Scripture as Sacrament:
The Bible as an Object of Knowledge
1999
Introduction
It would not be difficult to get confused by the variety of
contradictory interpretations of Scripture in use in the church today. What
makes the situation even more daunting is the confidence with which the various
groups make their contradictory claims. Each denomination or individual has
Scriptures they enlist in support of their interpretations, and many would
claim that Scripture alone is the source of their beliefs. Unfortunately, the
meaning of "Scripture alone" seems to vary from one person to the next.
There are reasons for this diversity, however, and spiritual
failure is not the main one. Interpretations differ because the meaning of
words is based far more on factors outside of a text than on the text itself.
Scripture, as any text, derives its meaning from whatever mechanism of
understanding appropriates it and invests it with that meaning. That is to say,
it is an "object of knowledge." Such mechanisms lie completely
outside of the text. They are usually a function of reasoning, which in turn is
molded by traditions and experiences. Even direct revelation from the Holy
Spirit is a kind of "mechanism" by which the words of Scripture are
appropriated, and it comes from outside the text.
To bear out this point, the following pages are largely
devoted to three aspects of Biblical interpretation that confirm these claims.
They flow naturally from the fact that the Bible is an "object of
knowledge." Texts are always capable of sustaining multiple meanings. This
aspect of language is especially true of the Bible, since it contains so many
different documents from so many different contexts. Since those contexts were
remarkably different from those of contemporary
What we will find is that the "original meaning"
of Scripture, while a crucial and viable goal of our knowledge, is not in fact
the primary domain in which God reveals himself in Scripture. Rather, God has
appointed the Scriptures as a kind of "sacrament" a divinely
appointed meeting place for revelation. As the water of baptism or the bread of
communion, the words of the Bible were everyday words used by the ancient
cultures to which the Bible was first written. Yet God chose and continues to
choose these words as a place for sacred moments with His people.
1. The same words can mean different things.
The meaning of a word is not contained or fixed in the word
itself.<1> A dictionary, for example, does not present
some essential or absolute meaning that guarantees I will know what another
English speaker is saying. Dictionaries do not control the English language we
control the dictionaries.
A dictionary simply records the most frequent ways in which
certain words are being used at the time that edition of the dictionary is
published. It does not record the vast number of metaphorical uses that can be
created on the spot by any English speaker. Dictionaries must be changed
repeatedly to include new ways in which words are being used. Over time,
certain meanings become "archaic" and eventually fall out of the
English language altogether.<2>
It is of dubious value, therefore, to look up the meanings
of words in the Bible by turning to an English dictionary. What does the way in
which words are being used today have to do with how they were being used two
thousand years ago and more? Suffice it to say, one would need an edition of a
Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek dictionary that was current at the time the
particular book of the Bible you were reading was written. Of course such
things do not exist.<3>
Scholars do their best to derive the various meanings that
were in use at the time the Biblical documents were written, but certainty is
often not possible. As we will see below, the difference between the meanings
of words in two different languages is bound to be as great as the difference
between the two cultures that use those languages. English words,
therefore, are incapable of translating the precise meanings the Bible
originally had.
In a sense, the meaning of the Bible depends on the
"dictionary" a reader brings to it. The default dictionary is the one
that comes from the way the reader uses words in his or her everyday life.<4> For English speakers who have never studied the Bible,
their definitions will be based on the way words are being used in their world
and culture, and they will try to make sense of the text accordingly.
Various Christian traditions have slightly different
"dictionaries" as well. A Roman Catholic will define the word
"conscience" as an inner voice that tells them right from wrong. A
Wesleyan will pay close attention when the word "holiness" surfaces
and may relate it to a second work of grace. In such cases the meaning that is
understood is a function of the denominational "dictionary" brought
to the text. The importance of tradition in understanding thus comes into focus.
What is almost an impossibility, however, is that a person
will automatically bring a "original
meaning" dictionary with them to the text. To read the words of Jesus as
he precisely meant them requires not only that we know what the Aramaic words
were behind the Greek in our New Testament, but also that we know how they were
being used in Palestine in the first century of the common era.
What about the Holy Spirit? Does not the Holy Spirit help us
understand the meaning? If we believe the Bible speaks to everyone today, then
we must agree that the "spiritual" dictionary the Holy Spirit
provides us is the dominant mode of God’s revelation. For each time and for
every individual, the Holy Spirit can "quicken" the words to be the Word
of God for us over and over again.
But this meaning should not be confused with the original
meaning, which was a function of the way in which words were used two thousand
years ago and more. To say that we can understand the precise meaning of
the Bible today without knowledge of the ancient contexts is to say that the
Bible was not understood or relevant to its original recipients but
rather was meant just for English speaking Americans today.<5> On the contrary, a picture of God emerges in which He
repeatedly stoops to the weakness of our understanding, investing new meanings
into his Word time and time again.
Clearly, the meaning we see in the words of Scripture
depends on the "definitions" we bring to those words. Because the
"dictionaries" from which these definitions come lie entirely outside
of the text, it follows that the meaning of Scripture for any individual
depends far more on factors outside of the Bible than it does on the words of
Scripture itself.
2. There is more than one possible way to relate individual
Scriptures to one another.
The situation is made substantially more complicated by the
fact that the Bible is not one document written in one context. Since the
Protestant Bible contains sixty-six books written in three languages over an
incredibly long period of time, we have a vast number of contexts to consider
when trying to get at its original meaning. Many of
these contexts are unknown to us.
Further, there is the matter of genre. One does not know how
to take words unless one knows the genre of literature at which one is looking.
A novel creates different expectations in its reader than an obituary does. If
we do not know what genre we are reading, let alone its ancient parameters, we
will not know how its words were being used. Such questions cannot be answered
on the basis of our sensibilities but only by investigating what the
limits of those genres were in the ancient world.
Because the Bible was written to address so many different
situations, fitting its varied statements together into a coherent voice is a
very complicated task indeed. What does the Bible tell us about God? What does
the Bible say about observing the Sabbath or about divorce? Any attempt to
answer such questions will require us to create a coherent pattern out of the
individual bits of "data" found throughout the Bible.
When Isaiah 38:18 says, "Sheol
cannot thank you, death cannot praise you; those who go down to the Pit cannot
hope for your faithfulness," the initial impression one gets is that there
is no future hope for the dead, even for a righteous person such as King
Hezekiah. How then does one relate this verse to 1 Thessalonians 4:16, which
says the dead in Christ will rise and thus have hope?
The two verses can be related to one another in a number of ways the point is
that one makes the connection from the outside of the Bible looking in. It is a
function of reasoning, often aided by one’s Christian tradition or experiences
(including experiences of the Holy Spirit).
Almost any coherent pattern one creates will encounter
"naughty verses" in the text, that is, verses that at least on the
surface seem to contradict the overall pattern.<6> A
Calvinist, for example, must relate his or her interpretation of Romans 8:35,
"Who will separate us from the love of Christ?" [answer:
no one] to the words of Hebrews 10:26, "If we continue to sin willfully
after coming to a knowledge of the truth, there remains no more sacrifice for
sins." As Calvinists, they will interpret the latter verse in a way that
does not contradict the doctrine of eternal security. A Wesleyan may also find in 1 Timothy 2:12 a verse that must be related to his or her
belief in the ordination of women: "I permit no woman to teach a
man."
The diversity of the original contexts makes such
prioritizing, evaluating, and integrating inevitable not because the Bible has
errors but because its words are an object of knowledge and thus require
interpretation. Such mechanisms of understanding organize the Biblical data
into coherent patterns and thus invest meaning into the text from the outside
looking in.<7>
Even some of the most basic patterns of organization are due
to the influence of Christian tradition rather than being intrinsic to the text
itself. When reading a Christian Bible, an orthodox Jew will interpret the New
Testament as a misunderstanding and perversion of what he or she would term
"the Hebrew Scriptures." A Christian, on the other hand, views these
same documents as the "Old Testament" and believes the New
Testament to provide the decisive key to understanding it.
The Jewish interpretation seems to us an obviously faulty
organization of the data of Scripture. Nevertheless, it is a possible
interpretation on the basis of the text alone. We think otherwise because we
are a part of Christian tradition and the church universal. In this instance,
Christian tradition holds a more crucial role in appropriating Scripture than
the actual words of the Bible themselves.
"Scripture alone," in this example, would not prohibit one from
concluding that Judaism -- and not Christianity was the appropriate religion.
3. The Bible was not revealed on our culture’s terms.
When we say that the meaning of words depends on the way
they are used, we say much more than one might think at first. The word
"father," for example, is used significantly differently in
middle class
Several far-reaching implications flow from this realization.
First of all, one cannot make neat distinctions between Biblical commands that
are "cultural" and ones that are "timeless." All the
commands of the Bible are cultural in the sense that their meaning was relevant
and significant within the cultures and world views to which they were first
given. In order for there to be timeless commands, we must suppose that the
significance of the command would be the same in all cultures in all places.
Anthropology teaches us that the list of such commands would be very short
indeed.<9>
Secondly, most of what we have understood to be timeless
truths are more likely truths that our cultural glasses see in the text.
The creation of a single "biblical world view" is really a
sophisticated organization and appropriation of the text from within our
current world view. No approach to Scripture that is oriented around the
original meaning of the text can speak of a monolithic biblical world view.<10> The nature of human understanding and language is such
that the appropriation of Scripture at any point in history is derivative from
the broader world view of that time period.
It is important to note how much the Enlightenment and
Western tradition in general colors the categories from within which we
approach the Bible. Indeed, there is often an evolutionary tinge to our
interpretations as we see things in the text that the original readers simply
could not have. While people seem comfortable with the suggestion that culture
played a role in the Biblical statements and commands, God is assumed to be
"on the same page" as we are. It is easier for us to believe that
there are things God required of them that He does not require of us, than it
is to believe that owing to our culture there are areas where God might require
of us things He did not require of them.
Connecting these two quite different worlds is not an exact
science. Meaning in one context is rarely directly transferable to another
context, particularly one as different from the biblical world as ours.
Nevertheless, the fusing of these "two horizons" does take place
repeatedly.<11> It does not take place precisely, not by way of some
magical formula that insures the right answer but through the Holy Spirit and
the communities of faith through which He speaks. Once again, the most crucial
part of relating the Bible to today is a function of experiencing God and of
listening to the way He has worked through our traditions. All these channels
of truth are processed by a healthy dose of reverent reasoning as we reflect
upon this object of our knowledge the Bible.
Conclusion
It should be obvious by now that any interpretation one has
of Scripture is overwhelmingly dependent on factors that lie outside of the
text. Not only is there the matter of the particular "dictionary" one
uses to define the words, but there is the broader matter of culture in
general. The possibilities for multiple interpretation
are almost endless on the basis of these factors alone. When one adds the fact
that interpretation requires the organization of a vast amount of
"data" into a coherent pattern, it is no surprise that there are so
many different denominations with so many different beliefs.
How then can we use the Bible in the church today? Where
does the tremendous gap in culture leave us? Is the meaning of Scripture doomed
to stay distant from us?
No! Revelation is not simply a thing of the past it cannot
be if the Bible is to speak to us today. The Bible was the Word of God to its
original recipients, but it also speaks repeatedly to us today as God stoops to
the weakness of our understanding time and time again. God has appointed these
words ordinary things that most humans use every day as a divine meeting place
for revelation. Scripture is a sacrament, outward and visible signifiers of
inward and spiritual signifieds.<12>
Because of the nature of language, we can never be
absolutely sure we have either the correct original meaning or the most
authentic way of relating that meaning to today. But we can still walk humbly
with our God, listening for His voice with openness of heart. We can still
humbly allow the Spirit to speak to us in communities of faith, testing the
spirits of interpretation as the body of Christ. The "Word" of God is
living and active and is still able to judge between the thoughts and intents
of our hearts.
Endnotes
<2> A
quick look at the King James Version or any Shakespearean play will suffice to
illustrate the point. To have "intercourse" no longer means to have a
conversation, and a person’s "conversation"
is no longer their entire conduct but simply their speech.
<3> As
we discuss below under point three, having such a dictionary would still not
necessarily bring us closer to the original meaning. In its fullest sense, the
"definitions" about which we are speaking presuppose the social
matrix in which they are used, and a dictionary does not really provide such
information. It is thus not enough to know a one word definition for a Greek or
Hebrew word if I know nothing about the world from which that word drew its
meaning and the immediate context in which it was used.
<4> Reader-response criticism
is a branch of literary criticism that is not interested in recovering the
original meaning from the text (often thought to be impossible anyway) but
instead is interested in how various readers respond to it. A text is viewed as
having as many meanings as there are readers.
<5> Interestingly
enough, those who say the Bible speaks directly to us (or that God put meanings
in the Bible that could not be understood until today) imply that we have a
privileged place in the entirety of salvation history. Such a perspective is
almost evolutionary in tone, setting us up as superior to all other times.
<6> Those
acquainted with Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1962) will no doubt see that the same dynamics
that take place in regard to scientific paradigms also apply to the
interpretation of the Bible or any epistemological situation. Once one sees
this connection, one has understood what the subtitle of this paper means.
<7> This
aspect of interpretation is the beginning of a fairly strong argument against
using terms such as "biblical Christianity" or "the Christian
world view." The patterns to which such terms usually refer is a particular Christian tradition’s organizing system
which is more a function of one’s religious community than the Bible itself.
The third section will make this point more clearly.
<8> For a good delineation of
this claim, see B. Malina, The Social World of
Jesus and the Gospels (London: Routledge, 1997)
chapter 1.
<9> Even a command as basic as
"love your neighbor" has different implications within the pages of
Scripture and these differ somewhat from today as well. There can be little
doubt, for example, that the author of Psalm 137 did not view the Babylonians
or their children as his (or her) neighbors. Jesus, on the other hand, gives a
substantially broadened focus to the command that was no doubt shocking to his
audiences. Finally, we are prone to include things in love that none of the
Biblical authors could have related to such as the emotional nurturing of an
individual’s self-esteem.
<10> This
is not to say that there are not common components to the various expressions
of world view in Scripture.
<11> An
allusion to the favorite term of G. Gadamer, whose
best known work is Truth and Method (London: Sheed
& Ward, 1975). For the relevance of Gadamer’s
work to Biblical hermeneutics, see A. Thiselton’s The
Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description with
Special Reference to Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980).
<12> The terms signifier and signified are terms from
linguistics and refer roughly to the distinction between a word and its
meaning.