The Rule of Love and the Witness of Scripture

The Rule of Love

I became a Christian in my early teen years. At that time, I realized that I needed to find a belief system that could give my life value and purpose. Identifying myself as a Christian, undergoing baptism, attending services at a local church, joining a Bible study group for young people—all of these activities gave birth to my sense of a meaningful relationship with a God who cared for me through the gift of the Spirit and the blessing of the scriptures.

During this time I tried to read and live out the teachings of the Bible as best I could. I memorized many of Paul’s letters—including the Book of Ephesians—and was especially struck by his call to readers in chapter 6 to put on the whole armor of God as aprotection against evil forces. But I read this passage not as a figurative trope for spiritual conflict. Instead, I saw it as a direct command to me to become a witness and a warrior for God. (I now reject violent imagery for my religious self-identification because I have become better aware of the deep problems with such language.) So in preparation for school one morning, I decked myself out in the chain mail of God’s legionnaires, according to Paul’s vision. I “girded my loins with truth” by writing “truth” in large block letters across the wide leather belt I wore in keeping with the fashion of the times. For the “breastplate of righteousness” I donned a tiedyed tee-shirt with the word “righteousness” emblazoned on the front and back in bold red letters. I put on tennis shoes with the word “peace” written all over them to ensure that my feet were “shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.” The baseball cap I wore, now transformed into the helmet of salvation, was so

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I saw it as a direct command to me to become a witness and a warrior for God.

identified accordingly, and the big Bible I was in the habit of carrying was painted with the phrase “sword of the Spirit” in fidelity to Paul’s martial description of proper Christian dress.

When my mother saw me ready for school in my strange Pauline costume she screamed that she would not allow me to embarrass myself in this way and insisted that I change into my normal attire. Crushed, I gave in to her demands, remembering that Paul also says in Ephesians 6 that children are to be obedient to their parents. Intuitively, I sensed that my mother’s insistence that I change clothes carried more weight than my robust attempt to interpret literally Paul’s teachings in order to be a better religious witness to others. This intuition stemmed largely from my mostlyinchoate conviction that a Christian should do whatever he or she can to promote charity and compassion in any given situation, and that while, on the one hand, I might make a splash on my high school campus with my quasi-military get-up, my mother, on the other hand, would suffer distress over her son’s increasingly strange behavior. I learned, in other words, that the Bible makes sense when conflicting passages are read in a sort of pointcounterpoint fashion with reference to some overarching principle of interpretation—in my case, that principle was something like Jesus’ love ethic.

My failed attempt to dress in strict obedience to Paul’s writing has taught me that discerning the theological truth of the Bible is largely a constructive rather than a descriptive enterprise. A reader doesn’t uncover the hidden or latent sense of the Bible buried deep within its pages but rather creates meaning through a sort of ge-

and the Witness of Scripture

that construal of a particular passage. In my exchange with my mother, I sensed that there was a hierarchy of meanings within the Bible that allows a reader to privilege one reading over another in fidelity to that hierarchy. That morning I learned a valuable lesson in biblical exegesis that has stuck with me ever since—namely, that biblical truth is not as obvious and straightforward as it may appear at first glance. The truth of the Bible can only be won by thoughtfully juxtaposing one interpretation over and against another through reference to a first principle that the interpreter considers to be self-evident and just.

At that time and now today, I think the overarching truth that should guide scriptural reading is that we are to love God with our whole selves even as God loves us; and that, in turn, we are to love one another even as we love our own selves. Desire for God above all else, generosity towards others, and compassion toward oneby

Mark Wallace Professor of Religion

stalt process of making sense of one passage in relation to others by appealing to a third factor or principle that trumps all others. Biblical reading, then, is a largely intertextual affair. It consists of weighing the relative merits of this or that interpretation in relation to some higher principle that helps one make sense of the individual medley—or sometimes cacophony—of the passages in question. Biblical reading always operates with a canon within a canon. Every reader tacitly or openly operates with a “working canon” concerning what she thinks is the right hermeneutical yardstick by which to measure the relative merits of this or

Desire for God above all else, generosity towards others, and compassion toward oneself—this is the heartfelt disposition that should guide all manner of biblical hermeneutics.

self—this is the heartfelt disposition that should guide all manner of biblical hermeneutics. In Matthew 22, when Jesus’ rivals pressed him about which commandment in the law is the greatest, he answered in a twofold manner, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” In his response, perhaps Jesus was remembering the 1st century BCE Rabbi Hillel the Elder, who articulated the Golden Rule as “that which ishateful to you, do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; now go and learn it.” Or he was citing Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, respectively. In any event, Jesus’ principle that God is love and that we are enjoined to love God, and to imitate God’s love in compassion toward our neighbor—to not do to others what we would not want done to ourselves, as Hillel the Elder put it, or to do others as we would have done to ourselves, as Jesus said—is the bedrock assumption I believe liberates the Bible to own its best possibilities, even as it sets free the faithful critique of the Bible when it becomes captive to teachings that betray its better insights. At many critical points, the Bible shines forth the radiance of God’s compassion, and we can look to these revelatory flickers, and sometimes extended rays of light, as illuminations of new ways of being in the world toward which the Spirit calls each of us. r

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