Last year I published (through MediaCom) a short commentary on the Uniting Church's Basis of Union. This is the second of four posts, each of which consist of the commentary on a selected Paragraph from the Basis. The first post - which includes a bit more detail about the purpose and structure of the book - can be found here. The third post will be published in due course.If this whets your appetite, you can order the book through MediaCom or CTM Resourcing. There's also a short article about the book in the NSW/ACT Synod magazine, Insights.
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Commentary on Paragraph 5 of the Basis.
In Uniting
Church discussions about the Bible you often hear the phrase, ‘I read the Bible
metaphorically, not literally’. It is often said as if it is evidence of great
intellectual insight. It isn’t. It is actually a quite unsophisticated claim
which tells us nothing at all about what is involved in reading the Bible.
Ironically, it replicates the same ‘flattening’ of the reading techniques
pursued by the literalism it opposes! What, for instance, would it mean to read
Paul’s letters as metaphors? They’re letters! And as letters – and ancient
letters at that – they require quite complex reading strategies to interpret
them.
In fact,
this is one paragraph where it is worth hesitating before appealing to a
contrast between Christendom and post-Christendom. The all-too-common
literal/metaphorical contrast reflects the dominance in our discussions of the
question of how to read the Bible.
This itself is a reflection of complex and enduring shifts in the study of
theology during the last few centuries. Suffice to say that in academic
theology, the discipline of hermeneutics – the study of interpretation –
developed in a way that the question of how
to read the Bible became detached from the questions of what the Bible is and why and where it is to be read. This
was not the case in earlier centuries. The questions of how, what, why and where
were held together in theological reflection on the Bible in ways that can be
very instructive for us today. In this crucial paragraph, the Basis prompts us to learn once again to
ask all of those questions. After all, what’s the point in having sophisticated
theories of how to read the Bible if we
don’t know why we are reading it?
So, let’s
start by looking at what this paragraph tells us about what the Bible is. It tells us that the Bible consists of the books
of the Old and New Testaments. The Bible is a two-volume anthology of the
formative literature of Judaism and the early Christian movement. These two
volumes are also given their respective classic theological designations
‘prophetic’ and ‘apostolic’. By consisting of these particular two volumes, the
Bible has some significant theological tensions built into its very structure.
The tensions are never resolved. We have to live with them – and that’s one of
the things that makes reading and interpreting the bible so interesting and
never-ending.
But the
tensions are not confined to the relationship between the two volumes. The
paragraph also refers to the "witnesses". The plural is deliberate. There are diverse
theologies not only between the Old and New Testaments, but also within each of
them. Reading the Bible, therefore, is like eavesdropping on a conversation
amongst a group of wise, probing and authoritative teachers, prophets and
pastors. The topic of their sometimes heated and disjointed but intentional
conversation is God’s history with Israel which had come to such sharp focus in
Jesus.
The word "witness" is important for another reason. By using it, along with the closely
related word, "testimony", this paragraph reminds us that the literature of the
Bible points to events and experiences which the human authors of the
literature did not invent. This same principle applies to the use of the word "received" in describing how the church has come to have the Bible in the first
place. When it confesses that "the church has received the books" of the Bible, the Basis is using a theologically finely-tuned word. It’s a way of
holding together two distinct convictions. On the one hand, the church affirms that
the Bible derives its authority from God. On the other hand, the human actions
and decisions that led to the Bible’s existence must be acknowledged and
honoured. And that’s the key reason why the question of how we read the Bible is so important.
What,
then, about why we read the Bible?
Interestingly, the answer to this also addresses the issue of what holds this diverse
collection of literature together as a single entity. The Basis tells us that the Bible is “testimony in which it hears the
Word of God”. For the Christian
community, the phrase ‘Word of God’ has always been linked to Jesus Christ. In
other words, the Bible is a witness to Jesus Christ and we read it to hear his
word to the church. It is of course Jesus who is the reason for the existence
of the Bible. It is the proclamation about him which holds the Bible together.
If Jesus had not been proclaimed as
Israel’s Messiah, what we know as the New Testament literature would never have
been written. And if he had not been proclaimed as Israel’s Messiah, the New Testament would never have been added to
the Old Testament. There would be no Bible.
Finally,
what about where we should read the
Bible? Here the Basis makes a quite
striking claim: “The Word of God on whom salvation depends is to be heard and known
from Scripture appropriated in the worshipping and witnessing life of the
Church.” Neither the academy nor private devotions as regarded here as the
normative place for reading the Bible. As the means of encountering the Word of
God, i.e. Jesus Christ, the Bible is to be read in the midst of the church’s
active life. The very activities of praying and proclaiming, of serving the
transforming the world, of forming disciples and listening to prophets, all shape
our reading of the Bible. All of them prompt ever-new questions which fine-tune
our listening to the Word of God.
And we
must take seriously what it means to read the Bible with the whole church. Uniting Church theologian, Dr.
Ji Zhang, has rightly pressed many of us to recognise that the Churches of Asia,
Africa, Pacific and the Middle East are reading the Bible and listening for the
Word of God in contexts characterised by severe poverty, religious pluralism,
the adverse effects of climate change, persecution and marginality. What they
hear as they listen must also become part of our listening for the Word.
