How to Read the Bible

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’;  but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Matthew 5:27-28 NASB

You have heard that it was said – “Interpretive tendencies survive because readers share elements of a common cultural background but also, more specifically, certain strategies, protocols for generating meaning. These strategies appear natural to the communities who use them. They simply seem to be a component of what it means to read, though in fact they too are contingent—the product of historically bound assumptions.”[1]

Lambert’s comment is potentially frightening. If it’s true, then how we read Scripture is a function of certain cultural and historical assumptions; assumptions about inspiration, the work of the Spirit, the faith of the authors, the language of the audience, etc. All those factors that we spend so much time trying to understand and elucidate—but much more, for we ourselves read the text in certain “natural” ways, ways that have been passed down to us through tradition, education and personal experience. The frightening implication is this: What does this mean for our idea of TRUTH? Are we simply calling something true because it fits what we already assume? Is there really any independent truth; truth that does not incorporate those assumptions? And what does it mean to say, “God’s word is true,” if the “word” is subject to our own historically bound protocols?

Does this sound just too academic? Okay, let’s take a few examples and see if it still feels too academic. On a recent trip I spent some time listening to a person who explained that a miraculous set of occurrences spread over a dozen years were responsible for her current medical condition. At each point in the story, she relied on a miracle explanation rather than a common medical description. As impressive as it was, I couldn’t help but wonder if the events were selective, that is, after the odyssey the events were interpreted as miraculous but were not recognized as such when they occurred. The paradigm provided the interpretation of the events after the fact. That means the same events could have been viewed differently (not incorrectly) if the paradigm were different.

Another example. Occasionally I meet people who claim that Jews are currently blinded to the truth of Jesus. They argue that God will eventually “save” all the Jews when they accept Jesus as their savior, but until then, these people are “incomplete,” that is, they worship the old God of Israel but not the new God of the Church. As you can imagine, there are plenty of arguable points in claims like this, not the least of which is the implied replacement theology and the Trinity. But the interesting point is that these believers read the same texts as I do (and as devout Jews do) and they find something entirely different in the interpretation. The meaning of the text is governed by their prior assumptions, not by the text itself.

We could add more examples. Simple things like how we pray, what sacraments we observe, what we consider moral or immoral, how a wedding ceremony is conducted, etc. The point is this: culture and historical circumstances often (perhaps too often) shape what we believe to be true. Changing our minds is not as easy as we might imagine since a real change of mind (Romans 12:2) is not simply cognitive. It affects everything about how we live.

When Yeshua said, “You have heard that it was said,” he drew on the common understanding of the crowd. Now we should ask, “Who told the crowd these things? How did they come to believe this?” Yeshua pushes the assumption envelope. He challenges the audience to rethink what they believe. Two millennia later we read his words and don’t feel any confrontation. Why? Because we have two millennia of cultural assumptions about what he said. Maybe we need to question why his words don’t make us uncomfortable as they did with the original audience. Maybe we are the ones lost in the stupor of comfortable acceptance.

Topical Index: interpretation, paradigm, David Lambert, Matthew 5:27-28

[1] David Lambert, How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, & the Interpretation of Scripture (Oxford Univeristy Press, 2016), p. 4.

A NOTE ON SHABBAT LEFT-OVERS

Yesterday we had a very peaceful day here in Reggio Emilia, Italy.  We walked to the Piazza Fontanesi, enjoyed the warmth under the shade of the trees, had a good glass of the house wine, noticed all the children playing in the square and the people engaged in conversation and we thought, “This is like a Shabbat in Babylon.  Two thousand years later, the influence of Shabbat can still be felt.”  We strolled back home, noticing how quiet it was.  Not many people on the streets, shops closed, a kind of serenity.  It was quite revealing.