Reading the Bible with the Church

Bibe Studies are a mainstay of a congregation.  If the people of the church do not know and understand the Bible, then the liturgy will make no sense, sermons will be hard to follow, and what we are to do as Christians between Monday and Saturday will have no guide or focus.

Everybody knows that the Bible is old, indeed, very old, and so needs to be interpreted.  Interpretation is not saying something different from the Bible; all interpretation does is to help us “get” the Bible, to help us think the way the Bible thinks and not the way the world thinks.  There has never been a time when the Church did not interpret the Bible.  Even the New Testament writers interpreted the Bible — which for them was what we know today as the Old Testament.  Every sermon and every Bible study class is an interpretation of the Bible.

Everybody should be able to read and interpret the Bible.  Interpreting the Bible is a skill to be learned, not a  science or method that requires the exceptional and advanced knowledge of a scholar or specialist.  The Bible is the Word of God for all believers, so the interpretation of the Bible is something all believers can do, with a very simple set of tools and the skills to use them.

The Church gives us the tools and training for reading the Bible with benefit – benefit, that is, to our Life in Christ and our calling to witness to Jesus Christ as Lord, Savior and God.  The Bible is the Book of the Church, the Book of all those who have faith in Christ.  The Bible is the Word of God from which we receive our faith in Christ, by which we constantly renew our faith in Christ, and through which we grow spiritually to become ever-more Christ-like (which is what Christians mean by holiness: to increasingly be joined in holy union with Christ).  The Church exists to reveal by word and sacraments and works of love the living, real presence of Christ in and for the world.  The incarnation of Christ never ends, but lives on in the Body of Christ, his Church. 

The Bible is God’s revelation of Christ to the Church, so that the Church knows how to be Christ alive in the world and so that the members of the Church can spot and correct errors and deviations and wrong turns into bad neighborhoods or dead ends that always lurk to tempt the Church away from being the ongoing incarnation of the living Christ for the sake of the world and into becoming a generic religion that worships the powers and pleasures of the world.  

The problem with focusing entirely on the historical facts behind  the Bible, to find out what “really happened,” is to say that knowing the ancient history is to know the real meaning of the Bible.  The Bible can only mean what its original readers thought it meant and what its original authors intended it to mean.  Once we know that history, we know what the Bible means, we have all that the Bible can tell us.  The interpretation of the Bible becomes the complex task of “translating” what the Bible meant into our world and our issues so that the Bible can mean something “relevent,” supportive of our religious ideas and ideals.

This is to treat the Bible as a “resource” rather than as a “witness.”  And this is false to the Bible’s own purpose.  The Bible — the Christian Bible of both Old Testament and New Testament — has only one purpose and meaning: it is the witness of the first Christians to their faith in Jesus Christ as Lord, Savior and God.  The Bible is a single witness to faith in Jesus Christ.  And as such, it must be interpreted as the unique and authoritative witnss to faith in Christ.

The Bible is not a religious resource that can be mined for what you think is valuable in it or “original” in it, and then use those resources to build up your own version of the “biblical religion” or the “historical Jesus.” 

The Bible is a witness to faith in Christ from the first Christian believers.  We have no right or power to change what that witness says or to pick-and-choose the comfortable or useful parts of that witness to justify our own beliefs or projects. 

A witness is an authority giving true testimony, and we must listen to the testimony of the witness to discover the truth.  That is how Christians approached the Bible for eighteen-hundred years, and it is how we today must re-learn to listen attentively to the witness of the Bible.

A witness testifies to the truth in a court.  What is that cout that hears the testimony of the witness of the Bible to Jesus Christ?  It is the Church.  The testimony to the truth of Christ that comes to us from the witness of the Bible, is spoken in the liturgy, the Scripture readings, the Psalms, and especilly in the sermon and in the sacrament of Holy Communion, the Eucharist.  That is why Lutherans emphasize the unity of preached Word and celebrated Sacrament of the Eucharist as both together the necessary framework of worship for every Sunday’s liturgy.  The biblical witness to Christ is heard, its true testimony given, by word and sacrament in liturgical worship.

So what does this man for how we read the Bible?  At its most basic, it means we read the Bible as believing Christians, and not as objective observers who seek “scientific” or “historical” proof.  Historical study serves faith; it does not, it cannot, “prove” faith.  And the Bible must be read with the eyes of faith.  We first must believe in Jesus Christ as Messiah, Lord, Savior and God, before we can read the Bible “with profit,” “with benefit,” as the witness to God’s own revealing of himself and his purpose in his incarnate Son, Jesus Christ.  Without the eyes of faith, the Bible is nothing more than a marginally interesting collection of ancient writings from an obscure Middle Eastern people and a religious cult formed around veneration of a crucified rabbi by his most loyal followers. 

The eyes of faith are not individual: all Christians see the Truth of the Gospel (cf. Gal. 2:5) with the one set of eyes, the eyes of the Church.  There is a balance here.  On the one hand, each of us by ourselves does not get to decide on our own what the Bible means; we must submit our ideas to the wisdom of the Church.  On the other hand, the Church as it is in this world is still the “Pilgrim Church,” a church made up of sinners on the way to salvation, and so is capable of making mistakes in its interpretation of the Bible.  We must trust the Church to be the voice of the witness of the Bible to salvation in Jesus Christ in preaching, baptism, Eucharist, prayer and liturgy.  But we cannot become lazy and take all that for granted, as infallible, but must “not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1 [RSV]).

This is the very reason why Bible Study is a key part of the life of a congregation.  The Bible Study class is — or should be — the place where our eyes of faith and the Church’s eyes of faith focus together on the testimony of the witness of the Bible.  The Bible Study class is not a history lesson, except when some historical background or perspective is needed to keep us from a mistake in reading the Bible passage we are studying.  The Bible, to repeat, is indeed very old; we can mistakenly bring modern assumptions and modern ideas to the Bible and “find” them in the Bible — or, not find them in the Bible and go away saying the Bible is “irrelevant!”  So knowing some of the history is helpful.

But it is only helpful, and only when we need it to clear-up a problem in understanding.  Bible studies get bogged down and go nowhere when they fall captive to historical facts and insights.  The witness of the Bible is not a witness to the history that lies within or behind it; the witness of the Bible is to the living Christ active in the Church for the sake of the world today, here and now, in our own lives as we live them. 

Bible studies become predictable and boring when we use the Bible as a resource to mine out nuggets of religious notions that are useful to us.  We treat the Bible as such a resource which we control, whenever our Bible studies are talking to the Bible to tell the Bible what it “really means.”  Faithful Bible studies are just the opposite: when we listen to the word of witness of the Bible, and allow the Bible to tell us what our lives “really mean” in the eyes of God. 

When our Bible studies listen to the witness of Christ in the Bible, we no longer decide what the Bible means, but rather Christ the Word decides what we mean.  In this way, reading and studying the Bible opens us up to true “repentance,” “conversion,” to turn and go that other way and learn that new language of witness to Christ (the literal meanings of “re-pent” and “con-vert”).  And that is the whole and complete purpose of the Bible: to obey Christ: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1: 15); “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.  For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8: 35 [RSV]).

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