Taming Tigers, Taming Texts

From Jeannine Brown and Kyle Roberts 

Given that at least 200 years of modern study of the Bible has encouraged disciplinary silos, we thought it would be pleasantly subversive to write a combined, interdisciplinary response to this month’s topic.

Theoretical questions of inerrancy or errancy aside, a question that interests us and might be highly relevant to this conversation is: What does a specific view lead a person to do with the Bible?”

We hear from a number of this month’s contributors that inerrancy can produce readings that push toward the universal and abstract rather than the particular and concrete—producing generalizing platitudes. Ben Mitchell notes, “Inattention to context sometimes leads us to universalize texts that were meant to apply in particular times and places.” Molly Worthen reflects on the (false) sense of security that can come from “Reformed fundamentalists’ promises that one ‘common-sense’ interpretation of the Bible was perfect and timeless.” And Karl Giberson bemoans that “[v]ery few evangelicals ascribe any meaningful human dimension to Scripture.”

Neglect of the human context—the strange, lovely, and sometimes perplexing particularities—of the Bible by evangelical Christians is disturbing. And if inerrancy leads to a view of the text as a storehouse of facts and abstract principles to be extracted from the narrative contexts, then the reading it produces will be impoverished. In fact, once those facts and propositional doctrines are abstracted, there is hardly any use for the Bible at all. We’d just need systematic theologies. As Kevin Vanhoozer notes, such views of Scripture seem to prefer the abstract principles to Scripture itself—what Beverly Gaventa calls the “blessed messiness” of the text.

Inerrancy can produce such readings—readings that “tame the text” rather than acknowledge its mystery and inexhaustibility (Sarah Ruden’s point), as well as the differences arising from its distinct human authors and contexts. The doctrine of inerrancy can assuage our anxieties when wrestling with the text—it can be a way of avoiding the real, living God rather than meeting that God in the “strange, new world” of the Bible (Barth). As N.T. Wright has pointed out, the doctrine of inerrancy can also be a way of exchanging the authority of God for our own authority. What becomes authoritative, then, are our inherited, cherished interpretations of the Bible. Our assertions about the Bible’s “nature” can play right into the game of power politics. Of course, this is true of any belief structure or presupposition—religious or otherwise. To borrow from that famous animated philosopher, we can be the most “wascally wabbits.” Nonetheless, our convictions about our sacred texts are especially amenable to promoting our most cherished, engrained, or deeply valued interpretations.

But what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Those who discard inerrancy are surely also at times guilty of taming the text. For example, some perspectives that view the text as errant discard certain parts of the Bible as irrelevant, ethnocentric, patriarchal, and even dangerous. The ever-incisive Kierkegaard, who was not a fan of historical criticism insofar as it blunted Scripture’s prophetic voice and undermined its divine origin, warned against any too-quick and easy dismissal of the Bible’s perplexing passages, or tough texts:

. . . is it not a self-contradiction on your part that you accept Holy Scripture to be the word of God, accept Christianity as divine teaching—and then when you bump up against something which you cannot square with your ideas and feelings—then you say that it is a self-contradiction on the part of God, rather than that it is self-contradiction on your part, inasmuch as you must either dismiss entirely this divine doctrine or take it just as it is” (Journals and Papers 3, 2888).

A hermeneutics of suspicion is not required to do this selective preferencing with the biblical text, but it can lend itself toward such choices. And historical criticism that aims to analyze the world behind the text often reveals its preference for that world rather than for the text itself (take, for example, historical Jesus reconstructions that become more important than the particularized portraits offered by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John). We suggest this axiom: Whatever one’s view of Scripture, our tendency and our constant temptation is to tame the text.

What would it look like to cultivate particular ways of reading that don’t tame the text? Since we do not have space here to develop specific examples, we will simply suggest a few, brief approaches that might cultivate reading the Bible in ways that, rather than suppress the text, unleash its creative, transformational, salvific, and sanctifying power.

Reading the Bible to Meet God

It seems to us that when it comes to reading the Bible in accordance with the purpose of the Bible—which is to reveal the living God to the people of God—it is important to recognize that the Bible’s nature and its function are tied up together: the Bible reveals God—the specific God of Father, Jesus and Holy Spirit. The Bible also facilitates the occasions for readers/hearers to listen to the voice of that God—and to respond. To not tame the text means to read, or hear, the Bible in anticipation of hearing the voice of God and meeting the Spirit of God.

Reading the Bible to Under-stand

When an approach that focuses on the world behind the text (whether of the “conservative” grammatical-historical or the “liberal” higher critical kind) becomes the tail that wags the dog, it is all-too-easy for the interpreter to stand-over the Bible. But the Bible’s divine origin suggests that the reader always stand under it. This means hermeneutics is a matter of under-standing the text as the Spirit illumines it for us today in all its historical, contextual particularity (and even oddities and perplexities). We ought not solely rely on the Spirit for understanding, but to use the best tools of interpretation we have available. Nonetheless, the disposition of learner and disciple is the place to start—and to end.

There is a human and a divine dimension to the Bible. This means that faithful, proper interpretation of it will call for both human tools and for a reliance on God’s illuminating presence. This explains, in part, why there will always be a tension or a challenging ambiguity when the Bible is read, and interpreted, and submitted to in the context of the church. If we want to avoid taming the text, we must embrace this tension and live together in it.