Here’s the two-step that got me to the most important place I’ve come to in how to read the Bible.
Step One: in seminary I was taught to read the Bible as a whole, coherent narrative that has Jesus the Messiah as the answer to all antecedent themes, longings, or prophecies.
Step Two: first in seminary and then in much greater detail in grad school, I was ushered into seeing that the only way to maintain this position is to recognize that the New Testament writers were giving beautifully revisionist readings of the Old Testament in light of what God had done in Christ.
Christological Creativity
Seriously. Have you ever looked up the Old Testament passage that some New Testament writer is citing? If we just stick with Paul, here are a couple of my favorites (and I do mean favorites–I think this stuff is amazing).
1. “‘The promise was to Abraham and to his seed’–he does not say, ‘and to his seedS,’ as though referring to many, but as though it refers to one, ‘and to your seed’–that is Christ!” (Gal 3:16).
Of course, in the “original context,” “seed” is a collective noun just as it can be in English. The promise was spoken to Abraham and his “descendants.”
But Paul knows something about the people of God, something he could not have known before God did it and he experienced it. Paul knows that the people of God are those who are “in Christ,” so the only way to be Abraham’s “seed” is to be in the “one seed.”
The “reality in Christ” determines the reading of the text.
2. “The righteousness based on faith speaks thus: ‘Do not say in our heart, Who will ascend into heaven?’ that is, to bring Christ down, ‘or, Who will descend into the abyss?’that is, to bring Christ up from the dead. But what does it say? ‘The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart,’ that is, the word of faith that we proclaim–that if you confess with your mouth Jesus is lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:6-9).
The most amazing part about this running commentary on Deuteronomy 30 is this: (1) Paul is offering it as a counter-point to the scriptural notion that a person will live by keeping the commandments, and (2) he does it using verses that originally meant the opposite of the use Paul is putting them to. In their “original context,” in Deut 30, the reason a person doesn’t have to go to heaven or cross the sea is because God has already given the Torah to Israel, so that they can do it.
But Paul knows how God has justified God’s people, and the reality of what God has done in Christ trumps the “grammatical historical” meaning of the passage.
Here is where N. T. Wright sometimes get squirrelly. He is always saying that such and such a thing is “What God was up to all along,” but he never quite fesses up to the point that we only know this in retrospect, and that retrospect requires a different reading of the text.
What Do We Do with This?
So how do folks respond to this creative interpretation?
1. Denial
A number of people simply deny that this is the case, and exert great amounts of energy trying to show how the apostles actually are giving the original readings of the text. This happens only in situations where people’s doctrine of scripture determines for them in advance that this kind of hermeneutics is unworthy of the word of God.
2. The Apostolic Pass
Other folks recognize that this sort of interpretive move is going on, but they issue the “kids, don’t try this at home” warning. The apostles might get away with it since they’re inspired by God in these writings, but we don’t have the same liberty.
3. Do What You See
The other option is to conclude that the apostles are not just telling us how to read those few passages, but they are demonstrating how to read scripture as a whole. If we continue to make the claim that Jesus is the answer to the longings of the story, then we have no choice but to give Christological readings to OT texts. If we don’t, then we are saying that the longings of that narrative await some different fulfillment.
Why Option 3 Is So Important
Live with Option 3 long enough and you start to develop two deep sensibilities.
First, a scriptural passage can say something that is not the last word. The meaning, the significance, of a passage for the church today might well be different, even opposite of what the writer was averring in its “original context.” A Christological hermeneutic is a hermeneutic in the strong sense: we have to reread in light of what we know to be true based on both scripture and experience.
Second, this means that we are the agents who must decide what faithful reading in line with the Christian story looks like.
We are always reading scripture and reinterpreting it in light of what we believe to be more ultimately true.
- People read the stories of the creation of a flat earth and reinterpret it with a spherical, heliocentric solar system in mind.
- Americans in the twenty-first century no longer read scripture as dictating slavery as a part of the best universe God designed as many of our forebears did.
- Many of us have determined that the equality we have in Christ has to trump the patriarchy that structures so much of what scripture says about gender.
- Calvinists make the “you can lose your salvation” passages in Hebrews fit their theology of unconditional election, while Arminians tell us why “predestined” doesn’t mean “predestined” after all.
We all approach the text with core commitments. The text is always in a dynamic relationship with those commitments, both calling them into question and reinforcing them.
Christ, Community, New Creation
What I learned by doing intertextuality is this: what is most important is what God has done in Christ, and what God has done “in Christ” includes both the implementation of a new-creation order and the birth of a new humanity for that new creation. This is why Richard Hays can claim that Paul’s hermeneutics are ecclesio-telic: because the “ecclesia,” the church, are those who are “in Christ.”
The creation of the community is a core facet of the new creation work that God is doing in Christ. And it is this Christ who shows us how to interpret God, and how to interpret the texts of God.
So when I stand up in front of a group of people and say, “The fact that our gay brothers and sisters are ‘in Christ’ must influence how we read the text,” I am running in a groove that has been deeply carved.
It begins with the recognition that we read the scriptures rightly only when we read them as witnesses to the work of salvation that God has done in Christ. It continues with the realization that in giving such readings we are being profoundly biblical because we are doing precisely what the apostles and prophets themselves model for us in the New Testament.
And it willingly, if dangerously, embraces the conclusion that there is no “Christ” except as that Christ has myriad peoples joined to him by the Spirit. The presence of those not like me holds up a mirror to my face to show me in surprising ways what my identity is in Christ, what Christ’s own identity is as it has now been defined by these people.
To know Christ is to know the body of Christ on earth, and to know the body of Christ on earth is to have one part of the interpretive key required to read the scriptures rightly–as Paul shows us in Galatians 3.
Gay Christian?
In my conversation with Robert Gagnon this weekend, I got the sense that he knows this. It’s why he won’t concede the notion of an LGBTQ Christian. In fact, in saying that anyone who disagrees with his exegesis of Mark 10 is, in essence, denying the lordship of Jesus in any meaningful sense, he has left us to conclude that anyone who is even open and affirming is not truly a Christian.
In offline conversation, Gagnon said that a gay person in a relationship should not be allowed to join the church, because they would have to immediately be put under church discipline–excommunicated, in keeping with 1 Corinthians 5!
Once we have said, as many of my traditionalists friends will in fact say, “by gay and lesbian brothers and sisters,” we have made a statement about the identity of the people of God, and a statement about the identity of the people of God is a statement about Christ.
And it is this Christ who is our hermeneutical key, leading us to faithful, life-giving interpretation of scripture.
“You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have life,” Jesus said, “Yet it is these that testify about me.” Indeed. Life is found not just in scripture, but in rightly read scripture that points beyond itself to the true Christ. And that true Christ has so given his body that it is comprised of us.
D.C. al coda.
Featured Image: Jim Forest, Flickr