Reading the Bible

Perhaps the dramatic difference between religious humanism and more tradional religion is the approach to reading scripture. Among orthodox and fundamentalist practitioners, scripture is the literal and infallible “Word of God,” transmitted to the human community through prophets or other human intermediaries either face to face or through some vague notion of “the Holy Spirit.” The technical issues notwithstanding—does God have a mouth to speak? What’s a Holy Spirit?—this approach completely discounts the human encounter and the human experience. In this view, humans are empty vessels, dolts, sitting around waiting for the divine initiative. Human creativity is eliminated.

Even in more liberal religious circles, where commitment to the divine authorship of the text is of less consequence, the homiletic method remains, it seems, the most popular approach to biblical analysis. In adult learning venues and Bible discussions, the most persistent goal is to make the text relevant; to encourage and enable students to draw meaning from the text in a manner that has a direct impact on how they understand themselves personally and as part of a religious community.

The perspective here, as in the more traditional settings, is the basic integrity of the text. That is, the text is taken more or less at face value, as presented, almost as though it were handed directly from the hands of the divine to our generation in its current form. Paradoxically, in these venues one will hear the oft-repeated expression, “well, in those days, they thought/saw/perceived/lived thus and so,” with no real effort to understand which of “those days” we are actually confronting, or what actually transpired “in those days.”

There is a certain narcissism even in this less fundamentalist approach. While it purports to allow the text to come alive for us, it does not allow the text to live for itself. Indeed, it tends to deprive the text of any life of its own. The Bible is, in truth, the literary expression of ancient Israel’s and the early Christian community’s struggles to understand their own national and communal identities and how that identity is bound to its relationship to the rest of humanity and to God. This search for identity and meaning took place over a period of hundreds of years, under varying historical, political, sociological and religious conditions. The compositions that make up the Bible were written for the purpose of addressing these concerns for a contemporary audience. They represent the life-blood of a living, breathing, organic religious community. To ignore the historical, political, sociological and religious background, therefore, not only results in a misreading of the text, but it also deprives the original community its ontological status. That is, the traditional theocentric understanding of Bible in effect denies the ancient community its power to generate its own theology, law, historiography and literature. God is the source of these creations; not the community.

Like our ancient ancestors, we struggle to define our relationship to God, to the world and to the religious community. We experience our relationship with God not as an historical event, but as a moment of choice and reflection in our own lives; a moment perhaps of the fear and dread of direct encounter with the divine, but also a moment of spiritual clarity and determination. We seek nearness to God through prayer, for instance, not because there was a Tabernacle in the wilderness, but because, like our ancient ancestors, we understand that the human encounter with the divine cannot be sustained as a stand-alone experience. It needs form and structure that can be carried over from one peak moment to the next and as a method for carrying the divine-human encounter into our daily pattern of living.

Our ancient ancestors were not simply passive recipients of divinely authored law and literature, history and religious poetry. Rather, in their effort to come to terms with the nature of religious peoplehood and its relationship to God, they created all of these things, changing them, adapting them, rewriting and reinventing them as an ongoing project of self-realization. Each stage of this development took place in response to a set of intellectual, historical, sociological and theological developments and can only be truly understood and appreciated within that context. When we grapple with the text from this perspective and allow ourselves to be challenged in this way, we can truly experience the Bible’s contribution and what it means to be a part of this ancient/modern enterprise.