What Is the Bible? (Part 3)
OK: but how do we read, interpret, and make sense of the Bible?
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
(An eight-minute read.)
Almost two decades ago, A. J. Jacobs, who said he was “Jewish” the same way Olive Garden is Italian, wrote a book that started its own little cottage industry—experimenting with what he titled The Year of Living Biblically.
Over the course of the year, Jacobs tried to live out every single command in the Hebrew Bible, chronicling the awkward situations he found himself in as a result (like throwing little pebbles at someone who admitted to committing adultery—since full-on stoning, per the Torah’s command, would be hard to pull off in modern society).
I read the first part of the book when it first came out, and found it somewhat humorous but not all that helpful. It inspired other “year of” books, like the late Rachel Held Evans’s book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, which was a similar attempt at trying to follow all the Bible’s commands specifically for women.
At worst, these types of books were perhaps attempts to show the utter absurdity of ascribing any sort of authority to an ancient book like the Bible.
At best, they were efforts to point out what should be obvious to all of us: any book we read, perhaps especially including the Bible, requires interpretation. None of us takes the Bible “just as it reads” and follows it all literally (whatever the word “literally” exactly means).
This is why Jews don’t stone people for adultery anymore. It’s why many Christian women in America don’t wear head coverings when they pray. And it’s why most Christian men don’t sleep in a different bed from their wives for the seven days around her monthly period.
Simply put, we all engage in interpretation. And try as we might to sometimes claim otherwise, none of us stick to a “plain reading” of the Bible at all times.
The last few weeks, I’ve made my proposal about what the Bible is (which you can read here and here).
Now, I want to try to provide a framework by which we can try to make sense of it.
I’ve actually written about this before, and I could write about it until eternity, but I want to try my hand at briefly explaining how to approach the Bible from an interpretive perspective (what is often called “hermeneutics”).
Again, this is a huge subject that could take up—and has taken up—volumes and volumes of reflection from people who are far smarter than I am. But here’s a “101” version of how I try to approach the Bible.
Rule book? Science book? History book? All of the above? None of the above?
First, I want to say this: I believe the primary reason for which God inspired the Bible is to draw humankind back into full and eternal union with himself (my friend, and fellow Seventh-day Adventist theologian, John Peckham, thus summed up his understanding of this in his recent introduction to Adventist theology—reflected in the title of the book, God With Us).
Implicit in this proposal is the belief that, despite its diversity, the Bible has some level of “unity” to it—which is probably taken for granted by many Jesus-followers, but not at all obvious to others.
At the very least, I believe the writers of the Bible all came from a single religious community (the people of Israel) and thought of themselves as united in their hope to reveal God’s desire for communion with creation, and the ways in which God’s people—and, eventually through them, the world—could experience and extend that communion to others.
What this also means, by the way, is that I don’t think the primary reason for which God inspired the Bible is so that he could micromanage our lives, or set the record straight about historical events, or give us detailed scientific explanations about quantum mechanics.
This isn’t to say that I don’t think the Bible has anything to say about any of those things—or that it is totally useless in these arenas.
But these things are not its main goal. They are largely incidental to the main goal.
As many others have noted before me, I therefore see the Bible as a unified story, following a particular trajectory that will one day end in “happily ever after.”
In this sense, the Bible has bookends—beginning with the universe in a perfect state in Genesis, and ending in a perfect state in Revelation. Everything in between, we might say, describes how perfection was lost and how perfection will be regained.
Or, perhaps more poignantly and appealingly, how union with God was lost and how union with God can and will be regained.
This is what I try to keep in mind when reading the Bible.
Of course, no writer of the Bible explicitly identifies this as the story they were writing. There’s not a single verse in Exodus or Ezekiel or Ephesians that spells this all out explicitly.
But I do believe that when we take a step back from the mosaic that is the Bible, this is the picture that emerges.
And seeing this picture prevents us from missing the proverbial forest for the trees.
Let me illustrate what I mean: I remember hearing the creators of the “Bible Project” (which I’d highly recommend) fielding questions a few years back about whether various laws in the Hebrew Bible applied to Christians today.
I loved Tim Mackie’s response.
He essentially said that when reading the Bible, people must ever keep in mind that the writers of those particular passages were living during a different part of the story. We therefore can’t start with the assumption that rules and regulations that were given to specific people in an earlier part of the story automatically apply to those of us living in a later part of the story.
Mackie wasn’t at all implying that none of it is relevant or applies to us.
But we first need to locate what part of the story we’re reading, and how it contributes to the overall trajectory of the story, before we try to apply these various laws willy-nilly (and especially before we start trying to tell other people that those laws apply to them, and they therefore better get in line—or else).
For some, this may sound way too complicated. We’d prefer a “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” approach. Life is more simple that way.
To be clear, while I do believe there are some pretty simple things we can glean from the Bible (love of God, love of neighbor; the importance of Jesus and his desire for eternal communion with us), I also don’t want to take shortcuts. I want to be patient with my reading, believing that God is primarily trying to draw me into his heart of love and transform me into that image of love—not give me quick answers. These things take time.
Let me also say one more thing about this: I believe, in the Bible, we see what John Calvin referred to as an “accommodationist” view of God. That is, God accommodated himself to the world in both what he revealed to the Bible’s writers (and how he revealed it), and what he required of his people throughout their history. He accommodated (and still accommodates) himself to our intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and ethical capacities.
This has to be the case, since God is infinite and his knowledge and wisdom are infinite, and we are—to put it simply—not.
Thus, the way he has to explain himself to us involves a far greater gap than if a PhD mathematician tried to explain algebra to a six-year-old.
Jesus essentially explained this in a passage quoted by Matthew that serves as one of the most clarifying interpretive filters I’ve encountered in the Bible.
When some religious leaders asked Jesus if it was permissible to divorce one’s wife for any reason (as the Torah permitted), Jesus responded that this law, expressed by Moses, was given not because it was God’s ideal, but because of the “hardness” of people’s hearts.
In other words, God had an ideal, but he realized that his people were nowhere close to being able to reach that ideal, so he had to take half-measures to start at least moving them in the right direction.
To use the analogy again, God wanted (and wants) human beings to do calculus, but we’re collectively only capable of doing addition and subtraction.
So he starts where we are, hoping to gradually lead us into greater awareness, understanding, and practice.
Using this interpretive filter may seem like a convenient “get out of jail free” card.
But I do believe that, when carefully applied, it helps clarify—though perhaps doesn’t completely answer—a lot of questions (e.g., “Why did God allow slavery in the Old Testament?” “Why did God command Abraham to sacrifice Isaac?” “Why did God prohibit the Israelites from wearing clothing with mixed fibers?” “Why did God’s people practice polygamy in the Old Testament?” “Why did Jesus have only male disciples?”).
I could say a lot more about all this, but here’s the bottom line for me when it comes to the way I approach the Bible: the Bible is a diverse though unified story that portrays how God is seeking to win humankind back to love so that we can experience and live out eternal communion with himself and with each other.
Through this process, he accommodated himself to the various experiences, capabilities, and contexts of both the individual writers of the Bible and those reading those writings—ever in the service of seeking to win us eternally to love.
Further reading and listening
I’ve said quite a bit about this topic in the last few weeks, though I could say a lot more. Instead of doing that, however, I figured I’d just point to a few resources that have been helpful to me in trying to make sense of what the Bible is and how to approach it.
To be clear, there are tons of resources I’ve consulted with over the course of my (theological) life—many of which I don’t even remember—that have contributed to my understanding of the topic. However, here are some of the resources that have been the most explicitly helpful to me in making sense of the Bible—some of which may only be tangentially so (recognizing that I don’t agree with every jot and tittle from any of these resources, and probably have major disagreements with some of them):
Scripture and the Authority of God, by N. T. Wright
The New Testament and the People of God, by N. T. Wright
“Bible Project” with Tim Mackie
Grasping God’s Word: A Hands-On Approach to Reading, Interpreting, and Applying the Bible, by J. Scott Duvall and J. Daniel Hays (Note: I read this book over 20 years ago for my undergraduate course in hermeneutics. I don’t know how much of it I would agree with now, but I remember it being so eye-opening to me as a young undergraduate theology student.)
Canonical Theology, by John Peckham
Inspiration, by Alden Thompson
“Sola Scriptura, Inerrantist Fundamentalism, and the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: Is ‘No Creed But the Bible’ a Workable Solution?” by Woodrow W. Whidden
Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, The Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge, by Kevin Vanhoozer
Proper Confidence, by Lesslie Newbigin
What Is the Bible? by Rob Bell (Note: I did a series of sermons back in 2020 that had this same title, which is the title of this short newsletter series as well of course, without realizing that Bell had written a book with the same name a few years before. I appreciate some things about the book—even if I do have some major points of disagreement with it.)
The Prophets, by Abraham Heschel
The Bible in America, by Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll
Unitarian Christianity, by William Ellery Channing
To read Part 1, click here.
To read Part 2, click here.
Shawn is a pastor in Portland, Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.