Whose Bible is it anyway?

I know, I've been a slacker about posting, so here's a summary of the last three months: work, home, summer, family, hurricane, back to school. Also, I ABSOLUTELY will post about Mijha and Runako's wedding but I am waiting until I have the photos.



This post is about something else, though. I am taking a class with the illustrious Peter Gomes: pastor of Memorial Chapel at Harvard, author, "Colbert Report" guest, and invoker of the best offertory plea I have ever heard: "The good news is, we have all the money we need to do all the great things we are called to do. The bad news is it is still in your pockets!" The course is on the Bible and the history of interpretation. It is not a Scriptural interpretation class per se--we are not examining the historical-critical method vs. the literary method vs. the Jesus seminar we-vote-on-what's-true-with-colored-beads method (a rigorous academic and spiritual discipline, to be sure); we are looking at the way Christian communities have understood and interpreted Scripture over time. It is raising questions that I have grappled with before, but that are always worth looking at again, namely:



Whose Bible is it anyway?



For most of Christian history, the Bible was purely the province of educated men, monks and theologians, those who had devoted their lives to its study. Even pre-printing press, they were leery of letting just anyone have access to the Bible; even the very wealthy, who could afford a handwritten manuscript, were discouraged. They opposed the translation of the Bible into the more accessible Latin, and later into various vernaculars.



The thing is, this is not because they held Scripture in low esteem; it's because they held it in such high esteem. They understood that this complex, mysterious, esoteric, inspired, opaque, illuminating, maddening collection of 66 books in three languages written over 1500 years (at least) was incredible powerful, and incredibly difficult. And in the wrong hands, a powerful, difficult book becomes a powerful, dangerous book. Anyone can get a book wrong. And misinterpretation leads to misappropriation and then that's where the fun really begins. So, believing that the gospel had been conferred by God, received by the apostles and proclaimed by the church fathers, they saw part of that charge as protecting Scripture by keeping its study and interpretation in the care of those who had devoted their lives to the languages, history and hermeneutics of Biblical study.



I'm more sympathetic to this than I once was. Maybe it's because I'm in my third semester of Greek, which means I am up to my elbows in translating Matthew and Mark--and we haven't even gotten to Paul yet, whose first-rate mind and delight in wordplay has challenged and perplexed translators for centuries. Greek has a complexity that English cannot begin to grasp. A word can have several meanings; translation is more art than science. My tortured Greek translations from last night's homework sounded something like "The men who were destroying democracy once a long time ago continuously are considering killing the public speakers now but maybe in the future by themselves or maybe with their friends because they are not to be trusted, insert random pluperfect participle with no relation to any of the previous clauses here." Tragic, and totally normal for Greek. Or consider a common phrase in Scripture, "agapeo tou Xristou"--the love of Christ. Does that mean our love of Christ, or Christ's love of us? Whole theologies hinge on this, and the English gives us no hint of this.



Or consider something I came across in a reading for another class, the reading out of Exodus of Moses' call to return to Egypt and command Pharaoh to let God's people go. It's a passage I've read a dozen times, but I noticed something this time I had skimmed over before. As they are journeying to Egypt, God decides to kill Moses. Doesn't tell us why. Doesn't warn him. Moses is about to get the holy smackdown--IN HIS SLEEP--when Zipporah somehow senses something. So she cuts off her son's foreskin and lays it across Moses' genitals, saying "Surely you are a bridegroom of blood." (Modern translation: "Ain't this a bitch.") What are we to do with that? Do you want that in just anyone's hands? Whose hands are the right hands?



So I have a greater sympathy than I had in the past for this perspective, this sense that to handle the Bible responsibly, we must know its history, its culture, its languages, its traditions, its history of interpretation through the ages. It is the work of scholars and sages, men and women who devote their lives to fathoming an unfathomable book.



But.



I can't entirely get on board with this, perhaps because I am still an evangelical at the core--as Gomes says, in the end, we are where we came from, and I come from a Southern Baptist home and church that inculcated Scripture as soon as a child's mouth could shape the words. I think in Biblical rhythms; its language is as natural to me as my own. And as a result, I have access to wisdom I could not have on my own. I know, when my emotions are haywire, that "the heart is deceitful above all things; who can know it?" (Jeremiah 17:9), assuring me that the heart is not always trustworthy, and that there are depths in me unknown to any but the One who created them in me. I know in difficult times that "when He has tried me, I shall come forth as gold" (Job 23:10). I know that I am engraved on the palm of God's hands (Isaiah 49:16) and that He stores my tears in a bottle (Psalm 56:8). I think of the David narrative, which I have loved for years, and the different angles and lessons I find in it every time, like a prism.



I think, too, of the teachers I have had who were not Biblical scholars, who were just ordinary people who loved God and the word, and the insights they have offered me that rival any I have gathered from the scholars who write the commentaries. Like the woman who noted that when Revelation 19 tells us that Christ "has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself," it means there is reserved a name for Christ that has never been blasphemed, never been uttered casually or as a curse, never been defiled by the actions of His church. Something has stayed sacred, something is yet untouched. What a beautiful idea.



But go beyond the Bible as individual devotion and imagine what Christianity would be if we did not have the liberation narrative of the African-American slaves, whose telling of the freedom story of the gospel transformed and sustained their community, whose spirituals were modern-day psalms of lament, and who cracked open the gospel for us in a way from which we are still learning. Could we have counted on the scholars to do that for us, or did we need an illiterate, oppressed people to see what the wise of the world could not?



As a Southern Baptist kid, you learn about what we call "the priesthood of the believer." That means that the Holy Spirit and I can read Scripture together and I don't need anyone else to tell me what it means, I can stand before God on my own. It's very populist, which I like. It's also wide open for abuse. Anything powerful can become powerfully misused. Water is a good thing, until a hurricane washes away your city. Fire is a good thing, until it burns down a forest. The greater the power, the greater the potential for destruction. And certainly the many folks--Creflo Dollar, I'm looking at you--who misappropriate the gospel, who preach a false gospel of prosperity and affluence that I believe is anathema to a God who loves the poor (who, by the way, make up most of the world) are evidence of what happens when Scripture is misinterpreted and misappropriated.



So we need checks on it. Scripture should be interpreted in community--we need people to rein us in, to say "whoa, we're getting kind of crazy here, I don't think that's what it means." We need the elders in the faith who have wisdom and experience, and we need the young folks who have zeal and an openness to new things. We need each other in this venture of reading God's word, and I suspect that is what He had in mind all along.



I have a dear friend who is a priest and tells the people in his confirmation class that the Bible is "not one book but 66, not English but in Hebrew and Greek, not a written record but an oral tradition, not Western but Semitic, not individual but communal, not democratic but patriarchal, not self-seeking but seeking the good of the group." I think he is right, but I can't help thinking that if I were a 13-year-old confirmand in his class, it would put me off ever tackling the Bible. We must have a healthy respect for its complexities and subtleties, but not so much that we are afraid to approach it, and willing to allow what we are told on Sundays be the extent of our dealings with it. And we should be more Biblically literate--we shouldn't be afraid to talk about the culture in which Scripture was written, or how traditions and understandings of human psychology have changed; we should take very seriously the task of translating ancient texts into a 21st-century world. And we should stop--please, please, let's stop--referring to it as a manual. People, no one has ever been inspired or transformed by a manual. Whether it is for my digital camera or my DVD players, I usually a) don't know where the manual is, and b) only look for it when something's gone wrong. Let's get rid of the manual metaphor, this is not a new Toyota I'm talking about where I'm just trying to figure out how to get rid of the child locks. Most of all, let's not be afraid to say that it doesn't make sense and we don't get it. I'm still not getting that whole Moses story. In fact, I'm trying not to think about it too much.



The thing is, the early church fathers were right: the Bible is a dangerous book. But maybe we are meant to be a dangerous people. Not in the way we sometimes are, where we are dangerous in a toxic, oppressive, my-way-or-the-highway-to-hell kind of way; but dangerous in the way that turns this broken, hurting world on its ear by proclaiming that there is a different way of doing life together, and that the Kingdom of God is a new world being birthed in the shell of the old one, and things can never be the same. That is the most dangerous message I can imagine. And the most exciting.



So whose Bible is it? It's mine. And yours. Together. Let's do this thing.