PH-218 by Clyfford Still
PH-21 by Clyfford Still
The home of Holy Scripture is worship. It is the public, not the private, reading of Scripture that is definitive for Scripture’s role in the life of the church. The assembly of the faithful gathered, in expectant silence, to hear the word of the Lord read aloud from the testimony of the apostles and prophets: that is both the initial and the enduring primary location—in reality and in doctrine—for encounter with and reception of the biblical text. […]
“Private” interpretation of Scripture, that is to say, interpretation of the text that occurs elsewhere than in the liturgy, is nevertheless always dependent upon and symbiotic with it. The further one moves away from the liturgy, the more one’s reading of the text will become detached from the nature, uses, and ends that the church confesses, by God’s gracious will, to be true of the text. Think of Scripture as a living thing: it requires its native habitat for deep roots, good light, and rich air. That habitat is the living people of God in convocation, eager to receive together the living word of God spoken aloud for all to hear. Removed from that habitat, text and reader alike grow malnourished, emaciated, desiccated. Neither can be transplanted to another environment without loss.
The problem here is not that Brad is wrong (he isn’t), but how strongly this line of thinking runs against the grain of evangelical piety. I imagine many churchgoers could begrudgingly affirm what Brad is saying here. But the reason it would be difficult for them to assent to it is because their entire practice of the faith has misled them as to the true ‘home’ of Scripture. Private interpretation, including quiet times and personal Bible reading, is not thought of as “dependent” on public reading; private interpretation is the main thing. To ask one of these churchgoers to endorse what Brad is saying is like asking a person who was taught his whole life that drinking alcohol is sinful if he wants to grab a pint with you at the local pub. Even if he can agree that the Bible does not condemn drinking as sinful, he still will be reluctant. His conscience has been malformed. I think evangelical piety creates a similar dynamic with respect to the Bible’s function within the church. If we agree with Brad that the gathered people of God is the primary location for Scripture to be read/interpreted/exegeted—and that reading it apart from that context is, at best, merely a means to serving that more primary function—then it would seem that our practice is leading us astray here.
There is no one right way to read the Bible. That is the first thing to say about interpreting Scripture. There are as many fitting ways to read the Bible as there are ends of the Bible; indeed, there are as many fitting ways to read the Bible as there are occasions and persons to do such reading. That does not mean there are no unfitting ways to read the Bible. It only means that to exclude some does not mean to exclude all but one, or only a handful. That would presume a finite number of ways of reading the Bible. On the contrary, “we have no warrant for putting a limit to the sense of words which are not human but divine.” And if the sense is unlimited, then so are the ways by which to arrive at it. Like other complex activities—especially games: chess, basketball, tennis—there are rules, norms, and predictable patterns. But there is always development and innovation within the ongoing tradition of the practice. We will never reach a time when the possibilities of chess are exhausted, or when a coach can no longer draw up a new out-of-bounds set play. So for interpreting Scripture: new ways of reading, new readings of Scripture, will continue so long as Scripture endures in the church. Which is to say, until the End.
This is such a key point. I tried to gesture at this reality here. My sense is that as potentially liberating as this perspective can be for some, many Bible-believing (or, perhaps more precisely, biblicist) Christians are often resistant to such notions. Raised on inductive Bible study methods (which are ‘scientific’ and thus potentially repeatable by anyone), they are uncomfortable with the thought of such open-ended ways of reading. So far from liberation, this approach seems to them to unleash anarchy.
It is no accident that monastic life is the location and model of unguarded intimacy with Christ through the Song [of Songs] and, in turn, through the rest of Scripture. In the lives of monks and nuns—those we later come to call mystics—we come to see that Scripture is not primarily a didactic, discursive, or scholarly text. It is a spiritual book for spiritual persons: those given to know the mind of the Spirit of God (cf. 1 Cor 2:6-16). The way to know Scripture, therefore, is one and the same as the way to know the Song: saturation, meditation, solitude, silence. Spiritual exegesis, in other words. For in the case of the Song, there is no proposition waiting at the end of the interpretive task, no doctrinal payoff. It is just the Lord. The ecstasy of contemplation is finding him—finding him—and delighting in nothing else. In this way the faithful reader of the Song exemplifies faithful reading of Scripture as a whole: defined, from beginning to end, by the acclamation, the exultation, the unashamed exclamation: “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing upon earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the rock of my heart and my portion forever” (Ps 73:25-26).
Brad makes a very interesting point here about monastic (mystical) interpretation of the Song of Songs and, by extension, the rest of Scripture. He thinks that monks and nuns were on to something in reading the Bible in the mode of the Song—a mode of reading oriented toward intimacy and delight rather than rational apprehension or what have you. What I find fascinating, though, is this: It seems that this ‘monastic’ style of reading shares some overlapping concerns with the so-called “theological interpretation of Scripture” (TIS) movement. TIS proponents are often fed up with the inherited scholarly ways of reading Scripture (e.g., didactic, discursive) that fail to arrive at where Scripture means to take its readers (i.e., communion with God). However, and this is what I find especially interesting, the theological interpretation movement is an academic trend being carried out by scholars. Which makes me wonder if it will ever, in actual practice, lead to the kind of spiritual exegesis of the mystics that Brad commends here. For, as he points out, the means for this kind of reading are: saturation, meditation, solitude, and silence. It seems to me that the monastery provided a certain habitus that was uniquely suited to the interpretive ends that these readers were pursuing. As well-intentioned as the TIS movement is, and as much as I resonate with its critiques of grammatical-historical exegesis, its practitioners are not well-positioned to arrive at the same end. Perhaps this is where we once more seek to “re-imagine” theological education in the vein of Bonhoeffer at Finkenwalde.
Finished reading: Durable Trades by Rory Groves 📚
Durable Trades is the needed cure for what Graeber described as Bullshit Jobs. Groves' narrative in the early chapters is a familiar one: The Industrial Revolution uprooted work from the home, created ever-more-specialized jobs to increase efficiency, and, as a result, has basically banished all thought of self-sufficiency from our minds. The majority of Groves' book, however, explores what he calls “durable trades”—roughly sixty or so trades that have withstood technological disruption and cultural change, even as they’ve morphed in all sorts of ways over the centuries. Groves scores each trade using five categories: historical stability, resiliency, family-centeredness, income, and ease of entry. A useful and eye-opening book.