Wright, N.T., Scripture and the Authority of God: How to
Read the Bible Today. New York: Harper Collins, 2011
“They (current books of Biblical scholarship) indicate
that there is today a lively and serious engagement with the whole question of
what scripture is, how to read it with cultural and intellectual alertness and
integrity, and how to enable it to be what it ought to be in the life and
mission of the church.” (19)
I was twelve or so. My brothers, cousins and I were crossing
the pasture on a Sunday afternoon, jostling, jabbering and generally trying to
fill a boring afternoon with something, anything that wasn't nothing. As we
walked, my brother, Bob, stuck out his foot and tripped me, landing me in a cow
pie. “You **** fool!” I yelled as I picked myself up and hurled myself at him.
My uncle was
a minister; his children had heard a lot of scripture. “It says in the Bible
that if you call your brother a fool, you'll go to hell,” cousin Abe taunted.
Cow shit
washes off in no time; that particular taunt had a smell that lingered through
the rest of my green years. So much for cultural and intellectual alertness
and integrity.
“Non-scholarly”
Christians might be forgiven for despairing that if God inspired scriptures for
the guidance and edification of his people, He might have done it in a less
puzzling way, a way that doesn't require centuries of scholarship to unpack its
apparent riddles and enigmas. (Not to mention the knitted brows of lay persons
trying to grasp the scholarship.)
The problem
of how to read the Bible arises in part because the written word
is by its nature, static. “It is written,” after all. Oral traditions seem less
static, they enjoy the benefit of greater flexibility, a likelihood of
adaptation to suit changing cultures and times, different ways of telling the
stories by different story tellers. I'm reminded that the record of the Ten
Commandments was written in stone, apparently required to be so by the writers
of Exodus in order to emphasize their immutable nature. That made sense in a
nomadic people trying to establish and maintain a distinct identity among
alien, “pagan” peoples, but there is a price to pay for writing your words in
stone.
Does
Wright's book help us along the road to benefiting from scripture in a world where
it often seems outdated and stale, almost irrelevant? Apropos to the current
climate around Bible as authoritative, Wright bemoans the splits among
Christians we characteristically give names to like fundamentalist, liberal, conservative, literalist, etc. I find it
helpful to consider the possibility that we might someday stop the endless
abuse of the Bible on all sides, the selective use or rejection of portions
that support or don’t support our worldview. That could be helpful, if
impossible, given our natures.
And is it
useful to list from A – L the misreadings of the “Right,” and from A – L, the
misreadings of the “Left?” I find it interesting that the “Left” and the “Right”
have exactly the same number of ways of botching the reading of the Bible. For
example, “B” in the “Right Misreadings” list is the folly of “The explicitly
materialist ‘prosperity gospel’ understanding of Biblical promises.’ (108)” Lefties,
on the other hand, make the error of “[claiming] that modern history or science
has either ‘disproved the Bible’ or made some of its central claims redundant,
undesirable or unbelievable (109).” My church has adopted a document that
similarly lists Bible reading dos and don’ts, and calls the two lists “paths”
and “ditches,” i.e. the positive practices to keep in mind and the negative
practices to avoid. Lists are generally notorious over-simplifiers of situations, partly
because they have the appearance of being complete when they can’t possibly be,
and because the relative weight of the items in the list appears the same even
if it isn’t.
There are
things in Wright’s book that will help some Christians to understand in part
how the changing interpretations of scriptures have come about historically.
The progression of thinking from medieval times through the Enlightenment to
Post Modernity is helpful, as is Wright’s suggestion that we give credence to a
“Five-Act Model.” The latter proposes that Biblical history be viewed as one
would view a five-act play, with each act being discrete and distinct, yet
integral to the whole. The five acts are: creation, “fall”, Israel, Jesus and
the church. The New Testament is Act 4, leading into Act 5 in which we find
ourselves today. Reading the Bible as a one-act play may lead to “over-reading,”
so that we feel compelled, for instance, to replicate the Sabbath of Act 1 in
Act V.
Those who live in this fifth act have
an ambiguous relationship with the four previous acts, not because they are
being disloyal to them but precisely because they are being loyal to them as
part of the story . . . we must act in the appropriate manner for this moment in the
story . . . a moment where genuinely new things can and do happen (123).
Wright ends
with two case studies, namely Sabbath
and Monogamy. He illustrates in
Chapters 9 & 10 the progression through the acts of the play that sees strict seventh-day laws in Act 3 leading to accusations that Jesus was breaking
the Sabbath in Act 4 to present day “Sunday shopping.” The last chapter
illustrates that the fact of Solomon’s many wives (Act 3) is not indicative for
Act 4, nor should it be considered to be in Act 5.
I also
learned a new word in Chapter 9: adiaphoron:
"something over which one should not divide the church." I don’t expect it to slip
into coffee conversation on Monday, but I do wonder if the issues that are “hot”
these days, like gays as church members, should be treated as adiaphoron.
Wright
helped me think about this in a new way.
Scripture and the Authority of God is
not a big book at 195 pages and it is a “Revised and Expanded Edition of The Last Word” of 2005. On the whole, it
probably serves best as a primer of current Bible scholarship for lay persons;
it seems much too cursory for more and I found myself wishing that Wright had
not used the “much too big a topic to be covered in this volume” excuse quite
so often, particularly when I had questions for which I craved answers.
I close
with a quote (13) that may make novice seekers in the field of hermeneutics uneasy,
but which anyone who reads extensively already knows:
Anyone who has worked within biblical scholarship knows, or ought to
know, that we biblical scholars come to the text with just as many interpretive
strategies and expectations as anyone else, and that integrity consists not of
having no presuppositions but of being aware of what one’s presuppositions are
and of the obligation to listen to and interact with those who have different
ones.
Amen to that, brother. Amen to
that.
My slip in the cow pasture may not have consigned me to hell after all;
that language clearly belongs to another act of the story!
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