The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  An Inclusive Word

  The third and final landmark for those on this pilgrimage, in which we try to make sense of the Bible, is the fact that in addition to being both public and dynamic, the Bible is also inclusive. That is to say, it has the power to draw all people unto itself. Historically, we see the ever-widening circle of the Bible’s appeal, and we can perhaps explain that by the cultural developments that moved out and beyond the provincial Mediterranean origins of the Bible into the Greco-Roman world, and then into the West, and then throughout the whole world. That, however, is simply a map maker’s view of the matter. What is more significant to observe, and indeed more profound, is the fact that people and cultures foreign to the people and cultures of the Bible find themselves drawn to the Bible and understand it not as somebody else’s book made available to them as an act of charity, conquest, or missionary endeavor, but as their own book, theirs legitimately and on their own terms. In the story of the Jewish patriarchs, non-Jews see themselves. In God’s particular activity in Jesus Christ, people beyond the little world of primitive Jewish Christianity see themselves and their story included in God’s activity. When in John’s gospel (John 10:16) Jesus says, “And I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd,” this is a great mandate for inclusivity which these “other sheep” recognize. As Jesus himself included among his own companions winebibbers, prostitutes, men and women of low degree, people who by who they were, by what they did, or from where they were excluded, so too does the Bible claim these very people as its own.

  It is one of the unbecoming but unavoidable ironies of Christianity that Gentile Christians, who were excluded from the Jewish churches, and who in the times of the Roman persecution were themselves excluded from all hope in this life, should themselves become the arch practitioners of exclusion. Even centuries of Christian exclusivism, however, extending into our very own day, cannot diminish the inclusive mandate of the Bible, and the particular words of Jesus when he says, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” What Roman Catholic social theory teaches as the church’s “preferential option for the poor,” to the annoyance of Christians rich in the things of this world, is the same principle that extends the hospitality of the Bible, indeed preferential hospitality, to those who have in fact been previously and deliberately excluded. So the Bible’s inclusivity is claimed by the poor, the discriminated against, persons of color, homosexuals, women, and all persons beyond the conventional definitions of Western civilization.

  The Bible is not inclusive simply in the abstract and in principle. It is inclusive in particular. Your story is written here, your sins and fears addressed, your hopes confirmed, your experiences validated, and your name known to God. The most reassuring conviction of the witness of scripture is that we are known by our own names. In Hebrew’s 2:12, Jesus says, “I will proclaim thy name to my brethren,” and the most telling moment of John’s account of the resurrection is when the risen Christ addresses the distraught and confused Mary Magdalene by her own name, and in hearing her name called, she discovers who the risen one is.

  One of the great paradoxes of race in America is the fact that the religion of the oppressor, Christianity, became the religion of the oppressed and the means of their liberation. Black Muslims ask incredulously how any black person in America could possibly be a Christian, given the legacy of white Christianity. The answer, of course, is that if Christianity in America depended upon white Christians, there would be no right-minded black Christians. What is the case is that Christianity, and the Bible in particular, did not depend upon Christians for its gospel of inclusion, but upon God. Thus black American Christians do not regard their Christianity as the hand-me-down religion of their masters, or an unnatural culture imposed upon them and thus a sign of their continuing servitude. No! They understand themselves to be Christians in their own right because the Gospel, the good news out of which the Bible comes, includes them and is in fact meant for them. We will find that when we look at the life of the Bible, and the life of the world in which it is to be found, we discover that the heart of its public dimension, and indeed the source of its dynamism, is this principle of inclusion by which all of the exclusive divisions of this world are transcended and transformed.

  In thinking about the Bible—its public nature, its dynamic, living qualities, and its inclusivity—as we try to make sense of it with mind and heart, we would do well to remember these three principal characteristics. They serve as landmarks, points of departure and of return, and they will guide us even as we seek guidance in opening the Bible.

  Chapter 2

  A Matter of Interpretation

  TO read is to interpret. When one is reading the Bible, interpretation is as risky as it is unavoidable, and it is not just trendy theologians or liberal Christian bishops who get into trouble over its interpretation. In a debate in the Israeli Parliament in December 1995, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said that he disapproved of some of the practices of King David, particularly of his conquest of other peoples, and his seduction of a married woman, Bathsheba, whose husband, Uriah the Hittite, David sent to his death. In I Kings 15:5, it is written that David “did what was right in the sight of Yahweh and did not turn aside from anything that he commanded him all the days of his life, except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite.” According to an account in The New York Times of December 15, 1995, outraged Orthodox rabbis screamed at the foreign minister to “shut up.” Another shouted, “You will not give out grades to King David!” A third man flew into such a rage of apoplexy that he had to be treated for hypertension in the parliamentary infirmary, and a motion was introduced condemning the government for having besmirched the “sweet psalmist of Israel.”

  Earlier in the year the same rabbis had been outraged, and again over remarks about King David’s sexual activity, but this time their fury was directed at a female member of Parliament, the daughter of the late Moshe Dayan, who read from II Samuel 1:26, in which David says of Jonathan, the son of Saul, “Very pleasant hast thou been unto me. Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of a woman.” The homosexual implication was clear, and even more clearly denounced by the Orthodox parliamentarians. Despite what the Bible says, the rabbis have declared that King David was holy, “and,” said one very prominent rabbi, head of the Education Ministry’s Torah Culture Department, “whoever says that King David sinned does nothing but err.”1

  To read is to interpret. This is neither an esoteric nor a subtle point, but when it comes to the reading and interpretation of the Bible it is a point that cannot be made too often or too clearly. A text may have a life of its own, but that life depends upon the author who gave it life, investing it with an intention, a purpose, and a meaning. The text therefore already participates in something other than itself; it participates in, and at least initially gives expression to, the intent of the author. To tease out the relationship of the text and its author is a responsible task, but that of course is not the only task of reading, for there is also whatever the reader brings to and finds in the text, and eventually takes from the text. This relationship among author, text, and reader is known in the literary trade as the “interpretive triangle,” and since readers seldom read in isolation, and since texts, especially sacred or religious texts, are generally held in community, the interpretive triangle itself has a context, a set of circumstances that surround it and to which it responds. This context we call the “community of interpretation.” Were we to visualize what we have just described, we would have a triangle within a circle within a square, a strange-looking device, which, like the symbols in mathematics, allows us to represent a process that itself is invisible and so fundamental as almost to be missed.

  For most people, and despite centuries of sophisticated biblical scholarship, the precritical view of the Bible remains: a book in two parts, or testaments, old and new, which is meant
to be, in the argot of the late twentieth century, “an owner’s manual” for living the Christian life. It is of the same character as any of the other basic reference books available to us, and to be used in much the same way as we would use dictionaries, encyclopedias, telephone books, and other helpful compendia designed to get us through life. What The Old Farmer’s Almanack was to nineteenth-century Yankee farmers, and The Sears Roebuck Catalog to their far-western cousins on the plains, the Bible was to the Christian. Often, in households where there were few books to be found, the Bible and one of these two would constitute the family’s library. Many will say, “What’s wrong with that?,” and we can make for ourselves many arguments in favor of the simple virtues and values that issued forth from such households. These were the books, perhaps along with Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, that made our country great. When the pastor of my boyhood church in Plymouth, Massachusetts, described himself as “preaching from the book that the Pilgrims brought” in the Mayflower, he didn’t mean a commentary or a concordance or a volume of criticism, he meant the Bible, and in the Geneva translation.2 It is an interesting fact, and plentifully documented, that the Pilgrims brought many books with them in addition to the Bible, and many of these were in fact commentaries and books of biblical criticism and interpretation. As we shall see, the English Protestants loved their Bible, but they also loved books about their Bible, which tale we will defer to another place in this study.

  Do We Really Need to Know All This?

  Biblical criticism has a very bad name. The very term criticism implies a clinical disrespect and disregard for something of worth and value.3 Criticism means finding fault, taking apart, destroying. Whoever heard of a film critic who liked what he saw, or a book of criticism that edified anyone other than the critics? The critic sets himself up as an arbiter and expert, and from his lofty perch tells people either what they should think or that what they do think really isn’t so. Criticism undermines our confidence in the thing criticized and, even more, our confidence in our own judgments and tastes.

  Second only to lawyers we despise the critic, and our literature is filled with invective against them and their trade. Henry Fielding, the eighteenth-century novelist and author of the bawdy Tom Jones, must have got some bad reviews, for he said, “In reality, the world have played too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.”

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson, called the critic a “louse in the locks of literature”; Ernest Hemingway called them “eunuchs of literature.”

  The criticism of criticism and of critics is a rich field. Although critics could be left to do their worst in the pastures of high culture, when they applied their methods and opinions to that which by right belonged to the people, to the Bible, they invited a violent negative reaction which true popular piety made legitimate.4 When after years of study and research the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was issued in 1953—the product, as it was believed by many critical of it, of a century or more of the higher criticism—it was said by those who believed in an infallible text that fallible men, the revisers, were not competent to alter an infallible text: the King James Version.

  Even an infallible text requires interpretation, however. One of the most helpful new books in the field of biblical interpretation is Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, written in 1993 by William Klein, Craig Blomberg, and Robert Hubbard, all three of whom are professors in Denver Seminary and from an evangelical tradition. They believe the “Bible to be God’s written revelation to his people,” and that “it records in human words what God desires.” Their work is endorsed by an impressive list of scholars who share many of their theological and interpretive presuppositions about the role of the Bible in the life of the church. One of these says, “Discovering what God really means is a matter of life and death…. Understanding what the Bible says to us at the end of the twentieth century will be easier because of their work.”5

  The authors acknowledge the difficulty of the task before them. How can one interpret a Bible “full of alien genealogies, barbaric practices, strange prophecies, and eccentric epistles”? While we might like a Bible that is simpler to deal with, perhaps a list of principles, or a straightforward narrative, or a collection of aphorisms, we are stuck—my word, not theirs—with the Bible as it is.

  “As it is,” however, presents some significant tensions, if not out and out problems, in reading and interpretation. Citing Moises Silva’s Has the Church Misread the Bible?, they face the problem:

  The Bible is divine, yet it has come to us in human form. The commands of God are absolute, yet the historic context of the writings appears to relativize certain elements. The divine message must be clear, yet many passages seem ambiguous. We are dependent only on the Spirit for instruction, yet scholarship is surely necessary. The Scriptures seem to presuppose a literal and historical reading, yet we are also confronted by the figurative and nonhistorical, e.g., parables. Proper interpretation requires the interpreter’s personal freedom, yet some degree of external, corporate authority appears imperative. The objectivity of the biblical message is essential, yet our presuppositions seem to inject a degree of subjectivity into the interpretive process.6

  These issues reflect the history of the interpretation of the Bible. Hermeneutics is the technical term for the discipline of interpretation, and the history of interpretation is how people in various ages and from various traditions have come to terms with the complexities that these assumptions and concerns represent. If we are going to attempt to understand the Bible “as it is,” we are going to have to make the effort to understand how it came to be “as it is.”

  Who Needs Interpretation?

  We do. It is impossible to avoid. The earliest Christians were forced to engage in an act of interpretation of colossal importance when they had to figure out how to reconcile their scriptures, the Hebrew Bible, with the most significant event that had happened to them, the resurrection of Jesus. For orthodox Jews, the resurrection of Jesus was an event outside of scripture and impossible to reconcile with scripture as they read it. Those who followed Jesus and believed him to be resurrected from the dead were regarded as discontinuous with scripture, and indeed as blasphemers and heretics. The debate in Paul’s letter to the Romans is not so much about whether the Jews can be saved under the cross, but about whether Jews who believed in Jesus were Jews at all, and heirs of the promises to Abraham. Thus, when in the writings of the early Christians scripture is mentioned, that scripture is of course the Hebrew scripture, the only Bible that Jesus, Paul, and the earliest disciples and apostles would have known. The first hermeneutical task, therefore, was to reconcile the transforming event of Jesus’ resurrection with the body of scripture and with those who interpreted it.

  There were two options available. One was to regard Jesus and his teaching, now seen though the experience of the resurrection, as discontinuous with the Hibrew scripture. A new order of reality had been created which was out of harmony with, and therefore superior to, the old. To be a follower of Jesus was to repudiate Moses. The other option was to see in Jesus the fulfillment of all that had been promised and expected in Hebrew scripture and Jewish prophecy. Thus Jesus is not antithetical to Moses; he is the successor to Moses and to all of the prophets, and it is therefore through the apparent discontinuity of the experience of Jesus that we are able to make sense both of Jesus and of Hebrew scripture. The “formed” or “formal” scripture, as we can at this time call Hebrew scripture, is reconciled to the new experience of Jesus in the minds of those for whom that experience has become definitive, and their writings on this subject, what we may begin to call the “forming” scriptures, become the New Testament. To make this point more clear, it is fair to describe the New Testament as a Christian commentary on the Old Testament, a commentary that does not simply reconcile one to the other but appropriates the Old as its own. Thus, to the question about that body of scripture known as
the Hebrew Bible—“Whose Bible is it, anyway?”—the Christian answer becomes an emphatic “Ours!” It is Augustine who puts it most succinctly: “What was concealed in the Old is revealed in the New.” The New Testament itself is the product of an early and radical hermeneutic.

  This may sound too technical and too polemical at first blush, but most Christians have for so long adapted to this phenomenon of the appropriation of Hebrew scripture as our own that only when the liturgical fashion of just a few years began to refer to the Old Testament as Hebrew scripture, or the Hebrew Bible, did we begin to ask if it was theirs or ours, and how it could be both. When I asked my students this question—“Whose book is it, anyway?” —referring to the Old Testament, I got blank stares; and then I asked the class to listen to excerpts from perhaps the most famous piece of choral music in the world, the Messiah of George Frideric Handel. Immediately they got a very clear picture of prophecy and fulfillment, which is what Handel’s librettist, Charles Jennens, intended. It is virtually impossible to dislodge the prophecies of Isaiah from the fulfillments of the Gospel, and for some, even the notion is heretical that one could consider such a possibility. Yet that fusion, that construction, if you will, is indeed a matter of interpretation.