REstory 11: More Seriously? (Biblical Interpretation in light of the God of New Creation)
Healing Treatment: Testimony and Trust
Imagine going to your primary care provider about confusing and painful symptoms and receiving a devastating diagnosis for your mystery illness. The emotional burden is heavy as you work towards acceptance and grief and learning how your family history has contributed to the situation you find yourself in, knowing things will never be the same. Eventually, after some time, you begin to find some acceptance while still carrying your grief, and you begin to glimpse a far-off hint of what flourishing might eventually look like in your new reality.
This is the third post in a series on reconstructing biblical interpretation using the metaphors of receiving a major medical diagnosis. We’ve talked about how in many spaces, “Patternism” based on “Proof-texting” that comes from “Plain Reading” has created expectations for the Bible and God that are too small. Using the metaphor of family medical history, we acknowledged that we’ve received both blessings and baggage from our family/community of origin, and that looking in the Bible for “commands, examples, and inferences” in order to “restore the first century church” was misguided — even with good intentions, this has been insufficient.
Our imaginations were formed by the expectations we were given, and we need treatment to be healed so we can hope to trust the testimony in scripture — again, but in a different way. It was the church community that raised me that taught me to love scripture so much that eventually I could no longer keep reading the Bible according to the cramped, insufficient expectations I was given.
So we ended the last post in John chapter 5, wondering about Jesus’ grief as he tells religious leaders that their use of scripture shows that they obviously don’t know God. He tells them, “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” The hope is that when we turn to scripture with Jesus, we can Go Out In Joy, leaving small insufficient stories behind. We will be trading up into a larger and lovelier relationship with scripture.
So what should we DO with the Bible?1 I’ve heard some church leaders explain at length how they definitely don’t want the “legalism” of their parents’ or grandparents’ generation. Unfortunately, very few have offered a thoughtful, constructive alternative — they often seem to still be stuck in patternism but just with a shorter list of rules and a little less sectarianism than the previous generation. I’ll give you the teaser — the way forward is theological interpretation. Instead of reading scripture for a pattern of rules to follow, we should ask first “What is God like?” and let God’s nature and love determine what we do with the Bible — more on that in a minute.
Today’s post (and the next post, too) will begin to chart the way forward, reconstructing a healthier path to more appropriate trust with scripture. In our health/diagnosis metaphors, today’s post is like receiving the first set of treatment instructions from your primary provider. Often the first glimmers of hope come when someone offers you the first constructive steps forward towards health. Let’s buckle our metaphorical seatbelts (wink), because we’re going to sample a wide menu of metaphors!
I said in the last post that we shouldn’t be using the Bible as a pattern, blue print, rule book, or constitution. The good news is that there are many more metaphors to open doors in our imaginations for a broader, healthier engagement with scripture.2 Try on some of these analogies:
Some suggest that we should think of the Bible like a map.3 Some advantages for this metaphor is that it de-centers the text as the ultimate goal — we already know that the map is not the destination. A map is incredibly useful for guidance as an indispensable part of the larger goal of journeying to where we’re going, and we already know that what we see on a map is not the full reality but represents or points to the larger reality (the little dot on the map with a name next to it is not the same thing as an actual town). Developing this further, since the biblical text is designed to be dynamic and interactive, we could ask if maybe the Bible is more like a compass?
Some suggest that we could instead see the Bible as a grand narrative. So much of scripture is tracing the stories of ancient Israel, even stretching into the New Testament documents of the earliest churches in the first century. Proponents of this metaphor would explain that even the different genres within the canon (books of law or poetry or letters) still serve the overall narrative. Developing the narrative metaphor further, we could discuss how scripture is a Love Story. However, pushing back on narrative as a main metaphor, others might explain to you in detail how an extended epic poem is a better comparison that is closer to the reality of how the Bible works as a whole.4
Others have offered the analogy of seeing scripture as a Feast. The books of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Revelation all include imagery of the writer eating the scroll; somehow the text needs to get inside of us, and different eaters will have different experiences.5 For a variation on this, when my husband taught courses in New Testament to college freshmen, he showcased the different books/writers in the canon as your different relatives together at the table at the family reunion (some of whom are very weird, and we need to discern who to sit next to at the table for wisdom and perspective in our different life seasons).
Another possibility when we note the scope of the dramatic metanarrative of scripture, we can see it as an expansive 5 Act Play. In this framework, the five acts of this “theodrama” are Act 1 Creation, Act 2 Israel, Act 3 Christ, Act 4 the Holy Spirit in the Church, and Act 5 is Resurrection into New Creation.6 More on this in a minute.
Additionally, recognizing that the Bible contains multiple books (some of which contain multiple genres even within one book), several have suggested that we think of the Bible as a large Library. Some books have contrasting viewpoints (like Jonah and Nahum or like Ezra and Ruth), and several books or passages are bringing really different perspectives to bear (like comparing how the four different gospels portray the resurrection of Jesus). We need all of these perspectives in the library to even come close to the full witness of the people of God through those centuries.7
Which brings me to my final category, and this is less of an analogy and more my attempt to name the Bible’s essential nature; ontologically, scripture is “holy testimony.” What we have in the Bible is the collected testimony of the people of God. Seeing scripture as holy testimony allows for the full functional range of all the genres we find in the Bible.8
I will continue to develop this proposal for seeing the Bible as holy testimony in the next post. But today, as we’re looking for healthier metaphors to adjust our expectations, I want us to wrestle with that question above - what do we DO with scripture? For those of us who were taught that we’re supposed to “do what the Bible says,” the next question with our new metaphors is: how do you “obey” a map? A compass? A narrative? A love story? An epic poem? A 5-act play? A library? How do you “obey” testimony?9
Which brings us to another conversation — we need better metaphors not just for scripture but also for ourselves. Who are we as readers and theological interpreters of scripture? Scholars who are advocating theological hermeneutics are explaining that we should interpret scripture into our lives based on what God is like and what God is doing in the world. This is where atonement intersects with hermeneutics - whatever story we think we are in with God will become the lens we use to interpret scripture. This matters so much!
I will write more about this in the next post, but if we are living between Creation and New Creation, then we should see ourselves interpreting Scripture on a trajectory of participation that moves from Creation to New Creation.
In the 2007 Pixar movie Ratatouille, there is a scene where sous chef Colette is training Linguini, the newest employee at the restaurant named for its late founder Chef Gusteau. She tells him that Gusteau always did something unexpected, and that she’s memorized all the recipes. At this point Linguini picks up his notepad and writes down “Always do something unexpected,” and Colette says, “No! Follow the recipe! It was Gusteau’s job to do something unexpected; it’s our job to follow the recipe.”10
Many of us were taught that the only “right" way to read and interpret scripture is like Colette’s sharp instructions to “follow the recipe.” For a lot of people, repeatedly reproducing exact details of the original was the only definition of “faithful” interpretation. But that would be a small God who would want people to parrot exact recipes for Sunday worship century after century - this is not healthy interpretation. Instead, we are invited daily to be co-creators cooking in the kitchen with the Master Chef!
Back to the 5-Act Play analogy above, if the book of Acts and the New Testament letters are in Act 4:Scene 1, then we are living in Act 4:Scene 2. If we take the analogy further, imagine that a lost Shakespeare play is discovered, but Act 4:Scene 2 is unreadable due to some effect of time like water damage. Imagine that Shakespeare scholars are tasked to produce this recently found play for the world. If they have the full text of Act 1, 2, 3 and also Act 5 where the narrative of the drama is heading, what will they do to fill in the missing Scene 2 of Act 4? Will they tell the actors to just repeat Act 4: Scene 1 several times over and over again? No, instead they will take their clues from what they know about Shakespeare, and how the whole drama has gone so far AND where they know the narrative is going (New Creation), and they will creatively interpret and co-create material that will be faithful to that trajectory.11
This is why within the field of Theological Hermeneutics, multiple scholars have used the examples of Improv Actors (Improvisational Theater) and Jazz musicians as the most appropriate analogies to what we are actually supposed to be doing with Scripture.12 If we believe that God’s dream is a renewed and healed Creation in a New Heavens and a New Earth, then instead of scripted puppets, we should see ourselves as Improv actors or Jazz musicians, co-creating with the Creator.
Another example comes from my earlier experience as an RN in an ICU. It really hit me within the first few weeks and months in that job that my professors and preceptors from nursing school couldn’t teach me everything I needed to know as a nurse! They couldn’t predict or script for me exactly what skills I would need to perform each day. Instead, their job was to train me with a solid foundation of knowledge and skills so that when I showed up at work, not knowing anything about the patients I would be caring for that day until I walked in the door, I would be able to creatively remix everything I had been taught for what was needed moment to moment in complex, unfolding situations. This included the capacity for awareness of my own gaps in knowledge or skills so that I could collaborate with other practitioners or learn new things that had been left out of nursing school. Faithfulness should always include the expectation of further learning!
The resurrection of Jesus means that we are in a New Creation story! Wherever “doing what the Bible says” has meant “copying the exact details of the first century church,” we have minimized what God was wanting to do in the world through God’s Spirit inside us. It is these analogies of cooks in the kitchen, Improv actors, jazz musicians, and nurses who keep remixing skills and learning every day after nursing school that can help bring our interpretation much closer to participation in New Creation! Faithfulness was always meant to involve enacted creativity!
The next post will help us dig deep into this creative faithfulness, but this week I hope you feel welcome into a treatment of re-learning trust. Welcome to a wide palette of analogies to retrain your imagination about scripture as together we Go Out In Joy — we need all these metaphors to stretch our expectations about how we participate with scripture:
Inside this Giant Library of Holy Testimony, we find a sprawling narrative that turns out to be a Love Story between God and the world — and we are Improv actors co-creating within our Scene of the 5-Act Play on our way to New Creation. We are like cooks in the kitchen training with the Master Chef to co-create this messy feast that is hosted at an extended table with our ancient family. Like nurses who wisely and creatively remix their skills each day, our lives join the poetry and song alongside the experiences of our ancient siblings to form a map of the terrain that we follow like a compass, always pointing to Jesus as the Word who reveals God to us.
© 2024 Ladye Rachel Howell. All rights reserved.
I have written at length about hermeneutics in my first masters thesis, complete with analytical research and footnotes. Local friends will recognize the influence of one of my former professors, John Mark Hicks - his is still my favorite class from seminary. You can find his work here, and also on You Tube.
Be careful about dismissing metaphors on the assumption that their representational use means that they are “less-than” reality. Conceptual Metaphor Theory is a conversation that began within cognitive linguistics, and Metaphor Studies is a promising field. See Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson.
See Kevin Vanhoozer’s book Pictures at a Theological Exposition: Scenes of the Church’s Worship, Witness, and Wisdom for one example of the Bible-as-map metaphor.
This is Duke Professor Brent Strawn’s take; you can find his TheoEd Talk here, and listen to a fuller conversation here.
Jeremiah 15, Ezekiel 3, and Revelation 10 all portray the writer as eating the scroll. See also Eugene Peterson’s book Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading for a lovely view of this metaphor.
Props and credits for this framework go first to N. T. Wright in his book Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today and to my professor John Mark Hicks’ post-reformed adaptation of this framework (see links above!). I’ll share my tweaks to this framework in the next post in this series.
Another striking metaphor for scripture is actually a person. Go back and re-read John 1 several times slowly, letting your vision center and your heart focus on Jesus as the logos, the Word from the very mouth of God. If John was naming Jesus as THE Word of God, when did that language change? If John’s gospel gives us permission to let Jesus be the Word of God again, what do we do with scripture? Hiding right there in the same chapter is a lovely analogy — the Bible is like John the Baptist. My husband and I have been teaching this metaphor for awhile, and recently we were excited to see that Brian Zahnd touches on the John the Baptist metaphor in his book Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News. Alan and I will publish a longer treatment of this concept in a forthcoming journal article, but you hope you will enjoy this teaser. Like scripture, John the baptizer has miraculous origins, is ragged and worn from the wilderness, and is always pointing to Jesus. His witness is a little too weird for some people, his testimony is compelling to the curious but confusing to the comfortable, and fiercely lives out a dear devotion to Jesus even though he still had unanswered questions. He interprets his own testimony inside of the larger historical witness that raised him.
And obviously, different branches of the family tree of belief have different canons, and that doesn’t have to be a threat to faith. I will write about the history of the canonization process in the future (how different groups at different times sifted through ancient traditions to compile the accounts of the witnesses into a canon (choosing some, and not choosing others).
With this question of “what do we DO with scripture,” some teachers or preachers who know they want to hold on to the Bible as normative in community identity, but are aiming to lead people out of inherited legalism will explain that what churches need to discern is whether certain biblical texts are “Descriptive” or “Prescriptive.” Descriptive means describing — showing what something was like back then, and prescriptive means prescribing — giving us instructions that we should follow. They might explain that our frustration or confusion has come from how some churches were making prescriptive commands out of texts that were meant to be descriptive. This is often a helpful step for many people. This is a longer conversation, but I would say that if we’re trying to go through scripture verse by verse to discern which ones are descriptive and which ones are prescriptive (“head coverings for women was just cultural, so that must be descriptive, but loving our neighbors seems to be a pretty broad command from Jesus and from Leviticus before that, so that must be prescriptive”) then we are starting off on the wrong foot. Instead, if we start with the corrective assumption that the Bible is in essence a collection of testimony, then it follows that we need to first see the whole canon as descriptive. The primary goal of witness is the sharing of testimony — the witness is describing their experiences of certain events, in their time, alongside their community, embedded in their cultural context. It is not a normal goal of sharing testimony for the audience to think they must go out and exactly reproduce the step-by-step replica of what the witness has shared. After we have seen how the whole canon is descriptive testimony (describing the trajectory of how the Spirit of God was working through the people whose testimony we read), then we can discern where our lives fit along that trajectory. More on this in the next post.
Credit again to my clever husband for pointing out this comparison :)
Again, credit for this provocative corrective analogy goes to N. T. Wright and John Mark Hicks (see footnote 6 above).
See Samuel Wells’ book Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics, and see also Peter Heltzel’s book Resurrection City: A Theology of Improvisation, and Maryann McKibben Dana’s book God, Improv, and the Art of Living.