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LETTING
THE BIBLE SPEAK
In his Journals, the Danish philosopher and theologian of last century,
Soren Kierkegaard called for a second reformation. “Christendom,” he wrote,
“has long been in need of a hero who, in fear and trembling, had the courage
to forbid people to read the Bible.” 1
Such a call seems no
less radical in today’s post-Christendom environment than it was in Kierkegaard’s
day, when there was a proliferation of Bible Societies dedicated to the
task of translating and distributing the Bible to all corners of the globe.
Kierkegaard was fiercely critical of these Societies, describing them as
‘vapid caricatures of mission . . . which like all companies only work with
money and are just as mundanely interested in spreading the Bible as other
companies in their enterprises’. 2
While this criticism
summarily dismisses the constructive role the Bible Societies have played
in the spread of the Gospel to so many cultures and parts of the world,
it compels us to ponder some of our deeply held assumptions about the Bible,
especially in relation to the way it functions as Holy Scripture in Western
culture, which has its roots in European Christendom.
In a paper delivered
in 1993 to the British and Foreign Bible Society, Dan Beeby cited God’s
famous smuggler to the Soviet Union and China, Brother Andrew, who observed
that in the West ‘too many Christians today do not want the Bible to interfere
with their Christianity’. 3 This
observation suggests two things. First, it states what we all probably know
to be the case: In the West Bibles are plentiful but are seldom read. Chances
are, most homes still have at least one Bible in them, but they’re seldom
referred to, far less read on any kind of regular basis. This fact renders
meaningless the oft-quoted statistic that the Bible is the most published
book ever.
Following on from this,
Brother Andrew’s comment suggests that the Bible is marginalized. A Bible
gathering dust on the shelf cannot shape one’s mind, move one to pray, command
obedience, or deepen one’s faith, far less cultivate holy living. As Dan
Beeby puts it, ‘the Western Church possesses a Bible but not a Scripture’.
Implicit in this distinction is a recognition as Christians that ‘for most
of our lives our minds have been trained and nourished by the assumptions
of a non-scriptural culture’. 4
Beeby’s argument is
supported by George Hunter III, who says the modern mind is not so much
informed by the Bible as ‘anaesthetised by the junk food of the mind, served
up by an endless diet of (women’s and) men’s magazines, formula novels,
game shows, situation comedies, soap operas, shallow movies and synthetic
friends’.5
One of the most subtle
yet profound effects of a non-scriptural culture on the Christian mind is
the tendency to privatise one’s understanding and application of the Christian
faith, including one’s reading of the Bible. Descartes’ famous dictum, and
the battle cry of the Enlightenment, ‘I think therefore I am’, not only
located the ultimate source of knowledge in the power of human thought rather
than divine revelation. It also placed the individual human subject at the
centre of reality, thereby giving rise to a non-relational view of the human
person as an autonomous individual whose being is defined solely by one’s
capacity to think. The slogan ‘I think therefore I am’ not only ignored
totally the place that relationships have in defining one’s humanity — including
one’s relationship with God. It also carried with it a profound scepticism
toward all institutions, including the Church, which make truth-claims that
cannot be verified or proved by the freestanding, freethinking individual.
The corollary of this
was a view of religion as something that deals with private, unverifiable
myths and beliefs, as opposed to hard, scientific facts. And that, by and
large, is still the predominant view today. The Church is marginalised,
and the book by which it lives and derives its view of truth - the Bible
- is marginalised and silenced. Scepticism persists towards the institutional
Church, and people prefer to pursue or develop their own spirituality without
being tied to traditional doctrinal beliefs and church structures. Hence
the popularity of the New Age movement, the Sea of Faith network and the
like.
In his book, Habits
of the Heart, American sociologist Robert Bellah cites a 1978 Gallup Poll,
which found that 80% of Americans believe that … ‘an individual should arrive
at his or her own religious beliefs independent of any churches or synagogues’.
6 Noting the percentage gap in this
country between those who, on their census form, still declare a denominational
allegiance, and those who actually attend church, I suspect the American
situation, which Bellah describes, is very close to our own, and is probably
indicative of western culture as a whole.
Interestingly, the roots
of today’s religious individualism are not to be found in the Enlightenment
alone. Indeed, the Enlightenment’s emphasis upon the individual did not
arise in a vacuum. In his seminal work of 1941, The Nature and Destiny of
Man, Reinhold Niebuhr drew attention to the impact of the Renaissance and
the Reformation on modernity’s emphasis upon the individual. 7
The Renaissance’s concern to emancipate learning from the medieval tyranny
of religious dogmatism, through the rediscovery of ancient Greek philosophy,
science and literature, was accompanied by an emphasis upon the uniqueness
and potential of each human being, and upon the freedom of the will.
At the same time, the
Reformation principle of the ‘priesthood of all believers’ brought about
a heightened emphasis upon the faith and responsibility of the individual
before God, in direct defiance of the mediating role assumed by the medieval
church. Personal faith rather than reliance upon the Church’s priesthood
and system of sacraments became a distinguishing mark of Protestantism.
Luther, said Niebuhr, put the matter in a typically robust illustration:
“When you lie upon your deathbed you cannot console yourself by saying,
‘The pope said thus and so’. The devil can drill a hole through that assurance.
Suppose the pope were wrong? Then you will be defeated. Therefore you must
be able to say at all times, ‘This is the word of God’.” 8
Luther’s exhortation
for individual Christians to know for themselves the word of God coincided
with the advent of the printing press in sixteenth century Europe, which
took the Bible out of the churches and placed it in the hands of ordinary
people. Luther was rather visionary in his appreciation of the power of
the printing press in advancing the Protestant cause, describing printing
as ‘God’s highest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven
forward’.9 As Neil Postman comments,
Luther understood ‘that the mass-produced book, by placing the Word of God
on every kitchen table, makes each Christian his own theologian—one might
even say his own priest, or, better, from Luther’s point of view, his own
pope’. 10
If the Reformation was
instrumental in sowing the seed of religious individualism on the continent,
the seed was successfully transplanted on to British soil by the English
Puritans in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Puritanism
was a complex and diverse phenomenon, but at its heart was a concern for
purity of doctrine and Christian life at a time of enormous political and
religious upheaval. I would identify two aspects of Puritanism that encouraged
religious individualism.
First, as those of Puritan
leaning resisted the repeated attempts of the monarchy to impose religious
and liturgical uniformity upon the nation, there was a reaction against
the use of set liturgies in public worship. Driven by a conviction that
God should be worshipped and obeyed according to the ‘purity’ of the Bible,
many Puritans desired freedom in worship, with an emphasis on ‘free prayer’
and the ‘freedom of the Spirit’. In many congregations the Spirit-led extempore
prayer of individuals was preferred over the ‘stinted forms’ of the Establishment.
Second, as the doctrine
of predestination grew in prominence in Puritan doctrine, there was an increasing
introspection on the part of individual Christians: “Am I one of the elect?
How do I know that I am one of the elect?” This was the concern that dominated
the writing of William Perkins, the most widely read Puritan of the first
half of the seventeenth century, who, by the end of that century, had replaced
the combined names of John Calvin and Theodore Beza as one of most popular
authors of religious works in England. His famous Golden Chaine Concerning
the Order of the Causes of Salvation and Damnation, According to God’s Word
constitutes an exposition of God’s double-decree, whereby some people have
been ordained to salvation and others to eternal damnation.
As individual Christians
sought assurance that they were among the elect, not the reprobate, Perkins
directed their attention ultimately not to the contemplation of the person
and work of Christ, as Calvin had sought to do, but to an examination of
their conscience which, he maintained, is unaffected by the Fall,11
is bound by the Word of God, and leads to the performance of good works.12
Not that Perkins encouraged an individualistic piety, nor did he exalt the
importance of the individual, for he emphasised the need to listen to the
counsel of the wise and godly and to belong to, and be accountable to, the
visible church.13 But his central
interest in the knowledge of election, the special role he gave to religious
experience and the conscience, and his zeal for individual souls, did take
Reformed theology and piety one step further down the track of religious
individualism.
This was reflected in
the Puritan approach to the interpretation of Scripture. As with Calvin
and Reformed teaching in general, Puritan teaching emphasised the role of
the Holy Spirit over against Tradition.14
However, as Brooks Holifield notes, it also ‘elaborated far more carefully
than Calvin the internal spiritual qualities of the (individual) believer
that were necessary for understanding the written Word. Within Puritanism
generally, humility, inward purity of heart, and spiritual piety became
prerequisites for understanding’.15
The subtle transfer
of cognitive authority from the Church to the individual in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries was further advanced by the Enlightenment. Even
though the Church resisted many of the secularist aspects of the Enlightenment,
it was nevertheless influenced by the general confidence in the basic intelligence
or common sense of the individual person, the legacy of which is still felt
today. As Stanley Hauerwas sums it up, ‘the reformation doctrine of sola
scriptura, joined to the invention of the printing press and underwritten
by the democratic trust in the intelligence of the common person, has created
the situation that now makes people believe that they can read the Bible
on their own,’16 without the necessary
mediation of the Church.
This perception is reflected
in the situation of universities, in many instances, presuming to teach
theology and biblical studies either in a non-confessional manner, or in
a confessional manner that is not anchored in the life and praxis of the
Church. We now know, in this post-Enlightenment era, that there is no such
thing as detached, neutral, scholarship. The atheistic lecturer in biblical
studies brings just as many assumptions and implicit beliefs to his or her
task as a card-carrying Baptist.
In my view, there is
a threefold danger in the pretence of academic neutrality, when it comes
to biblical studies. First, in setting up a biblical studies programme that
exists independently of the life and praxis of the Church, it tends to treat
the Bible as something that can be mastered and controlled by the individual
through an academic process, rather than something to which one must submit
with others in faith and prayer. The tools of textual criticism that define
the academic process are deemed to be of greater importance than the mediating
function of the Church as a living, interpretative community of faith.
Second, it drives a
wedge between one’s study of the Bible and one’s faith, between theory and
praxis. What we learn about the Bible in the classroom may or may not impact
upon our lives outside the classroom, even to the extent that we develop,
in Kierkegaard’s words, ‘a religion of learning and law’ that constitutes
a ‘distraction’ from the real task of Christian living. In this regard,
Kierkegaard observed that the downside to the pursuit of biblical knowledge
is that no one reads the Bible ‘humanly’. By this, he meant that the Christian
life so easily becomes a ‘fortification of excuses and escapes; for there
is always something one has to look into first of all’, the result of which
is that ‘one never begins’.17
Third, the vacuum generated
by the absence of the Church’s mediating function in theology and biblical
studies tends to get filled up with a whole host of substitute assumptions
and ideologies, the dangers of which are evident in the troubled histories
of Northern Ireland, South Africa and Nazi Germany - and we might add Serbia
to that list - all deeply Christian countries, yet each one captured by
a nationalistic or sectarian ideology that is profoundly anti-Christian.
The term ‘cultural Protestantism’ has come to refer to the situation wherein
Christianity is identified with its surrounding culture to the extent that
the ideologies and intellectual forces that shape and drive one’s culture
also dominate the Church, so that the lives of Christians are no longer
shaped by the distinctive promise and demand of the Gospel.
Stanley Hauerwas notes
precisely this tendency in relation to his own country, the United States
of America, a country whose imagination and self-understanding have been
shaped profoundly by stories of Roy Rogers and countless other wild west
heroes who rise to the occasion to combat evil, blazing six-gun in hand.
In this culture, notes Hauerwas, few Christians see any inherent incompatibility
between the use of violence and what Jesus was about. Indeed, as we have
seen in relation to Iraq and Serbia in recent years, righteous violence,
in which the forces of good combat the forces of evil, often accompanied
by the image of the President leading the nation in prayer, seems to have
become a distinguishing feature of American foreign policy.
Drawing attention to
the biblical account of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, Hauerwas argues
that ‘to claim that if Jesus had joined us on the Emmaus road, we would
have recognised him is not unlike claiming that in order to understand the
Scripture all we have to do is pick it up and read it. Both claims assume
that ‘the facts are just there’ and that reasonable people are able to see
the facts if their minds are not clouded. Yet . . . the story of Emmaus
road makes clear that knowing the Scripture does little good unless we know
it is part of a people constituted by the practices of a resurrected Lord.
So Scripture will not be self-interpreting or plain in its meaning unless
we have been transformed in order to be capable of reading it’.18
While many Christian
leaders today talk about influencing Western culture through the propagation
of Christian values and biblical principles which, allegedly, are self-evident,
such talk tends to bypass the biblical emphasis upon metanoia, which is
variously translated as repentance, conversion and transformation. The fact
is the Bible does not impart a readily discernible set of universal principles
or values. It narrates a history - the history of a triune God’s relation
to the world, in, through and with a first century Jew, Jesus of Nazareth.
To understand this history, to become part of it, and to follow and abide
with the One who stands at the centre of it, requires metanoia. Thus, when
the Bible exhorts us to love one another, it does not do so on the basis
that love is a universal value that can be applied through an act of the
will. It does so on the basis that God in Christ has first loved us. In
other words, we can only truly love once we have been, and are continually
being, transformed by God’s love.
Who is the agent of
this transformation? It is the Holy Spirit, certainly. But, as we know from
the New Testament, and in particular the story of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit
does not merely transform one individual after another. The Spirit creates
a new community, a resurrection community, a new humanity. Transformation
is both corporate and personal, the two being interwoven.
Too often, especially
in the Reformed tradition, the community dimension has been neglected, leading
well known Old Testament scholar G. Ernest Wright to observe 45 years ago
that in practice congregations tend to be ‘a gathering of individuals who
know little of Christian community in the biblical sense and expect little
from it. Like secular clubs they meet in the various groups to hear speakers
on a variety of topics that are usually unrelated, undigested, and unillumined
by the Christian faith. The worship of the Church has been heavily influenced
by individualistic pietism, concerned largely, not with the social organism,
but with the individual’s need for peace, rest and joy in the midst of the
storms and billows of life. The self-centredness of the pietistic search
for salvation tends to exclude vigorous concern with community. Hence the
modern Christian searches his Bible in a manner not unlike the pagan’s search
of his sacred literature, the purpose being to find inspirational, devotional,
and moral enlightenment for personal living, and nothing more. The sectarianism
of the Churches, and their racial and national cleavages, are further expressions
of an individualism which distorts the nature of Christian society and provides
excuse for the world’s individualism’. 19
To the extent that Wright’s
observation is still valid today - and I think it is - there is a pressing
need for the Church to rediscover what it means to be the Church, and it
is this more than anything else, I believe, that will be the key to letting
the Bible speak in today’s world. The mere distribution of more Bibles will
not do it, nor will exhortations for more people to read their Bibles. It
will require a community which, in standing under the authority of its Scriptures,
is cultivating a way of being in the world that reflects the distinctiveness
of its life in, through and with Christ.
Within this room there
will be a variety of opinions as to what this means in practice. For the
Apostle Paul, the reality of being in Christ or - as he sometimes described
it - being clothed with Christ through baptism, meant being part of a radically
new life-in-community, a new humanity, in which the traditional divisions
and consequent inequalities that existed in wider society between Jew and
Greek, slave and free, male and female, were abolished.20
It meant being charged with a ministry of reconciliation that flows from
the reconciliation of the world to the One in whom there is a new creation.21
It meant being called to a new life of faith and freedom in the Spirit rather
than being enslaved either to the Law22
or to the desires of the flesh.23
We know from reading the rest of the New Testament that it also meant a
whole lot of other things on both a personal and community level, but the
bottom line was, the Church was being called to truly be a counter-cultural
community, an agent of renewal and hope in a world caught in the grip of
sin and death.
At the centre of this
community stood the person of Christ, not merely as a role model - a fine
example who lived 2000 years ago - but as the One whose resurrection life
continually indwells his Church - his body - in a dynamic way, releasing
people to live in the Spirit. In this context, central to Paul’s understanding
of the Christian life was the reality of being, or living, ‘in Christ’,
a phrase he uses over 160 times in his letters. In the same way, John’s
Gospel uses the language of ‘abiding in Christ’, just as a branch abides
in the vine.
It was this reality
of being in union with Christ, and not merely following his example, that
led John Calvin to give such priority to the Eucharist. For him, the Lord’s
Supper was not just a meal of remembrance. It was a visible expression of
the present and enduring union with Christ, a union that is in his body,
the Church. The bread and wine are signs of a reality that our life before
God flows from the flesh and blood of Christ, that we are fed on his human
nature in virtue of the ‘wondrous exchange’ by which Christ has taken our
unrighteousness upon himself and clothed us with the righteousness that
is his.
I mention this because,
it seems to me, the less eucharistic Reformed worship has become since the
time of Calvin, the more the Church has fallen away from this sense of being
in union with Christ, and the more individualistic and Pelagian it has become.
The sermon is the main feature of many Reformed worship services, but without
the Eucharist we tend to regard the sermon primarily as something that is
intended for individual Christians rather than something that leads us into
eucharistic community with one another. As James B. Torrance puts it, ‘we
sit in the pew watching the minister “doing his thing”, exhorting us “to
do our thing”, until we go home thinking we have done our duty for another
week!’24
The issue here is not
one of two competing authorities, Scripture and tradition. Rather, as Vigen
Guroian argues, ‘it is about truth and how that truth comes to life, how
it is hypostasized (or enfleshed) in the communion of believers. . . From
the standpoint of this eucharistic and communal hermeneutic, the prevalent
Western model - namely, that two authorities, Scripture and tradition, are
subject to interpretation by the autonomous intellect - is very questionable’.25
In conclusion, I am
not convinced that the Bible can speak directly to our western culture,
any more than it can speak in an unmediated fashion to any culture. Just
as a book on quantum physics is dependent upon and requires the mediating
function of the community of scholarship of which it is part, so the Bible
is dependent upon and requires the mediating function of the community of
interpretation which the Spirit has called into being and which we call
the Church. Biblical interpretation is a community process grounded in the
unique world-view, the distinct memories, and the particular set of practices
that constitute life in the Kingdom of God. The clue to letting the Bible
speak to the West, therefore, is to be found in the area of ecclesiology.
1 The Journal of Kierkegaard
trans. A. Dru (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), p.150, cited by Stanley Hauerwas,
Unleashing the Scriptures: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1993), p.17
2 Journal, cited ibid. p.17
3 Dan Beeby, “Scripture: From Rumour to Recovery?” unpublished paper, 1993,
p.1
4 Ibid. p.2
5 George G. Hunter III, How to Reach a Secular People (Nashville: Abingdon
Press, 1992) p.23
6 Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American
Life (California: University of California Press, 1985), p.228
7 Cf. Niebuhr, “Individuality in Modern Culture”, from The Nature and Destiny
of Man, Vol. 1, 1941, reprinted in Individualism Reconsidered: Readings
Bearing on the Endangered Self in Modern Society, eds. D.Capps & R.K. Fenn
(Center for Religion, Self & Society, Princeton Theological Seminary, Monograph
Series No. 1), pp.33-9
8 Ibid. p.34
9 Cited by Neil Postman, in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
(New York: Vintage Books, 1993), p.15
10 Ibid. p.15
11 Perkins taught that the soul consists of two faculties, understanding
and will, the former being the realm of reason and conscience, the latter
being the realm of affections. The conscience, in which the image of God
resides, he alleged, is part of the understanding of all human beings, whether
elect of reprobate, and is determining of their actions.
12 The emphasis Perkins gave to the role of the conscience is evident in
Ian Breward’s comment that he “spent Sabbath afternoons resolving cases
of conscience and from the outset his books displayed a keen interest in
the subject. His book A Resolution to the Countriman dealt with the issues
raised by the use of almanacs, A Case of Conscience—the Greatest that Ever
was appeared in 1592, A Discourse on Conscience in 1595, while he was working
on a synthesis of his earlier work when he died in 1602, so that Cases of
Conscience was published posthumously” (William Perkins, ed. Ian Breward,
(Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), p.62).
13 The accountability of the individual Christian to the Church for purity
of life became evident in the Puritan devotion to exercising ecclesiastical
discipline. Censures covered all manner of sins from the display of ‘strong
and violent passions’ to ‘idleness, tatling, and being busie-bodies in other
men’s matters’. “Even such peccadilloes as gossiping or occasional laziness
were actually punishable by excommunication” (Cf. Horton Davies, Worship
and Theology in England (Volume 2): From Andrewes to Baxter and Fox, 1603-1690
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p.234).
14 The Church was regarded as the keeper of Scripture, not its lord. As
William Perkins put it, “The Church is not to challenge to herself authority
over the scriptures, but only a ministry or ministerial service, whereby
she is appointed of God to publish and preach them and to give testimony
of them”. Cf., Ian Breward’s Introduction to William Perkins, p.46.
15 E. Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan
Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570-1720 (New Haven & London:
Yale University Press, 1974), p.50
16 Unleashing the Scriptures, p.17
17 Cited by Hauerwas, ibid. pp.16-7
18 Ibid., p.49
19 G.Ernest Wright, The Biblical Doctrine of Man in Society (London: SCM,
1954), p.21, cited by Hauerwas, ibid., p.26
20 Cf. Galatians 3:27-28
21 Cf. 2 Corinthians 5:16-20
22 Cf. Galatians 2:16f
23 Cf. Ephesians 4:17f
24 James B. Torrance, Worship, Community & the Triune God of Grace (Downers
Grove, Illinois: IVP, 1996), p.20
25 Vigen Guroian, Ethics After Christendom: Toward an Ecclesial Christian
Ethic (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994) p.59
Rev.
Dr. Graham Redding is a Presbyterian Minister in Wellington, New Zealand.
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