as radical a vision of the future in triumph over the present as the mind of man has yet devised. No, for Martin Luther King, Ir., the proof text for the movement, for himself, and for America was not one of the prophetic paeans to social justice from the Old Testament, but rather I Corinthians 15:52: "The trumpet shall sound. . . and we shall all be changed."

The Bible in Ameriea (Gi

rod,ay,bothsociar"::"'-:::::"::-::,srsareunhappywith the status quo. Each feels that the culture has reneged on a moral com- mitment in which each has invested heavily. To listen to the Christians who support Pat Robertson's 7oo Club is to hear a litany of betrayal and ,disenfranchisement and profound dissatisfaction with the direction of the country. "Moral drift" is what they call it. They recognize it in changing social mores that are tolerant on such matters as abortion and homosexualiÇ, and in a climate that seems to be driven by anti-family values, social violence, and the corrosive effects of an ever-present por- nography.

If the social conservatives are unhappy one would suspect in this win- lose culture that the social activists should be happy, but they too pine for the days of yore and the days that are yet to be. There is nothing more depressing than to hear recited the litany of lost ground and lost opportunity which so often is at the center of today's Martin Luther King, Ir., Day celebrations. As veterans of the movement age and their glory days grow more distant, they compare the moral energy of that generation with the apparent moral indifference of today. The backlash against affirmative action, the cut in social-service budgets, the hard- ening of attitudes toward minorities and the poor, particularly toward the urban poor, the seemingly intractable problems of blaek crime, the decline of the black family, and the economic instability of the black middle class-all of these cause social activists, in flights of rhetorical fancy not too far removed from fact, to declare that "we are worse off now than we were before the Civil Rights Act of 1964." The wholesale burning of black churches across the American South in the summer of 1996 is a hideous flashback to those long hot summers not so long ago, when in the South, instead of burning churches, they lynched the black people who went to them.

Two things hold these apparently polar constituencies of social con-

r 6ì',) opENrNG THE BrBLE servatives and social activists together in what ought to be a creative tension: their anger and their expectation thai things ought to be better. Of this visceral cultural anger that cuts across all conventional divisions in our society, Russell Baker has written, under the heading "God's Angry Land,"

' America is angry at Washington, angry at the press, angry at im- migrants, angry at television, angry at traffic, angry at people who are well o[f, angry at people who are poor, ângry at blacks and angry at whites. The old are angry at the young, the young angry at the old. Suburbs arc angry at cities, cities are angry at suburbs, and rustic America is angry at both whenever urban and suburban

: intruders threaten the peaceful rustic sense ofhaving escaped from God's angry land.

Baker calls anger in America "a new national habit." Angry white Christians and angry black social activists both feel cheated. The things that have always worked for them no longer do so, and their ange¡ stems from a disappointed conviction that somehow progress was inevitable and things and people would get better. fu a British critic of the Welfare State once noted, however, "Things have got better; it's people who have got bloody worse."

Sir Isaiah Berlin once observed that "the ideas that liberate one gen- eration become the shackles of the next," and in these tendentious times in America we are coming to a painful realization of that truth. We have always celebrated the notion of freedom, and by it we have usually meant freedom from restraint or constraint, and liberation from various forms of bondage and tyrannies political, social, economic, and ideo- logical. The history of our social experiment may well be the extension of that premise to its logical conclusion-the ultimate, nearly autono- mous freedom of the solitary individual from all restraints, constraints, obligations, and relationships. In these celebrations of "freedom from" as a uniquely American form of self-indulgence, the middle-aged Free-

The Bible ín America (62

men of fustus Township, Montana, are the r99os descendants of the fower children of the r96os Haight-Ashbury District, a comparison nei- ther would find flattering.

That rugged individualism that is the personification of our American sense of freedom, and which we celebrate on the Fourth of |uly and in our popular myths and heroes, also contributes to the breakdown of the social fabric that has always provided a secure context for our freedoms. Freedom "from" has not yielded to an appropriate freedom "for," and the national culture is much the poorer for it. We are perhaps further now from Winthrop's ideal of a city set upon a hill than at any point in our national history.

Back to the Bibb?

In times like these in America, historically we have been invited "back to the Bible," and there are many who issue that call today. So-called Bible churches are filled on Sundays with people seeking a way into the good life, people who are literally hungering and thirsting after right- eousness. We will discuss that search in more detail in the final section of this book. "Back to the Bible!" is the cry of many sincere Christians, and as we draw nearer to the millennium, and as our troubles and problems develop new immunities to our quick-fix vaccines, that cry will grow in volume and in intensity. If the concept of "back to the Bible" means an effort to find a time and a place in which we will not be disturbed by the world in which we find ourselves, and an effort to find a secure, user-friendly, no-risk place to conserve ourselves and our worldly goods from threat and danger-much like those r95os Cold War backyard bomb shelters-then we are doomed to disappointment, for the Bible makes no such promises to Americans or to anyone else in this life.

If we accept the call to go back to the Bible, we will have to do so with an unnatural cultural modesty that makes it clear that we are seek-

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6+) OPENING THE BIBLE

ing what we have not yet enjoyed-the effort to conform our will and our work to the will and the work of God. The land we seek is not behind us, it is before us, and that is the secret the Bible has always been willing to impart to those who would seek it. The Bible opens with an account of creation in the Book of Genesis; it closes with a revelation of a time superior to this one, a time that is yet to be. Reading the Bible to find ways of iustifiing the status quo, then, is an enterprise that is bound for frustration and failure.

temptations to misread the Bible on our own behalf and to do- mesticate it for our o\4/n purposes are many and dangerous, and in Amer- ica, devoted as we are to the Bible, we have tried them all. Bibliolatry, the worship of the Bible and the making of it an object of veneration, of ascribing to it the glory due to God, is one of those temptations that we ought to avoid. Literalism, which worships the text and gives it an inappropriate superiority over the spirit that animates it, is another temp- tation to be eschewed. And the worst of these, what I call culturism, is the worship of a culture in which the Bible is forced to conform to the spirit of the age. In our discussions of interpretation we have qddressed those temptations, which in the context of the religious culture of the Qnited States have not served us very well.

The Bible is a book for the future, about the future, and written with confidence in the future. It embraces the future not out of disgust with the present or with the past but out of the conviction that God is in the future, and to be where God is, is to know fulfillment, purpose, and bliss. Who should be satisfied with anything less than that? Recovering the lost vision for America may mean recovering God's vision for a future society of equity, love, and peace, a socieÇ rich with change and destined for a world we have not yet known. Making sense of the Bible has been an American cultural preoccupation now for nearly four hun- dred years. We are neither righteous Israel nor decadent Rome. We are, however, a needy nation, as needy of God and of one another as we have ever been. Perhaps this bottoming out of our experience will make us less arrogant, less certain of our Manifest Destiny, more desirous of

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The Bible ín Amenca (6s

being transformed, and less willing to conform. The Bible is not a ther- apy progrem nor is it a human success story, a moral tale with an in- evitably happy ending. It is the account of a faithless people and a faithful God who seek constantly to renew their relationship each with the othei. Perhaps we are prepared to hear that story for the first time.