“Ancient words, ever true Changing me and changing you We have come with open hearts O let the ancient words impart� -- Lynn DeShazo
Interpretation's Arduous Task I am captured by language. Years ago, when guys my age were able to detail the intricacies of the internal combustion engine (by taking them apart and putting them together, no less!), and when they could tell the year of a car by the cut of a bumper, I could be found reading the dictionary and the thesaurus. This is true.
I am not suggesting this particular practice was the best path to take, but whatever the disadvantage my attraction to language has given me in the real world, I have been well served by this love of words in presenting to others the strange dialect of the Bible. This, of course, is not meant to claim any sort of accomplishment in my writing or speaking. Far from it. Rather, I only mean to let the reader know that I take the language portion of my ministry here very seriously indeed. To put a fine edge on it, words are exceptionally important to me. After all, what I have to give our church in the end, may be distilled down to my presence and my words, both of which I am called to somehow flesh-out from the TEXT of the Bible. The Hermeneutical Task As A pastor, then, I would express my use of language through preaching, teaching and conversation as the hermeneutical task. Hermeneutics (a word that may sound as foreign to you as rack-and-pinion steering is to me) may be defined as the interpretation – the understanding and explanation -- of Holy Scripture. Allow me to unpack this idea: I stand before a TEXT; its ancient cadence ripples the air. Will it speak to us again? Will these little snippets of words, placed together as they are, pitch and rumble and roar? AncientFuture God, just what will you say to us as a Church this coming Sunday morning? We pray: Speak now! Speak again! Speak to us from this ancient TEXT! Thy servants will be listening and we are ready to obey! Put this way, the hermeneutical task may sound rather benign, but I assure you it is not. I remember a preacher from long ago saying that the appropriation of the TEXT is like the shedding of blood (!). While I wouldn’t go that far, I do understand what he meant. For, to bring the ancient TEXT to life again, using the clatter of our twenty-first century’s myopic words, figures-of-speech, dialects and vernaculars, stands as an exceedingly difficult mission. First, the TEXT is hard to hear because language only poorly communicates an understanding of abstract truth, let alone something as thick as the Word of God.
Simply put, the encounter with God through his Word cannot be contained in language. He is simply too large and present to neatly fit within the contour of our words. Language radiates toward God, it approximates him, but it cannot sound his depth. So, when I speak in order to display God through his Word, I know the language will splinter under the stress. This is inevitable. Second, the TEXT struggles to be heard today because the high view of the Bible that most of us were taught (inspired, authoritative) has been consistently undermined by all segments of modern learning. One need not be a theologian to recognize that the perplexing world of the Bible has no resonance in our day. In point of fact, America and the Western societies are about as far away from the world-view of the Bible as one can get. Our culture’s understanding of biology, geology, history, psychology, sociology, and even medicine have not only stiffly disputed the idiom of the TEXT, they have dismissed outright the historic structures of Christendom. So that what we face today is a situation where, at best, scripture is considered by the culture-at-large as foolish, and at worst bigoted. The upshot of this is that truly modern people, and most especially post-modern people, have little time for an explanation of the universe that includes first-century saviors, salvation by bloodshed, and the boogeyman of hell. Finally, and most significantly, the TEXT is difficult to hear because of the cognitive severance we feel from the TEXT. The Bible was written to people and by people who lived in a different place and time (obviously), who spoke different languages (this is also obvious), and who owned a different world-view (this is not as evident, but very important). This means that there is a distance between us and the Word of God, a distance that includes language, culture and most importantly the dullness of the interpreter.
Important implications flow from this. For instance, no matter how familiar we are with the biblical material, each TEXT demands that we diligently do the arduous work of interpretation, and this demand confronts us at each new sitting. In addition, I would stress that an unexamined familiarity with the TEXT actually may crash the interpretative act because, to blatantly assign the customary meaning to a TEXT without struggling to hear the Author again speak life into those ancient words, is to run the danger of freezing that TEXT into some sort of calcified belief -once alive, once vital, but now stiff and cold as a stump. If faithful interpretation is to be attempted at all then, our assumptions must be visible and on the table. To say all this another way, faithful interpretation means I must handle those ancient words with what Paul Ricour has called an attitude of suspicion. Suspicion means I repeatedly ask myself these two questions: First, am I about to impose my preferred meaning upon the TEXT (reading into it), or am I brave enough to let it speak for itself, even when it cuts me and even when I disagree with it? Here I am suspicious of my own motives. Second, is what the TEXT appears to be saying to me faithful to its single-plot of truth? (Frederick Buchner) In other words, do the years of various interpretations, laminated over the TEXT by past interpreters, really convey the understanding that the God-of-the-TEXT intends for today? Here I must carry to the TEXT the suspicion that something new may be presented. Remember: He that hath ears let him hear! That is, the God who stands behind the TEXT might be forcing freshbreath into those ancient words, new words for new wineskins. But am I attuned to these crisp whispers? My suspicion is that I am not, so I must be vigilant. Finally, what must guide the overall interpretive work is the rather stunning reflection that we are in conversation with the living God through his Word, and that his Word to us is God-breathed! (2 Timothy 3:16) That is, we must remember that the TEXT is a carrier of the breath of the God, and his utterances may burn into us like a lava stream, melting the marbled heart, warming the suffering soul and confronting the listener all over again with this living Ancient of Days. God is not
dead nor doth he sleep. This is the God who is there, really there. And this is the God who is not silent, often to our startled surprise. You see, I am compelled to an irreverent question: Does this describe our personal experience with the Bible? How long has it been since we heard His voice reverberate in the TEXT? Could this silence be due to our neglect? Is it we who have walked away? Is it we who suppress his voice by ignoring his call? Do we prefer lukewarm doses of milky pabulum to the thick, salty streams of God’s utterance? Do we prefer a god of the museum -- dusty, entombed, safe? Do we prefer a god who has spoken to longdead listeners in the ancient-past, to one who confronts us in pew, in the office and on the rocky pavement of the post-modern city? A god who now speaks would be the living God. And this God might demand! This God might sear! This God might even sing and dance! Crossing the TEXTURAL Divide We might well ask, when we consider such stiff resistance to the clamor of the TEXT, if it is possible for us to carry on as Christians in the face the culture’s shift to neo-paganism and our own seeming tone-deafness to the Bible? I contend that this impairment is especially acute now that we are forced to move beyond the collapse of Christendom that we mentioned above. We might well have been able to coast in our religious practices, never much noticing our dullness to the Word, if Christendom had survived. But now, nothing remains to prop-up our profession of faith. All around us the culture ignores our world-view and their disregard shreds our strength. We simply don’t know how to be Christians in a postChristian world. What we do know, instinctively, is that we are not where we should be. We know that we have been shoved to the margins of the culture, and that we have no home. Said another way, we have lost the practice of the ancient faith and we don’t know how to re-capture it because we don’t know how to be followers of
Jesus in the same way we used to, when doing so from the old paths just doesn’t make much sense anymore. This may tempt us to think that the message of the cross has collapsed with Christendom. After all, doesn’t God need us? Doesn’t he need the hinges of Western Christendom to bend the path of history to his will? I mean, if Western Christian ideas have truly dissolved, how can God continue his work? Who will be his missionaries? Who will train his pastors? Who will produce his trinkets and mementos? How will his good news be presented? The simple fact is, however, God does not exist for the benefit of culture, either Christian or otherwise. For example, many today are seeking a religious revival for America, but one suspects this may be motivated more by nostalgic Americanism than by the desire for genuine revival. If this is so, what is really sought is a return to the structures of Christendom. This return is futile. More importantly, I wonder if we have any understanding what this place would look like if a genuine revival of biblical religion actually occurred. Just what do we think would happen if the LORD of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob actually showed-up at church some Sunday morning? Annie Dillard describes it this way: “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible to the conditions. Does anyone have foggiest idea what sort of power we invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where can never return.” (Teaching A Stone To Talk) The Psalmist portrays it this way:
The mighty God, the LORD, has spoken; he has summoned all humanity from east to west! From Mount Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines in glorious radiance. Our God approaches with the noise of thunder. Fire devours everything in his way, and a great storm rages around him. Heaven and earth will be his witnesses as he judges his people: "Bring my faithful people to me – those who made a covenant with me by giving sacrifices." Then let the heavens proclaim his justice, for God himself will be the judge. (Psalm 50:1-6) The writer of the book of Hebrews declares it most clearly: It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Hebrews 10:31) Would it surprise us to discover that God is not interested in the survival of any worldly kingdom, neither a Christian one nor an American one? Would we be shocked to learn, instead, that he is actually most interested in the “kingdom of the Son whom he loves?” Could that be why we are directed emphatically to: “Hear ye him!” For those on the Jesus-way, the goal of history is neither a return to Christendom nor an American renaissance. Rather, in Jesus we are confronted with the one titanic truth of both history and of the future. It is an imminent truth and a certain reality, one that sucks out the marrow all other thoughts, all other actions, all other momentums and all other kingdoms: God's secret plan has now been revealed to us; it is a plan centered on Christ, designed long ago according to his good pleasure. And this is his plan: At the right
time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ – everything in heaven and on earth. (Ephesians 1:9,10) Think of it, the point of history is not democratic capitalism, the military industrial complex, or even the cure for cancer. No, the final resting place of history is the consummation of all things under the leadership of Jesus. Believe me, I know how unpopular this sounds to the post-modern ear. I know that pluralism disallows such declarations as this: Jesus is Lord. But if anything is clear from the TEXT this declaration is. Plainly, Jesus is God’s final (read: ultimate and complete) word to us. Jesus is the Word of God and the standard by which we understand the written TEXT. To us who believe, scripture is much more that a mere testimony to the Christ, just as Jesus is much more that the focus of divine revelation. In point of fact, all TEXTS find their perfection in him because he is the pinnacle of revelation, and therefore the criterion by which the Bible is to be understood. Hear again these words from author of the book of Hebrews: Long ago God spoke many times and in many ways to our ancestors through the prophets. But now in these final days, he has spoken to us through his Son. God promised everything to the Son as an inheritance, and through the Son he made the universe and everything in it. The Son reflects God's own glory, and everything about him represents God exactly. He sustains the universe by the mighty power of his command. After he died to cleanse us from the stain of sin, he sat down in the place of honor at the right hand of the majestic God of heaven. (Hebrews 1:1-3) What must be most difficult to swallow is the discovery that Christianity is actually in something of a revival, just not in North America! How discouraging to learn that God somehow is reviving other Christians around the world, but not us. How shaken we must be to learn that North of the equator the faith is deformed and in decline, but south of the equator the Christian faith is the fastest growing religion in the world! Down there, among the unenlightened, apparently there are thousands
of conversions, cataclysms of healings and the stereophonic sounds of Pentecostal tongues. Down there, the TEXT is not only believed, it is practiced. Down there, seemingly, God is heard. Even though it wounds us to be left out, what are we to do? How can we invoke the name of the ancient-future God with sincerity when we do not really need him (consumeristic self-sufficiency), when we refuse to allow him the place of honor (pride of life, of position, of place), and when we seek resurrection without the cross (we’ve arrived, we are sure of what we are sure, and we have no more need to hear him anymore). The Hermeneutical Praxis Can anything be done? It will probably come as no surprise to the reader that it is my conviction we need a fresh encounter with the God of the TEXT, perhaps not as our brothers and sisters in Christ south of the equator are experiencing it, but a juicy encounter nonetheless. Somehow, we must re-moisten the pulse of the Word of God in our lives. Somehow we must re-immerse our lives in the TEXT, taking what we “know” of scripture and re-submitting it to the throb of God’s new tones. Somehow we must allow the Holy Spirit to re-clarify the Word to us by retuning our hearts to the pitch of his voice. This means we must do the tough work of interpretation. Yet, this is decidedly not the work of commentaries, lexicons, seminaries or source criticisms. Rather, it is a quiet listening, a brooding, and a thinking through the TEXT. It is you and me, standing soul-naked and exposed before the living Word of God, and letting the language of the Spirit crash in on us so that we are driven to respond.
To really interpret the TEXT, then, we must erect a textual praxis. That is, we must finally understand that God’s Word to us does not contain ideas to be catalogued, but truths to be lived. What is called forth from us is a concrete practice of the Word of God as opposed to a recitation of threadbare proof-texts. This means Jesus is to so be the practice of our lives that he is both heard and followed. This means we must be so conformed to the practice of his image, that his character is formed in us. And this forming cannot occur apart from the cotangent of the Word of God, the power of the Holy Spirit’s rehearsal of the TEXT to our ears and our own determination to follow his calling on our life even to the death if necessary. Happily, the first call of Jesus still echoes -- “Follow me!” “Follow me!” Here we are prompted to action. Here we are reminded that we have work to do. Here we are taken from the Jordan River, the Mount of Olives and even Calvary’s cross to the post-modern city where our streets are lined with need, where kids live with rats and where crack-houses stream little broken glass vials into the gutter. To hear this simple call again, “follow me,” is to be reminded that what is supremely presented to us in the TEXT is a particular way to live. St. Paul writes: “Concentrate in doing your best for God, work you won’t be ashamed of, laying out the truth plain and simple. Stay clear of pious talk that is only talk. Words are not mere words, you know, If they’re not backed by a godly life, they accumulate like poison in the soul. (2 Timothy 2:15, 16 – from The Message) The Final Hermeneutic What is at stake for us in all of this, finally, is the Word of God itself. If we refuse to re-hear and to re-enact the TEXT, then we quite literally are in danger of turning from the voice of God. Remember: “If you love me keep my commandments.” To prevent this we must be determined to attend and to live-out the truth of the Word, and this attention and this living-out must be done with others. St. Paul understands, even if we do not, that “…the church of the living God…is the pillar and support of the truth.” A rendering of this TEXT today means to tell us that, in
a world of people, it is exceedingly difficult to believe anything by oneself. Therefore, we stand in the truth, together. Then, if the society should humiliate us because we follow the Nazarene, if they seek to dismiss us as bigoted and antique, if they should drive us into exile (either cognitive or literal), if they should cause us to suffer financially, does this ultimately matter? In fact, will any of it matter when together we face that final moment? Have you considered the final moment when we who are fools for Christ become the fool-makers? When at the name of Jesus, all things and all people from all the ages are brought under his tutelage? In that day will it make a difference how much we own or how much we know? Will the privileges of rank hold sway then? Hardly. I would make a case that the last moment of the universe, that very moment of Jesus’ climactic succession, must guide our lives and inform our confrontation with the TEXT. By living in the shadow of his consummation, we are provided the final context for our understanding of the Word … a final hermeneutic. Like those first disciples, we must ever live under the sound of those angelic messengers who stood beside them after Jesus’ ascension: As they were straining their eyes to see him [Jesus’ ascension], two white-robed men suddenly stood there among them. They said, ‘Men of Galilee [and by extension, women and men from disciples from Madison County], why are you standing here staring at the sky? Jesus has been taken away from you into heaven. And someday, just as you saw him go, he will return!’” (Acts 1:10,11)
We cannot stand staring at the sky, but neither can we forget that the sky holds our future. What will fire us to live-out the TEXT day-by-day is our being captured by the biblical idea that this same Jesus will return. From this truth we can find our way to life, we can discover the gravity of the TEXT and we can encounter the movement and the momentum of the Jesus’ Spirit within us. If this preview of Jesus’ absolute and concluding Lordship becomes our conviction, if we are convinced that one day we will literally stand before Author of the TEXT, then we may begin to understand what really matters in life, and this understanding could open a genuine dialogue with him, the one, true living God. He is the one who calls us to obey by walking the Jesus-way and who promises that his presence is enough for us, even to the very end of the age. Hear then the words of St. Paul: Another reason for right living is that you know how late it is; time is running out. Wake up, for the coming of our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is almost gone; the day of salvation will soon be here. So don't live in darkness. Get rid of your evil deeds. Shed them like dirty clothes. Clothe yourselves with the armor of right living, as those who live in the light. We should be decent and true in everything we do, so that everyone can approve of our behavior. Don't participate in wild parties and getting drunk, or in adultery and immoral living, or in fighting and jealousy. But let the Lord Jesus Christ take control of you, and don't think of ways to indulge your evil desires. (Romans 13:11-14)