At this Wednesday night’s Ecclesia National Gathering plenary session, Mandy Smith used a great metaphor that captures what irks me about the attitude toward Bible study I have seen at times in conservative evangelicalism. She was preaching from Hebrews 4:12-13, which says, “Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.” The Bible is supposed to be a sword that pierces our heart and does spiritual “surgery” on us so that we can be sanctified in our personal lives of discipleship. But we don’t let it do this to us when we have turned the truths of the Bible into our personal ideological display-case like a collection of dead, preserved bugs, each conquered and stabbed with a needle for a middle-school science project.
As long as we are categorizing Biblical truths like bugs into our all-encompassing system of explaining everything, then the Bible is only provisionally authoritative for the sake of our own authority. Instead of the Holy Spirit, we are the ones holding the sharp, two-edged sword in order to pierce other peoples’ souls and spirits and to keep it away from our own. A truth that is perfectly clear and systematized is not a “living and active” word. Things become perfectly clear and stationary when they’re dead; when we’ve conquered them.
Former poet laureate Billy Collins’ Introduction to Poetry expresses the attitude with which many evangelical Christians approach Biblical interpretation:
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slideor press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Calling the Bible a poem, or even worse a mystery, is offensive to many evangelicals because what they hear is an attempt to wriggle your way out of obedience to God. But there’s an underside to this concern as well. Poetry is a much more frightening master than prose, because poetry cannot be mastered. Submitting to poetry is an art rather than a science, which makes it a lot harder to guarantee an A+ for yourself. It’s like the difference between grading an English term paper and a calculus exam. I knew in college that if I learned all the formulas in calculus and executed them correctly on my final exam, I would get a 100. Even though I ended up leaving the engineering school to be an English major, there was nothing more irritating than the English professor who gave me a B+ because my paper was technically correct, but fell short of being “inspired.”
If God speaks only in prose, i.e. grammatical-historical “fact,” then you can be a conquistador of God’s word. There’s a clearly quantifiable measure of the knowledge that you gain which is directly proportional to your power and prestige in the Christian community as a Bible teacher. Learning the Bible gives you authority, which is why you are invested in the Bible’s authority. You become an expert theological swordsman. But if God speaks in poetry, then some illiterate indigenous woman from Guatemala can “get” a Bible passage better than you do even if she hasn’t been a Christian for nearly as long as you have and she’s never heard of Karl Barth. The sovereignty of prose is transferable to the interpreter; poetry retains its sovereignty over the interpreter precisely insofar as it remains mysterious and refuses to submit to grammar or history.
I think the greatest crisis in evangelical Biblical interpretation today is not that evangelicals have stopped respecting the Bible’s authority; it’s that evangelicals have turned the Bible into a set of “truths” to be stabbed with a needle and put into a display case like dead bees and dragonflies and beetles. Ideology has replaced discipleship in an era when “holiness” is measured by your willingness to be politically incorrect and stand with the brave souls who refuse to bake cakes for people whose marriages they don’t approve. Christians today “stand up for the Bible” by spending hours arguing vociferously in facebook comment threads instead of seeing the Bible as the means by which God sculpts them to cultivate the spiritual fruits Paul described in Galatians 5:22-23.
What if we allowed ourselves to be the ones who get stabbed, judged, and healed by God’s living and active word instead of turning the Bible into dead, static truths that we stab and display like a bunch of dead bugs?
