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READING WITH THE
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ow do we take the Bible as God’s Word and make it the text for our lives when we come across words like these?
“O Daughter of Babylon, you devastator! … Happy shall be they who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” PS 137:8–9
We can just ignore them. We can denounce them, allowing that they may reflect a sense of right and wrong that seemed appropriate at one time, but surely shouldn’t have found its way into the Bible. We can equivocate them, writing them off as words of a bogus “Old Testament God of Wrath” that have (thankfully) been countered by those of the (real) “New Testament God of Love.” Or … we can ask if the presence of hard words demands we slow down and seek a deeper wisdom, maybe even make a
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Bible to have two dimensions: the perspective of its human authors who wrote the words, and the perspective of its divine Author the Holy Spirit who, in the imagery of 2 Timothy 3:16, “breathed” the words. Our forebears in the faith believed that, at one level, a challenging Old Testament passage like this one from Psalm 137 has its place in Israel’s unfolding story of covenant-formation, -breaking, -keeping, -renewal. They understood that at another level, as Peter says, every passage has its place in anticipating “sufferings destined for Christ and his subsequent glory” (1 Pet 1:11), and, as Paul says, was “written for our instruction, upon whom the ends of the ages has come” (1 Cor 10:11).
SEEING MULTIPLIED In a brilliant little essay entitled “The Superiority of PreCritical Exegesis,” church historian David Steinmetz explains the mindset of Christians from antiquity like the fifth century monk John Cassian (A.D. 360–435), who wrote of a fourfold sense of Scripture. The sum of that approach is:
Rather than ignore obscurities, with the help of the ancients we can embrace the truth that all Scripture was written for our instruction, and we can commit to wrestling with challenging passages. lifeline call to ancient readers who had a more nuanced take on Scripture and its levels of meaning.
DOUBLE VISION Our forebears in the faith read at two levels: the literary and the spiritual. They did so because they understood the 26 W O R S H I P L E A D E R | W O R S H I P L E A D E R .C O M | VO L . 29, N O. 1
What, in the first place, is the plain sense, the simple course of literary and historical exposition? In the second place, though, especially when there are challenging points, where we may be tempted to ignore, denounce, or equivocate: What might a passage teach us about faith—that is, about the coming Christ and His Church? What might a passage teach us about love—that is, about
