When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:34-40, NRSV)
Jesus and a Pharisee. Source
Recently, I led a conversation at a house church that my wife and I attend, in which the group discussed the nature of scripture. It was a startling discussion, because I rapidly discovered that I had the highest view of scripture of anyone in the room. To those gathered, the Bible was merely inspirational material for them on a personal level, or a record of religious tradition. To some at house church that evening, it had been wielded like a weapon against them or their loved ones, with such violence that they could no longer even really relate to or enjoy the Bible at all. There was a general skepticism in the room about any kind of presence of God or direct relation to God in scripture. Needless to say, most of my preparation as discussion leader quickly flew out the window. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating conversation.
A little while later, the Bible study that often meets in our home had its own discussion of the nature of scripture, in which I turned out to be the person with the lowest view of scripture in the room. I was the only person who thought that the Bible was not the infallible Word of God. I didn't really have time to get into a discussion of biblicism and its logical problems, so I merely gestured at some of the issues with this line of thinking by pointing out that, if the Bible is the infallible Word of God, we have to wonder what it means that parts of it are missing (the ending of Mark, e.g.) or textually scrambled (Job and Samuel both have this problem in places).
I've spilt a fair amount of pixels on this blog in painting a picture the problems with the typical American evangelical view of scripture. Today I want to move in a positive direction, and briefly sketch a more honest, fruitful, robust way of reading the Bible—without going so far as my more heterodox friends at house church.
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I'm nearsighted, so I can't read a chalkboard or street signs without glasses. They focus the light so I can see and learn the important stuff in class, or get where I'm going out on the road. Without glasses, I can misread the board and accidentally learn something the teacher didn't intend, or mistake the numbers on a highway marker and take a road I wasn't meant to go down.
For Christians, Jesus is the lens of scripture. Like glasses, Jesus helps us focus on what is truly important in scripture, and on what it is actually saying. Without Jesus, scripture can get blurry and out of focus, and it can get hard to determine which of the overlapping or muddled things on the page is supposed to draw our attention.
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| Pictured: Jesus, yo. Jesus. |
One of the ways that Jesus does this is by resolving conflicts in scripture for us.
The Pharisees of Jesus' day paid very scrupulous attention to scripture, especially the Torah, which is full of commandments from God. Sometimes, though, there are situations where two commandments come into conflict with one another, and you can't obey both at the same time. In those cases, the Pharisees wondered, what was a pious Jew to do? Which commandments take precedence over the others? In essence, one needed a ranked list of commandments. When the Pharisees ask Jesus in Matthew 22 (at the top of this post) "What is the greatest commandment," what they're doing is asking him, "What's at the top of your list?" And he has a clear answer for them: Deuteronomy 6:4-9 (aka "the Shema," which was already the key commandment in most forms of Judaism in Jesus' day) and then Leviticus 19:18.
That prioritizing question is the same thing that's going on in this famous story, found in Luke. In it, Jesus asks a man what his most important commandments are, and he gives the same two Jesus lists in Matthew 22. The twist is, the man wants to know how they should work in practice, and he gets a radical answer from Jesus:
Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them.
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| "The Good Samaritan," Francisziek Sobiepan. Source |
Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:25-37, NRSV)This parable is Jesus' demonstration of what can happen if your scriptural priorities are out of whack. The priest and the Levite both belonged to groups whose job it was to serve in the Temple, where ritual purity was extremely important. In avoiding what looked like a dead body, both men were keeping themselves in a state of ritual purity, which they had a scriptural mandate to do. Without ritual purity, they couldn't do their jobs, which were absolutely essential to the life of their nation.
The problem is not that they obeyed the commandment not to touch a (probable) corpse, but that when that commandment conflicted with the command to "love your neighbor as yourself," it was the former that they prioritized.* (Jesus then radically extends the boundaries of who this commandment is meant for: not just Jews, but non-Jews also, even their bitter enemies, the Samaritans.)
So when we interpret scripture, our guide is Jesus. Our model for doing theology should not be picking a position and then finding arbitrary prooftexts until we convince people we're right. ("OK, well, you have 37 verses to back up your point of view while the other side only has 23, so you win the Bible!” said no one, ever.) It should be investigating thoroughly what Jesus had to say, and what he did (Jesus' message is delivered as much through action as through words, if not more so) and using that to read the rest of the Bible—and the world.
For example: how should Christians relate to the poor? We often point to things like Proverbs, which has plenty to say about poverty and laziness, and Paul, who tells the Thessalonians that anyone unwilling to work should not eat. But our lens for these passages is Jesus, who preaches a radical ethic of giving and special concern for the poor. So whatever those other things mean, we need to read them with that in mind.
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I'll develop this way of reading scripture more fully in a future post, but I wanted to quickly point out some of its implications.
One of the important things about this way of reading the Bible is that it allows the Bible to be what it obviously is: a diverse collection of writings by people with different, sometimes conflicting ideas about God. Having a tool to resolve scriptural conflicts makes it easier to acknowledge that those conflicts exist and need to be wrestled with.
What this reading does not do is deny the inspiration of the Bible. It is possible, and indeed vital, to affirm that the authors of the Bible were inspired by God to write. God-as-Jesus' constant use of and engagement with scripture is next to impossible to explain otherwise.
Perhaps the best thing about this view of scripture is that it places the focus where it should have been all along: on Jesus. When we promote the Bible to an infallible book, the "Word of God," we risk forgetting that what Christian tradition and the Bible itself calls the Word of God is not a book, but a person: Jesus, God's logos, spoken into the world to rescue and restore it. Remembering that Jesus is the lens of scripture can help us to restore him to the absolutely primary place he ought to have in our faith.
Read the next post in the series here.
*This is a point at which the Pharisaic tradition actually agreed with Jesus. Rabbi Hillel, who lived around the time of Jesus, was known to have summed up the law in a strikingly similar way:
"On another occasion it happened that a certain heathen came before [Hilliel] and said, 'Make me a proselyte, on the condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot"... [And] he said to him, 'What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbour: that is the whole Torah, while the rest is the commentary thereof; go and learn it.'" Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sabbath: Folio 31a ↩
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