It’s Bible Month
Having said that, it’s easy to either hold the Bible up as a God-breathed, word-for-word textbook with a verse for every situation we encounter in life today or to dismiss it as a curiosity, a relic of a by-gone age that properly should be largely ignored in the light of contemporary science and our more enlightened understanding of the nature of reality.
I’m not sure that either extreme is either desirable or necessary.
I’ve long been helped by an observation of Myles Coverdale, a 16th century English ecclesiastical reformer, chiefly known as a Bible translator, preacher and, briefly, Bishop of Exeter (1551-1553). In 1535 Coverdale produced the first complete printed translation of the Bible into English. This is what he had to say:
“It shall greatly help ye to understand the Scriptures if thou mark not only what is spoken or written, but of whom and to whom, with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstances, considering what goeth before and what followeth after.”
This both honours the integrity of the text and breaks us free from the need to interpret everything written millennia ago as though it were intended to be unchangeable, like the ‘Law of the Medes and the Persians’ (Dan 6:15), and wholly applicable to us today. As Coverdale pointed out, everything needs to be contextualised.
It’s when we see the trajectory of Scripture, the overall direction that unfolds, that we have a more life-giving way of interpreting it in our own day and context.
It starts with a primitive people in barbaric times. It introduces them to a God they can only barely glimpse, progresses to a system of laws and regulations that effectively act as a form of behaviourism – that as they start living according to these laws they find their perspectives change, their hearts soften and the possibility of experiencing God becomes more apparent. While it becomes clear that the law is impossible to keep, we learn that its whole purpose was to point beyond itself – to Christ (Gal 3:24). In Christ we discover a whole new way of being, of seeing, of living, of engaging with the world. It's a way led by the Spirit of God. And it’s a way that invites us into a more expansive vision of how the world might be. We get hints of it in New Testament writings – “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female.” In Christ, the walls of separation and division are torn down as we are called into the oneness that is our birthright in Christ.
While the text of Scripture may have been completed 2000 years ago, this does not mean that God has stopped speaking and no longer speaks today. It is not difficult to extrapolate forward the life-giving principles laid out in Scripture and allow them to be touchstones for us in our current age. For example Jesus’ great commandment that we are to love one another – to seek the highest and best good of the other - could make a huge difference in the church’s life and testimony in our current age if only we could take it seriously.
Yet, rather than interpreting Scripture through a love-based lens, we so readily default to interpreting through the lens of fear. As a result the church is portrayed as reactionary and backward looking. We are much more readily identifiable as what we are against than what we stand for in a positive and life-giving way. And rather than see this as a problem, we see it as a virtue. That the world hates us for our bigotry, our small mindedness, our meanness of spirit, we wear as a badge of honour – after all, we expect to be persecuted for our faith. How the Spirit of grace must grieve.
As we engage with Scripture this month, how about we run an experiment? How about we seek to catch ourselves, what’s going through our hearts and minds as we read? Are we interpreting through the eyes of fear or love? And when we sense the fear, let’s ask ourselves – what’s behind this? What view of God am I buying into here? Is this the God who IS Love, or are we more consumed with one we imagine to be wrath, judgement and punishment?