Thy Word, Thy Difficult Word
2 Timothy 3:10-17; Psalm 119
September 27, 2015
Thy
word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.
As I pondered scripture this week
those words came to mind, and prompted me to wonder – out loud here – what’s
the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word bible?
I did some word-association with
Google. Google returns somewhere between a half million and 360 million quotes
about the bible, depending upon search terms. I’m not certain about much, but I
am certain that more people have opinions about the bible than have actually
read it. From the bumper sticker slogan, “God said it; I believe it; that
settles it,” to William Blake’s couplet, “Both read the Bible day and night,
but thou read black where I read white,” you can pretty much find every opinion
under the sun about the words gathered in this ancient collection of writings.
So, if we’re going to spend the
fall wrestling with difficult passages of scripture, it makes sense to begin in
the same place, with some common understandings of what scripture is, where it
came from, and how it properly functions in the life of the church and in our
own journeys of faith.
Let’s start with what it’s not. The
Bible is not a book with all the answers to all of life’s questions. It’s not
magic nor is it miraculous. My friend Tim Beal, in his book The Rise and Fall of the Bible, tells a
story on his teenage self that gets at this:
I tended to approach the Bible as though it were a
divine oracle of truth, the ultimate Magic 8 Ball. Ask it a question and it
would give you God’s answer. I’d close my eyes while flipping through it like a
dictionary, stop at random, and point my index finger somewhere on the open
page, trusting that it would land on the passage I needed to read at that
particular moment. This mode of biblical divination remains popular among kids
as well as adults to this day. Many people tell miracle stories about how it gave
them exactly the life-changing answer they needed. For me, not so much.
‘Does Joanne like me?”
Flip, flip, flip. Stop. Point.
‘He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his
privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord’ (Deuteronomy
23:1).
Eventually I learned to flip far enough through my
Bible to avoid the long legal discourses on skin diseases and crushed testicles
in Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. But I still didn’t find what I was
looking for.[1]
Tim is far from alone in struggling
to figure out what scripture is and what its role in faith should be. American
Presbyterians have a long history of wrestling with scripture. In the late 19th
and early 20th century the denomination was rent asunder in the
controversy between modernists and fundamentalists. The heart of that crisis
was profound disagreement over the scripture. Would we affirm the inerrancy of
the Bible, a literal virgin birth, a bodily resurrection, or would we take a
different route?
It’s important to note that
fundamentalism is not an ancient part of the faith, but rather a 19th-century
reaction to modernity, and, in particular, a reaction to the publication of
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in
1859, and the rise of various forms of literary criticism. Source criticism,
for example, began to demonstrate that the first five books of the Bible were
not written down by Moses but come from different sources at vastly different
points of ancient Israel’s history, and were written with vastly different
agendas.
The church was compelled to choose
between modernism and fundamentalism, in part, by Harry Emerson Fosdick’s 1922
sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” The sermon’s publication and national
dissemination cost Fosdick his position as pastor at First Presbyterian Church
in New York City, but its clarifying word also pushed the church to decide. His
great hymn, with which we opened worship this morning, reflects the challenges
of his time.
It’s worth noting, in passing, that
Williams Jennings Bryan, who argued the fundamentalists’ position at the Scopes
Trial in 1925, was a leader in the movement within the General Assembly of the
Presbyterian Church to have Fosdick removed from his church in New York. Though
the fundamentalists won those early battles, before the decade was out the main
of the Presbyterian Church rejected fundamentalism, and we have never gone back.
Fosdick, by the way, never ceased
in pushing the church, and by the mid-30s, from his position as pastor of the
Riverside Church on the Upper West Side, Fosdick noted, “we cannot harmonize
Christ with modern culture. What Christ does to modern culture is to challenge
it.”[2]
Today, in our Book of Order, we
affirm “the scriptures to be the Word of God written, witnessing to God’s
self-revelation. Where that Word is read and proclaimed, Jesus Christ, the
Living Word is present by the inward witness of the Holy Spirit. For this reason,
the reading, hearing, preaching, and confessing of the Word are central to
Christian worship.”
Of course, that is about a clear as
mud when you begin to stir it around a little. It’s a fine statement of faith,
but it fails to say a lot about the texts in which our trust is supposed to be
invested.
So, where did this book – or, more
accurately – these books come from? And, more importantly, what does it mean
that we call them “the word of the Lord”?
It’s clear from scripture itself
that scripture has always been a central part of the life of faith in Judaism
and Christianity. The foundational monotheistic instruction, after all, begins,
“Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord alone … write these words on the
doorposts of your house and on your gates.” In other words, the written
testimony of the people of God forms the foundation of the faith.
Jesus’ first public act in the
gospel of Luke is to take down the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and read. That
act is described in a writing – the gospel – that begins by acknowledging that
“many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have
been fulfilled among us.” In other words, the text is central to the faith.
(Oh, and the fact that Jesus took down a scroll rather than a codex has its own
set of implications for how holy scripture would be used and how it would come
to shape the church.)
But, even bound as one book, the
text does not speak with one voice. It is, in fact, multiple texts from
multiple perspectives telling more than a single story, and irreducible to a
single narrative. It is frequently self referential, and it interprets itself
continuously.
I have noted regularly that Jesus
often reinterpreted the sacred scripture of his people – what we call the Old
Testament. “You have heard it said …” he would announce and quote scripture,
“but I say to you …” and he would rewrite the text for his context. This would
be called liberal interpretation in some quarters, and it is nothing new under
the sun.
Jesus’ “rewriting” was intentional. Not all of the
rewriting that has happened over the years was. That is to say, we know that
there’s a huge amount of variation from copy to copy of the ancient
manuscripts, and there is no such thing as an “original” text of the gospels or
other New Testament writings. Instead, there are literally thousands of
manuscripts and fragments with thousands of variants.
Most of the variants are
insignificant, but not all of them are. For example, early manuscripts include
four different endings to Mark. Mark is accepted as the oldest of the gospels
and was source material for Matthew and Luke.
What can it mean, then, to read
from our translations of the texts as eventually canonized more than 300 years
after their origins, and set the book down with the pronouncement, “this is the
word of the Lord”?
Given that incredibly complicated
and messy history, at the very least perhaps it means that God really does love
diversity and variety – even in the way the story of God is recorded. As Tim
Beal notes near the end of his Bible history, “if there’s one thing that this
‘story of the Book’ makes clear, it is that the only constant in the history of
the Bible is change.”[3]
For us, as we embark on a season of
reading some of the most challenging passages, I hope this will be a liberating
perspective. I hope we will feel freed of the baggage of believing that there
is only one correct interpretation. After all, the texts gathered as scripture
speak with many voices and offer various interpretations of themselves.
The Bible is far more than a single
story, and this, as my friend Tim explains, begins with the very first letter.
I’ll give him the final word this morning, about, as it were, the first word.
The first word of Genesis is the
Hebrew bere’shit (be-ray-sheet). As Tim explains,
Bere’shit can be translated two very different but
equally correct ways … [depending] on how we take the first letter, called bet, in relation to the word it
modifies, re’shit. Christian
tradition […] has generally taken re’shit
as a noun, from ro’osh, “beginning.”
[…] Taken that way, the bet is
translated as a preposition, “in.” Thus, “In the beginning, God created ….”
But the word re’shit
may also be translated as a verb form, meaning “began.” This is how Jewish
tradition has tended to take it in this verse. Taken that way, the bet is translated as “when” rather than
“in.” So, if we take re’shit as a
verb rather than as a noun, we get “when began” rather than “in the beginning,”
and the opening sentence of the Bible reads, “When God began to create […] the
heavens and the earth – the earth being formless and void, and darkness upon
the face of the deep, and the spirit of God upon the face of the waters – God
said, “There is light.” And there was light.
What’s the difference? In the first, we have
creation ex nihilo, out of nothing.
[…] In the second, by contrast, we have creation in media res, in the midst of things.[4]
Two completely different meanings
with vast implications for how we understand God, the universe, and everything
from two perfectly correct but irreconcilable translations of the first letter
of scripture. The word of the Lord is undecideable, from the beginning, and
thus the invitation to “listen for a word from God,” is always an invitation to
enter a conversation that rests on the form and power of the questions. For, if
we can ask the right questions our way will, indeed, be well lit. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
12:20 PM
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