There are many devout and sincere Christians for whom the notion of interpretation in scripture is anathema. They argue that scripture has a clear and plain meaning. To interpret is either to intrude upon that meaning with a view of one’s own, or to otherwise confuse or confound. Interpretation is either to add or to subtract from what is already there; it amounts to a form of vandalism, and it is to be prevented at all costs. Those who hold to this view are fond of the aphorism “The Bible says what it means and means what it says.” For example, in Matthew 8:12, the outer darkness into which the wicked are cast is described as a place where “men will weep and gnash their teeth.” A toothless reprobate asked his hellfire-preaching pastor what would happen to those who had no teeth to gnash: “Teeth will be provided” was his answer.
As far as scripture is concerned, interpretation almost always implies that human meanings are being imposed upon divine words. That point of view, however, I wish to argue, is itself unscriptural. Scripture is filled with an attempt to interpret, to make sense of the things of which it speaks. In fact, Jesus’ first sermon, in his hometown, was a reading from the prophet Isaiah upon which he expounded in good rabbinic fashion. For an account of this, see Luke 4:16–30. This is what teachers did: They took a text and drew their listeners into the interpretive triangle. Sometimes the interpretation was pleasing to the people, and sometimes, as in the case of Jesus’ debut, the people were not at all pleased with the interpretation. Jesus’ congregation sought to kill him, an extreme reaction. Today the congregation would simply fire the preacher.
Jesus himself is not always the clearest teacher, if his audience of disciples is to be believed. His parables were meant to amplify points or to make clearer points of moral teaching, but his closest listeners, the apostles, never seemed to get it. The parables, however, and indeed, the miracles and the healings, are all teaching devices, exercises in interpreting the larger principles of scripture that Jesus was intending to convey. The Sermon on the Mount, beginning in Matthew 5, is one extended interpretive discourse on what it means to live in the kingdom of God, to be a full human being under the divine plan for society. The Sermon on the Mount is the sermon Jesus might have given in his hometown, for it is a consummate commentary and interpretation on what the Jews would call “all the law and the prophets.”
One of the most vivid instances of the function of interpretation with regard to the interpretation of scripture is recorded in Acts 8:26–40, where the Apostle Philip encounters an Ethiopian eunuch on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. The eunuch, a minister of state of the queen of the Ethiopians, and her treasurer, is, we are meant to understand, a man of parts. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was on his way home; and seated in his chariot, he was reading a scroll from the prophet Isaiah. The writer of Acts tells us that the spirit moved Philip to run up to the Ethiopian, and when he heard him reading aloud from the prophet, he asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” The Ethiopian replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” He invited Philip into his chariot, and then, “Philip opened his mouth and beginning with this scripture he told him the good news of Jesus.” The Ethiopian was so impressed that he asked to be baptized, and Philip baptized him on the spot.
“Do you understand what you are reading?”
“How can I, unless someone guides me?”
Philip asks the right question of the reader of scripture, and the Ethiopian gives the right answer as the reader who begins with the premise that help is needed. Full credit is due the Ethiopian, but credit must also be given to Philip, who used his proximity and his gift of interpretation to such good effect. He was, we learn from Acts, sent by the Spirit to accomplish this purpose. This is an example of what Paul means when in Romans he asks, “But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher? And how can men preach unless they be sent?” He answers his own questions: “So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ.” (Romans 10:14–17)
Interpretation is the fuel that drives understanding. The making of meaning is what scripture is all about, the effort by every possible device to make sense of the divine in search of the human, and the human in search of the divine, the joy of discovery, the sorrow of loss. If scripture is about anything in all of its splendid diversity, it is about this, and so it is not really about whether there is or is not interpretation in the reading of scripture. Of course there is interpretation. The question is, what kind of interpretation? What do we bring to the text to discern what the text intends for us to find? For some it may well be a matter of technique, those technical skills that one must bring to get the most possible from the reading. All of us are not skilled linguists, however, able to read the Old Testament in Hebrew, the New Testament in Greek, and to supplement those linguistic skills with an array of theological, historical, philosophical, philological, and analytical skills such as will make us masters of the fields of translation and interpretation. Few clergy, and, alas, even fewer laity, now possess sufficient of these skills to be reliant upon themselves alone.
If not technique, perhaps chance is the best way to take the measure of the scriptures. There are many who still practice the random reading of verses once popular in certain Bible-minded communities. The theory is this: In that all of scripture is equally inspired and is therefore equally instructive in all matters, any verse, and any sequence of verses, is sufficient for guidance provided you are guided to them not by chance but by the Spirit. Theologian Robert McAfee Brown tells us of the devout practitioner of this method, who, in search of guidance, opened the Bible and put his finger at random on a verse. It was “And Judas went out and hanged himself.” (Matthew 27:5) Trying again, this time he happened upon Luke 10:37, “Go and do likewise.” To read the Bible as one would a Chinese fortune cookie or some book of chance is to fail to understand what scripture is or what it demands or how one ought to seek its message. Scripture is not passive, and neither should those who read it be passive. As we read in Proverbs 4:7, “The beginning of wisdom is this: get wisdom, and whatever you get, get understanding.”
If interpretation is not simply a matter of technique, and is too important to be left merely to chance, perhaps, at least at the beginning, it is a matter of trust. In the teaching of preaching I try to communicate this aspect of trust and interpretation to my students. I do this by asking them to do four things: Trust the text. Trust themselves. Trust the people. Trust the Spirit. The idea here is that the text has something to say and that we may in fact be able to hear what that is in terms that we can understand and appropriate. Our listeners trust that we will help them in their process of discovery and discernment, and both preacher and listener are guided by the Spirit into a lively encounter with the text.
The element of trust enters into the art of interpretation of scripture when we understand that the Bible comes to us as a trust both from God and from the people of God. It is the record of holy encounters between people and God, encounters that have been reckoned to be decisive and compelling, and that have been preserved from generation to generation because they remind each generation of the presence of God in their lives and the search for God when the divine absence is felt. When we consider the sweeping themes with which the Bible is concerned, the fundamental questions that its protagonists ask, the portraits of God and of men and women that it paints, the dilemmas that it describes and the hope that it offers, we can trust the Bible to be a window into the complexity of the human and of the divine. These words are trustworthy and true not because they correspond to verifiable fact and scientific data, but because they speak with a perceptive, truthful accuracy of the hearts and minds of men and women very much like ourselves. We trust the text not because it is “true” in the sense of fact, but because in its infinite variety it points to the truth and communicates truth because it comes from the truth which we call God.
> The Danger of Interpretation
One of the greatest ironies available to people who take the Bible seriously is that they may be tempted to take it, and themselves, so seriously that God and the truths of God to which the Bible points may be obscured, perverted, or lost entirely. The temptation to see in the Bible only the Bible, and to see no further than our own understanding of what we see, has frequently led to an idolatry of scripture as dangerous and perverse as any blandishment of Satan in the Garden or in the wilderness. This dangerous perversion of scripture is as old as scripture itself, and it is a result of temptation so subtle that we may not even recognize that we are being tempted. Such temptation flourishes at the point where the Bible is most relevant to us and where we feel the strongest in our understanding of it. We acknowledge the power of the Bible, which we understand as the word of God, and at the same time we want that power for ourselves, to order our lives by it and to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves. So we seek to possess what the church calls the “true and lively word,” and to invest God’s word with our meaning. The results have often been disastrous, and the problem is as old as the effort to interpret scripture.
The temptations of interpretation take three forms, all related and equally dangerous. These temptations are a form of idolatry. They violate the first commandment, and they violate the believer just as Adam and Eve were violated, and just as Satan would have violated Jesus in the wilderness if he could have. When we read the Bible, and by doing so interpret it, we should be mindful of these three temptations:
The worship of the Bible, making of it an object of veneration and ascribing to it the glory due to God
The worship of the text, in which the letter is given an inappropriate superiority over the spirit
The worship of the culture, in which the Bible is forced to conform to the norms of the prevailing culture
We may call these three temptations bibliolatry, literalism, and culturism: Each plays its subtle part in interpreting the Bible.
Bibliolatry
Years ago, in the days of compulsory attendance at chapel in the colleges across America, a preacher would have to go very far indeed to capture the attention of a jaded congregation worshiping under compulsion and the watchful eyes of monitors taking attendance. I recall one of my own experiences in the chapel of Bates College, when, to the consternation of the congregation, one morning the preacher of the day, a young and somewhat iconoclastic assistant professor of religion, took from beneath the folds of his gown a carved wooden African idol of some fertility deity, took it to the altar, and placed it square in front of the cross. He then told us that this was his god, and that there were lots more where this came from, and that as far as he knew they worked just as well, and perhaps even better, than the one in whose name the chapel had been built. Well, this was strong stuff even for the pewhardened undergraduates of nearly forty years ago. The dean and the president, both pious Baptists, were lost for words but their faces spoke volumes. Our young professor had wanted to get our attention and he had got it; and for days afterward we talked of what we had seen and heard in the chapel. One had to work hard to remember that his text, forgotten in the excitement of his heresy, was Exodus 20:3, “Thou shalt have no other god before me.”
A colleague who went to a small Christian college in the South told me of a similar incident, this one, however, even more vivid. The preacher of her experience stood up and read his lesson from his Bible. He then closed the book and threw it out of the nearby open chancel window, and said, “Well, there goes your god.” He was of course making a point about idolatry, and he was illustrating it with an attack upon bibliolatry, or the worship of the Bible.
In the absence of a visible God, the temptation is always near to make a god of whatever is visible and related in some proximate way to the real thing. At its best we call this symbolism, the appropriation of qualities and signs that we can and do see and assigning them a function in behalf of the ultimate thing that we cannot see. In the state we do this through, for example, the symbol of the flag, which represents for us the substance of the state. In Christianity we do this with the cross. Liturgically, we recognize this process in what we call “sacraments,” which are, in the language of the English catechism, “the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” Statues of saints and martyrs, holy relics, even the architecture of buildings devoted to holy purposes, such as cathedrals, are all part of our human need to “see” the invisible, to vest what we cannot see but what we truly believe in something that represents that belief to the naked eye. Such signs and symbols are means to direct our senses and our spirits to the realm of invisible spiritual realities.
This symbolism has always been a difficult concept for people of faith, for faith ought not to depend for its veracity upon what people can see. The inherent risk in symbolism is that the symbol becomes a substitute for what it is meant to represent. The means becomes an end in itself, and the worship and devotion which the end requires, when devoted merely to the means, become a form of idolatry and an exercise in fraud. The history of belief is, in the West, replete with instances of this conflict. Early on in the Bible, the golden calf discussed in Exodus 32 is an instance of this dangerous substitution. Moses had gone up to Mount Sinai to receive the tablets of the law from God, and while he was away his brother, Aaron, was left to contend with a people restless for some tangible sign of God’s favor, and for a deity who could compete with the Egyptian fertility gods whom they had known in their slavery. Aaron thereupon fashioned a golden calf from the gathered-up earrings of the Israelites, which they proceeded to worship.
The creation of the calf can be read as a longing after God, and the calf as a surrogate for the distant Moses whose absence distressed the people. Neither Moses nor God, however, took a benign view of what the people had done, and the golden calf and the worship and sacrifice that went with it were denounced as rank idolatry. God called the people a “stiff-necked people,” and intended to destroy them for their ingratitude, but they were spared by the intercessions of Moses, who himself was furious at their behavior. Upon his return to the people he smashed the tablets of the law, and destroyed the calf. Idolatry was not to be tolerated. Throughout Hebrew scripture one of the corporate besetting sins is cultic idolatry, which we may take to represent in part a moral impatience and a desire to possess as one’s very own the word and works of God.
What we see, and what we taste, and what we touch all have the illusion of reality, and thus does an image or a statue or a token or a book appear to be much more real than what the image, statue, token, or book represents. A picture is worth a thousand words both in advertising and in religion, even when in religion those words are the words of God, but the appearance of reality, which the image is meant to represent, is illusory. Plato’s famous dialogue on the shadows on the walls of the cave, and whether they were or were not reality, is an ancient formulation of the problem. The question of image and reality is one to which Saint Paul turned in one of his most famous passages when in II Corinthians 4:17–18 he writes, “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
In Christian culture the idolatry debate has usually associated itself with the notion of graven images. The early church was concerned with the question of whether or not the icons used in devotion, particularly in the Eastern Church, were a violation of the prohibition against graven images as set out in Exodus 20. Those people against idols—the iconoclasts—saw the reverence paid them as idolatry; those in favor argued for the pedagogical benefits for the faithful. The controversy was settled by the Council of Nicaea in 787, which permitted the placement of icons in churches as aids to devotion but made the useful distinction between authentic worship, which belonged only to God, and the reverence
that could be accorded images, noting that the reverence paid to images was really reverence to that which the image represented.
Protestantism, with its Calvinist and Puritan inheritance, has always been nervous about representational figures, and the accounts of Oliver Cromwell’s army and its desecration of statuary in English cathedrals and parish churches are all too familiar instances of Protestant iconoclasm. Calvin, we know, was much against the use of graven images, as he felt that such use encouraged the unlettered in superstition and the temptations of idolatry. He took consolation in the hope that Christians, as a result of the reforms of his day, would be able to read the scriptures for themselves, and therefore would not have to depend upon images and representation for the word of God. It never occurred to him that the Bible, now available to all who could read, could easily itself become an object of veneration, an idol as dangerous as any statue or mural.
It was Martin Luther, however, whose reformation slogan, sola scriptura, “by scripture alone,” gave rise to the greatest temptation yet, which was to make of the Bible a domesticated substitute for the authority of God. Luther challenged the authority of the pope. The teaching tradition of the Roman Church, with the authority it conferred upon its bishops and priests, and most especially upon the pope, made the Bible a book that could not be understood outside the teachings of the Roman Church. The Bible, in a tongue foreign to the people, and mediated by a church whose clergy had a monopoly upon the interpretation of scripture, was thus an inaccessible book, its truths and riches unavailable to the average Christian. Through Luther’s challenge, the authority of the Bible was substituted for the authority of the pope and the Roman Church, and by this, for Martin Luther, both Bible and people were liberated. Nothing was to be interposed between the people of God and the word of God in the Bible.
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