REstory 12: More Seriously! (Biblical interpretation with the Holy Spirit)
Flourishing by Walking into a Larger Story With Our Ancient Siblings
Imagine beginning to glimpse hope again after receiving a complicated medical diagnosis. Your primary provider is explaining what health choices you need to make, and if you chart that path, you’ve got a good chance at flourishing — maybe even greater flourishing than before you came in with the symptoms of your sickness. We’ve been using these health and diagnosis metaphors to guide us through major questions about shifting strategies for biblical interpretation (also known as hermeneutics).
Some have been told that since they had changed their mind about what they had originally been taught about the Bible, they were no longer taking the Bible “seriously.” However, many are realizing that if they let go of the small expectations they were given for the Bible, they find themselves taking scripture More Seriously. And maybe being surprised by Joy.
This post will have three sections. First, I’ll describe the trajectory of New Creation. Then we will talk about the character of God throughout the canon, and then at the end we’ll investigate the work of the Holy Spirit in the reading of scripture.
The Trajectory of New Creation
In our last post, we mentioned how scholars in the field of theological hermeneutics urge us to interpret the Bible guided by what we think God is like. Instead of starting with the assumption that the Bible is a pattern of instructions to be decoded, we should begin first with the question: What is God Like? Connected to this, in this REstory series, I have shared that it is the Resurrection that changes everything — both for shifting the atonement narratives we were given and for shifting the assumptions about the biblical interpretation we’ve inherited.
The Resurrection means that we are living between Creation and New Creation — with the creative God of Creation and New Creation. This means that we should interpret scripture with New Creation expectations.
Like we said in an earlier post (REstory 3: Gardening Among the Galaxies: Risking on Resurrection for Worldbuilding Right Now), assuming that the God of New Creation desires the creative participation of humans is a huge shift! That is why instead of seeing the Bible with the narrow, limiting metaphors of pattern, blueprint, rule book, or constitution, we should instead try on the metaphors of a map, a compass, a grand narrative, a Love Story, an epic poem, a 5-act play, a library, or holy testimony. Then we can see ourselves as improv actors, or cooks in the kitchen co-creating with the Master Chef, skilled nurses, or jazz musicians. (Check out the footnotes from last week for resources to expand your imagination about biblical interpretation).
New Creation makes it clear that patternism’s goal (“do what the Bible says”) is too small. Instead, knowing we’re headed towards New Creation means that we are on a trajectory.
It is a fundamental misunderstanding for any church to think they are finished being surprised by God, even in Scripture. The assumption that what we were supposed to do with scripture is find the authorized Sunday morning worship practices from the first century was always too small — not only has it made our Bibles too small, but it has made God way too small for many churches. That God is often too small to work deep transformation in people’s daily lives, and many people have (rightly) walked away from that God.1
Unlike a fixed blueprint pattern, a trajectory assumes expansive movement outward — that this creative God is not finished leading us into larger transformation and stretching us more to love even more neighbors
The Title of the Trajectory: God With Us
But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. If the Bible is a Giant Library of Holy Testimony that describes a grand narrative from Creation to New Creation, then I’d like to suggest a title for this narrative: God With Us (Immanuel). “Immanuel” is not just a word from a verse in Isaiah 7 that gets reinterpreted for Jesus in Matthew 1. The idea that God wants to live among humans starts in Genesis 1 and flows through Revelation 22. This God is always turning their chair towards humans.
This God creates in love and loves the creatures and wants to be near them.
In the last post, we also discussed seeing the biblical canon as a 5-Act Play — this also fits beautifully with the title God With Us. This is a story of progressive presence. In every chapter of this giant narrative, when humans cause ruin and devastation, God doesn’t give up, but God gets closer and the story gets wider.
In Act 1 (Creation), God created the whole world to be with God’s creatures. And when that fell apart, in Act 2 (Israel) God got closer, choosing one people to come live among them so they could show the whole world what it’s like for God to dwell among people. And when that fell apart, God didn’t give up but got closer. In Act 3 (Christ) God comes as a human — as a vulnerable baby born to a vulnerable teenager in a rural backwater district of Roman occupied Judea. God comes as Jesus to show the world what God is like and invite them into such a different way to be human that it’s like living in a different kingdom.
And then that fell apart. Religious professionals conspired with petty politicians and humans killed God-in-Jesus. But God didn’t abandon the project, but defeated death with life, raising Jesus with a new body. And so in Act 4 (the Holy Spirit in the church), God comes even closer, putting God’s own Spirit inside of humans. And we know where this story is going. In Act 5 (Resurrection into New Creation), God continues to pursue presence and has promised to raise us with resurrection bodies and also to heal the whole cosmos and remake it into a New Heavens and a New Earth.
Now, many of us think of stories in a linear fashion, and as I’ve worked through my hermeneutics research, I wanted to capture how the testimony contained in the biblical canon is not static but a dynamic, growing narrative, and an image like this started to form in my mind:
However, I was also convinced in my research that we needed an image that better captures the complexity and connections. Too often humans trained in binary, black-and-white, us-vs.-them thinking are prone to draw exclusive boundaries. Within the field of hermeneutics, this exclusive mindset can lead people to draw hard lines between the “chapters” in the different eras within the Bible. Some denominations have called them covenants, some have called them dispensations; either way, this sadly often goes hand in hand with the idea that the earlier sections (or chapters, covenants, or dispensations) are no longer relevant or required for people in later time periods.2
While these assumptions are understandable, I think they fall short of a coherent approach that works for the whole canon. The idea that biblical texts from an earlier era “don’t apply to us now” causes people to devalue earlier covenants and even miss the expansive, creative, inclusive love of God. So because of these concerns, a spiral began to form in my imagination:
This is an expanding story of progressive presence.
Every time humans wreck the story, God gets closer, and the story gets wider. The increasing closeness of God demonstrates a transcend-and-include movement. Every chapter of this narrative expands to transcend-and-yet-still-include the chapter that came right before it.
I will write more about this in the future, but for now I will mention three significant advantages of this paradigm shift. First, this framework is dynamic — the expansive movement is visually obvious in the spiral and can help people unlearn the small, static expectation of “doing what the Bible says.” Second, this inclusive spiral attempts to heal the almost 2000 year old habit of Christians either outright devaluing or struggling to value the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament).3 In this model, Christians are continually reminded that they have not replaced Israel as the people of God but instead are guests in Israel’s story (or a branch grafted onto the tree). Third, when we see how the whole narrative of God With Us shows us a God who both moves in closer and expands the inclusive story outward in every chapter, we can love and imitate that expansive, inclusive God.
The Work of the Holy Spirit
But let me deepen our understanding of the act of reading. One main focus of my hermeneutics research was to investigate the work of the Holy Spirit in biblical interpretation. I come from a fellowship which, in the most conservative congregations, has historically (or currently) denied that the Spirit of God has done any work beyond inspiring the writing of the Bible (often assuming a dictation model). Some of them might concede that the Spirit could maybe help Christians today remember verses from the Bible when they need them. To try and heal that neglect, in my lifetime some groups from this heritage have begun studying the Holy Spirit and acknowledging their experiences and their curiosity about the gifts of the Spirit (primarily from 1 Corinthians 12-14).
To be clear, I cheerfully and emphatically disagree with those in my fellowship who claim the “cessation of the gifts of the Holy Spirit,” and I am happy to discuss the wide-ranging gifts that Christians receive from the Spirit of God inside them. But funny enough, even though some in this heritage wanted to lock the Holy Spirit into the Bible, I think we’ve actually missed what the Spirit is doing within scripture. I am fascinated by what’s happening with the Spirit when we read scripture.
This is the surprise that came out of my research. If Christians really believe that the living Spirit of God is inhabiting our bodies, then when we read scripture, we experience a living connection with our ancient siblings.
For example, if Luke interviewed Zechariah and Elizabeth and Mary about their experiences, and if Luke was commissioned by his patron Theophilus, each of those people was filled with the Holy Spirit. But now, even though their bodies are dead, when we read about their experiences written down in Luke chapter 1, because we also have the Spirit, we experience a living connection with them. If we really believe that the Spirit of God is alive, then when we read the testimonies of the people of God, we experience a real communion with them. Because we’re connected by the living Spirit of God, we can inhabit their stories and learn some muscle memory from our ancestors. We’re invited to lay our stories next to their stories and let our stories speak to each other - we already know that this is an appropriate and responsible use of testimony!
This is where it’s important to circle back to last week’s metaphors for us as readers of Scripture. If we are living between Creation and New Creation, then we are more like cooks in the kitchen, improv actors, skilled nurses, or jazz musicians. In this framework, the Bible becomes a conversation partner in our creative discernment — after all, it can look really different to learn to love your neighbor or enemy in first century Roman-occupied Palestine than in Arkansas in 2024 or than in Mozambique. Instead of trying to imitate the worship of the first century church, because of the living connection with the Spirit of God, the diverse voices of our ancient siblings within our library of scripture illuminate our creative discernment with their experiences.
In the next post, I will get really practical — we’ll come down from the big-picture and spend some time with the nitty-gritty. For today, let’s remember that because of the Resurrection, we participate in the work of God along a trajectory that started long before us with the lives of our siblings in scripture, and continues beyond us to New Creation. We find in the Bible an expanding narrative of a Creator who delights to live with the creatures, and with every rupture in the story, this God moves closer and the love story stretches wider.
This God With Us even comes so close as to inhabit human bodies by the living Spirit, who connects us in real time to our ancient siblings whose testimonies we hold next to ours. After a discouraging diagnosis, this is the path to healthier Bible reading, taking scripture more seriously, leading us to flourishing as we Go Out In Joy!
© 2024 Ladye Rachel Howell. All rights reserved.
I am not at all saying that there’s no transformation happening in churches that continue to use the Bible as a pattern or blueprint. But if we become formed in the image of the God we worship, following the small god of patternism will keep our transformation small.
I am not at all denying covenants are in scripture nor denying that they are deeply important. However I am critiquing the use of covenants as hard hermeneutical divisions within the canon of scripture. Covenants are agreements of faithfulness, not literary/legal silos in a holy library. Anytime you’ve heard someone contrast “well they were under law but now we’re under grace” or “back then they lived by works, but we live by faith” or “that was the Old Testament God, but now we have Jesus” this separating of “covenants” or “dispensations” into different silos is happening.
Just about every Christian writer from the first century on had antisemitic assumptions; it is awful, and it’s one of Christianity’s oldest problems. Tragically, Martin Luther’s antisemitism is baked into protestant theology and hermeneutics (see the above footnote); Luther’s antisemitic theology is connected to the German church’s inability to protest or reject Hitler’s coming to power 400 years later. Also, this is a much longer conversation that is really relevant right now, but antisemitism and critiquing Zionism are not the same thing.