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The Intimidating Task of Bible Study, Part 4

October 13, 2011 Readings, Relationships, The Text, Theology Comments are closed

(Fourth and final in a series of posts taken from Wes Howard-Brook’s introduction to his commentary on the Gospel of John, Becoming Children of God: Read the first post here. The whole introduction to this book, of which these posts are a small part, is terrific, and probably worth the price of the book alone. This is the last post I am making from the intro, so enjoy!)

Still another aspect of my own reading perspective is important to note at the outset. I am not a member of the academic guild of Bible scholars. My reading of the Bible generally, and the fourth gospel in particular, comes not out of the context of university conversation – whether secular or theological – but rather from the perspective of radical discipleship. That is, I am interested in the biblical texts not simply as objects of study and intellectual interest but as paradigmatic tales of God’s relationship to our ancestors and to us. If I did not believe that the Bible offered insights that are essential to our negotiation of our way out of the desert of the decaying American empire and toward a more hopeful future, I would quickly move on to some other pursuit and urge all listeners and readers to do likewise.

university_of_sydney — the halls of academia

Of course, many academic scholars share a commitment to the power of the Bible to liberate people and social structures. I do not intend by this description of my own reading location to characterize academia broadly as an ivory tower or as otherwise irrelevant. Many of my own ideas have been the fruit of seeds planted by scholars, and many people in universities actively promote the Bible’s liberating message. What is central here is not a critique of academia but an awareness of the different but equally credible reading perspectives that flow from university and “grassroots” standpoints. The university environment is capable of nurturing conversation among other scholars, both within biblical studies and across disciplines. The radical discipleship environment is capable of nurturing conversation among people of various experiences and traditions about the value of the Bible for social transformation. Each standpoint has strengths and weaknesses too numerous to list here. But it is important for those who read the Bible without a doctorate to recognize that their own readings are not necessarily diminished as a result.

It is, of course, almost trite to note that Jesus was not an academic; nor were his first followers; nor were the first Christian preachers, teachers, and other leaders. The development of the perception of a privileged reading position by academics is a relatively recent phenomenon, based not on biblical criteria but on principles stemming from the Enlightenment’s notion of the primacy of “scientific” reason.

This is not, to be sure, to revert to the celebration of naïve or accidental interpretations that come from the fabled random opening of the Bible, with the expectation that God speaks through whatever passage one happens to land upon (Admit it – you’ve done this!). Bible study, whether from within academia or from some other social location, requires hard work for our generation, so removed from the Bible’s own worlds and ways of speaking and thinking. My own interpretation flows from the attempt to pay a respectful and sincere visit to the house of academia and then to share the insights gleaned from within with those whose daily lives do not allow the luxury of such a visit.

Finally, a personal element of my experience that cannot be separated from my reading of the fourth gospel: I grew up Jewish as a member of the first post-Holocaust generation. Although this upbringing was largely a matter of ethnicity than religion (perhaps, in the end, a false distinction, no matter what one’s beliefs about God), it seared into my consciousness a deep understanding of the capacity of human beings for evil as well as the ability of Christians to kill others in the name of Christ. It is a difficult social dislocation for someone of this background to learn to see the wisdom of Jesus and come to claim the Christian tradition as one’s own. It is particularly difficult to embrace the fourth gospel, given centuries of powerful misreadings that have found the text’s characterizations of “the Jews” as a basis for two millennia of mistreatment, mayhem, and murder. My own experience of being a Jew who has come to accept the power of the church’s memory of Jesus has given me a perspective on the experience of the first Johannine community that is certainly different from those whose Christianity came with their “first” birth. I engage John’s story of Jesus with the knowledge that this aspect of who I am both reveals and conceals.

I invite readers to consider how their own stance affects their reading process. This is not a matter of “confessing” one’s “sins” or “prejudices” as much as engaging in a reflective process that has been made necessary by insights gleaned by the deepest sort of philosophical and literary thinking. The powerful tool known as deconstruction challenges us to dig beneath any viewpoints that claim to be “objective” or “foundational” for the preconceived notions and commitments that underlie them. If we believe that God calls us to break down the altars of idolatry that pose as divine centers in our society, we should also be willing to examine both our own false gods and the images of the true God that animate us.

The Intimidating Task of Bible Study, Part 3

September 27, 2011 Culture, Politics, Readings, Relationships, The Text Comments are closed

Third in a series of posts taken from Wes Howard-Brook’s introduction to his commentary on the Gospel of John, Becoming Children of God: Read the first post here.

Approaching the Gospels

One of the curiously powerful aspects of the gospels in general that stands out for readers familiar at all with other ancient literature is the social context in which their stories are told. Whereas almost all other national epics and myths speak of the important events and struggles in the lives of gods, kings, or other nobles, the gospels’ concern is almost exclusively with the lives of the poor and marginalized.

streetkids — stories of the unremarkable

Even literature after the New Testament, up until the Romantics’ discovery of the tragic narrative power of stories of street urchins and other outcasts, primarily focused on the trials and tribulations of people of wealth and authority. Lives existing amidst material splendor and social power have always intrigued those who look longingly on what they imagine to be the “good life.” In contrast, the lives of the poor have generally seemed banal and trivial, devoid of interest because of the supposed monochromatic pattern of hard work and routine demands.

If we have relatively lately learned to “enjoy” the stories of the poor and have come to accept the harsh beauty of emotions and minds living on the tense edge of daily despair, such a perspective would have been virtually unthinkable to those of biblical times. The biblical patriarchs were wealthy herdsmen who, with their families, became landowners of distinction in their local communities. If the exodus portrays the desperate struggle of an enslaved people, it is only to show that their imprisonment first in Egypt and then in the desert is but a temporary obstruction on their way to the Promised Land where they will eat their fill and gather abundant land and cattle. The longest continuous biblical narrative is the saga of Israel’s poignantly ironic marriage to monarchy, in which the main characters literally stand head and shoulders above their peers (e.g. 1 Sam 10:23). Even the prophetic promise/threat of exile was of concern primarily to Israel’s elite, as the majority of poor people remained in Palestine even after the Babylonian conquest. And the postexilic narratives of rebuilding are the stories of priests and scribes, the intellectual and cultural leaders of the Persian colonial territory that had once been a great nation.

In this context of national journey from the perspective of the leaders and other powerful figures, the gospels sound a harshly discordant note. Their tales of lepers, blind people, bleeding women, and landless peasants searching desperately for hope are a shocking contrast to their biblical predecessors. For as we know, the New Testament was originally a collection of writings aimed at providing a message of divine love and healing for people who could not hear such a word in the established religious institutions. Although the Christian “Way” amazingly quickly swept across social classes and national boundaries in its first centuries of proclamation, the stories themselves are most easily understood by people who have experienced for themselves the failure of governments and clergy to relieve either physical or spiritual hunger.

John’s gospel, in contrast with Mark and Luke in particular, has little to say about poverty and God’s promise to provide good things for those who have gone without because of injustice. The fourth gospel proclaims not that the poor are “blessed” but that they are “always with you” (Jn 12:8) – although the Johannine perspective is not the cynical acceptance of the permanent presence of an underclass that it might seem to be when heard out of context. In the fourth gospel, characterization and plot focus not so much on economic exclusion as on the social barriers of ethnicity, ritual impurity, and lack of “proper” belief. Those who have been denied privilege in the dominant culture because of their “wrong” birth (e.g., the Samaritan woman and the one born blind) are the ones upon whom Jesus’ compassion centers. At the same time, those who are willing to be reborn, regardless of original birthplace (e.g., Nicodemus and the “Judeans”), are invited into the community to which the gospel calls its readers.

Beyond Reading

And this reality leads directly to the negative and positive poles of my own reading stance. As a “white” male citizen of the United States at the end of the twentieth century, I must engage in strenuous acts of imaginative projection and concrete insertion in order to begin to hear the power of this gospel’s word to those on the margins. It is a twofold task that cannot be done exclusively from the comforts of my warm home.

Each experience I have had in which I have, albeit hesitatingly and feebly, touched the actual lives of the poor in our culture has been a hermeneutical gift of immeasurable proportions. An hour with street people in downtown Seattle metamorphoses the abstraction of “the homeless” into the broken yet still human lives of Junior, Charles, and Althea. A few days in jail transforms one’s vague notion of “criminals” into a perception of ordinary people whose lives have either gone sour along the way or existed on a road of shattered glass from the moment of their births. Many of us are, regardless of our good will, faith, or love, at a huge distance from those in our inner cities or in the Third World to whom the gospels speak clear and almost obvious truths. Only by pushing out from our easy chairs and into the cold darkness of the streets, prisons, public hospitals, and other havens for outcasts can we begin to catch the radicality of the gospel’s word.

If this is true at the level of our personal zone of daily life, it is all the more the case with regard to our political and social privilege. I come to recognize more and more each day how the wealth of our nation has been systemically taken from the mouths of others. Indigenous peoples of North America, Africa, Latin America, and Asia all cry out as just prophets condemning our theft, indifference, and brutality as a nation. The increasing clamor for immigration limits and border patrols bears powerful testimony against our claim of being a just and free land, open to accepting the world’s poor. And, more to the point of the fourth gospel, we have again increased the sickening acceptance of racial and ethnic scapegoating, whether against poor African-Americans or wealthy Japanese and other Asians.

All this puts us as a people squarely on the opposite side from the Johannine Jesus and the community of the fourth gospel. But this brings us to the positive pole in my own prerelationship with the text. Despite my personal and national privilege and responsibility for massive injustice, I believe in a God who invites peoples such as myself to work and pray with others for the liberation of all peoples. While acknowledging my participation in unjust structures and in enjoying the fruit of rotting trees, I trust in the God of all life, who constantly calls me to focus on God alone and the way of shalom. Without attempting to express a complete personal philosophy in this space, it is important to proclaim my commitment to helping to shape a future in which all creation will sing joyously of the God of nonviolent and interdependent love.

Thus, I come to my own reading of John with a dual awareness. My birthplace veils the gospel from me in certain ways, leading me to find new experiences that help penetrate into the place from which the text seems to speak. At the same time, my commitment to a God who breaks down injustice and generates true love and freedom for all people opens me in other ways to hear the text speak its challenges to the status quo.

Stay tuned for Part 4!

The Intimidating Task of Bible Study, Part 2

September 18, 2011 Culture, Readings, Relationships, The Text, Theology Comments are closed

Second in a series of posts taken from Wes Howard-Brook’s introduction to his commentary on the Gospel of John, Becoming Children of God: Read the first post here.

If we choose to accept this life-changing invitation, how do we start? How do we know that the path we take is not simply a trail that loops back to Egypt ends in a cul de sac in the desert? If we journey alone, we indeed run a high risk of picking a futile road to nowhere or, worse, to a place of great danger. The Bible’s narrative of God’s mighty acts and words is heady stuff that can, to the misguided, justify the worst sort of violence and brutality.

The antidote is the one given by the Bible itself in nearly every story: to journey not alone but in the community of fellow travelers. Whether that means starting a Bible study group, going to church, or delving into the scholarly conversation, the joyous task of encountering the Bible makes sense only as part of an interpretative community. From Eden to Revelation, the Bible’s various forms of discourse present one of the most intensely social collections of writings known to humanity. Its people are constantly in dialogue, either with other people or with God directly.

And its questions are persistently in the first-person plural: Who are we and where are we going? The Bible contains virtually no notion of the isolated individual, no flinty-faced Marlboro man gazing outward with a private vision. The first challenge of reading, then, is to share in whatever ways we can in acknowledging this most basic premise of the text.

This book is an attempt to share some of my own reading of a particular text from the Bible. By putting my reading into writing, I am aware that I risk the same freezing of live conversation that the gospels writers themselves risked. Each day, new insights unfold for me about the fourth gospel, as I continue to grow in my self-awareness and my awareness of the gospel’s own intertextual and intercultural contexts. But, as with the gospel, I hope that readers of this writing will continue the conversation, albeit at a distance, by continuing to think, pray, and act in response to what they read here.

This work, as with the Bible, is the product not of an isolated individual but of the collection of energies that make up the matrix in which I journey. In the following section, I will state openly some of my life commitments and reading strategies. I do this not so much to persuade readers that these are the best or the correct perspectives, but in the interest of encouraging all Bible readers to continue the process of demythologizing the notion of the “objective” or “scientific” reading.

In the next section we will note the importance of asking the question: “Where are you from?”, in order to name one’s commitments before encountering the Word.

Stay tuned for Part 3!

The Intimidating Task of Bible Study, Part 1

September 13, 2011 Culture, Readings, Relationships, The Text, Theology Comments are closed

Taken from Wes Howard-Brook’s introduction to his commentary on the Gospel of John, Becoming Children of God:

Attempting to read a biblical text challenges us in ways that quickly threaten to sink us in a quicksand of questions. Which translation is “best” if we don’t read ancient Greek or Hebrew? And even if we try to learn something about these long-dead languages, how do we move forward in our language to talk about the text? Once we start getting enmeshed in inquiries about language, the paradoxes of words and their relationship to reality “out there” can become powerfully mind-boggling. Linguistic and literary theory are minefields in which much heat is radiated but precious little light remains after the explosions.

At the same time, the biblical texts – like almost no others still widely read in our time – confront us with worlds confoundingly foreign. Names of people and places seem unpronounceable, and locations are obscure. People behave in ways strange to our “normal” practice, but we cannot easily discern whether their behavior is strange to those with whom they interact in the stories. Much of the context involves situations with which we have absolutely no experience or concern. Furthermore, few sources of information from the ancient world are available to enlighten us on these crucial matters. A few pieces of broken pottery or tablets and miscellaneous scraps of documents are hardly sufficient to recreate for us a sense of the long lost world of Israel. What would future cultural historians do with a couple of our daily newspapers and a handful of random paperbacks from the best-seller list? Would such artifacts allow for reasonably certain inferences about our daily lives and concerns?

What Is One To Do?

Beginning to consider these questions and the infinite corollaries that cascade from them can lead to several responses among prospective biblical readers.

First, we can attempt to close our minds to the questions and, like fundamentalists, pretend in effect that the Bible was written in English in the recent past, interpreting its “plain words” according to our (unspoken) cultural assumptions. This is the de facto reading “method” of most people of goodwill who have grown up with the Bible as a book on the shelf to be read among other selections from history or literature. Whether because the questions are threatening or simply because they have not occurred to us to ask them, we read the Bible naively and come up with naïve – and often dangerous – interpretations.

A second option is to allow the questions to take us over and move toward becoming biblical scholars at one level or another. One can very easily be swept up into methodological questions – for instance, questions of form criticism and hermeneutics – and never return to the Bible itself. Or one can attempt (impossibly) to consider all that has been written on a particular biblical text in an effort to cull the wisdom of “better” and “more qualified” readers than oneself. This project runs into the barriers of one’s own linguistic competence (biblical scholarship speaks many languages) and the supply of periodicals in local theological libraries. Not to mention the financial and social costs of giving up one’s job and family to create the time to read such a mountain of material!

A third possibility in the face of the mammoth nature of the undertaking is to give it up altogether. The Bible is too arcane, too distant, too complicated to be of much practical use for those of us struggling to discern the Creator’s path for humankind in our troubled era. Why bother to conjugate lost languages to figure out how to act in the face of racism, poverty, and the infinite oppressions of everyday life in the American empire? The very act of attempting to dig out from under the mound of questions is evidence enough of the privilege we should probably be about the business of renouncing.

Each of these options avoids in a different way the challenge and opportunity to learn from our ancestors what the Bible offers. Whether one chooses fundamentalism, ivory-tower academia, or some “new” religious approach disconnected from the biblical tradition, the result is to deny the invitation to acknowledge that we stand on the pinnacle of the mountain of human experience. Our “age” – whether we conceive of that term as signifying the baby boomers, generation X, millenials, the period of technology, or the era of democratic capitalism in the West – is only the most recent chapter in a human story spanning many millennia. The simple fact remains that the Bible is the deepest echo of our ancestors’ own cries of “Who are we?” and “What are we to do with our lives?”

So, if we are to choose an alternative to abandoning or getting lost in the search for biblical wisdom, we must begin with a humble acknowledgement that our efforts are limited by many factors that cannot be overcome. Rather than denying either the invitation to learn or the existence of barriers, I urge us to name our limits and continue to move forward.

Who We Are Matters

This very process has also been taking place from within the formal institution of biblical scholarship. Where once professional Bible readers (are there such things?!) claimed “scientific” methods that obviated the need to claim the personal positions and limits of the interpreter, more and more we find scholars admitting what has been true all along. That is, each reader or community of readers comes to the Bible with a panoply of prejudices and commitments that necessarily play a powerful part in shaping how one hears the word of God speaking. Poor peasants in Latin America can connect with Jesus’ parables drawn with images of farming far more readily than clean-fingered university professors in the United States or Europe. Women can hear both the pain caused by the patriarchal mind-set that permeates the Bible and Jesus’ shocking invitations to reshape that mind-set in ways that men such as myself can never do. People anywhere committed to the transformation of unjust social structures into God’s realm of shalom will pick up the pervasive political context of the gospels when readers satisfied with the status quo find only “spiritual” messages.

This is not to suggest that one particular cultural perspective or sociopolitical ideology is “better” for reading the Bible. Rather, it is to call all prospective readers to the enlightening and humbling task of paying attention to how who we are affects who we believe the God of the Bible to be. At the same time, it is not to succumb to a trackless pluralism in which anyone and everyone can read the Bible and find their “opinion” equally valid. Criteria do exist for distinguishing among readers, just as distinctions between faith in Yahweh and faith in Baal, Marduk, or Caesar are not mere tricks of the text. Our image of God and sense of God’s will for us and for creation powerfully influence our sense of what makes for a “right” world. Are we simply part of a dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest struggle to survive, or ought we to aim together for a harmonious interconnectedness that respects the dignity of all life? Our biblical interpretations are crucial to answer this eminently practical inquiry.

Beginning the Journey

This getting to know ourselves in order to get to know the Bible can, of course, produce the same avoidance of the question as does the attempt to get to know the Bible “directly.” We will never completely know ourselves any more than we will completely know the Bible. But just as we should not allow our ignorance of Greek or Pharisaic practice to prevent our encounter with the sacred texts, we should not stop reading the Bible simply because some unrevealed prejudice may be affecting our reading. Instead, we can, like the Hebrews in Egypt, courageously accept the invitation to leave our captivity behind and begin the journey toward liberation.

Stay tuned for Part 2!