One of the biggest problems I think I come across in Christian education is what I think of as a flat reading of scripture. By this I have in mind treating the whole bible as some kind of text-book: all one kind of writing, pretty much all of it giving propositional truths. Even bits that are obviously poetic and literary are treated as if the poetic form is merely a more aesthetic delivery system for what are really, at base, propositional statements. Related to that is the way that the differences of time, human writing and collecting and the history of receiving a text is banished to a far horizon (I think this is touched on at p.115: "literalism is generally tied to believing that truth is reduced to actuality, factuality, and historicity, whether or not the human or the divine author intended any such thing [p.115]"). This mind set is deeply uncomfortable with different parts of scripture apparently saying contradictory things because 'contradiction' means falsity in some part. Though of course if your definition of falsity is in large part leaning on a limited idea of 'propositionally true', then, yes; you are in trouble. Of course, a lot of this could be stood-aside from by simply being less prompt in equating "God's word written" with a kind of uniform concept of propositional truth. To turn the matter around: if scripture is in some way 'God-breathed' (I'm happy to start there, as is Dr Jersak), then what kind of way does it speak to us in the different 'notes' it is breathed through? As in music, cannot the dissonances also speak? If God speaks in Scripture, what do the differences and divergences tell us? -It's not good, in the end, pretending they're not there.
So a related question about how the early Church read scripture starts to bob up to the surface. They didn't have what we now call the New Testament, only that pesky hard-to-understand Old one. Can their readings of those writings help us to do a better job of reading scripture to tune into God?
I'll confess that for me the Anglican liturgical practice (retained from its pre-reformation form) where we stand for the Gospel (and indeed face the gospel book and its reader) has helped me in this. Symbolically, to me at least, it says, "Christ is the centre -the rest is commentary". The Word (who was at the beginning) is the heart of the word of God written, the rest is commentary and context enlivened by the Spirit of the Word. (interestingly echoed on p.97: "... the “divine liturgy” of the church is a medium that functions to frame the Scriptures within the canon of faith—the message of the gospel—showing how they work together within the drama of redemption that inexorably points to Christ crucified and risen")
My hope was that this book might help me to think this through more, perhaps give me a resource to pass on to people I converse with about such things from time to time and /or perhaps deepen or re-found my line on the matter.
While above I mentioned as the way I think of a certain approach to reading scripture -'flat'- is the word used in this book too -in a fairly similar way. I think this word is going around in discussions about how we receive scripture and I've clearly picked it up too.
The idea of Christ being the centre and re-establishing in our thinking and attitudes that the Word is primarily, first and foremostly, Jesus is also robustly expounded here. One of my other favourite terms comes in here too: seeing the scriptures as witnesses to the Word. And from there he quickly gets into noting the hard questions prompted by the dissonance between the Abba of Jesus and some of the frankly genocidal commands in, say, Deuteronomy. And in relation to this issue, I found myself very much resonating with this:
I would not opt for the functional Marcionism of inerrantists who ignored the “toxic texts” or pretended they don’t exist. Nor could I follow the biblicists —literalists who were willing to throw the character of God under the bus, painting him as a monster and calling it “good” without blinking. Nor could I follow many progressives who had seen the problem but left the Bible behind altogether—and with the Bible, sometimes Jesus too! (p.45)
I like the way that the author keeps the Emmaus Road encounter as a paradigm case. Though I must admit that his putting the prodigal son story as a master text by which to interpret and weigh all others much surely have vied for the headline label, but I guess that "the Emmaus way" is probably more disclosive in that role than, say, "the prodigal way".
I was a little shocked that the fundamentalist /literalist way of reading scripture was labelled a heresy -a modernist heresy, but I must admit that I have gone a long way down the road already to thinking that there is something in that label. I found the characterisation of this in this sentence, very arresting: " seeing Christ thrown under the bus again and again through an agenda-laden, simplistic misuse of our sacred text..."
So, I think that I found that overall, the book was confirming me in where I'd come to, and that I would want to have this book to hand to commend or pass onto people I talk with about scripture and spirituality and Christian formation. I read with a sense of recognition of both the problems being identified and of the ways forward trough the network of issues raised. It is good to have a winsome book which goes through things systematically, with clarity and in a way that shows clearly that this a a 'faith seeking understanding' issue not one to be mistakenly characterised as 'disobedience', unbelief or deception.
It's quite a fat book -over 280 pages- but not a hard read at all; it covers a lot of ground in a winsome way with occasional turns of phrase that help to attract and hold the imagination. It doesn't labour points but feels to give enough information and argument to outline the main points and there are useful further reading and resources signalled along the way where the reader can follow-up things that become of particular interest.
The first parts of the book look at how the bible gets misused and misinterpreted and in what ways flat readings are inadequate and downright unhelpful, while making a case for a biblical strategy for reading scripture chistotelically. The second parts of the book cash out the theory. I was particularly taken by the chapters on rhetoric and diatribe -so far I'd only seem them in fairly scholarly books, it's good to see an author widening the audience and appreciation of these ways in which scripture is full of texture which is easily missed. The second moiety of the book moves more into the nature of God in relation to scriptural language. The key thought to emerge is that God is love and that we need to be wary of language about God, especially 'wrath'. We are also treated to some of the writings of the early Church supporting this. The main point, though, seems to be that by flattening out the scriptures, there's no way to put characteristics asserted of God into order and so a mean-spirited wrath is put on a par with love.
One of the things I gained from reading this book which I didn't expect was the challenge to read more of early church writers like, well more specifically, Origen and Melito of Sardis (being introduced to an online version of his On Pascha seem like a good place to start). I noted too that there's a really helpful 'further reading' section.
Lines I liked
The Word of God is inspired, inerrant, and infallible. And when he was about eighteen years old, he grew a beard (p.29)
if there is a God (forever a faith statement), that God is Love. And God is Love only, for every other attribute of God must ever only be a facet of that one pure diamond lp.56]
I invite you to make an honest inquiry of how the so-called “toxic texts” function as a mirror that reveals the human condition and our habit of projecting our own un-Christlike images onto God, especially in the form of religious violence. [p.58]
seeing Christ thrown under the bus again and again through an agenda-laden, simplistic misuse of our sacred texts... [p.114]
... whatever unrecorded words Jesus relayed on the road to Emmaus, they did not fit into the historical-grammatical-literal approach (i.e., literalism) of my education. Frankly, I felt ripped off [p.129]
Imagine Jesus saying, in all humility, “I hate to make this all about me...BUT, yeah, it really is.” [p.142]
Thoughts I found helpful
An Emmaus reading of their accounts sees these agendas. When the authors rationalize bloodshed, we ask, “How do they prefigure the Sanhedrin’s rationale for Jesus’s crucifixion?” And when they problematize violence, we ask, “How do their critiques anticipate Christ’s denunciation of violence?” As I read any given text through Christ, I need to con-sider whether the author’s perspective reveals a veil that Christ has since removed or an unveiling that foreshadows his revelation of God [p.84]
Imagine that the whole Bible is simply an incredibly long version of the parable of the prodigals. And conversely, imagine that the parable is Jesus’s ingeniously brief summary of the whole Bible, distilled into short-story format. We can do this because both offer us the same gospel narrative...one in an expansive library and the other in a tight paragraph. So, here’s what we can do: turn the parable into an imaginary walk-in closet organizer for every section, every book, and every chapter of the Bible. [p.97]
The traumatic training offered in the Bible’s R-rated material should not be read as the threats of a violent deity but as the loving (and dramatically memorable) warnings of a good Father in good faith. The people of God made countless missteps that become vivid moral lessons for avoiding landmines. God wastes nothing... because of Jesus’s instructions on loving, forgiving, blessing, and praying for our enemies, and his explicit rejection of retaliation, vengeance, and violence, we must never use a text where the Philistines are slaughtered to call for the slaughter of “infidels.” Rather, we might see how they foreshadow Christ’s victory over the nonhuman enemies of satan, sin, and death, and our personal battles with the spirit of pride, malice, and other un-Christlike attitudes within ourselves.[p.133] (Personal note: this has been the only way I have been able to appropriate these texts)
I will say this to all Christians, Jewish or Gentile: we have no business in the Jewish sacred writings without reference to our Rabbi and his Emmaus Way of reading them. And that way of reading always points to and prostrates before him... Christotelic reading [p.141]
So, as we read Old Testament narrative, we are invited to watch and see:
•When the people of God experience suffering, Christ suffers with them.
•When God’s people cause suffering, Christ suffers in their victims.
•When the people of God achieve victory, Christ is the victor.
•When God delivers his people, Christ is the deliverer.
•When the people go into exile, Christ goes with them.
•When the people of God are led out of exile, Christ leads them.
•When the priest offered a sacrifice, Christ was the priest.
•When the lamb was sacrificed, Christ was the lamb.
•When God appeared, that was Christ. [p.158]
... new consensus has been emerging around what we are calling a “Christ-centered hermeneutic.” This term describes what we have been discussing throughout this book: that we must read the whole Bible through the lens of Jesus. Christ is the chief cornerstone—the Canon par excellence—so that all Scripture is received as authoritative only after passing through the life, teachings, and gospel of Jesus [p.196]
Rather, the best theologians are those who analyze and describe what the praying and worshipping community has come to believe through its corporate experience of the reality of the triune God. In other words, worship precedes theology, often by several decades. As we experience the presence of God in prayer and worship, we begin to compose liturgies and songs that express what we have come tosee. Eventually, theologians become observant and follow suit. Teachers may begin to confirm the implications of what the congregation has already been singing and praying (which is to say, believing) over the past decades. Ironically, the first generation of these teachers are often regarded as heretical, sometimes even by the very congregants who spawned theoriginal revelation. Why? It may be that the congregation is still under the spell of previous teachers whom they regard as their authoritative prescribers of the truth. [p.197]
The voices of sacrificial religion that permeate the story of Scripture are at least threefold in tone and content. Sacrificial religion speaks to readers as “the voice of the accuser,” “the voice of the victim,” and “the voice of the law.” Each voice makes particular claims and demands ..a fourth voice emerges in the biblical text, corresponding to the revelation of sacrificial love. I call it “the voice of the Lamb.” The voice of the Lamb—the voice enfleshed in Christ as self-giving love—proclaims the way of the cross vis-à-vis the worldly religious way of the sword. [p.204-5]
...biblicism regularly fails to delineate between the omniscient Author and the limited or unreliable narrator. However, there are many examples in literature where we are required to do just that. For instance, in Don Quixote, Cervantes constructs an epic tale of a very strange protagonist—but he also writes the tale through multiple genres, stories within stories, and a famously unreliable narrator. That is, the true author (Cervantes) knows exactly what he is doing, but he tells the story through a narrator who does not. Thus, the author is not truly the narrator. Narrators are actually extensions of the character they’re describing or evenan independent character who speaks from a particular perspective. [p.218]
Quotes I want to put 'out there'
the first Christians would not have asked whether the Bible was authoritative. Instead, they would have said that Jesus was their authority, and then they would have asked, “Which books testify to this?” Those that did were chosen for inclusion in their written canon, [p.76]
I confess to finding the pastoral and evangelistic damage literalism causes upsetting. The edge comes from seeing Christ thrown under the bus again and again through an agenda-laden, simplistic misuse of our sacred texts...with the ironic claim that this constitutes faithfulness. [p.114]
literalism is generally tied to believing that truth is reduced to actuality, factuality, and historicity, whether or not the human or the divine author intended any such thing [p.115]
Modernist literalism... constantly stumbles into thinking that if a text (such as Genesis 2, Job, or Jonah) is not accepted as factual history, then it isn’t true. But consider this: is the parable of the prodigal son not profoundly true? Is Christ’s story of the good Samaritan not supremely true? [p.123]
... the redactors who gathered the Hebrew canon consciously incorporated texts that challenge and subvert other texts across the Scriptures... without imagining that this might undermine or threaten the authority of their Bible. The narrative is allowed to stand as is, confirming the integrity and genius of the story of God and God’s people.[p.201]
I used to flip right to the “good stuff” in Job until I started seeing how “good” the foolish counsel seemed to me. Some of it appears to make good sense. Exactly! The important function of the friends’ speeches is to shine a light on our own idiocy. The friends’ speeches are an inspired revelation of our own error, not a divine thumbs-up to their error. [p.207]
Side note: Paul commissioned the female deacon Phoebe to deliver (preach!) his sermon to the Romans in person. He would have prepared her to communicate the tones such that his first audience picked up on the diatribe [p.245]
The emotional pairing of the terror of judgment offset by the relief of escape is effective(ish). But if our message focuses on fear that makes God the cause or agent of fear, we’ll either run from God or turn to him but have no desire to draw near to him. Spiritual Stockholm Syndrome
True justice for the prophets is the beautiful restoration of the shalomic state by means of mercy—defined as every manifestation of divine goodness. In that case, justice and mercy kiss [p.269]
Provocative or intriguing quotes
Origen included within his literal sense the need to discern and distinguish (1) actual history from (2) fictitious history (when we can) composed by the Spirit to communicate more-than-literal truth. In either case, the message the story conveys is true [p.130]
If we don’t see that Christ is the point, then the whole Bible remains Old Testament, but if we do, then the whole Bible becomes New Testament [p.218]
Link-Love for Review
A More Christlike Word on Amazon
A More Christlike Word website
Bradley Jersak’s website
#AMoreChristlikeWord
