REstory 9: Seriously? (Rethinking Biblical Interpretation with Jesus)
Diagnosis: Presuppositions, Plain Reading, and Proof-texting
Many of us can imagine getting an unexpected diagnosis from a healthcare professional — maybe it’s happened to us, maybe to someone we love. Maybe there were some confusing symptoms that caused us to seek answers, or maybe a routine visit revealed something lurking under the surface we didn’t even know to ask about yet. Maybe the diagnosis sounds really technical or mysterious, and it feels easier to avoid the news. Maybe we feel frustrated or angry at how our tangled family history contributed to the complicated choices we don’t even understand yet. Maybe we don’t like the inconvenience of interrupting the plans we already had for this year. Maybe it’s overwhelming to think about how much our life will have to change in order to choose a path of healing.
I’m going to let these health metaphors carry us through these next few posts about scripture (diagnosis, family history, path to healing — this week is diagnosis). Just as getting unexpected health news can interrupt our normal patterns and force us to face decisions we didn’t plan on making, it’s normal to have a wide range of emotional responses as we sort through unlearning and relearning what we’ve been taught about scripture. The compassion of Jesus holds all of it — the diagnosis, our choices, and how we feel about it all.
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I’ve spent my whole life around Bibles. I’ve had multiple translations — I even worked at a Christian bookstore in high school and sold Bibles. My childhood included nightly readings from children’s Bible story books, some of which were a lot older than me (and in most of them Jesus looked like a mild white European who always had great hair). I journaled through the Psalms as a teenager, and as a young adult I toted my giant study Bible on hikes in Central America before I wised up and bought a much lighter pocket Bible for travel.
But then my relationship with the Bible got really confusing for a few years as I wrestled with unwieldy questions like the ones we’ve been describing in this REstory series. The order of my own experience of unlearning unhealthy doctrines and relearning healthier ones started first with honest questions (that my church hadn’t answered), then coming to know Jesus again (as if for the first time), then slowly realizing that Jesus shows us what God is like, then researching atonement, then rediscovering resurrection (again - as if for the first time), then rethinking scripture.
I’m not trying to describe a tidy, linear process with clear chapter divides — it wasn’t tidy at all. But I did experience that progression, and it wasn’t until much of that water was under the bridge that I realized that I would need to rethink how I had been taught to use the Bible. Accompanied by the resources of wise companions (many of whom are footnoted in my posts), I was receiving a much larger view of God first. If God was really that much bigger than I had been taught, then I would have to somehow learn to re-read scripture differently in light of that God — because this was a different internal narrative. The framework I had inherited for interpreting the Bible, however well-meaning, was insufficient; it only works with a tiny Story A God.
I was learning my way into a very different, healthier picture of the God who Jesus shows us long before I started rethinking scripture. For me, the order matters because there is an unkind (and sometimes scornful) assumption spoken from many pulpits that those people who are changing their minds about the Bible are “just giving in to culture,” which often portrays questioners as first deciding they care about culture and being cool more than God and so then decided to “not take the Bible seriously” or some other version of intellectual irresponsibility.
Tragically, however, those communicating that disdain or dismay from the pulpit don’t realize that their own assumptions are preventing them from seeing their own blindspots. They wrongly assume that their group’s practices were already the highest or rightest standard of reading the Bible, and that others are deviating from that standard. They assume that they’re the ones taking the Bible seriously, and that anyone else doing it differently is just “listening to culture.”
But it’s actually more responsible to let Jesus show us what God is like, and also how to read scripture.
Diagnosis: Presuppositions. In the middle of my relearning years, we were traveling one summer, and we visited two different churches in Tennessee on two different Sundays. The first Sunday, the preacher at the podium held up his Bible and said urgently, “This is not the Word of God — Jesus is the Word of God,” and I looked around to see if anyone else had fallen on the floor in shock (they hadn’t), and I also felt overwhelmingly curious what everybody else might be thinking and if anyone there was interested in continuing that conversation. The next week at a church in a different city, the preacher there said, “we don’t need anybody to show us how to live, because we have the Bible.” This felt like whiplash and made me really sad. Those two preachers not only have different assumptions about scripture, but also about Jesus. This matters for formation; it’s going to be harder to figure out apprenticeship to Jesus in that second church. We don’t apprentice ourselves to a book, but to Jesus.
Those two Tennessee sermons helped me name the tensions in the presuppositions people bring to the biblical text. And now, I would say that how I engage the Bible feels completely different than in earlier stages. It’s way more beautiful, and I shouldn’t expect this to simple. (Why would we not expect our relationship to ancient scripture to be complicated?) I regularly meet with people who don’t feel permission to even admit (let alone ask) their important, valid questions about the Bible. I also regularly meet with people who have walked away from scripture and are just beginning to want to figure out how to read the Bible differently / again.
In this REstory series, we’ve been describing how for over 500 years, many churches in the West have been given the wrong story about God — a story that many people are wisely walking away from (remember the wisdom from Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs: “If you find yourself in the wrong story, leave.) We’ve also been gathering resources for unlearning the shrinkwrapped versions of God we’ve inherited and for relearning our way into older, broader, healthier ways to talk about the work of God in the world. But what should we do with the Bible?1
Anytime we learn our way into a different narrative about God, we will experience shifts in how we read scripture and what we expect from it. New perspectives can be disorienting, so it’s best to find a solid place to stand where we can see clearly what it is all about. I’ll give you a hint where I’m going — the resurrection is the hinge that the whole Jesus narrative turns on, and it is also resurrection that will give us healthier expectations for scripture as a whole. That’s the place I want to stand for reading the Bible well.
But I want to take a minute and say here that whenever the Bible has been used to enforce a small story about a God who requires blood sacrifice in order to forgive humans (and who would send them to hell for not believing just right), many people understandably want nothing to do with the Bible once they’ve walked away from that God. Every time they hear it read, it’s still intertwined with the harm they experienced. That is a really natural, common reaction, and compassion is the appropriate response — anytime an object has been used as an instrument of harm, it is appropriate to have feelings of wanting nothing to do with it. Many people need a period of distance from the Bible if they ever hope to re-read it with different, healthier lenses.
So approaching the Bible again requires compassion, and that process is pretty specific to each person’s story. Later, when that internal healing has begun, there is a wide range of recommendations and practices and resources (coming in the next few posts) about what to do with the Bible when someone has navigated the hard work of shifting their faith narratives.
Again, anytime we learn our way into a different narrative about God, we will experience shifts in how we read scripture and what we expect from it. This is totally normal, and this is the main point of this post:
How people use the Bible tells us almost everything we need to know about what they think God is like.2
Diagnosis: Plain Reading. So today I am offering a critique of the unhelpful hermeneutics I’ve witnessed. The word hermeneutics is often used interchangeably with interpretation. If you need to differentiate, you could say that hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. Regardless, one super important point is that everyone is doing interpretation.
No one is doing a “plain reading” of scripture — that doesn’t exist.
Many fields of study, even within the hard sciences that tend to prize empiricism, admit that “neutral objectivity” was a post-Enlightenment myth (that often privileged the people in power), and folks in those fields are realizing they need to always be doing the hard work of investigating implicit biases and arranging accountability measures.
That is why one friend of mine says that the most important page for interpreting your Bible is… (insert dramatic pause) …the inside flap of the front cover. What my friend is saying is that whatever assumptions I’m carrying with me (before I even open the Bible) will determine most of what I do when I read it, and that is true for each of us. Everyone has an interpretive strategy, inherited from other people, whether they admit it or not. And yet, I had a conversation recently with a college professor (and church elder) who was genuinely convinced that no one had taught him how to interpret the Bible, insisting repeatedly, “I just read it.”
People like that professor/elder have been taught to assume that in order to “take the Bible seriously” they need to “do what the Bible says,” which can be taken easily from the “plain reading” of the words on the page.3 This sometimes shows up in some form of a “desert island” hypothetical scenario. In light of conflicting interpretations, teachers might insist that “if everyone was on a desert island and would just read the Bible, we would all have the same interpretation.”4
Diagnosis: Proof-texting. For a lot of people, these inherited connections lie under the surface as unexamined assumptions (on the inside flap of your Bible). Even though this usually comes with “good intentions,” and maybe even a polite demeanor, it is dangerous. Whenever the “plain reading” on the page is given priority, it trains people for the bad habit of proof texting. Proof-texting is when readers isolate verses or passages out of the historical, cultural, and canonical context, which always causes the interpreter to impose their own context/experience.5
Plain reading and proof texting are not respectful or responsible use of ancient scripture. Not a single one of us today wants anything we say to be taken out of context, right? That would be rude, right? Universal, bias-free interpretation has never been possible. Our interpretation is always influenced by various factors that need to be thoughtfully examined. Jesus in Luke 10, in a conversation with a lawyer about finding instructions within scripture for “inheriting life of the ages,” asks the lawyer, “How do you read?”
It is Jesus who provocatively leads people out of small interpretations in Matthew 5, repeating in different scenarios of “you have heard it said… but I tell you…” He has already told them that he’s not abolishing the Torah and the Prophets but fulfilling them (completing them and filling them up). And we are mistaken if we think it was only that first century audiences needed to unlearn their earlier interpretations — every generation has assumptions and misinterpretations to unlearn!
Presuppositions, plain reading, and proof-texting scripture are a complex initial diagnosis. Next week we will use the metaphor of family medical history to talk about our inherited interpretation problems and start to point the way forward. But for now, with respect and compassion, Jesus offers to hold our unraveling, old expectations and promises to fill and overflow them.
My first Masters thesis was on hermeneutics, and you can find it here. You can watch a video of a podcast where I was interviewed about my research here.
If I translate that into academic language, I’d say that our hermeneutics says a lot about our theology. What people think the Bible is for says a whole lot about which God they worship.
Within the field of hermeneutics, this assumption that the meaning of a text can be found in a plain reading of the surface meaning of the text is called perspicuity.
In Christian Smith’s book The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, he demonstrates why unity around the plain reading of the text is elusive and has never been possible because of “pervasive interpretive pluralism” that has been present in every century.
Examples range from using Ephesians 5.19 to enforce non-instrumental music on others or singing Great is Thy Faithfulness with happy gusto without remembering its context from Lamentations 3 or quoting Jeremiah 29.11 as if it were written for my child graduating from high school or insisting that “husband of one wife” in 1 Timothy 3.2 means women, divorced, widowed, or single people can’t be elders without studying the complex context in Ephesus. When it comes to proof-texting, we’ve all done it, and my point is not to shame but awareness and accountability and an appetite for doing better :)