Quotes from "The Good Book", Chapter 1

Spent some time today (Saturday) reading The Good Book, by Peter Gomes. Not for any particular reason other than spending some comfortable time with my parents, for my birthday.

This book is subtitled, "Reading the Bible with Heart and Mind", the first part of the book is entitled "Opening the Bible", and the title of Chapter One, from which these quotes come, is "What's It All About?".

I made notes of some passages I particularly liked. (I touch-typed them in and used a spellchecker, but hopefully I haven't made gross grammatical mistakes or correctly spelled the entirely wrong words below. Please feel free to point out any mistakes I made, and I'll fix them. (Thanks.))

As a bit of background, I'll point out that Gomes is black, gay and a Baptist. None of which are relevant, right?

On pp. 8--9, Gomes quotes James D. Smart, writing in a book title The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Church, written in 1969. (You may recall an earlier post I did on the dichotomy between scholarly study and the lay view of the bible.)

Responsibility for this strange silence of the Bible in the church does not rest upon preachers alone. Much too often they have borne the whole reproach without there being any recognition of the complex character of the dilemma in which they find themselves. Rather, there had been a blindness which scholar, preacher, teacher, and layman alike have shared -- a blindness to the complexity of the essential hermeneutical problem, which, in simple terms, is the problem of how to translate the full content of an ancient text into the language and life-context of late 20th century persons.

Gomes goes on to say:

Contemporary Christians tend to avoid complexity as being hazardous to their faith, and are thus unprepared to cope with complexity when it confronts them. In April 1996, for example, all three major U.S. weekly newsmagazines featured Jesus as the cover story for Holy Week. What was the reason? This was hardly an outbreak of newsroom piety, but rather the "discovery" that scholars were debating yet again the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, and that many of the words and actions attributed to Jesus in the new Testament were in fact, in the view of much of modern scholarship, the work of writers of the early Christian movement. "Some scholars are debunking the Gospels," ran Time's cover headline. "Now traditionalists are fighting back. What are Christians to believe?"

I was asked by many sincere believers as well as by the vaguely curious what I thought of Time's story. Would it do damage to the faith? Hardly. As the sign in the old antique shop reads: NOTHING NEW HERE. Questions about the nature of the gospels and of their place in the life of the church are as old as the gospels themselves. Questions about the resurrection are as old as the Apostle Paul's writings on the subject. These are matters that have always belonged to the church, and always will. Time's discovery of the Christianity's two-thousand-year-old debate suggests only how far Time is removed from the intellectual life of biblical scholarship. But alas, the story also revealed the large gap between the basic working assumptions of biblical scholarship long held by the scholarly community and the conventional wisdom or general knowledge of a less and less biblically literate Christian population. To make a story there must be winners and loser. The not too subtle implication of this Holy Week Special is that what the scholars believe they know and what the believers believe they believe are seen to be at odds, and if the scholars are right, then the believers must be wrong, and the Christian faith folds like a house of cards.

Gomes considers the source of "bible illiteracy" on pp. 11--12:

We might well ask how this illiteracy came to be, given that the Bible has always had pride of place in Christian worship and particularly in American Protestantism, but any of us who have had experience of what passes for "Bible study" in recent years in most churches can answer that question. For many the Bible served as some sort of spiritual or textual trampoline: You got onto it in order to bounce off of it as far as possible, and your only purpose in returning to it was to get away from it again. It is the lay version of what Willard Sperry, one of my predecessors in The Memorial Church, used to lampoon as "textual preaching." The preacher who was keen to practice what he preached would follow this formula: "Take your text, depart from your text, never return to your text."

Bible studies tend to follow this route. The bible is simply the entry into a discussion about more interesting things, usually about oneself. The text is a mere pretext to other matters, and usually the routine works like this: A verse or a passage is given out, and the group or class is asked, "What does this mean to you?" The answers come thick and fast, and we are off into the life stories or personal situations of the group, and the session very quickly takes the form of Alcoholics Anonymous, Twelve-Step meetings, or other exercises in healing and therapy. I do not wish to disparage the very good and necessary work that these groups perform, for I have seen too many good effects and have known too many beneficiaries of such encounter and support groups to diminish by one iota their benefit both to individuals and to the community. I simply wish to say that this is not Bible study, and to call it such is to perpetuate a fiction.

Bible study actually involves the study of the Bible. That involves a certain amount of work, a certain exchange of informed intelligence, a certain amount of discipline. Bible study is certainly not just the response of the uninformed reader to the uninterpreted text, but Bible study in most of the churches has become just that -- the blind leading the blind or, as some caustic critics of liberal Protestantism would put it, the bland leading the bland. The notion that texts have meaning and integrity, intention, context, and subtexts, and that they are part of an enormous history of interpretation that has long involved some of the greatest thinkers in the history of the world, is a notion often lost on those for whom the text is just one more of the many means the church provides to massage the egos of its members.

I'll take the libery of suggesting here that "massaging egos" can mean that the church allows the kind of judgementalism I blogged about earlier.

Gomes then discusses three aspects of the bible:

• it's public
• it's dynamic
• it's inclusive

public -- p. 18:

When I say that the Bible is public, I mean to say that it is a treasure that is held in common, it belongs to the community of believers and not to any one individual or to any one part of the community of believers.

pp. 19--20:

The public nature of the Bible is meant to have an impact upon public life. Again, it is not a secret of private vocation but a public proclamation of what can be discerned of God's intentions for the creation from the witness and testimony of scripture. People should not be surprised, therefore, that Christians always want to translate their understanding of scripture and its demands into the public lives that Christians lead. The Bible is meant to play a role in society, as are Christians. This public dimension of the Bible invariably produces conflict, even in allegedly homogeneous Christian societies, and certainly in secular and pluralistic societies. This however, is a conflict responsible Christians cannot avoid, and the working out of the proper relationship between the public dimensions of one's biblical faith and one's citizenship in a community that does not necessarily share or appreciate that faith is part of the inevitable and uneasy burden that every responsible Christian must shoulder. The early Christian martyrs would have lived to ripe old ages had they not found it necessary to proclaim their biblical convictions in public. To try to create a "Christian society" where there is no risk to the public nature of the Bible and the faith that cherishes it is a form of arrogant escapism. The Bible is a public book, and as such will always give offense. Christians who take the Bible and themselves seriously have to be prepared for that.

dynamic -- p. 21:

The Buddhists say, "Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; rather, seek what they sought." To understand the dynamic aspect of scripture, we must appreciate the fact that "what they sought" seeks us, and in fact, "what they sought" is apprehendable to us in terms and times that we can best understand. So in the Bible we handle lively things, which means that we must be subtle, supple, and modest, all at the same time.

inclusive -- pp. 22--23:

It is one of the unbecoming but unavoidable ironies of Christianity that Gentile Christians, who were excluded from the Jewish churches, and who in the times of the Roman persecution were themselves excluded from all hope in this life, should themselves become the arch practitioners of exclusion. Even centuries of Christian exclusivism, however, extending into our very own day, cannot diminish the inclusive mandate of the Bible, and the particular words of Jesus when he says, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." What Roman Catholic social theory teaches as the church's "preferential option for the poor," to the annoyance of Christians rich in the things of this world, is the same principle that extends the hospitality of the bible, indeed preferential hospitality, to those who have in fact been previously and deliberately excluded. So the Bible's inclusivity is claimed by the poor, the discriminated against, persons of color, homosexuals, women, and all persons beyond the conventional definitions of Wester civilization.

p. 23:

One of the great paradoxes of race in America is the fact that the religion of the oppressor, Christianity, became the religion of the oppressed and the means of their liberation. Black Muslims ask incredulously how any black person in America could possibly be a Christian, given the legacy of white Christianity. The answer, of course, is that if Christianity in America depended upon white Christians, there would be no right-minded black Christians. What is the case is that Christianity, and the Bible in particular, did not depend upon Christians for its gospel of inclusion, but upon God. Thus black American Christians do not regard their Christianity as the hand-me-down religion of their masters, or an unnatural culture imposed upon them and thus a sign of their continuing servitude. No! They understand themselves to be Christians in their own right because the Gospel, the good news out of which the Bible comes, includes them and is in fact meant for them. We will find that when we look at the life of the Bible, and the life of the world in which it is to be found, we discover that the heart of its public dimension, and indeed the source of its dynamism, is this principle of inclusion by which all of the exclusive divisions of this world are transcended and transformed.

In thinking about the Bible -- its public nature, its dynamic, living qualities, and its inclusivity -- as we try to make sense of it with mind and heart, we would do well to remember these three principal characteristics. They serve as landmarks, points of departure and of return, and they will guide us even as we seek guidance in the opening the Bible.