When General Gordon wandered round Palestine in 1882/3, he took with him not a guide book but a Bible. He was pondering four questions; the site of the crucifixion, the boundary between the tribes of Benjamin and Judah; the identification of Gibeon and the exact location of the garden of Eden.
Today it is less certain that we can use the Bible as a guide to the Holy land or to life. Those who have used the Bible in this way have been responsible for so much that horrifies the contemporary mind. As apologists for Christian faith we bear the burden of the fact that the Bible has been used as a warrant for murdering Jews, burning witches, torturing scientists, segregating blacks, executing homosexuals and suppressing the rights of women. But what is the Bible if it is not a guide book to carry round and consult on matters of geography, ethics, doctrine, politics, and history past, present, and future?
If we cannot read the bible in that way now, what then are we to do? Of course much of our reading of the Bible seems to cause us no difficulties; we find it has the power to inspire and illumine our understanding of God. However, there are many parts of Scripture which can strike us as offensive, narrow, repetitive, violent and prejudiced or just totally incredible. A modern rabbinic commentator has suggested that a working party to revise the canon of the Old Testament might jettison the Song of Songs as too erotic; Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings as for the most part too violent; Leviticus as irrelevant; Ecclesiastes as too cynical; much of the prophets as too obscure; Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy as too legalistic and repetitive; Lamentations as too depressing; and Proverbs as too materialistic; so that in the end we are left with Ruth, Psalm 23 and bits of Genesis suitably edited!
An alternative approach might be to see whether Scripture gives us any guidance to its own interpretation. The guidance the Old Testament gives is challenging not to say subversive. To start with it does not make any particularly portentous claims for itself as official revelation throughout. The God it speaks of is referred to in an enormous variety of ways through stories, poetry, prophecies, laws, building instructions, lists of names, proverbs and even erotica. In one place it is giving us detailed ways of preparing sacrifices, while elsewhere it tells us God doesn’t care for such things at all. What he wants is justice and mercy. Again God seems always to be interfering in the course of history but then he dissociates himself from us entirely. As it says in our first reading, “My thoughts are not your thoughts and my ways are higher than your ways.:” On occasion God seems to chat with some figures like a neighbour over the garden fence, but then he says that none may see his face and live, and when Moses asks God his name, his reply is effectively, “Mind your own business.” Even some of the greatest prophets like Samuel and Elijah, can get it wrong, and tales abound of attempts to find a way of distinguishing true prophets from false. God is always one step ahead and not where he is expected to be so that often the Old Testament can seem like a training manual in not understanding God. And yet it is also of course a witness to the inexhaustibility of God’s involvement in his creation and his love for that creation. So a contemporary rabbi can say; “The recurrent image of God as the betrayed lover jostles with that of the loving parent bound to forgive its errant child. We feel a constant tug of emotions of love given, expected, unrequited, denied or betrayed… It is not the revelation of God that is to be looked for – it is there throughout in all its nakedness and hopelessness. But where is the revelation of human beings in response, where is that love returned?” (Jonathan Magonet)
That last question is worth repeating. If God is being revealed every which way in the Old Testament; and if the Old Testament is also full of inadequate and mistaken, as well as heroic responses to God, where is the revelation of the true human response to God? The answer to that question given by the Church is that Jesus is the revelation of the complete human response, the full return of human love to God. And yet the New Testament also shows us that Jesus was constantly being misunderstood and rejected by those who surrounded him, even those he was closest to. The New Testament is a revelation of true and false discipleship in the same way that the prophets could be true or false. So what we find in Scripture is throughout a record of both encounter and contest, an exploration of a human relationship with God which always transcends the words with which it is described. We must never forget this crucial fact of the distance between human perception and divine reality even in what might seem to be the simplest and most direct biblical texts. If we do forget it then we shall be in danger of that kind of unthinking dependence on Scripture which is the equivalent of idolatry. “My thoughts are not your thoughts and my ways are higher than your ways.” Following Christ, we are liberated from idolatry but given the burden of responsibility for our own decisions, our own encounter and contest with Scripture. Some might view this as a charter for doing what one wants irrespective of Scripture. To which there are two simple responses; all Bible readers are in danger of being selectively fundamentalist choosing for other than biblical reasons which texts they will hold onto and which ignore. And what I am talking about is a continuous but almost always painful dialogue with the whole of scripture, a dialogue which is capable, as the Psalms are capable, of both protest and acceptance.
So finally it is only through such painful dialogue that we shall begin to understand the Bible as a text whose proper understanding must lead in the end to its inspired performance. For the Bible is not like a guide book but more like a play text or musical score. For an inspired performance, something in the text and the performer has to come together. Self discovery and the discovery of what the text means have to come together in a way which is possible only after long periods of attentive reading and practice, of going over the text both with others and on one’s own. If Scripture is the complex and gradual revelation of what it might be like to believe in God and to be saved in Christ, then in the end the quality of our humanity will be the only criterion of the adequacy of our interpretation. If the life of Christ is the definitive performance of scripture then our reading of Scripture must be an imitation of Christ.
In order to explore all this further we shall soon be initiating a congregation- wide reading of Scripture. Starting in Advent our weekly e-letter and Sunday notice sheets will indicate passages to read that week, working progressively through a book from the Old Testament and from the New. There will also be monthly meetings for people to come together and discuss what they have read. In this way we shall attempt to fulfil the prayer in this week’s collect that we may ‘read, mark, learn and inwardly digest’ the Scriptures.
The Vicar writes
Stephen Tucker