Why no one merely reads the Bible

An important point in my faith was the day I learned that I don’t merely read the Bible – I interpret the Bible. Initially, this came as quite a jolt because it introduced the possibility that I might, dare I say it, actually be wrong about some things.

Although it’s a simple idea, the concept of hermeneutics (i.e. the study of the theory of interpretation), has profound implications for how we approach the text and our faith as a whole. During the enlightenment we adopted this idea that we could get beyond ourselves (emotions, histories, psychological makeup, cultural biases, etc.) and engage the text with pure reason: like a scientist approaching his experiment: cold, unattached, and uninvolved. In this way, we believed we could discern the clear meaning of a particular text. We could get rid of ourselves and crawl into the brain of say, Paul, John or whoever the writer may have been, and see what they “really” meant. However, at the heart of post-modernism is a deep critique of this idea of “pure reason” and, drawing on that insight post-modern studies in hermeneutics current thinkers have deeply questioned the ability we humans have to understand “the clear meaning” of texts – particularly complex scientific, legal, and religious texts. The reality is that we aren’t uninterested or passive observers – instead we’re readers who bring all of ourselves to the text.

There’s an important point that needs to be made at this juncture concerning religious text’s specifically, just because a text can read in many ways doesn’t mean that an infinite number of interpretations is legitimate. One example Peter Rollins gives in his book How (Not) to Speak of God is the difference between the set of numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… and 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4… If we take these numbers as various interpretations then in the former we see an infinite number of interpretations while in the latter we see a mathematical boundary that contains the infinite. In other words, the phrase “God is love” can be interpreted in many ways – and in fact has been interpreted differently down through the centuries of Christendom. Yet, we see the boundaries provided in the sense that the phrase “God is love” cannot be interpreted as “God is hate”, or “God is hurtful and embittered”.

In the same book, Rollins encourages us to approach the Bible like we would our favorite painting – the point isn’t to leave ourselves at the doorway and approach it purely from the mind of the artist – obsessively focused on what it meant to them. Instead, we bring ourselves to the painting, experience it, which in turn gives rise to our interpretations of it – sometimes multiple interpretations of it through the years. Yet, again we see a sense of boundary because a picture of two people clasped in a loving embrace wouldn’t give rise to interpretations of hatred or disgust. What’s strange is that the more we research a painting’s history and engage in conversation with those from the past (often via books) and those present to us now, we often find that it complicates the meaning instead of clarifying. I think this concept is largely lost on those within the church who refuse to admit that the Bible cannot be reduced to a single interpretation without doing massive violence to the text. The conservative Southern Baptist School I attend exhibits this belief by requiring all undergrads to take 2 semesters of Hebrew and Greek each. Why? Not simply because this will help us be better interpreters of the text (which is true), but rather because we’re operating under the mistaken belief that if we can learn the original languages of the Bible then we can get the correct interpretation. As someone who has taken 3 of 4 semesters required I can assure you that learning the original languages is no magic bullet to laying bare the plain meaning of any scripture. Actually, the opposite is true. It’s not until you immerse yourself in the original languages that you realize the challenging job translators have of taking words, sentences and concepts from one language and recreating them in another. Added to this complexity is the fact that words often have more than one meaning and, the fact that Hebrew and Greek don’t have a particular word order to their sentences as English words do. Instead we rely on endings attached to words to identify them as nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. and then do our best to recreate sentences in the way we think the original writer meant them. This is why I can’t help but smile at people who say they want a literal interpretation of the Bible, because they don’t realize that it would literally be un-readable.

I don’t believe the above insights should cause us to throw up our hands in despair and state “Oh great! Now we can’t know anything about the Bible!” Rather I think the point is to realize that jumping into the Biblical text is no easy task and shouldn’t be treated as such. Rather, we should be humbled and driven to seek out communities of faith – not where they claim to lay bare the meaning of the Scriptures (that’s when you should smell a rat), but where we can seek to enter into the holy task of participating in the ongoing conversation with the Church of the past and present.