One night during my first year of seminary my classmate and housemate, Keith, came into my room looking haggard, carrying a big thick commentary on some book of the Bible and announced: “Had God known what we were going to do with the Bible, he never would have given it to us.” I remember this night fondly because it was such an incredibly funny and yet ironically cogent observation. As is the case with some other good things that God has given us, we who are a part of the Judeo/Christian tradition have come up with a myriad of ways to misuse the Bible.
We have ignored matters of context and used pieces of Scripture as a religious weapon to beat people into submission or as a justification for bad behavior. We have tried to make it into a modern science or history book or criticized it because of it’s failure to be either one of those things. We have assumed this collection of many books written over thousands of years is one book and then either derided it for inconsistency or tried to explain away its apparent contradictions. We have done things with it that are probably not within the Divine intention for it, and as a result when reading it we often find ourselves missing the beauty of the forest while we are lost in the examination of the bark on specific trees.
So what are we to do with this ancient collection of religious texts? Just what is it? What assumptions should we make about it and how should we read it? Why should we bother with it at all? These are all what we call hermeneutical questions. They are among the questions that help us to define the lenses through which we will read the Bible. Whenever we read any book we come to it with a set of expectations that order how we read it, and the hermeneutic we apply to reading the Bible will say a great deal about what we bring to it and, more importantly, what we take from it.
For me the foundational answer to this hermeneutical question is to start with the assumption that the Bible is the word of God. However, I don’t mean by this that God dictated every word and people wrote it down word for word as he spoke. I mean that we hear God’s voice in it because it is the report of his interaction with his creation. So when I sit down to read the Bible, I assume that, first and foremost, it is going to tell me something about God: about who God is and what God has done. And second, I assume it is going to tell me something about the people who have related to God: about who they are, how they have prayed to God and how they have been both challenged and changed by God. In other words, when I read the Bible I don’t expect to find an answer to all of life’s questions, I go looking for direction in who God is and how I can relate to God.
In worship we periodically sing a hymn that gives us some direction in this matter of Biblical hermeneutics. It’s called “Ancient Words” and its chorus is especially instructive:
Ancient words, ever true, changing me, changing you.
We have come with open hearts;
O let the ancient words impart.
The words of the Bible are well tested and have shown a kind of resilience that not all human literature can claim. They speak with an unmistakable veracity that grabs and holds our attention. We see ourselves in these words. They tell us something about God and about ourselves as God’s creation. In these words we hear something that we want to preserve and pass on because they challenge us and change us. They are old words that remain relevant even in new times.
For the next six weeks our sermons will be about listening to this old message in a new time. We’ll look at some of the oldest stories in the Bible in the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis, and explore their applicability to our day and time. These stories are some of the biggest targets of those who want denigrate the Bible and at the same time some of the texts most abused by those who claim to order their lives by the Bible. But what can be heard above the din of this atheistic and religious rancor is the crystal clear song of love that God has been singing to his creation since the dawn of time.
David Rohrer
04/17/2020