by Timothy Beal
Johnson recalls his lifelong soul search. He’s traveled far and wide, through cities and wildernesses. He’s heard answers from lawyers, doctors, and theologians. None have satisfied. In response to each of the answers he’s been given, he repeats his question with more forceful, gravelly urgency.
In his quest, he turns to the Bible.
I read the Bible often. I tries to read it right
And far as I could understand, nothing but a burning light
Called to preach since age five, steeped in the African American Baptist tradition, this blind sage of spiritual blues knew the Bible inside and out from memory. Yet it gave him no answer, only a more profound mystery: nothing but a burning light.
I first discovered this song when I heard Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn perform a cover of it in a concert in Atlanta, Georgia, about a year before I finished graduate school at Emory. The image of “nothing but a burning light” immediately grabbed me, and stayed with me as I began my career as a professor. In fact, it was the title of my final lecture the first time I taught my introductory Bible course, which I called Dead Prophets Society. To me, it is an image of mystery that is both compelling and at least a little dangerous. Warming, burning. Enlightening, blinding. Life giving, dangerous. No angel of the Lord speaking from it, as there was in the burning bush that spoke to Moses. An all-consuming revelation, it sheds light on the absence of answers.
There is indeed a bluesy biblical mysticism here, a solicitation of deep spiritual unrest that opens us to that which is beyond articulation. The failure to find the answer gives way to a more profound revelation, a burning light of unknowing.
In its “failure” to say one thing on anything, in its “failure” as a book of answers or font of univocal truth, the Bible opens itself to mystery. It is faithful not to the answer but to the question that takes you to the edge of knowing. “There is a crack in everything,” declares another great songwriter and theologian, Leonard Cohen. “That’s how the light gets in.”
The Bible by the Side of the Road
The ninth-century Zen master Lin Chi is remembered for saying, “If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Meaning kill your attachment to the Buddha. Nurturing an attachment, even to the master of detachment, prevents spiritual growth.
Attachment to the cultural icon of the Bible is similarly debilitating. It’s a false image, an idol. If you see it, kill it. The Bible is dead; long live the Bible. Not as the book of answers but as a library of questions, not as a wellspring of truth but as a pool of imagination, a place that hosts our explorations, rich in ambiguity, contradiction, and argument. A place that, in its failure to give clear answers and its refusal to be contained by any synopsis or conclusion, points beyond itself to mystery, which is at the heart of the life of faith.
We might even go so far as to say that the Bible kills itself. It deconstructs itself. Reading it undermines the iconic idea of it as a univocal, divinely authored book and our desire to attach to it as such. As we saw in our exploration of biblical polyvocality Scriptures have a tendency to exceed the boundaries of orthodoxy and resist closure. The Bible keeps reopening theological cans of worms. It resists its own impoverishment by univocality. In so doing, it fails to give answer, leaving readers biblically ungrounded.
In response, we can buy another values-added Bible and keep the dream alive. If at first we don’t succeed, buy, buy again. The Bible biz is at the ready. Or we can give up on the Bible altogether. Very many do, as if it stands or falls based on how well it fits our inadequate idea of it. Or we can begin to let our attachment to that idea die.
8
And I Feel Fine
WHEN I GRADUATED from high school, a former Sunday school teacher and close friend of my family gave me a paperback copy of Harold Lindsell’s The Battle for the Bible, urging me to read it before leaving for the Lower 48 to begin college at Seattle Pacific University. Considered a fundamentalist manifesto by many, the book argues that Christian faith stands or falls on biblical inerrancy.
In this day of iTunes and Target gift cards, such a graduation gift seems inappropriately serious. But this friend was sincerely concerned about the challenges I would soon be facing. His inscription on the inside cover warned that, “even at a Christian college like Seattle Pacific,” there were professors who did not believe in the inerrancy of the Bible and would seek to undermine my faith in it. College, like life, he seemed to be saying, would be a battle for the Bible.
I brought the book with me to college, but I decided not to read it. By that time in my life, there was a still small voice inside me that longed for an alternative to this sort of embattled Biblicism. Although I didn’t admit it to my peers or this friend, the battle for the Bible was already well under way. I had lost most of my will to stand guard.
Still, the battle was far from over. I did very well in college, except in the one course I took on the Bible. It was an introduction to the literature and history of the Old Testament. I failed the final exam and got a C-minus overall. Part of the problem was that my former girlfriend, who’d dumped me over Christmas break, was also in the class, and I had a hard time concentrating on the lectures. More than that, however, I found myself struggling with the course content. I’d like to say that it was too conservative in its presumptions about the Bible. After all, by that time, halfway through my sophomore year, I had given up on church, let alone reading the Bible. I thought of myself less as a Bible-believing Christian than as a poetry-reading mystic.
Truth is, my problem wasn’t that the course was too conservative. In fact, it was exactly what my former Sunday school teacher had worried it might be, and what I thought I wanted. A well-respected biblical historian and very popular teacher, Professor Frank Spina modeled depth and complexity in his understanding and abiding appreciation of the Bible—what it is, where it came from, and how to study it in a faithful yet academically responsible way. He adeptly drew our attention to the differences in the two creation stories in Genesis, refusing to explain them away as mere seeming contradictions. He encouraged us to ask whether biblical accounts of the Hebrew people’s liberation from bondage in Egypt and their conquest of Canaan in the books of Exodus and Joshua were historically accurate, and offered us alternative scholarly theories that fit better with the archaeological record and other ancient documents. Throughout the course, he challenged our simplistic ideas and preconceived notions.
Looking back now, I can see that the main reason I earned a low grade in the course was that I wasn’t quite ready to embrace what it was offering. Although I’d abandoned the biblical faith of my youth, I retained its basic, iconic understanding of the Bible. I hadn’t changed my idea of it. I had simply rejected it as such.
In my case, it took a very different sort of introduction to the Bible for me to begin to let go of my preconceived, all too familiar idea of it. It was in a course on English Romantic poetry, and the voice that broke through was that of the visionary printmaker and eccentric genius William Blake. (“That explains a lot,” more than one colleague has remarked. I always take it as a compliment.) Blake wrote of encounters with prophets and devils, whom he liked very much, and with moralists and angels, whom he resented even more. He declared moral goodness oppressive and reason a false idol. He wrote “Proverbs of Hell” that praised excess over prudence and desire over reason. He lamented any lack of imagination, closing the “doors of perception,” keeping us from seeing the infinite in everything. I wasn’t always sure what to make of his provocative proclamations and strange visions. But I was drawn to the impassioned volatility of his religious imagination. My sense in studying his works was that he had been somewhere I had never been but wanted to go. His imagination seemed radically other than my own. Yet he passionately identified with Christianity and claimed that his inspiration was none other than the Bible.
Two lines that Blake wrote in his Laocoon, a collage-like meditation on art and religion, hit me especially hard: “If Morality was C
hristianity, Socrates was the Savior” and “The Old & New Testaments are the Great Code of Art.”
For Blake, Christianity was not about morality but art, by which I think he meant the ongoing process of making and remaking, visioning and revisioning, of changing the world by changing one’s way of seeing, opening the “doors of perception.” To be creative was to be in the image of God; creativity is God in and with us. The Bible, moreover, was not to him anything like the moral guide and book of answers that I’d grown up with. It was, rather, “the Great Code of Art.”
For me, studying religion is about making the strange familiar and the familiar strange. It’s about encountering religious beliefs and practices that initially appear unfamiliar, foreign, other, and coming to understand how they can be true for those who embrace and live by them. It’s about getting to know the context within which they make sense. But it’s also about encountering those religious beliefs and practices that seem familiar to us in new and surprising ways, whether interpreting them according to new theories and methods or comparing them to less familiar religions. In that process, we often find that the familiar becomes strange. As we become familiar with the strange—as we begin to see ourselves in the stranger—we also may begin to see the stranger in ourselves. A sense of otherness takes root in our own familiar.
I never went so far as to join the Church of William Blake (yes, there is such a thing). But for me, studying how Blake saw the Bible began to estrange me from what I thought I knew about it. A thousand Sundays hence, I am still drawn to his vision of the Bible as a code of art. Not a book of moral guidelines or answers, “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth,” but a body of literature whose spiritual value lies in its power to inspire new creations, new ideas, new ways of seeing ourselves and our world. Not the final word, the end of the discussion, but a locus of genesis, a deep wellspring of creative meaning-making, with no final Word in sight.
There are, moreover, resonances between Blake’s great code of art and my library of questions. As code of art, the Bible not only is art, but it inspires artistic creation in those who study it. Likewise, as library of questions, the Bible not only raises questions, but also inspires readers to raise new ones in relation to it. And both ways of thinking about the Bible value process over conclusion: art is about the making more than the made, and questioning is about the asking more than the answering. The most profound questions, those that burn at the heart of the religious life, are those that live beyond all the answers given them. And there is indeed an art to asking those kinds of questions. The Bible is a pool of imagination in which to pursue that art. It hosts the human quest for meaning without predestining a specific conclusion. For those wanting “real answers, real fast,” I recommend Socrates.
Cracking the Binding
With my own students, I often enjoy sharing what I call “word snacks,” little etymological explorations of words that perhaps have become too familiar. I find that looking into the early family life of a word rekindles latent meanings that can be enlightening and even inspiring. So it is with the word “religion.”
Most say that the Latin origin of religion is in religare, from the verb ligare, “to bind” or “attach.” Religare therefore means “to rebind” or “re-attach.” With this origin in mind, we have a sense of religion as a kind of binding. Religion is about being bound and re-bound to a set of beliefs, doctrines, institutions, and scriptures. It’s about identifying oneself with a particular tradition, and with a larger body of likewise religiously bound people. That’s religion in terms of the binding.
But the ancient philosopher Cicero suggested that the meaning of religion goes back to a different Latin origin, relegere, from the verb legere, “to read” (from whence we get words like “lecture” and “lectionary”). Relegere is therefore “to re-read” or “read again.” Take this as the origin and we have a sense of religion that is less about the binding and more about the ongoing process of rereading. It’s about reinterpreting sacred scriptures and other religious traditions in order to make them speak meaningfully to new horizons of meaning.
Our aim here is not to decide which is the true origin, but to reflect creatively on what each might suggest about religion, and in what sense the Bible is a religious text. Instead of choosing one origin or the other, I suggest that we think of religion in terms of both religare and relegere, both rebinding and rereading. Thus: religion is about being bound together as a community and being bound to a library of scriptures that we are bound to reread and reinterpret in relation to new and unique horizons of meaning. In this light, religion is not simply a binding system of beliefs or set of doctrines but a process of rereading, reexamining, reinterpreting a scriptural tradition that we have inherited and that gives us a sense of identity and context. The religious life is a communal practice of reading again, of opening the Bible in ways that crack its binding, so to speak, and open it to new understandings, new interpretations. Or, to put it in terms we used earlier, it calls for a reinvestment of sacred capital: out of the product and into the process, thereby privileging the vital, ongoing relationship between readers and texts, a relationship that is dynamic, transient, and creative.
In fact, the Bible itself models this kind of rereading. Recall, for example, how the book of Job rereads the book of Deuteronomy as a way to raise questions about why the good suffer and the wicked prosper, and what it means to speak rightly to and about God. Recall as well how different creation stories draw images from others, creating new visions of cosmic and human origins and, in the process, new ways of conceiving the relation between creator and creation. And recall how different literary strands from different periods in Israelite and Judean history were sewn together by later editors, reread into larger narratives like the Torah. We find evidence of similar editorial processes of rereading and reinterpreting throughout the Jewish Scriptures.
The New Testament literature likewise is shaped by rereading. All its writings are fundamentally concerned with rereading Jewish Scriptures in order to understand the meaning of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. Again and again, the Gospels quote Jewish Scriptures that they reinterpret as “fulfilled,” that is, filled out, by Jesus’s words and actions. Moreover, they ground Jesus’s authority in his own rereadings of Jewish Scriptures. Jesus is presented, first and foremost, as a biblical interpreter. We saw this very clearly in the story of Jesus reading from the Isaiah scroll in his hometown synagogue in the Gospel of Luke. Another good example is the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew (chapter 5), in which Jesus repeatedly quotes passages from the Torah and then reinterprets them in radically new ways. “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’” he declares, quoting a line that appears three times in the Torah. “But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.” Here and throughout the Gospels, Jesus does not simply cite Scripture as though it were a self-evident, self-interpreting source of authority. He rereads it, drawing out new, often highly provocative meanings, “fulfilling” it in a way that gives it new form for a new day. What would Jesus do? Reread. The Bible tells me so.
So too Paul’s letters, which often reread Jewish Scriptures in surprisingly creative ways, drawing entirely new meanings from them in the process. We saw an example of this in his letter to the Galatians, where he rereads a fairly mundane regulation about how to handle a corpse, along with other passages, in order to develop his own insight into the meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion as it relates to their particular community.
So too throughout the New Testament. The book of Revelation alone has well over two hundred references and allusions to Jewish Scriptures. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to find a few hundred words in a row from the New Testamen
t where there is no reference to or interpretation of a passage from the Old Testament.
Loose Canon
There are many more examples of biblical passages rereading other, earlier ones. The Bible grew into its present form as new roots and branches grew from older ones. The Bible is rereading all the way down. It is a library whose various titles are in vital conversation with one another. They do not all agree on any of the most important questions, but they are engaged with one another in a dynamic relationship of interpretation and argument.
The Bible is, moreover, an unfinished conversation, a work in progress. To say that biblical texts reread and reinterpret other biblical texts is not to say that the Bible as a whole is self-interpreting, and therefore closed off from our own rereadings. It does not interpret itself in such a way as to tell us what it means. It does not tell us the right way to read it. It does not provide the keys to its own right interpretation. Rather, in its rich, unresolved polyvocality, it leaves open innumerable, perhaps endless possible readings.
Here we may find inspiration in Jewish tradition. Rabbi ben Bag Bag, a second-century sage, is remembered for saying of the Torah, “Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.” Another Jewish legend says that every one of the six hundred thousand people who were present at Mount Sinai for the giving of the Torah saw a different face or facet of it. From early on, Rabbinic Judaism rooted itself in the faith that the Torah is an inexhaustible font of meaning. The Torah is not so much in the world as the world is in the Torah. It anticipates its own infinitude of interpretations. Seen in this light, the Torah is a loose canon, insofar as it remains open to innumerable rereadings.