Relocating To Elfland

Last night I attended a book launch at Union Theological Seminary for a volume coauthored by my friend, Dr. David Innes: Left, Right & Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics. There’s a great deal I could say about the panel discussion, in which not only the authors but also Richard Land and Jim Wallis participated; but as a pastor and biblical exegete, I found one particular question from the audience especially striking. A young woman asked the three (apparently) white males on the panel: “How do you adjust for your whiteness and maleness when you read the Bible?” It was closely related to another question asked by the moderator to the authors: “If you are both Bible-believing Christians, how do you reach such fundamentally different conclusions about a biblical approach to politics?” At the heart of both questions is the problem of hermeneutical “lenses”: none of us reads the Bible “objectively” (we are always particular people in a particular cultural setting, ineradicably influenced in the way we perceive and understanding everything); so is anything we ever say about the Bible “objectively” true? Can it ever be?

I felt for the respondents. Tomes could be (and have been) written on these issues, and they had mere seconds to fire back an answer! Here are a few thoughts that came to me later as I thought about the questions.

First – and this isn’t intended saucily – one might just as well ask, “How do you adjust for your femaleness (or color, or whatever) when you read the Bible?” What this throws into relief is that there are multiple perspectives/lenses in reading the Bible. Why should we interrogate one, but not others?

Once this variety of perspectives has been identified, there are three possible approaches. One is a political approach, which seeks (or assumes) the preeminence of one lens (e.g., female, male, black, white, Latin American) over others. This is power hermeneutics; whether it proceeds from a culture of majority privilege or a culture of minority under-privilege, it is fundamentally about power; it is about imposing one lens on the interpretive community to the subjugation of others.

A second possible approach is the rationalist one, which assumes that we can (theoretically, at least) throw away all the lenses and just read the Bible “objectively.” This Cartesian notion has been shot to death so many times in the last fifty years that I won’t bother doing it again here.

But, of course, we must be careful of an opposite ditch. There is, thirdly, a relativist approach in which (contra rationalism) it is assumed that because none of us is objective, all of our readings of scripture are so biased that none of us can ever say, “Look, that’s absolutely and universally true.” In this approach, whatever objective truth may exist “out there somewhere,” we certainly have no access to it; we have only what we see through our lenses.

Two things, quickly, by way of analysis:

As some of Barth’s disciples (and others) have pointed out, each of these three approaches seems not to take adequate account of the God of the Bible in reading the Bible. God Himself speaks in scripture with divine authority, His Spirit bears witness to the Word, thus every time we come to the Bible we (and all of our lenses) come under divine judgment. The issue is not whether I can get hold of my lenses and, if necessary, throw them off; the simple fact is that God will! He is the key “player” in the hermeneutical process; and He speaks and acts as sovereign Judge. Anyone who does not come to scripture with a humble awareness that he or she is sinfully biased and that God will expose his or her biases and command repentance, is coming to scripture as its lord and judge; and the object of the interpreter’s judgment is no longer the Word of the Lord, but mere text.

Let it be said that this divine judgment on all human interpretation is decidedly applicable in the North American context. Much was made last night of how “American” our reading of the Bible ought to be. I would say that we Americans in particular should come to scripture ready to be judged: the Bible is a Middle Eastern book, the Word took flesh as a Middle Easterner, and we have no idea how much our comfortable lenses will be smashed by the thought-world in which God chose to enculturate His revelation to humankind. If the gospel was an offense to Jews, and foolishness to Greeks, how will it rock the applecart of post-Enlightenment Western culture?

There is a further point I would want to make. When it comes to our biases in reading scripture, we are immeasurably helped by the fact that we are part of a holy catholic church. I was actually amazed that this never came up last evening. I am not permitted to claim a personal monopoly on biblical interpretation, nor is any local church community permitted to claim a monopoly, for the simple reason that we are all part of a worldwide interpretive community that stretches from the days of Jesus right down to the present. If my lenses are judged by the Lord in my reading of His Word, they are also judged by the readings of my brethren, even as their readings are judged by mine. Even those who preach and teach the Word profit from the Berean “judgments” of those who hear them. None of us should ever shy away from the challenge to our reading of scripture that comes from other Christian communions. This is part of the glory of being members of the Body of Christ.

“The grace of the Word of God is not magic. It is promised to the Church that is required and ready to serve it. If it makes strong what men make weak, good what men make evil, pure what men make impure, that does not mean that it does everything where men do simply nothing, where men perhaps do not stand under this requirement and in this readiness. When we have done all that was required of us, we must add that we are unprofitable servants. But if we infer from this that we might equally well allow ourselves to be idle servants, we are not trusting in the grace of the Word of God. When we do trust in it, we stand under the law of the Word of God which is laid upon the Church; we are active in its service (without the presumption of trying to compel its operation, or the folly of trying to see in its presence our own success).” (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, p. 2.765–66)

“Precisely in order that he may really appropriate what Scripture has to say, the reader and hearer must be willing to transpose the centre of his attention from himself, from the system of his own concerns and questions (even if he thinks he can give them the character of concerns and questions typical of his whole epoch) to the scriptural word itself.  He must allow himself to be lifted out of himself into this word and its concerns and questions. It is only from this that light can ever fall upon his own life, and therewith the help which he needs for his life.” (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, p. 2.739)

“Is there a worse threat to freedom itself than the establishment of man as his own lord and lawgiver? Who can exercise a worse tyranny over us than the god in our own breast? And what further tyrannies does not this first and decisive one drag in its train? It is inevitable that the man who claims to be directly in communion with God, and free from all concrete forms of authority, will all the more certainly be delivered over to the powers of nature and history, to the spirit of the age and of contemporary movements, to the demons of his situation and environment.” (Barth, Church Dogmatics, p. 2.668)

“When the Church has suffered seriously, i.e., not from without but inwardly and essentially, it is never because it has lived too much but too little under the Word of Scripture. But the Church has become increasingly strong and self-conscious and bold, and produced heroes and geniuses and benefactors, and been able to establish comfort and hope for all people, not only within but without its walls, and gained genuine respect for itself, even in the world, when it has had a humble mind, and been prepared to live not above or alongside but under the Word. The existence in all ages of a Church which is really alive is therefore a concrete answer to the objection that an acknowledgement of the priority of the Bible in the Church will be detrimental to the living God and a living faith. The very opposite is the truth. Death usually reigns in the Church when it is thought that this acknowledgement should not be made.” (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, p. 2.502)

“[The] life of the children of God is always a life for Christ’s sake. The foundation of the Church is also its law and its limit. . . . By its inmost nature the Church is forbidden to want independence of Jesus Christ, or sovereignty in thought or action. If it did, it would relapse into the unjustified and unsanctified nature from which it is withdrawn in Christ. This will always find plenty of means to assert itself in its life. But it cannot want to relapse into it. It is born of the omnipotent Word of grace; it would only die if it were to become or to be anything but the fulfillment of that Word. Grace holds good only where grace rules. The rule of grace which is unfailing where men are God’s children for Christ’s sake, the dependence of these men upon the Word of which they are reborn – this is the reality of the Church . . . . And in the light of it, it is and must be true that extra ecclesiam nulla salus.” (Barth, Church Dogmatics, p. 2.216)

“Obedience to revelation must invariably mean to let oneself be involved. To be involved must then mean to be questioned, in such a way that the question to which revelation is the answer becomes our own question, and so revelation, as the answer acquires a direct relation to ourselves.” (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, p. 2.26)

“God in his infinite wisdom decided to give us a book, a very long book, and not a portrait or an aphorism. God reveals himself in his image, Jesus, but we come to know that image by reading, and that takes time. God wants to transform us into the image of his image, and one of the key ways he does that is by leading us through the text. If we short-circuit that process by getting to the practical application, we are not going to be transformed in the ways God wants us to be transformed. ‘Get to the point’ will not do because part of the point is to lead us through the labyrinth of the text itself. There is treasure at the center of the labyrinth, but with texts, the journey really is as important as the destination. ‘Get to the point, man’ is the slogan of the liberal theologian; it is a demand for the kernel without the annoying distraction of the husky twists and turns of the text itself.” (Peter Leithart, Deep Exegesis, p. 55)

My family and I are currently reading through G. K. Chesterton’s The Poet and the Lunatics. It’s marvelous.

This description of one Amos Boon (in “The Shadow of the Shark”) made me laugh; it belongs up on the wall in a few seminaries:

“Anyhow, travelling about alone with nothing but a big Bible, he had learned to study it minutely, first for oracles and commandments, and afterwards for errors and contradictions; for the Bible-smasher is only the Bible-worshipper turned upside down.”

“The Theologian is absolutely dependent upon the pleasure of God, either to impart or not to impart knowledge of Himself. Even verification is here absolutely excluded. When a man reveals something of himself to me, I can verify this, and if necessary pass criticism upon it. But when the Theologian stands in the presence of God, and God gives him some explanation of His existence as God, every idea of testing this self-communication of God by something else is absurd; hence, in the absence of such a touchstone, there can be no verification, and consequently no room for criticism.” (Abraham Kuyper, Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology, p. 251)