Song of Solomon 2: 8-13 NRSV text
Psalm 45: 1-2, 6-9 NRSV text
James 1: 17-27 NRSV text
Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-23 NRSV text
Christians, Jews and Muslims are “People of the Book” – that is, we all, in different yet ultimately similar ways, live according to God’s revelation within a set of scriptures which we believe are normative for faith and conduct. This means that we cannot escape the burden and responsibility of interpretation. It is a task that is necessary for at least two reasons: firstly, there is no obvious single way of reading the texts we regard as scripture, despite assertions to the contrary, and secondly, Truth is always contextual – which is to say that it is hammered out in a dynamic “conversation” with the concrete circumstances of the community of faith.
Faithless interpretation
Within the Reformed tradition, we find two attempts to avoid the complexity of the interpretive task. The first is the Reformers’ doctrine of the Perspicacity of Scripture – the notion that the meaning is plain to the faithful reader – so that each individual reader could pronounce on the “meaning” of the text. Each opinion was as valid and liable to be right as any other. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that it is the way in which this doctrine has been understood and is problematic, because that is certainly not how it was intended to be understood or to function!
It’s important to understand the context and meaning of what the Reformers were saying: the driving force was to make the Bible accessible to ordinary readers. The scriptures were translated from Latin into the vernacular. Over against the teaching office of the Roman Catholic Church, the Reformers wanted to assert “the right of private interpretation”. While in practice this was often taken to mean that everyone became the sole arbiter of truth, the intention was to free the interpretation of scripture from the stranglehold of a corrupt Church. The Church needed to be under critical scrutiny by the Bible in order to be reformed. In practice, the (mistaken) notion that every individual can and should read the Bible in whatever way seems appropriate, and that all such ways are equally valid, has bedevilled the Church ever since.
The root of the problem lies in the excessive individualism of post-Enlightenment thought, in which the individual has no necessary connection with a believing, reading community. It is faithless because God addresses us not only as individuals but as a whole world! God’s self-revelation addresses how we make our world – our faith, our politics, our economics. The community of faith is meant to live out the truth of the gospel collectively, not simply in some radicalised private, individual, spiritual inner world of the self.
The second attempt is the fundamentalist option, which says that we must “simply” be prepared to take the “literal” sense of scripture. This is underwritten by a raft of assumptions, the most important of which is the inerrancy of scripture. If the Bible is the Word of God (so the assumption goes) it must necessarily be free of “error”. There is no room in this view for contradictions between different parts of the biblical canon. The Bible is assumed to speak with one voice – the Voice of God. God’s revelation is given through human intermediaries, but they function more as God’s scribes receiving divine dictation than creative theologians who have anything of themselves to contribute. Consequently, the Bible may be approached like a divine encyclopaedia, pronouncing on every necessary subject. We don’t have to interpret the bible, merely consult it! Any attempt to “avoid” the “plain meaning” of scripture is evidence of faithlessness.
The fundamentalist option is a latecomer in biblical interpretation, despite the assumption that it is “the way that it has always been done”. It grew out of the 19th century Princeton school, with B.B Warfield. In its contemporary form, it is actually profoundly faithless: it refuses to take the Bible as it is, but seeks rather to impose an artificial schema on it. It goes something like this: “If a book is to be the Word of God, it must be free of error and contradiction, otherwise it cannot be the Word of God”.
In other words, it’s a question of facts. If it can be shown that the Bible does, in fact, contain errors, then the whole edifice falls like a house of cards. If the Bible cannot be trusted on its (apparent) teaching that the world was created 6,000 years ago over 6 days of 24 hours each, then the Bible cannot be trusted on anything! The fundamentalists therefore find themselves embroiled in endless controversies about “facts” and “history”.
What is faithless is the notion that the Bible is actually up for question as the Word of God! Theoretically, the fundamentalists regard the Bible as potentially no more important than any other book! That is why countless former fundamentalists have that “all-or-nothing” experience, and, in rejecting fundamentalism, find themselves rejecting both faith and the Bible. For the Christian community of faith, the Bible is not referred to as the Word of God because it can be squeezed into a formula or be shown to conform to certain criteria: it is the Word of God because the experience of the community of faith is that it is the way in which God communicates! That is not open to (faithful) question: it is what it means to be within the Christian community of faith!
Whatever the Bible is, therefore, is what being “the Word of God” means. And a faithful, informed, searching reading of the Bible finds itself grappling immediately with the interpretive task. We are compelled to engage in that conversation between the world of the texts, the tradition, and our own, contemporary context. It is a process – of formulation and reformulation in different contexts – that we see within the canon of scripture itself. And it is controversial! It is risky. It means making value judgements. It means changing what we once said, and saying something new – not simply saying the old things in new ways, but sometimes throwing out the old in favour of something that we believe and trust is more true. [click to continue…]
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