I was invited recently to participate in the 30 Seconds or Less project of presenting every book of the Bible for Lent. In thirty seconds.
That wasn’t at all intimidating! I was to try to distill the ancient wisdom of the book of Proverbs down to thirty seconds. Or less. Fortunately I was also given a chance to state what I thought the “Good News” of Proverbs was, also in thirty seconds.
Here are my attempts, with text and video. Enjoy!
Continue Reading..
In a recent conversation about the Bible, I referred to it as “a collection of texts known as the Bible.” Someone responded:
In the collection known as the Bible?? I’m sorry, my friend, but you have gone off the deep end…
This response was a bit of a surprise. The fact that the Bible is comprised of various books by various authors is common knowledge to anyone who has taken a single religion class in high school or college, or to anyone who has actually opened a Bible. As a young child, I was required to memorize “the books of the Bible.” Continue Reading..
We had a great turnout last night at Harmony Brewing Company, in Eastown, Grand Rapids. This little brewery has been open since February, and features a cozy atmosphere, spins some good tunes (last night was Vinyl Thursday), and brews up some great offerings.
A few of us started off with Jackson’s Joy Fall Festival Ale, which was a good, if a bit sweet, oktoberfest-style ale. Others jumped in with the Hideout IPA, which was a stand-in for the usual Fiddlestix IPA. My favorite on their board is the Star Stuff Belgian Dubbel. The Black Squirrel Porter was unfortunately also tapped out.
About a dozen of us squeezed in together in the upper-level, a small, quiet space of about 10 or 12 tables. A couple familiar faces, a few Pub Theology first-timers, and some regulars made for a great discussion.
The sheet had the following topics:
1. True or False: the better you can articulate what you believe, the more spiritually mature you are.
2. How do certain [spiritual] practices open you up to new possibilities?
3. Is there a difference between the Word of God & the words of scripture?
4. Is it ever wrong to try to convert someone from one religion to another?
5. What’s the difference between Christian education and indoctrination?
6. Is a believer [ontologically] different from a nonbeliever?
We kicked off the evening on the first topic, and there was immediate push back to the notion that ‘spiritual maturity’ is linked to the ability to speak well about one’s beliefs.
Immediate counter-examples were offered: an older person who has a wisdom and maturity about him but is not a good source for systematic theology; a mother who lives in a way that bespeaks spiritual maturity (it was noted that there is more than one way to articulate things, we shouldn’t limit it to verbal articulation).
Another person thought the whole notion of ‘spiritual maturity’ was dubious. “Doesn’t that whole idea speak of having arrived? Does one ever arrive? Isn’t spiritual maturity that thing you strive for but never reach?”
We then mused about whether the church often falls into the trap of equating these two things: articulation and maturity. In my own tradition, it’s when you can say what you believe, when you can give the right answers, that we acknowledge that you have reached at least some level of spiritual achievement that you weren’t at before. Perhaps there are other means for evaluating faith — in fact I’m sure there are, and I think many of us are wanting to think more holistically about what it means to grow in one’s faith, beyond just words.
At the same time, someone noted that if you can’t at a basic level explain what you believe, perhaps you have some work to do. Fair enough.
The second topic had us discussing the various practices that lead to spiritual growth, and open one up to new possibilities, new ways of experiencing God, or living into one’s experience of God. Things like prayer, meditation, Scripture reading were mentioned, as well as getting involved in justice issues like poverty, slave trade, etc. “My faith is deepened as I seek to live among those who are marginalized in our society.”
One person noted that in his own very evangelical tradition, spiritual maturity equaled the ability to share the gospel with someone else: “How many people have you led to Christ?”
This led us naturally into topic no. 4: Is it ever wrong to convert someone to another religion?
There was some hesitation. It was initially noted that there are certainly wrong ways to share one’s faith: the in-your-face model, the used-car-salesman-routine, the forcing-awkward-family-relationships routine. Yet some felt, if eternal things are at stake – how could it be wrong to convert someone?
Then one person at the end of the table piped up: “Absolutely. There are times it is flat out wrong to disrespect someone else’s culture and religion by trying to convert them. I have friends in Buddhist and Hindu countries and I don’t think it would be right at all to go in there and try to convert them. I plan on seeing my Muslim and Buddhist friends in heaven. But maybe that means I’m not a real Christian.”
This provocative perspective made some uncomfortable while others cheered. What do you think?
We ended the evening on topic no.3: Is there a difference between the Word of God and the words of scripture?
This took us many places, but we began by looking at the perspective that there are two books in which God speaks to us – one, the book of the Bible, the other, the book of creation. It was noted that in a recent NPR story a person from a more evangelical background noted that someone could not believe in evolution and be a Christian. “This drives me crazy! How can we not be willing to find God in the world he has made, even if that forces us to reconsider some of our [long-held] theological positions?”
We then wondered about extrabiblical books, other gospels, the apocrypha, and so on. Are these ‘God’s Word’ in any sense? How does canon come into play, and should we restrict the Holy Spirit to speaking only through what ‘made it in’? And what about other traditions that include other books? Or what about books that were left out, were those for spiritual or political reasons, or some other reason altogether? Finally we wondered, what about words in the Scriptures themselves that portray God in a less than flattering light. Are these too the “Word of God”, or are there instances in the canon where we see humanity struggling to understand God, and perhaps not always getting it right? This latter line of thinking made several mutter “Marcion” under their breath, and made plenty nervous. Others felt these were legitimate questions that we should be able to ask.
In the end, it was a great night. Good beer, new relationships, honest conversation. All agreed that the pub is a place to have these open and honest conversations, to have our thinking pushed, and to recognize that God just might be bigger than we’ve thought. (And of course we ended in plenty of time to watch the Detroit Tigers beat the Oakland A’s behind the arm of Justin Verlander!).
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Feel free to weigh in on any of the above topics in the comment section below!
History
Lectio Divina is the Latin for ‘Holy Reading’ and was a form and approach to praying with Scripture that was common among medieval religious orders. The value of Lectio Divina was rediscovered in the twentieth century.
Essentially Lectio Divina involves taking a short passage of Scripture and pondering it. This can be done alone or in a group, and normally involves prolonged periods of silence.
Instructions
Choose a reader. The reader will read the text through four times, slowly, with a time of silence between each reading. Allow the words to wash over you. Be present. What is God saying to you right here and now? Open yourself to His Words.
From the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John:
“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water?”
Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water. . .”
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Last post we asked if it is possible to just read the Bible and understand what it says without having to ‘interpret’ it.
It’s a nice-sounding option, in theory. Unfortunately for us, that option doesn’t exist. In fact:
Is not every devotional reading (silent), every sermon (spoken), and every commentary (written) an interpretation or a series of interpretations of a biblical text?
We cannot escape interpreting the Bible. We are not God. Therefore, we are relative (conditioned by factors that are neither universal nor unchanging).
The entire history of Christian thought shows that Christians in different times and places have interpreted and understood the Bible differently.
Even at any given time and place, such as our own, is there not always a “conflict of interpretations” between, among, and within various denominational and nondenominational traditions?
If it were as simple as reading it and understanding it, there would be less divergence within Christianity. But the reality is that there are manifold ways of understanding the text, just as there is no end to the number of denominations and traditions within Christianity. This does not mean anything goes, or that all interpretations are valid – but merely that the text is rich, deep, textured, and from another time and place, meaning we should never become too strident nor certain that we have ‘the’ interpretation or have it all figured out.
We might be tempted to think that at one point — earlier in history, like in the early church — it was clear and everyone understood it the same. James K.A. Smith reminds us this was not the case:
For Christians, many of the anxieties of hermeneutics (the theory and process of interpretation) are nothing new. Well before we were haunted by the specters of Derrida and Foucault, the Christian community grappled with the conflict of interpretations (to say nothing of the Jewish/rabbinical precedents). One can see such conflicts embedded in the New Testament narrative itself. In Acts 15, for instance, we see a conflict of interpretations of “the law” — and we see a community grappling with interpretive difference in its midst. Despite a common mythology, the early church was not a hermeneutic paradise; rather, debates about what counts as the tradition have been integral to the Christian tradition. The early church was not a golden age of interpretive uniformity; rather, the catholic councils and creeds are the artifacts of a community facing up to the conflict of interpretations.
But often enough, as we noted last time, people simply deny that interpretation is necessary and unavoidable:
“We encounter this general attitude when we offer a viewpoint about, say, some controversial moral or political question to someone who (1) doesn’t like it and (2) doesn’t know how to refute it (perhaps deep down knowing that it is all too much on target) and so replies, “That’s just your opinion.””
Similarly, an unwelcome interpretation of some biblical text may be greeted by the response, “Well, that might be your interpretation, but my Bible clearly says…” In other words, “You interpret; I just see what is plainly there.”
This, however, is simply not the case. We all interpret. It is impossible to do otherwise. We read words or speak words, they combine to form meanings, and we interpret what that meaning is.
This “no interpretation needed” doctrine says that interpretation is accidental and unfortunate, that it can and should be avoided whenever possible. Often unnoticed is that this theory is itself an interpretation of interpretation and that it belongs to a long-standing philosophical tradition that stretches from certain strands in Plato’s thought well into the twentieth century. This tradition is called “naive realism” in one of its forms. It is called naive both descriptively, because it is easily taken by a common-sense perspective without philosophical reflection, and normatively, because it is taken to be indefensible on careful philosophical reflection. (Westphal, Whose Community? Which Interpretation?)
So is there no one ‘right’ interpretation? Well… there is the original intention of the author, and then the original intent of the Holy Spirit… and certainly we must hold that God knows what he meant (means) to say. But the point holds: we are not God. Therefore, there is always a distance between us and that truest understanding of the text. This is where faith and community comes in, and Merold Westphal, in his terrific book, Whose Community? Which Interpretation?, sounds this note exactly:
We need not think that hermeneutical despair (“anything goes”) and hermeneutical arrogance (we have “the” interpretation) are the only alternatives. We can acknowledge that we see and interpret “in a glass darkly” or “in a mirror, dimly” and that we know “only in part” (1 Cor. 13:12), while ever seeking to understand and interpret better by combining the tools of scholarship with the virtues of humbly listening to the interpretations of others and above all, to the Holy Spirit.
My friend Chris put it in very nearly the same way, in response to my first post:
Reading the Bible doesn’t require any special study; understanding it is another matter.
Anyone can “get something” out of just reading the Bible (or any other piece of literature). But if we’re concerned to do our best to “get” what the author(s) intended, then we have a lot of work ahead of us, especially dealing with a collection of ancient books written in ancient languages from ancient and diverse cultures with ancient and diverse systems of law, morality, and religion. If that work is beyond us, then we at least have the work of learning from the experts.
So should you read the Bible on your own, in light of all this? Yes! Of course. God will speak. Just be sure you check with your friends (and maybe a good commentary) before you say, “God told me…”
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.
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!
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!
A friend sent me this article… Read it and let me know what you think.
JERUSALEM (AP) — A dull-looking chart projected on the wall of a university office in Jerusalem displayed a revelation that would startle many readers of the Old Testament: the sacred text that people revered in the past was not the same one we study today.
An ancient version of one book has an extra phrase. Another appears to have been revised to retroactively insert a prophecy after the events happened.
Scholars in this out-of-the-way corner of the Hebrew University campus have been quietly at work for 53 years on one of the most ambitious projects attempted in biblical studies — publishing the authoritative edition of the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible, and tracking every single evolution of the text over centuries and millennia.
And it has evolved, despite deeply held beliefs to the contrary.
For many Jews and Christians, religion dictates that the words of the Bible in the original Hebrew are divine, unaltered and unalterable. For Orthodox Jews, the accuracy is considered so inviolable that if a synagogue’s Torah scroll is found to have a minute error in a single letter, the entire scroll is unusable.
But the ongoing work of the academic detectives of the Bible Project, as their undertaking is known, shows that this text at the root of Judaism, Christianity and Islam was somewhat fluid for long periods of its history, and that its transmission through the ages was messier and more human than most of us imagine.
The project’s scholars have been at work on their critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, a version intended mainly for the use of other scholars, since 1958.
“What we’re doing here must be of interest for anyone interested in the Bible,” said Michael Segal, the scholar who heads the project.
The sheer volume of information makes the Bible Project’s version “the most comprehensive critical edition of the Hebrew Bible in existence at the present time,” said David Marcus, a Bible scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, who is not involved with the project.
But Segal and his colleagues toil in relative anonymity. Their undertaking is nearly unknown outside a circle of Bible experts numbering several hundred people at most, and a visitor asking directions to the Bible Project’s office on the university campus will find that many members of the university’s own staff have never heard of it.
This is an endeavor so meticulous, its pace so disconnected from that of the world outside, that in more than five decades of work the scholars have published a grand total of three of the Hebrew Bible’s 24 books. (Christians count the same books differently, for a total of 39.) A fourth is due out during the upcoming academic year.
If the pace is maintained, the final product will be complete a little over 200 years from now. This is both a point of pride and a matter of some mild self-deprecation around the office.
Bible Project scholars have spent years combing through manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, Greek translations on papyrus from Egypt, a printed Bible from 1525 Venice, parchment books in handwritten Hebrew, the Samaritan Torah, and scrolls in Aramaic and Latin. The last member of the original team died last year at age 90.
The scholars note where the text we have now differs from older versions — differences that are evidence of the inevitable textual hiccups, scribal errors and other human fingerprints that became part of the Bible as it was passed on, orally and in writing.
A Microsoft Excel chart projected on one wall on a recent Sunday showed variations in a single phrase from the Book of Malachi, a prophet.
The verse in question, from the text we know today, makes reference to “those who swear falsely.” The scholars have found that in quotes from rabbinic writings around the 5th century A.D., the phrase was longer: “those who swear falsely in my name.”
In another example, this one from the Book of Deuteronomy, a passage referring to commandments given by God “to you” once read “to us,” a significant change in meaning.
Other differences are more striking.
The Book of Jeremiah is now one-seventh longer than the one that appears in some of the 2,000-year-old manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some verses, including ones containing a prophecy about the seizure and return of Temple implements by Babylonian soldiers, appear to have been added after the events happened.
The year the Bible Project began, 1958, was the year a priceless Hebrew Bible manuscript arrived in Jerusalem after it was smuggled out of Aleppo, Syria, by a Jewish cheese merchant who hid it in his washing machine. This was the 1,100-year-old Aleppo Codex, considered the oldest and most accurate version of the complete biblical text in Hebrew.
The Bible Project’s version of the core text — the one to which the others are compared — is based on this manuscript. Other critical editions of the Bible, such as one currently being prepared in Stuttgart, Germany, are based on a slightly newer manuscript held in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Considering that the nature of their work would be considered controversial, if not offensive, by many religious people, it is perhaps surprising that most of the project’s scholars are themselves Orthodox Jews.
“A believing Jew claims that the source of the Bible is prophecy,” said the project’s bearded academic secretary, Rafael Zer. “But as soon as the words are given to human beings — with God’s agreement, and at his initiative — the holiness of the biblical text remains, even if mistakes are made when the text is passed on.”
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Link to original article.