Book Review 1: Seized by Truth

Time to move on with my book reading. Over the next few weeks (mostly on weekends), I want to run through Joel Green's new book, Seized by Truth: Reading the Bible as Scripture. I am very sympathetic to the thrust of Green's thoughts in these books. I've been surfing the same waves he is, although we land in slightly different places on the shore.

This weekend I want to look at his first chapter: "Reading the Bible, Reading Scripture." The basic thesis of this chapter is one that I myself have made a number of times: "Reading the Bible is not necessarily the same thing as reading Scripture" (3). Green mentions the dryness that can accompany the methodical pursuit of the original meaning. He concludes, "The best methods rightly used guarantee neither a Christian interpretation of the Bible nor a reading of the Bible as Christian Scripture" (10). He goes on: "Paradoxically, they might even get in the way of a Christian interpretation of the Bible or a reading of the Bible as Scripture."

By the way, does he have Asbury's famous English Bible Method of Jack Traina and David Bauer fame or Ben Witherington in the back of his mind when he says, "Others have embraced scientific methods, urging that we can and ought to derive "what it means" from "what it meant"--and indeed, that the only way to know " what it means" is by first establishing "what it meant"--leading to a hermeneutical motto like this one: observation leads to interpretation, and interpretation to application" (17)?

Green goes into the obstacles that stand in the way of biblical understanding: the fact that we have to read one word at a time and can't get the whole picture simultaneously, the fact that language is selective in what it tells and so leaves gaps, the ambiguity of language, the fact that language is culturally embedded. I've mentioned some of these in the first chapter of my Who Decides What the Bible Means?, which will be available on Amazon in about a month.

You'll hear echoes of Keith Drury in Green's mention of biblical studies' tendency to dissect the biblical text like a frog. Scientific methods of biblical interpretation treat the Bible as an object (which I think it inevitably is, see an argument I made once upon a time). Nevertheless, the result is, as Green claims, to divide the text from us, its world from ours.

Green's answer is to lead us from this conceptualization of modernity into a more postmodern conception (see here for my own description of the progression from pre to post-modernity in biblical hermeneutics). He wishes to deny the chasm between the text and us.

In the final section of the chapter, Green dives into one of his more recent interests, namely, cognitive science and how it affects our memory and knowing. He talks about how believing is seeing in the sense that our presuppositions shape what we see in the world. His goal is to reform the way our brains believe so that we will read the Bible as Scripture rather than as object.

The chapters that follow will make what he means by this a lot clearer. I think many of you will find it very attractive, even if I'm not sure if I can go there completely myself.