The Bible as the "functional center" of the church's life
The art of reading scripture

How is the Bible authoritative for the faith and practice of the church? What practices of reading offer the most fruitful approaches?

A cartoon in the New Yorker shows a man making inquiry at the information counter of a large bookstore. The clerk, tapping on the keyboard and peering intently into the computer screen, replies: "The Bible? ...... Yes, that would be under self-help?"

As the cartoon suggests, in a postmodern culture the Bible has no definite place, and citizens in a pluralist, secular culture have trouble knowing what to make of it.

In such an environment as ours today, the Bible's role is as one more consumer product, one more therapeutic option for a rootless people engaged in an endless quest of self-invention and self improvement. If the Bible is to be anything more than this, the people of faith have their work cut out for them[1].

Enter "the Scripture Project" out of Princeton University, where fifteen scholars and pastors agreed to meet together periodically for four years to read scripture together (1998-2002). What became clear from this process is that reading scripture together is an art, requiring engagement of theological imagination in order to recover the church's rich heritage of Biblical interpretation.

What soon became clear was, like every to her true art form, reading Scripture together is a difficult thing to do well. We don't mention this difficulty often in Church. Making good sense out of the Bible and applying it wisely and in-depth to our lives is a hard thing to do. Interestingly the recognition of this difficulty of interpretation is one of the huge differences between Christians and Jews; Jews have always revered the reading of Scripture together as the greatest and most difficult of all art forms. But there is good news to be discovered also. Like every other form of art, reading Scripture together has the potential for creating something beautiful.

Interpretations of Scripture are not just right and wrong, although at times identifying such categories are useful and necessary. Perhaps the deeper question is to what extend do our readings reveal the intricacy and the wondrous quality of what the biblical writers call "the works of the Lord." Or how does such reading together draw us toward a way of being that is --- to use the Apostle Paul's language --- more "lovely," more "gracious," more "excellent," "noble," and worthy of praise" (Phil 4.8)?

Roger Sizemore, Ph.D.
26 Aug 06

Endnotes:

  1. Cartoon by Peter Steiner, The New Yorker, 6 July, 1998, p. 33, and the above introductory statements are from Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hayes, The Art of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Press, 2003), p. xiv.

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." Gandolf, in The Fellowship of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkein

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