And there’s a second conversation going on. Just as the biblical authors converse with one another, so Christians in the history of the church have conversed with one another—about the Bible’s own conversation. Church history is a series of conversations about The Conversations in the Bible. Some, as we sketched in the second chapter, believe we can ignore what God has said to others; they leapfrog over the history of the church to return to the Bible alone. This approach, sadly, ignores the conversation God has directed throughout the history of the church. But if we learn to read the Bible with tradition—and it’s a bit like sitting down at a table with three or four generations in our family on Christmas holiday—we can enter into this big conversation in which we can learn from the wisdom of the past. Our privilege and our challenge are to carry on that conversation in our world today.
God communicates Bible with God’s listening people
in conversation
Relationship with God
I bring it all together into one central focus now: A relational approach believes our relationship to the Bible is transformed into a relationship with the God who speaks to us in and through the Bible. We come back now to our first observation: If we distinguish God from the Bible, then we also learn that in listening to God’s words in the Bible we are in search of more than a relationship with words on paper, we are seeking a relationship with the person who speaks on paper. Our relationship to the Bible is actually a relationship with the God of the Bible. We want to emphasize that we don’t ask what the Bible says, we ask what God says to us in that Bible. The difference is a difference between paper and person.
God communicates Bible with God’s listening people
in conversation
relationship with God of the Bible
Let me put this now one final way: God gave the Bible not so we can know it but so we can know and love God through it.
Professors and Their Administrators
Maybe another analogy will point us in the right direction. My relationship to the president and provost and dean of my university, Northern Seminary, might be called a relationship of authority. William Shiell, our president, and Jason Gile, our dean, are in one sense authority figures. They have more authority than I do—and they should have. Frankly, knowing the kind of life an administrator is called to live, I am quite happy to cede that authority to them. Actually, I’m not ceding anything to them. They are given authority by the board of trustees, and my responsibility is to acknowledge their authority. However you look at it, they have a kind of authority I don’t have.
However, it’s all about framing the relationship. If I frame their relationship to me in terms of authority—as in “They are my authority figures”—then I have to frame my relationship to them in terms of submission—as in “I do whatever they say.” If a professor’s responsibility is simply one of submission—which it isn’t at our school—the whole relationship is framed by words like “hierarchy,” “authority,” and “obedience.”
Is this a proper way of framing the relationship of an administrator and a professor? I hope not. In fact, if an administrator chooses to frame his or her relationship to professors in terms of authority—as in “I am in charge. Listen to me. Do this or that!”—then the dynamic heart of the relationship has gone south. Administrators who find this approach appealing are usually in trouble or they are saying the professor is in trouble. If a man or woman frames his or her relationship to a spouse or to children in terms of the word “authority,” you can bet your sweet bippy that the relationship is not what it should be.
What if we frame our relationship differently? What if, instead of framing a professor’s relationship to the administration in terms of authority, we frame it in terms of love, trust, and conversation? To be sure, within that frame there is authority and sometimes debate and disagreement. I’ve had my share of that. But the point we are making is that the framing of the relationship is very important. What words do we use that best frame such a relationship? I am certain of this: authority and submission are not the best terms.
Let’s extend this to another realm. For reasons better left untouched right now, some traditional Christians have framed the relationship of a husband and a wife in terms of hierarchy, authority, and submission. Why? Because Paul and Peter use such terms in their letters (see Ephesians 5:21–33 and 1 Peter 3:1–7). Apart from studying these passages more carefully in their own contexts, which story reading of the Bible insists on in light of passages like Galatians 3:28 or Colossians 3:11, we are apt to frame a husband-wife relationship in such terms, but we would be making a serious mistake. There’s a lot more to it than this. Any relationship of a husband and wife that is not foremost a frame of love will distort the relationship.
The story of the Bible has one book devoted to husbands and wives, the Song of Songs, and before one ever reads Ephesians 5 or 1 Peter 3, one should dip deeply into the Song’s intimate secrets. The framing of a husband and wife relationship in terms of love—the kind of delightful, playful love found in Song of Songs—completely changes things.
So too if we frame our relationship to the Bible in terms of authority, we will inevitably have authoritarian issues emerging as theology. Here is a conclusion that has taken me years to come to: without denying the legitimacy of the various terms in the authority approach, those who have a proper relationship to the Bible never need to speak of the Bible as their authority nor do they speak of their submission to the Bible. They are so in tune with God, so in love with him, that the word “authority” is swallowed up in loving God. Even more, the word “submission” is engulfed in the disposition of listening to God speak through the Bible and in the practice of doing what God calls us to do.
Once we come to terms with the relational approach of the Bible and we frame the Bible as God’s story in the form of a plot with wiki-stories, we begin to think about our relationship to the Bible. If submission falls short of how we respond to the Bible, what word best captures our response to the Bible? Turn the page.
CHAPTER 7
GOD SPEAKS, WE LISTEN
What Is Our Relationship to the God Who Speaks to Us in the Bible?
One day in my office a student turned our conversation to the right set of beliefs about the Bible. He asked, “Why does my youth pastor ask me all the time if I still believe in the ‘inerrancy’ of the Bible?” I was about to explain to him the history of the doctrine of Scripture and the battles Christians have waged over the Bible when he interrupted me with these words (and this is how he said it): “You know, Scot, I really don’t give a d—n what my youth pastor’s view of the Bible is because he doesn’t give one frickin’ dime to the poor and he’s never met a homeless person in his life and he didn’t even know about Darfur when I mentioned it to him at Christmas.” This student obviously was a bit worked up, so I sat back to listen.
He continued, “My view of the Bible is this: I read it often—not every day—and I do what I think God tells me to do. I don’t make much money, but I give . . .” He was about to tell me what percent he gave to the poor but stopped himself because, he told me later, he thought it might be self-congratulatory. Then he asked a pointed question, a good one: “What good is ‘inerrancy’ if you don’t do what God says?” His next question shook me a bit: “If I do what God says to me through the Bible, doesn’t that show that my view of the Bible is the right one?” Students. You gotta love ’em.
How many of us know our doctrine about the Bible but don’t do what the God of the Bible says? To paraphrase our Lord’s brother, “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if people claim to have [the right view of the Bible] but do not practice what it says?” (James 2:14, retooled). Believing in inspiration, revelation, infallibility or inerrancy, and authority describes one’s view of the Bible. Fine. We need to talk about our view of the Bible. But that isn’t enough.
We have too many today who say, “Now that you’ve got the right view of the Bible, you’re on the side of
the angels.” Having the right view isn’t the point of the Bible. We need to have not only a “view” of the Bible but also a “relationship” to the God of the Bible. Knowing water will hydrate the body and believing that drinking five bottles of water daily is healthy are not the same as drinking the water until one’s body is properly hydrated. Those who drink the water are the ones who really know and believe. Having the right view of the Bible is knowing and believing, but we need to move to the next step: engaging the God of that Bible.
Jesus told a parable that teaches this point. It is called the parable of the two sons (see Matthew 21:28–32). Here’s the parable part:
“What do you think? There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work today in the vineyard.’
“ ‘I will not,’ he answered, but later he changed his mind and went.
“Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, ‘I will, sir,’ but he did not go.
“Which of the two did what his father wanted?”
“The first,” they answered.
Agreeing-and-not-doing and not-agreeing-but-finally-doing are two different things. A relational approach focuses on the second.
We must begin an entirely new conversation that gets us beyond the right view of the Bible to one that seeks to answer this question: “What is our relationship to the God of the Bible?” I suggest that the answer to that question, and one that comes to mind immediately for the one who reads the Bible attentively, is simple: Our relationship to the God of the Bible is to listen to God so we can love him more deeply and love others more completely. If God’s ultimate design for us is to love God and to love others, we can acquire that love only by learning to listen to God.
Listening and loving are intimately connected.
Yo, Scot, You Doin’ Anything?
A student knocked on my door one fall during the first week of classes. “Yo, Scot, you doin’ anything?” she asked.
“No, of course not,” I said in what has to be one of my more common understatements. “Come on in.” You should know that the average college student spends nine hours a week studying. If that same student were taking sixteen hours of credit, that means she would be occupied with being a student twenty-five hours a week. You do the math.
She sat down in a chair next to me and asked me without a moment’s hesitation, “What do you think about homosexuality?” To which I thought to myself, Wow, that’s a big question to ask a teacher you’ve seen exactly once. She must have realized that and quickly asked another, “What do you think of the war in Iraq?”
Now I had a flashing insight. I knew this student wasn’t in my office to ask questions or to look for answers to big questions. She wanted to talk to one of her professors. Having had experience at this, I sensed she was homesick and wanted to be with a parent-like figure. So I asked her about herself, and she asked me a brief question about my blog and my wife and my kids. I then asked her a question, and for the next twenty minutes she went on in a nonstop prattle. Suddenly looking at her cell phone, which doubles as a watch, she exclaimed, “Ohmigosh [that’s one word nowadays]! I’m late for class.” She slung her backpack over her shoulder, hurried out the door, down the steps, and then, as if realizing she hadn’t quite made closure, yelled back, “This was fun. Let’s do it again sometime!” Sure, I thought.
This student grew to see me as one of her favorite professors for one reason: I had enough time to listen to her. I never quite knew what she saw in me, but I was all ears for her on many occasions. She would stop by—“Yo, Scot, you doin’ anything?” (No, of course not)—and we would chat and I would listen and then she would leave. Sometimes that’s all it takes. Listening and loving, we must never forget, are connected.
Kris and I talk all the time; she asks me about my day and I talk my way through the day. I ask her about her day, and she talks her way through her day. Then we’re done. I don’t think we say to ourselves, “Now I’m listening; listening is loving; therefore, I’m loving now.” Instead, listening to each other is our mode of existence. (I must confess that I’m nowhere near the listener Kris is.)
Reading the Bible is an act of listening. Listening, to quote the title of a popular book, is an act of love.1
Listening as Love of God and Others
The most perceptive book about how to listen to the Bible is by Alan Jacobs, a professor at Wheaton College. Jacobs reminds us that words matter because words flow out of persons. In A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love, Jacobs articulates a theory of reading that emerges from two important observations:
1. Written words are personal communication from one person to another.
2. The proper relationship of a Christian to a person’s communication is to love that person by listening to their words.2
Words on a page, Jacobs informs us over and over, are not just little squiggles of information on paper. Written words are personal exchanges, personal deposits of a person. Our words come from the depth of our heart and soul, and they extend who we are. That is why we care what others think of what we say. Not everything we say is this serious, of course. When I say “How much?” at the grocery store, not too much is on the line (unless, of course, I don’t have enough money in my pocket). But statements like “I love you” and questions like “Will you be here for me?” and promises like “I will be with you” are personal exchanges. Words matter because they represent persons. Because words represent persons, how we respond to words matters.
When someone writes me an email, it is far easier for me to disagree with the words, scan what has been said, or even casually dismiss the words than if the person were standing in front of me and saying the same thing. I am much more likely, and you probably are too, to listen to a person than to an email. In fact, it would be unchristian to refuse to listen to, to ignore, or to dismiss a person facing me. Jacobs reminds us that the Christian summons to love our neighbor as ourselves, what I call the “Jesus Creed,” teaches us that written words are as serious as the spoken word.
Jacobs calls this Christian understanding of words “the hermeneutics of love.” “The hermeneutics of love requires that books and authors . . . be understood and treated as neighbors.”3 This means that when our neighbors speak, we listen. Love listens.
Listening in the Bible
Did you know that the words “listen” and “hear” are found more than 1,500 times in the Bible? Klyne Snodgrass, a friend and former colleague, studied each of these references and came to this realization: “The biggest complaint in Scripture is that people do not listen to God. Theirs is a freely chosen deafness.” Choosing not to listen contradicts the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: . . . Love the LORD your God” (Deuteronomy 6:4–5, emphasis added). Klyne then reached this insightful conclusion: “The greatest command is to love God; the prior command [to loving God] is the command to hear.”4 Love of God and love of others can happen only when we have ears to listen to God speak.
The words “hear” or “listen” in the Bible operate on at least three levels (I will provide my own translations): attention, absorption, and action. Attention opens our ears. If you’ve ever been around a group of people speaking a language you don’t know, you instantly recognize what Paul meant in 1 Corinthians 14:2: “For those who speak in a [spiritual] tongue do not speak to other people but to God. Humans do not attend to what they are saying [because they cannot understand it]; they are speaking mysteries by the Spirit” (my translation).
A second, deeper level of meaning can be found in Solomon’s great prayer request after he became king. This expression pertains to absorption, when our ears let God’s voice in so that it fills our being: “So give your servant a [hearing] heart” (1 Kings 3:9). And God did give him a “wise and discerning heart” (3:12), a heart that fully absorbed what God was saying.
The third level puts legs on the ears as action, as Jesus says: “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them int
o practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock” (Matthew 7:24). Or as when the Father says to the disciples of Jesus when he was transfigured: “Listen to him!” (17:5, emphasis added in both passages). Both of these speak of a listening that has ears that lead to certain behaviors.
When we read the Bible as Story and develop a relationship with the God of the Bible,
• we learn to listen to and for God in the Bible as we read it;
• we are attentive enough to recognize God’s voice and let it in;
• we absorb what God says so that it floods our inner being; and
• we act on what we have heard from God.
Listening to our fellow humans is an art, and you need to get better at listening. So do I. Listening to the Bible is also an art, and you need to get better at that as well. So do I. Sometimes we don’t listen. Another way of saying this is that sometimes we listen but not well—there is some attention, but no absorption or action.
Not Listening
I was fifteen. My driver’s education instructor had directed me to drive to Reed Park in Freeport, Illinois. The park was near the Little League diamond, where there was a parking lot with a series of graveled ovals around which and through which we beginners all learned to turn a vehicle safely and accurately. On this day it was my turn to drive backward, which I was about to learn was not easy.
At the far end of the parking lot, my instructor directed me to stop the car and begin backing up. I listened (in the sense of attended) and began to do what I thought he had instructed me to do. To my left was a slight hill, maybe three feet high, extending the length of the lot. Somehow I managed to get both wheels on the driver’s side on that hill and the instructor’s side still on the level gravel oval. We were both leaning left to maintain our balance.
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