The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  He speaks, and listening to his voice,

  New life the dead receive,

  The mournful broken hearts rejoice,

  The humble poor believe.

  It is the moral sense of meaning and not the alleged tyranny of fact that has kept the Bible alive and lively, and it is nothing less that the dynamic spirit of God that has made of its interpretation the liveliest of human spiritual and intellectual exercises. When we speak of the Bible as “the lively oracles of God,” a figure derived from four citations in the New Testament (Acts 7:38, Romans 3:2, Hebrews 5:12, and I Peter 4:11), we should be reminded that an essential characteristic of an oracle is that it is not a fact but a transaction between the one who speaks and the one who listens, and that that transaction of necessity involves the listener, or the reader in our case, in the work of interpretation. The Bible and the history of interpretation, therefore, is the precious record of human people’s exchanges and transactions with their holy book and with the Holy One. In seeking the good life we seek the one who is good, who not only gives life but gives that life meaning, value, and worth beyond itself. This is the context of hope, and not merely the act of hoping. To read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest, to listen to and for the word of God, is to take seriously the invitation and the command of Hebrews 12:25, “See that you do not refuse him who is speaking.”

  And Now

  Over the years of my teaching, my favorite book upon which to lecture has been The City of God of Augustine, a work of grand ambition, enormous complexity, and defining significance for the Christian world. Others may prefer the more intimate Confessions, with its hint of “kiss and tell,” and the more human portrait the confessions paint of a worldly-wise convert to the faith of Jesus Christ, but I like the enterprise, admittedly flawed, of a man who, very much the captive of one world, seeks to write about another, and who lives on the boundary of one realm and looks toward another. It will not do here to give a potted history of this book, one of the monumental works of Western civilization. If you want to know more about what it says, read it for yourself. What draws me to Augustine now are the words with which he concludes his work, in which he senses, as perhaps all do who write about holy things, that his spiritual reach has exceeded his intellectual grasp. It is with his words, then, that I bring mine to a close:

  And now, as I think, I have discharged my debt, with its completion, by God’s help, of this huge work. It may be too much for some, too little for others. Of both these groups I ask forgiveness. But of those for whom it is enough, I make this request: that they do not thank me, but join with me in rendering thanks to God. Amen. Amen.

  (The City of God, XXII:30)

  Notes

  Chapter 1: What’s It All About?

  1. Sakae Kubo and Walter F. Specht, So Many Versions?: Twentieth-Century English Versions of the Bible (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1983), p. 20. This is probably the best summary of the boom in Bible publishing available to the nonspecialist. The historical background provided for each translation and edition is very helpful, as is the final chapter, “Guidelines for Selecting a Version,” and the Glossary of Technical Terms in the Appendix.

  2. George Barna, president of the Barna Research Poll, is quoted in The Boston Globe, October 15, 1994, in James L. Franklin’s column, “Religion Notes.”

  3. Martin Marty of the University of Chicago unearthed this quotation of President Grover Cleveland and used it in his centennial address to the Society of Biblical Literature under the title “The Bible: America’s Iconic Book.”

  4. James D. Smart, The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Church: A Study in Hermenutics (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster, 1969), p. 10. Smart’s study could not have come at a less propitious moment to receive the attention it deserved. The churches were distracted by the troubles of the late 1960s, and many were of the opinion that the Bible no longer had anything relevant to say to the societal stresses and cultural revolutions of the age. It was not simply the overwhelming nature of biblical scholarship, but the sense both of the “Death of God” movement and the “post-Christian culture” syndrome in which the mainline Protestant churches found themselves that made them appear less accessible and hence less relevant. Scholarship, rather than liberating the Bible from superstition and a prescientific worldview, left the Bible in the hands of the “experts” and the evangelicals. Noting the estrangement between biblical scholarship and biblical preaching, Smart further observed, “Biblical scholars and preachers are partners in a common venture, dependent upon each other, and the work of each is likely to be futile without the other.” (p. 33) As many biblical scholars sought to free themselves from their former bondage to theology, history, and doctrinal and creedal formularies of the church, they became more and more enamored of the idea of biblical studies as a scientific field of inquiry in its own right. They exchanged their bondage to the church for bondage to the canons of the secular academy and the disciplines of philology, archaeology, and anthropology. The result is the danger of what Smart called a “spectator hermeneutic.” He echoes the view of Bernard E. Meland, who, writing in 1962 on the question of “Objectivity and the Scientific Paradigm,” noted, “I have been convinced for some time that modern scholarship has deceived itself in the strenuous effort to achieve purely objective inquiry. There is really no such thing as purely objective inquiry, that is, inquiry in which the interested, centered existence of the inquirer plays no part.” (“Theology and the Historian of Religion,” Journal of Religion, 1962, p. 271).

  5. Time magazine, April 8, 1996. The subject is not really Jesus but the work of the so-called Jesus Seminar, whose ongoing effort has been to determine the relationship between what Jesus might have said and done and what the New Testament says he said and did. Among the seminar’s more controversial conclusions is that only 18 percent of the words ascribed to Jesus in the gospels may have been spoken by him. The debate between what is literally true and historically verifiable in the Bible and the meaning of the faith of the early church, which is not dependent upon these facts, is as old as the nineteenth-century debates about the higher criticism. What makes this newsworthy, at least to Time, is the fact that the controversial work of the Jesus Seminar takes what would be arcane debates of the academy and places them before the public in such a way as to excite the interest, and the anxieties, of the faithful.

  6. H. King Oehmig announced the publication of Understanding the Sunday Scriptures: The Synthesis Commentary, Year ‘A’ in the Class Notes section of Sewanee: The Alumni Bulletin of the University of the South, October 1995, p. 32. Summaries of the Sunday lessons have long been available for the Episcopalian worshiper in the pew, and a large number of lectionary textual studies exist for the person preparing to preach on the Sunday lessons, but this new venture seems more substantial than any of these existing efforts.

  7. I learned of this new venture in Bible education while lecturing at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio in November 1995. Called “The Disciple Bible Study,” this relatively new program of the United Methodist Church emphasizes serious attention to biblical scholarship and study by means of committed small groups of parishioners who undertake a nine-month exercise in group formation, mutual spiritual care, and rigorous attention to the study of the Bible. The leaders for these groups are required to undergo training, the model for membership in the group requires the kind of commitment one is expected to make to Alcoholics Anonymous and Twelve-Step programs, and churches must apply to have the program in their congregations. The pastors reported to me that the effect of this group was remarkable in deepening lay leadership, mutual support for fellow members of the group, and biblical literacy. This appears to be an instance in which the church is reclaiming a model it ceded to the secular therapeutic culture, reinvesting it with the content of the church’s spiritual inheritance and disciplines.

  8. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1993), p. 21. Smith discusses the evo
lution of the idea of scripture both within and beyond the Jewish and Christian traditions and affirms both that “scripture is a human activity” and that scripture is not simply “texts.” In his concluding chapter on “Scripture and the Human Condition,” while arguing that “no one on earth today quite knows what scripture ‘is’, or why,” he adds, “Scripture has played too important a part in human life for its role to be ignored.” (p. 212) The true issue, he suggests, is not scripture itself. “Rather, what is requisite is an understanding of scripture, and of the place in human life that it has filled when and where it has been important—for the light that may be shed on those other manifold problems.” (p. 213)

  9. William H. Willimon, in The Bible: A Sustaining Presence in Worship (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson, 1981), argues that the Bible must be both seen and heard in Protestant worship. The advent of the divided chancel in Protestant liturgical architecture, he argues, has made the connection between the reading of scripture, often done from a Bible prominently displayed on the lectern, and the preaching of the sermon, usually done from the pulpit with no Bible in sight, at best ambiguous. And he is very much against the sentimental Protestant affectation, which still flourishes in certain evangelical circles, of the preacher clutching his personal Bible while preaching. “This is the community’s book,” says Willimon, “not the preacher’s private possession.” Although he doesn’t mention it, Willimon would probably approve of the Church of Scotland tradition whereby the Bible is brought into church in a stately procession, carried by the beadle just in front of the minister, and placed with great dignity on the pulpit. No member of the Church of Scotland would mistake this for idolatry but would rather understand it as the public honor due the people’s book. When Willimon wrote this book, he was pastor of Northside United Methodist Church in Greenville, South Carolina. He has been since and for many years the distinguished Dean of the Chapel at Duke University where he practices what he preaches.

  Chapter 2: A Matter of Interpretation

  In assessing the pluses and minuses of the historical-critical method for the field of biblical interpretation, Duke University historian David C. Steinmetz wrote an article called “The Superiority of Precritical Exegesis,” which first appeared in Theology Today, April 1980 (pp. 27–38), and was later reprinted in A Guide to Contemporary Hermeneutics: Major Trends in Biblical Interpretation, edited by Donald McKim (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986). Reminding us that Benjamin Jowett once wrote, “The true use of interpretation is to get rid of interpretation, and leave us alone in company with the author,” Steinmetz suggested that such an ambition, the goal of much modern scholarship, is both naive and impossible, and perhaps medieval methods that discerned levels of meaning in the text have more to teach us than we heirs of Jowett might care to concede.

  1. The New York Times, January 2, 1995.

  2. In addition to the Bibles in the Geneva translations belonging to Elder William Brewster, Governor William Bradford, John Alden, and a host of other Pilgrims now in the library of the Pilgrim Society, there are to be found an impressive number of contemporary commentaries, concordances, and Puritan theological works having to do with biblical interpretation, upon which these English Protestants depended. The most authoritative discussion of these Pilgrim books is that of my late colleague, Miss Rose T. Briggs, in her paper “Books of the Pilgrims,” which appears in Old Time New England, Volume 61, 1970.

  3. The technical term for the interpretation of scripture is “hermeneutics,” from the Greek hermeneuo, “to interpret.” The term itself is so daunting that it tends to be used only in professional academic circles. The Concise Dictionary of Christian Tradition defines hermeneutics as “the science of interpreting (especially) ancient literature. It covers both the analysis of the text in its context and presuppositions of the interpreter who lives in a different context from the original author. As a subject it has become of great importance in recent times to theologians who are particularly conscious that the horizon of understanding of biblical and ancient writers and their own are widely different.” Closely allied to the work of hermeneutics is the equally technical and off-putting term “exegesis,” defined by the Concise Dictionary as “the act of explaining a text, e.g., a book of the Bible. The general rules that govern the explanation are provided by hermeneutics, and so exegesis involves the application of these rules to particular passages or portions of books. It is reading the meaning from the text, not reading a meaning into the text (eisegesis). As such it is of fundamental importance to all Christians involved in the explanation of the Bible in the modern world.”

  Everyone who reads the Bible, whether they acknowledge it or not, does so within a hermeneutical theory, for interpretation is what we do when we read. When we try to make sense of something, even when we say it does not need to make sense at all, we apply either explicitly or implicitly a theory of interpretation to which we submit the meaning of the text. The so-called higher criticism of the Bible is often charged with imposing external, rational, or other human criteria upon the Bible and thus either obscuring or perverting its clear sense and meaning, but even this criticism of criticism is in itself an unavoidable hermeneutical theory. There is clearly a period in history that existed before the rise of the nineteenth-century phenomena of literary and historical criticism of the texts and contexts of scripture. But there never was a period in which the Bible lacked for interpretation—which is by definition the application of a critical faculty to the text and context—and so the illusion of a precritical period in the study of the Bible is just that, an illusion.

  It is a comforting illusion nevertheless to those who wish to believe that what the Bible means is what they believe it to mean, and that while others may interpret by means of impositions, interpolations, and bits of intellectual sophistry, they themselves are free to submit themselves to the authority of scripture, convinced that what it means now is obviously what it meant then as well. American fundamentalism is generally thought to be a rejection of criticism, that is, interpretive theories that undermine their convictions about the authority of scripture. Those convictions, often described as a view of the Bible as “inspired, inerrant, and infallible,” themselves constitute a formidable hermeneutic. It is of course within the circle of this hermeneutic that fundamentalists have developed their own comprehensive theories of interpretation with which they require the Bible to be read. A monument to this effort is the Schofield Reference Bible, which in its efforts to make sense of every verse within the assumptions of its theological theories leaves nothing to the imagination or to chance. The “high view of scripture,” which is one of the distinctives of evangelical Protestantism, is always faced with the problem of whether interpretation can be distinguished from the Bible itself, and which one determines correct belief and behavior. The very conception that biblical interpretation must be the same as what the biblical writer intended, a version of original intent, is itself the imposition of a hermeneutical principle upon the text without which it is impossible to understand the text in the “correct” way. Religious traditions do not come to texts empty-handed, that is to say, without the presuppositions of the tradition itself, the assumptions of the community of interpretation to whom the texts belong.

  This may seem like just so much literary theory, which destroys the intimacy between the reader and the text, and which, in its secular context, has done so much to turn departments of English into antagonistic militias of deconstructionism. But Roman Catholics, for example, do read the Bible in a different fashion, that is, with different experiences and expectations, from, say, Scottish Prebyterians, and Anglicans read the same texts quite differently from American Southern Baptists, and Jews read the Hebrew Bible in a way quite different from Christians who regard the same set of texts as the Old Testament. Thus, as we saw our discussion of “The Use and Abuse of the Bible,” it is not merely a case of conflict between a historical understanding of a text and its contemporary interpretation that may be at odd
s with that historical understanding, but rather a conflict between interpretive principles both explicit and implicit between the larger culture and the particular community of interpretation, that is, the tradition, and within the tradition itself. Thus, while the Battle for the Bible is a very trendy slogan, what is really going on, and has been for as long as there has been a diversity of opinion about the Bible, is the Battle of the Hermeneutics, although such a noneuphonious title would do little to sell books or make news. When someone says a version of “I know nothing of exegesis, eisegesis, or hermeneutics: I know only Jesus and God’s word,” they may sincerely believe that to be the case, but they are equally wrong, not necessarily in the interpretation, which of course must rest upon the merits, but in the assumption that they do not appropriate these technical terms, which seem so alien to piety, every time they read the Bible.