Notes Along the Way -- Bible

1 The Memory Verse Approach to the Bible
1. I grew up with what you might call a "pre-modern" view of the Bible. A better way to describe it might be an unreflective view of the Bible. I knew almost nothing about the historical or literary context of the words. I interpreted the words of each verse with the dictionary my church had given me and of course the English language as I knew it.

I used the King James Version (KJV), which listed each verse individually. This layout of the words is very significant. It programmed me to see each individual verse as a self-contained truth or proposition. It intrinsically pushed me away from reading each verse in the light of the verses that came before and after it. 

I remember one of my brothers-in-law -- who was also my childhood pastor for several years -- sharing his brief experience with the New King James Version (NKJV). He eventually went back to the KJV because he didn't like the way that it formatted the verses in paragraphs. I remember marveling at how clearly this reaction reflected his biblical paradigm -- and the paradigm of my childhood. We read the Bible to hear individual truth claims from individual verses more than to hear a message in a continuous literary context.

I should be clear. It is not that my brother-in-law or others completely ignored literary context, which refers to the words that come before and after a text. I merely mean that our primary orientation in reading was on the level of the individual verse. I call this a "memory verse approach" to reading the Bible. The meaning of the Bible is heavily atomized into short truths or axioms that can be quoted.

Individual verses can of course be quoted in context too. But perhaps more often, they can be made to mirror what we unconsciously anticipate they should say. Words are very flexible things. A verse ripped from its context can be made to say many more things than a verse in the flow of a paragraph. You might argue that the meaning of a verse is most ambiguous when it is isolated in this way. This is why I have come to say that the Bible is best applied as a whole rather than as individual verses.

By a "pre-modern" reading of Scripture, I mean one that largely is not context-oriented. Stereotypically, it may not be context-aware. It is typically "unreflective" about its own biases and the influences on why it interprets the text in the way it does. It reads the words in light of the "dictionary" in one's head without much awareness or interest in how an original author or audience might have meant or understood the words. 

Please don't take this as a condescending or judgmental remark. I am simply trying to analyze the ways in which a person might read the Bible -- called one's hermeneutic.

2. I want to illustrate this way of reading the Bible with the way Matthew typically uses the Old Testament. Jesus and his family go down to Egypt to escape Herod. Then they come back out of Egypt and return to Israel. Matthew hears an echo of Hosea 11:1, and he says this event "fulfilled what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet saying, 'Out of Egypt I called my son'" (Matt. 2:15).

I will share later how troubling I found this quote at one point. As it turns out, Hosea 11:1 is not a prediction about the Messiah at all but a reference to the exodus. Hosea was referring to how, hundreds of years earlier, God had brought his son Israel out of Egypt. But Israel had been faithless to him and gone after other gods. The verse is not a prediction -- and Jesus certainly didn't go after other gods.

Matthew probably did intend overtones of the exodus, but it seems clear that Matthew read the Old Testament not unlike my childhood reading of the Bible. He doesn't even focus on a whole verse but on a part of a verse that jumped out at him. After all, the whole verse in Hosea says, "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son."

Two conclusions. First, I grew up with a way of reading the Bible -- a hermeneutic -- that felt free to isolate verses and even snippets of verses from their contexts and to hear them as individual truths or even to apply them to my personal situation. Second, this way of reading the Bible was actually modeled by Scripture itself at various points. That's why we can't be too judgmental about this approach -- it is modeled by the Bible itself.

3. I find a childhood example of this approach to reading Scripture very revealing. In 1971, my family was trying to decide if it was God's will for us to move to Florida. Not only did we pray, but we searched the Scriptures as well. Now, upon a little reflection, it should be clear that there are no verses in the Bible that directly tell the Schenck family whether they should move to Florida. But this is not the way we were programmed to read the Bible.

We were programmed to expect the Holy Spirit to make words jump out at us. The Bible was a living word on a personal level. So when one of my sisters was reading Judges 1 that week, verse 15 in the KJV jumped out at her: "thou hast given me a south land." She felt like the Holy Spirit was confirming to her that it was God's will for us to move to Florida.

Let me emphasize that this was a normal way for the church of my childhood to read Scripture. If you had asked my sister whether that was what the book of Judges had originally meant, I think she would have initially found the question disorienting. "What do you mean?" she might have responded. After some explanation, I suspect she might have easily agreed, "Well no, but the Holy Spirit spoke to me through the words directly about my life."

So, this unreflective or pre-modern way of reading Scripture 1) atomizes the biblical text, 2) sometimes hears general or universal truths in individual verses, 3) in some church traditions, can hear a direct, individualized, contemporary word from God in the words that is quite distinct from the original meaning, and 4) is modeled at times by the hermeneutic we find within Scripture itself.

4. It was really at college that I was exposed to the contextual interpretation of the Bible in a more thoroughgoing way. I'll call this contextual approach a "modernist" approach -- it aims at objective interpretation of the text in what we might call its historical and literary context. It focuses on evidence and reason to draw conclusions about meaning.

At some point around the beginning of my senior year of college at Southern Wesleyan University, I realized that my full tuition scholarship only covered a certain number of hours -- and I had come into college from high school with 28 hours of college credit. In short, I needed to finish in three years or my money would run out. It wouldn't be too hard to do, but I needed to test out of a couple requirements.

One requirement I thought I might test out of was New Testament Survey. After all, hadn't I grown up going to church at least three times a week? Hadn't I read the Bible through? I was a good test taker. I would do what I always do -- cram and ace a test.

And I did pass the test and graduate in three years. (My daughter Sophie intentionally graduated from college in two and a half years both to beat me and graduate before her brother, who is a year older than her.) But there were a couple interesting insights that dawned on me as I studied to pass the New Testament exam.

First, I realized how much of my childhood preaching must have focused on the Old Testament and on the stories of the Bible. I really didn't know a fair amount of the teaching of Jesus. It would later seem to me that Protestants focus a lot on Paul and not as much on Jesus. Dare I say that evangelicals in particular do not focus a lot on the Gospels or Jesus, it seems to me. When I adjuncted for Notre Dame, it appeared to me that Roman Catholics have the opposite orientation -- more on Jesus, less on Paul.

In high school, I remember seeing a made-for-TV movie called Peter and Paul. I was able to get an exception from my parents to watch it because it debuted on a Sunday night, and we didn't watch TV on Sundays. There was a dramatized scene in the movie when Paul argued vehemently with Peter at Antioch over Jewish and Gentile Christians eating together. 

I remember being very annoyed. "That's not in the Bible!" I exclaimed to myself. For one thing, my holiness background didn't think getting angry and arguing was particularly "sanctified." It went against my holiness to think of these two holy men behaving like that.

Except it is in the Bible -- in Galatians 2. I just don't remember ever hearing anyone preach on that passage. And I didn't remember reading it. In my opinion, one of the drawbacks of having young people read the Bible in the KJV is that they won't know what the text is actually saying a lot of the time. It's just archaic language. In fact, some of the time you think you know what it's saying, you might not because the meaning of the English words may have changed. 

5. A second moment of reflection came when reading some excerpts from Merrill Tenney's New Testament Survey text. I remember reading him talking about where Thessalonica was located along the Egnatian Way. He was giving historical context for 1 Thessalonians. For example, it was a free city with some significant autonomy. Archaeology had confirmed that its leaders were called "politarchs," which Acts accurately represents (Acts 17:8).

The question I had was, "What's the point?" Why would I need to know any of these things in order to understand 1 Thessalonians? Although I couldn't have articulated it at the time, my pre-modern hermeneutic was beginning to encounter the modernist hermeneutic that was employed by all Bible scholars at that time -- both evangelical and non-evangelical. Merrill Tenney was certainly a conservative, Bible-believing evangelical. He was trained to read the Bible in context.

Indeed, the difference between evangelical and non-evangelical scholars in the 1980s was not a historical approach to the Bible but on whether the Bible was true or not. Evangelicals tried to read the Bible in context and insisted that its words were without error -- including both historical and theological errors. 

Non-evangelicals also tried to read the Bible in context but had no such boundaries. They felt free to conclude the Bible was either truthful or non-truthful, historical or non-historical at each point. But, at that point in time, both groups used a historical, contextual method to attempt to arrive at the originally intended meaning of the text.

Because I had grown up potentially hearing individual verses as individual truths, the question of historical context was somewhat foreign to me. It's not that historical context was not inconsistently introduced into interpretation in my church context. My childhood preachers did bring in historical factors at various points of interpretation -- especially when historical elements were obvious in the text. It's just that historical context was not the primary orientation.

6. As an aside, I might add that I experienced some paradigmatic tremors my senior year of high school as well when I took Mr. Stock's humanities class. For some reason, it was strange to me to discover that so much of the Bible overlapped with the history of the Ancient Near East. I had read about the Assyrians in the Bible, and now I was hearing about the Assyrians with Mr. Stock with no mention of the Bible. I had read about the Babylonians and Persians in the Bible, and now I was hearing about them in Mr. Stock's class.

I found it all very neat, but it was strange, for some reason. It was great, I thought, but for some reason it was weird.

In retrospect, I think it was the encounter of the pre-modern paradigm I used in church and the modernist paradigm I used at school. I loved science in high school. I knew and embraced the scientific method thoroughly in high school. I knew and embraced logic and good philosophical thinking in high school. I was a modernist thinker.

But my paradigm at church was completely different. It used the evidence to support faith assumptions, which were not evaluable. It was not programmed to read the biblical text in context but to hear revelations from God in the words. I was a pre-modern thinker who was unreflective about context.

These two paradigms intermingled in Mr. Stock's class, and it was a little disorienting. What was fascinating is that Mr. Stock's class completely supported the biblical text as far as I could see. I just wasn't used to thinking about the biblical text in that way. 

Once you have seen the biblical text in context, it is almost impossible to unsee it. You can move into what Paul Ricoeur called a "second naivete." That is to say, you can go on to be able to read the text both contextually and "spiritually," if you would. I have no problem with lectio divina or the "divine reading" of the Bible. You read small bits of the text. You chew on them. You open yourself up to God to speak to you through them. This is somewhat like the hermeneutic of my childhood, and I have no problem with it.

It just isn't necessarily reading the text in context or for what it originally meant. Lectio divina is only as contextual as you are. It is not "wired" to be a contextual meaning. For me, it is thus a "post-modern" reading. I can read the Bible in context. And I can read the Bible against a personal or spiritual context that is not bound by historical or literary context. I can do both.

7. A final note about that encounter with 1 Thessalonians in college. What should I do with a verse like 1 Thessalonians 5:26: "Greet all the brothers with a holy kiss"? I was raised to see every verse as a direct command of God to me. In truth, of course, there were numerous verses we didn't apply directly to ourselves. Our paradigm filtered the verses that stood out and the ones that didn't.

Still, there was a fellow in my church who stopped eating pork because of Leviticus 11:7-8. He took it as a direct word to us/him. Nevermind other verses in the New Testament like Mark 7:19 or Acts 10:15. The whole Bible was flattened into a single voice, and somehow it was missed that, from a Christian perspective, the New Testament provides the authoritative lens for reading the Old Testament.

But my study at that time raised the question. "Would God allow a verse to stand in Scripture that was not timeless and universal?" Sure, I now understood that this verse about the kissing greeting was written first to Thessalonians who lived two thousand years ago. But would God have let the verse be in Scripture if it were not a command to us as well?

These were the beginnings of my hermeneutical birth pains. I was beginning to see how to read in context. And once you see it, it is almost impossible to unsee it.