Approaching the Bible as an ancient book may explain aspects of the story that trouble us today, but this method fails to deal with the Bible as the bearer of God’s revelation.
Jews and Christians have read aloud from the Bible in public for centuries. The liturgical practice of systematically reading through the biblical texts—usually in three-year cycles—dates back at least to post-exilic Jewish worship (Nehemiah 8:1–8), and perhaps earlier to services of covenant renewal (Deuteronomy 31:10–13). The story of Jesus’ reading from the Book of Isaiah in a synagogue on the Sabbath (Luke 4:16–21) indicates that the custom influenced the early Christian community. Later the Christian church developed its own system of scripture readings.
Recently I was given the assignment of preparing a guide to help preachers interpret the lectionary readings. This was a new experience for me, a scholar who has devoted his career to teaching the Bible academically. The project raised in a new way the question of why the Bible is read and interpreted as scripture in worship services. By Bible, I mean either the Jewish Bible (Tanakh) or the Christian Bible (Old and New Testaments).
Many people take the Bible for granted in services of worship. The Bible belongs to our tradition—what we have received from our ancestors in the faith—and as such deserves to be read to a congregation. Yet in our time the lofty reputation of the Bible has been challenged in many ways. The Bible has been criticized because it seems to support social injustices (such as slavery, the subordination of women, anti-Semitism). The Bible, it is said, is inextricably tied up with patriarchal culture; hence it should be rejected, as some radicals advocate, or its language should be made inclusive, as attempted in a recent expurgated version.1 But the bandaging and covering over of these issues does not resolve the problem of the Bible in our time.2
Having in mind the liturgical practice of following a lectionary, I plan to consider major ways people regard the Bible in a community of faith in this and the two ensuing columns. The subject will be considered under three aspects: (1) the Bible as an ancient book, (2) the Bible within the Bible, and (3) the Bible as Word of God in human words. All three are legitimate ways of reading the Bible, though each has strengths and weaknesses. Readers of this column may decide in which interpretive camp they belong or suggest others.
Whatever motivates one to read the Bible as Scripture, it is incontestable that the Bible is an ancient book. It belongs to the past and is illumined by the study of ancient history and archaeology, as readers of this magazine know. That is one reason ministers and rabbis turn to commentaries, often written for a university setting. Before preaching to a congregation, they want to understand that ancient world: its political actors (such as the Hittites), its social practices (for example, the prerogatives of the first born), its view of God (as, say, a Divine Warrior), its language (ancient Hebrew or koine Greek) and so on. The problem is how the interpreter makes the jump from the past to the present, so that the Bible speaks to people today. The need to build a bridge from the past accounts for the revival of hermeneutics (the science of biblical interpretation) in the last decades.
A generation or so ago it was fashionable to think of evolution as a bridge. The biblical history displays a growth from relatively naive levels of understanding God and God’s will (perhaps the Mosaic period) through various stages of social development to the enlightened plateau of the prophetic view of a world-inclusive ethical monotheism (reached in the lofty poems of Isaiah 40–55, the so-called Second Isaiah). But this evolutionary view, which was arbitrarily imposed on Scripture, has been largely abandoned.
Another way, once advocated by Harry Emerson Fosdick, the influential minister of Riverside Church in New York City, is to emphasize the continuity of religious experience. Reading the Bible, he told an earlier generation, involves “abiding experiences and changing categories.” That is, although the forms of theological expression and social practice change, the experiences remain the same—and it is with these basic experiences that we can identify as we read the Bible.
Approaching the Bible as an ancient book may help to explain aspects of the biblical story that trouble us in the modern world, but this practice fails to deal adequately with the Bible as scripture, as the linguistic bearer of God’s “word” or revelation. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel advocated this high view of Scripture when he spoke of the Bible as God’s Search for Man: “It is as if God took these Hebrew words and breathed into them of His power, and the words became a live wire charged with His spirit. To this very day they are hyphens between heaven and earth.”3 For many people in the community of faith, Jewish or Christian, the Bible is the medium through which God searches for and speaks to people today.
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Many worshipers resolve the problem of the pastness of the Bible by taking a stand first with their own community’s confession of faith. It is not the ancient book that is authoritative, but the community’s theological position as expressed in creeds or practice. Perhaps it is Talmudic Judaism in its various expressions, perhaps Christianity as defined by the creeds of the early centuries. Perhaps it is the Lutheran church, which has its Augsburg confession of faith, or the Presbyterian church, which stands on the Westminster Confession. These confessional stands provide the vantage point, the interpretive lens, that enables people of faith to read and evaluate the ancient literature of the Bible.
Even those who take their stand in a confessing community, however, are often dissatisfied with making the Bible subservient to creedal declarations. The Bible has its own independent witness as scripture, which somehow carries the authority of divine revelation. So next time we shall consider the view that it is not the Bible as a whole that is scripture for us, but a core found within it, a “canon within the canon.”
Jews and Christians have read aloud from the Bible in public for centuries. The liturgical practice of systematically reading through the biblical texts—usually in three-year cycles—dates back at least to post-exilic Jewish worship (Nehemiah 8:1–8), and perhaps earlier to services of covenant renewal (Deuteronomy 31:10–13). The story of Jesus’ reading from the Book of Isaiah in a synagogue on the Sabbath (Luke 4:16–21) indicates that the custom influenced the early Christian community. Later the Christian church developed its own system of scripture readings. Recently I was given the assignment of preparing a guide to help preachers interpret the lectionary […]
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The New Testament and Psalms: An Inclusive Version, ed. Victor Gold, Sharon Ringe, et al. (New York: Oxford, 1995).
2.
See the review by Gail R. O’Day, “Probing an Inclusive Scripture,” The Christian Century (July 3–10, 1996), pp. 692–694.
3.
See my essay, “Coexistence with God: Heschel’s Exposition of Biblical Theology,” in Abraham Joshua Heschel: Exploring his Life and Thought, ed. by John C. Merkle (New York: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 47–65. The quotation is on p. 54.
