5 Ideal Christian Reader 2

So how would the ideal Christian reader read the words of the Bible in addition to the knowledge of the original meaning options that we have already suggested? A second aspect of such a reader, and one very amenable to our Wesleyan tradition, is that the ideal Christian reader will be as full of the Holy Spirit as humanly possible as he or she reads the text. Certainly when God is defining the words for you, you will hear God's Word in the words.

The Bible itself implies that such Spirit readings may or may not be in continuity with the original meaning of the text. The easy example that I often use is Matthew 2:15's use of Hosea 11:1. Hosea 11:1 in its original meaning clearly is talking about Israel and its exodus from Egypt, "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. But the more I called them, the more they went from me; they sacrificed to the Baals and offered incense to idols."

But Matthew sees a portion of Hosea 11:1 fulfilled in Jesus' exit from Egypt over 700 years after Hosea. Clearly the spiritual meaning Matthew found in these words is quite removed from anything Hosea intended. In this one example alone we have the deconstruction of the modernist evangelical paradigm. When we place the locus of biblical authority in the original meaning, the original meaning tells us that the original meaning is not necessarily the locus of biblical authority.

However, we have already mentioned the danger of looking for the Spirit apart from context and original meaning. Who is to say that you are really hearing the Spirit? It is an easy excuse to fall back into the pre-modern paradigm. So we need something more, the weak link in the Protestantism paradigm, namely, the church.

If the Spirit of Christ inhabits the body of Christ, then it is when we are most in communion with the church, made up of the saints of the ages, that we are most likely to hear the Spirit. In other words, the ideal Christian reader will read the Bible through the eyes of the church, in communion with the saints of the ages.

What does this mean in practical terms? The early fathers referred to something they called the "rule of faith" of Scripture. Augustine suggests that it comes "from the plainer passages of Scripture and from the authority of the church" (De Doctrina 2.2). When a Christian is confronted with "unclear" passages, you use either the context or this rule of faith to steer you toward the correct interpretation.

You might recognize Augustine's teaching here as nothing other than Kuhn's model for how paradigms work. The church of Augustine's day had established certain interpretations of key texts as the controlling texts. For example, Augustine mentions in On Doctrine that Scripture enjoins nothing but love (2.10). So any passage that might seem to contradict the love principle must be read differently or figuratively. In other words, if a literal meaning did not seem to fit with the rule of faith, Augustine downshifted into metaphor or allegory.

Of course Augustine was a pre-modern reader. But as postmodern evangelicals, we can follow his basic principles with our eyes open to context. There are certain rules to what a Christian can believe and do. We find these in the creeds and universal traditions of the church. It is possible to read the words of the Bible in ways that contradict these, and we would find plausible arguments from original meaning scholars in their favor.

But these are not the Christian ways of reading these texts. You could easily argue that Genesis 1:1-2 were not originally about ex nihilo creation, but this is not the Christian way of talking about this text. You could easily argue that New Testament texts calling Jesus Son of God are about his cosmic royalty rather than his ontological divinity. But this is not the Christian way of talking about these texts. For Christians, the words of these texts should cue discussions about certain beliefs all Christians hold in common, the consensus ecclesiae, the "consensus of the church."

This is the rule of faith in belief and the law of love in practice. Any reading of the words of Scripture that does not eventually cue the common beliefs of Christendom or the practice of love is not a properly Christian reading of the words.