I’ve never met the philosopher Richard M., but I’ve enjoyed his ruminations on the Web enormously.
A week or so ago, he wrote in a brief note that he might soon post an essay to the Web about “how modern Friends ought to read the Bible”.
This tantalizing suggestion was followed by an actual essay, last Thursday, under the title, “The Authority of the Bible”.
I wound up holding that essay in the Light all weekend long.
The main thing that came to me — with more and more force as the weekend passed — is that in this essay Richard approached the Bible as an outsider, examining it with an outsider’s detachment, as he addressed his fellow outsiders. (Thus: “I do not think that any reasonably thoughtful and educated person can find this alternative [using the Bible as proof of what is true] plausible if they give it a serious test.”)
I understand that approach, and sympathize. If you are an outsider to the Bible, treating it this way is a totally natural and honest way to begin your relationship with it.
But it’s not the only natural and honest way to relate to the Bible, nor even necessarily the best one. And that recognition is what provokes me to write this response.
Most Christians — including most Christian Quakers — are, I think, more inclined to approach the Bible as insiders, which is to say, as people whose lives are embedded within the same great story that the Bible introduces. So for them, the Bible is not an objective textbook that one examines with detachment, like a school board considering a proposed new civics text. Rather, it is a collection of the testimonies of some very remarkable people in the far past of one’s own extended family, whom one looks at through the rose-colored spectacles of personal kinship. In a nutshell, it’s a sort of family photo album.
Richard’s concern, in his essay, regarded Christians who do what is frequently described as “proof-texting”: holding up isolated passages of the Bible as “proof” that this or that is true. (E.g.: “What do you mean, it’s okay to eat green eggs and ham? Read Hepzibah 7:49, you unbeliever, where it clearly says: Thou shalt not eat green eggs with ham and live!!”) Richard’s concern warmed my heart, because that sort of proof-texting bothers me, too.
Any really heavy reliance on proof-texting is a sign of disease in a religion. When a religion is vital, alive and healthy to the tips of its extremities, its followers are so immersed in its vision and practice, and its way of understanding comes so naturally to them, that they have little need of such proof-texting: their own lives bear sufficient witness to the Truth that no further props are generally needed.
Extensive proof-texting comes in when a religion is moribund, and its limbs are starting to grow cold. At that point, its members begin citing proof texts in an effort to jump-start a life that no longer pulses naturally through the body.
But this isn’t to say that all proof-texting is unhealthy. Sometimes, as in Peter’s address in Acts 2, the proof text actually succeeds in drawing its hearers to new life. Sometimes, as in Christ’s scriptural citations to his antagonists, it is deliberately addressed to deaf ears, and antagonizes the owners of those ears still further, but in such a way as to improve some onlookers. It’s not always done so clumsily, or by a preacher so uncomprehending, that it serves only to discredit the speaker and hurt his cause.
Most Christians do some proof-texting, and some do an awful lot. But I don’t experience that proof-texting is the center of most Christians’ relationship with the Bible. Really heavy-duty proof-texting seems to me to be concentrated in the far right wing of the church — that is, among the one-third of churchgoers to whom religion is vitally important, but who are themselves very far from the confidence of the early believers, and who therefore feel deeply threatened by any idea not clearly affirmed by their own teachers.
For most of the rest of Christianity — because they feel themselves embedded in the story — they do see the Bible as a sort of family album. And while one can and sometimes does pull out the family album to settle questions (“There! You see what he’s holding in that photo? Green eggs and ham!!”) — an act which is indeed proof-texting — the more common thing is to pull the volume out just to steep oneself in the world and personalities it depicts.
Someone who approaches the Bible as a family album is much less likely to feel threatened by an idea that maybe, e.g., Paul was mistaken on some particular point, than someone who takes the Bible to be the spiritual equivalent of a standard physics text or code of law. It’s okay to disagree with deceased family members, whether publicly or privately, whereas it’s really not okay at all to disagree with What’s Real or What’s Right.
And it feels particularly okay to disagree if — as is the case with most Christians — the actual life of the religion in question pulses tangibly in one’s own daily experience. One’s own experience then becomes sufficient proof that one is on the right track.
It is for this reason that I have some difficulty with my friend Richard’s closing recommendation — that “we should read the Bible looking for truth and not merely for truth as we already see it.”
Again, I understand and value the reasons why Richard makes this recommendation. And I’m not trying to say that it’s wrong! It’s always good to be looking for truth, no matter what one is looking at!
But to follow this recommendation, without any further guidance, can leave the newcomer who has been taught that the Bible is a sort of answer book like a physics text or municipal code, still looking on it as a pretender to that sort of rôle — a pretender which we are now approaching warily but with an open mind, like a hiker approaching an unfamiliar snake.
Me, I’d say: forget the whole idea that the Bible is anything like a physics text or municipal code book!
The Christians who take the Bible as a sort of family album today are, therefore, the ones who are closest to the spirit in which most of it was originally assembled.
Moreover, as far as I know, only the priestly law of Moses and the book of the Apocalypse (Revelation) make any actual claim on their own behalf to be at a higher level of authority than a story told at second hand possesses. The Gospels, the histories, and the prophetic and apostolic works do not claim any higher authority than that for themselves, but instead assign all higher authority to the God whom they are laboring to describe.
And as regards the law of Moses, its claim to possess a higher authority in-and-of-itself largely folded for Christians when the church set aside the laws of cleanliness and ritual almost two millennia ago. Whereas, regarding the book of the Apocalypse, which explicitly asserts in its final verses that it possesses such higher authority in and of itself, there are many genuine Christians, including the Greek Orthodox and Syrian establishments and the Protestant leader Martin Luther, who never accepted it as fully worthy even of the stature accorded to other books in the Bible.
Personally, I think that approaching the Bible as a family album is far healthier than approaching it as a book of supposedly definitive statements on every aspect of life. It leaves the spirit of the worshiper free, in the same sort of freedom that a child enjoys in the bosom of a healthy family. The child of such a family is drawn into the spirit of God by the life of the family in which he is raised, not by proof-texting!
And that, in fact, is how the early Friends understood the Bible — if I may be forgiven a little proof-texting of my own —
The scriptures or bible … contain many various passages … of things transacted and done in a time and state not suitable to that of man in the beginning, nor to that of the gospel or new covenant: as, for a man to have several wives, or many concubines at once. It was not so in the beginning, nor ought it to be so now, yet such things are recorded in scripture of divers persons, without any expression of censure.
— George Whitehead, The Presbyter’s Antidote Tried (1673); repr. in Penn and Whitehead, The Christian Quaker, and His Divine Testimony Stated and Vindicated (Joseph Rakestraw, 1824), pp. 386-87
…The Scriptures of Truth … contain,
— Robert Barclay, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity, Prop. III (1676-78)
…Any teaching or expounding the Scriptures out of the life shuts up the kingdom: for the life is the kingdom, and words from the life yield the savor of the kingdom; but words out of it, though ever so good and true, reach not to the life in another; but only build up a knowledge in the contrary wisdom…. And so this kind of teaching and knowledge shuts up the door and way of life, and must be lost, before the kingdom can be found.
— Isaac Penington, The Jew Outward, Being a Glass for the Professors of This Age… (1659)
The poor people is groping in the letter to find life there, when the life was in them that gave it forth.
— Richard Hubberthorne, Reply to a Book set forth by one of the Blind Guides (Calvert, 1654), p. 2