5 The Ideal Christian Reader

The natural tendency would be to run through this litany of examples and philosophy and then leave like the person of James who after looking at his or her face in the mirror, goes away only to forget what they look like. So as we now ask who the ideal Christian reader is, it is important that we take with us the conclusions of our quest thus far.

1. First, all readers of the Bible are, to one extent or another, unreflective readers. By this we mean that all of us read the biblical text to some extent or another without realizing that the text might possibly mean something other than the options we have considered. More specifically, all of us, to one extent or another, read the biblical text out of context. This is true of everyone from the best scholar of all time to the worst biblical interpreter in the world.

But some readers of the Bible are less aware of what context is than others, and we would call a reading of Scripture that is programmed paradigmatically to read the text out of context a "pre-modern" approach to the biblical text. In many respects, such pre-modern readings aren't as far off as your typical seminary professor might lead you to believe, especially if you read the text unreflectively as an orthodox Christian. A Wesleyan reading the Bible in a pre-modern way is far to be preferred from a faithless atheist trying to read the Bible in its original context with no allowance for miracles or the literal existence of God.

Yet the words of the Bible can come to mean anything with the pre-modern approach, so it is the basis for cults and all kinds of false teaching. Ulimately, text can come to mean anything the individual wants the text to mean, and their voice subtly becomes the voice of God, which is extremely dangerous.

On the other side of the coin is what I call the principle of reform. We in this room are Protestants, and while Luther's reforms were not perfect and in some respects went to an opposite extreme in their relative separation and isolation of Scripture from the church, the idea of the original meaning of Scripture holds within it a catalyst for reform. The process of identifying beliefs we might have as Christians today that were not on the map of the earliest Christians is a wonderful tool for ecclesiological self-examination.

So for Luther, the concepts of puratory and celibacy of the clergy were ideas clearly not based in Scripture. The Roman Catholic Church might have read them into Scripture in a non-reflective way, but they are not aspects of the original meaning. These moments of reflectivity lead to the Protestant Reformation. So if we do not accept the principle of reform on the basis of the church's foundations, closely related to the original meaning of Scripture, then we should all become Roman Catholic.

On the other hand, simply because we identify a point of development doesn't mean that we must abandon it. This is the point where I believe Luther and Protestantism has got it wrong. For example, I do not believe the early church had anything like ordination as we now practice it. Nor did they practice communion the way we do nor did they have a developed understanding of the Trinity or the dual nature of Christ that we do. We need not abandon church buildings as the house church movement does, simply because that's the way most of the early church did it. It is not development of doctrine and practice after New Testament times that we should reject, but inappropriate development of doctrine and practice. The original meaning is the most appropriate catalyst for such reflection on development, and we should have some pin heads like me around to ask inane original meaning questions.

The ideal Christian reader will know everything that can be known about the original meaning of the text. Such a reader does not exist of course, but we should have as a part of the body of Christ scholars who devote their energies to reading the Bible in context.

2. At the same time, the quest for the original meaning is not strictly the church's quest to hear God's Word in the words either. Again, let's remember what we saw in the mirror. The original meaning of the biblical text is often uncertain and requires a technical expertise in original languages and in ancient history and literature that few in the church are competent to conduct. There are many plausible reconstructions of the original meaning of the biblical text that are at best pre-Christian and many plausible reconstructions--in terms of the evidence--that may actually conflict with things we believe as Christians.

And let me mention at this point that the Wesleyan Church has intrinsically voted against the original meaning as the appropriate path to Scripture. If we thought the original meaning were the path to God's Word, then we would require Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic of anyone who had the capacity to learn it. We would go and sell all we had to learn ancient Canaanite and Mediterranean culture so that we could read the words in their original historical and literary context. We would get our hands on every commentary we could, whether it be written by Christian or atheist, and be open to many concepts we traditionally are not, because we don't want to take any chance of missing the true original meaning of the text. We would rather be heretics or liberal than let traditional Christian interpretations trump the original meaning.

But this is not the way we read Scripture. Indeed, it is not the way evangelical Bible scholars read Scripture, though they might deny it vehemently. When I used Hays and Duvall's evangelical inductive Bible study textbook this Spring, I had to smile at a category they called "presuppositions" for biblical interpretation. It amounted to a set of rules for how a Christian is allowed to read the text. It intrinsically deconstructs the evangelical claim to hear God's Word strictly in the original meaning of the Bible, for it sets non-biblical parameters for what we can and cannot let the text mean.

In the postmodern age, I am arguing that it is and has always been appropriate to read the biblical texts with Christian glasses on, whether what we are seeing turns out to be the original meaning or not. When the early church was debating over the Trinity, the anti-trinitarian Arius himself argued from Scripture that Christ was in fact the first of God's creations before time. He used texts like Colossians 1:15 to argue his case--"he is the firstborn of all creation." Indeed, the church largely abandoned the use of logos language such as we find in John 1:1--"In the beginning was the logos... and the logos was God"--because the background concept of the logos saw it as the first of God's creations.

In short, to defend the idea of the Trinity, the biblical language alone was insufficient to fend off heresy. The Nicene creed uses quasi-philosophical language to present we all as Christians believe: "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made..." Each one of these phrases is pointed at one or another controversy in the early church. And all of them require us to read the biblical text well beyond its original meaning. The quest for the original meaning will not guarantee us the Christian meaning that for which we turn to these texts.

The conclusion will follow later today: reading the Bible as the church, under the rule of faith and the law of love, and with the Spirit.