Tract-time

So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. Romans 10:17  NASB

Hearing – Just pause a minute and think about what Paul wrote.  He doesn’t say that faith (pístis) is a function of doctrine, or dogma, or creeds, or the Bible.  He writes that faith arrives by audible transmission.  No poster, no tract, no pocket Psalms or New Testament.  Nope!  Faith is an oral experience.  You hear it.  It calls to you.  It’s not visible on the printed page.  It doesn’t reside in the leather-bound book or the scroll.  If you believe, it’s because you heard something; something that changed your life.  Afterwards, perhaps, you got involved in the text, but faith didn’t arrive that way.

This shouldn’t be surprising.  After all, shema (šāmaʿ) is the foundation of Judaism.  Hearing and doing, not reading and writing.  Our post-Enlightenment culture might have turned faith into a religion of the book, but that wasn’t true at the beginning.  We recognize this historical fact, but it seems to me we often forget it in practice.  We spend most of our spiritual time reading a text rather than listening to a voice.  The reasons for this shift are not always obvious.  Suffice it to say that writing solidifies the faith.  In the quest for certainty, print triumphs over sound.  I am sure you can figure out why.

“Scripture is widely understood today to be the antithesis of a community’s oral tradition.  It is conceived as the tangible document that fixes the fluid sacred word and gives it substance and permanence.  The idea hardly even occurs that a sacred text could exist for long without being written; nor does the recognition come easily that virtually every scripture has traditionally functioned in large measure as vocal, not silent discourse.”[1]

What do we learn?  First, we discover that faith cannot exist in isolation.  Hearing requires sender and receiver.  It doesn’t require human senders and receivers, per se, but it does require audible transmission even if the sound comes from the divine.  In biblical faith, meditation and cognition are not the priority.  Neither is the written word.  This is a shocking fact.  Biblical faith is prophetic delivery despite the stone tablets.  “A text becomes ‘scripture’ in active, subjective relationship to persons, and as part of a cumulative communal tradition.  No text, written or oral or both, is sacred or authoritative in isolation from a community. . . there is no absolute ‘meaning’ in a scriptural text apart from the interpreting community that finds it meaningful.”[2]

This helps us understand why different communities had different canons.  What speaks to me and my community might not be the same as what speaks to you, and what eventually gets canonized is what speaks to the community.

Paul’s faith arrived in a voice from the Messiah.  That was and is the foundation.  Without the voice, it’s just words on a page.

Topical Index: faith, hearing, shema, audible, Romans 10:17

[1] William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. ix.

[2] Ibid., p. 5.