Group Consciousness

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,  2 Timothy 3:16

Scripture – “But that’s how you read it, not how I read it.”  Ever heard that complaint?  Engage in virtually any controversial theological argument and somewhere along the way you’re bound to encounter the “this is what it means to me” assertion.  Have you ever wondered how rational people can continue to insist on interpreting the sacred text in such obscure, perhaps even opposing, ways?  How is it possible, for example, that Jews can read Isaiah 52 and not see it as a description of the Christian Messiah “Jesus”?  Or Christians can read the Decalogue and not perceive that Sunday worship is a violation of the Fourth Commandment?

William Graham provides insight into this confusion:

“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.”[1]

“A book is only ‘scripture’ insofar as a group of persons perceive it to be sacred or holy, powerful or portentous, possessed of an exalted authority, and in some fashion transcendent of, and hence distinct from, all other speech and writing.  Conversely, what is scripture for one group may be perfectly ordinary, or even meaningless, nonsensical, or perversely false text for another.”[2]

“All Scripture” writes Paul.  We’ve often noted that his view of scripture included the Tanakh, not the Christian “New Testament.”  That part of the Bible didn’t even exist when Paul wrote to Timothy.  But our assumption that Paul’s definition of “Scripture” only meant the Tanakh is also just that—an assumption.  Frankly, we do not know what Paul meant by the term “scripture” since we do not know what documents were considered sacred in his group.  What we do know is that the Talmud, not yet written, and a host of other oral and written texts were in circulation at the time Paul wrote and that many different groups accepted or rejected some of these documents and traditions.  Paul’s Judaism (also an anachronistic term) was fluid.  Even the books of the Tanakh were not yet canonized.  Paul’s understanding of “sacred” was based on his acceptance of tradition and personal experience.  His paradigm is not the same as ours simply because his believing community is not the same as ours.

Now read the verse again, and see if you can put your paradigm aside long enough to entertain another view.  This is precisely what is happening when you can’t make any progress while discussing the meaning of a passage from your Bible with another believer who has a different believing community.  It is almost never about the text itself.  It’s about the paradigm, and if you can’t understand why the other person seems so obtuse, try unveiling the paradigm assumptions of the other person’s community.  It’s not about “the truth.”  It’s about “what I’m comfortable believing.”

Perhaps we need some time to digest this.  After all, we have probably assumed that the printed text of the Bible is the word of God.  But Graham reminds us: “ . . . this recognition means that scripturality arises not from the formal acts of religious leaders or church councils, however important their eventual roles in confirming the sacrality and boundaries of scripture, but rather in the interaction of persons and groups of persons with a text or texts.”[3]  Sacred scripture is what you and your group decide is sacred scripture.  Councils may come later and stamp approval or circumscribe the collection (as all religions do), but that doesn’t make your texts less sacred.  In the West we have swallowed the Church synods and the Rabbinic councils as the final determiners of what is sacred, but neither history nor culture suggests this is true.  People choose how God will communicate with them.  The relationship defines the text.  The table of contents doesn’t.

Topical Index: Scripture, paradigm, community, 2 Timothy 3:16

[1] William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 5.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., p. 6.