Paul writes – While the suggestion that we “study the Bible together” is one that can arise from a genuine desire to live more deeply into and out of the Biblical narrative; it can also be “code” for an engagement with scripture that extends a cause or an agenda, i.e. my choice of text read through my inflexible interpretative assumptions, my biases and my blind-spots, in order to reinforce my position relative to what (I believe) the Bible says. There is nothing in this approach that puts me in a place of vulnerability before the Biblical text, because I’ve already predetermined what I consider its unchangeable meaning (for others).
However, too genuinely engage in Bible study with others is to do so, open to the possibility of my being read by Scripture. It is to be open to hearing afresh what the Spirit might be discerned as saying or directing.
It was against this backdrop that I was interested in a small (blog) piece written by Greg Jones – William Stringfellow Reads the Bible. I’m a huge admirer of Stringfellow (d. 1985) and found Greg’s reflection reinforcing of that admiration. He writes:
“…Stringfellow tells a funny story to illustrate how far the elephant of biblical indifference had gone into the Episcopal Church:
[In the early 1960's I served] on a commission of the Episcopal Church charged with articulating the scope of the total ministry of the Church in modern society. The commission numbered about forty persons, a few laity and the rest professional theologians, ecclesiastical authorities and clergy. The group met, in the course of a year and a half, three times for sessions of more than a week. The first conference, as I recall it, floundered in churchy shoptalk that anyone outside the Church would find exasperatingly irrelevant, largely incoherent or simply dull [sound familiar]
Toward the end of that meeting some of those present proposed it might be an edifying discipline for the group, in its future sessions, to undertake some concentrated study of the Bible. It was suggested that constant recourse to the Word of God in the Bible is as characteristic and significant a practice in the Christian life as the regular participation in the celebration of the Eucharist, which was a daily observance of this commission. Perhaps, it was argued, Bible study would enlighten the deliberations of the commission and, in any event, would not impede them. The proposal was rejected on the grounds, as one Bishop present put it, that "most of us have been to seminary and know what the Bible says: the problem now is to apply it to today's world." The Bishop's view was seconded (with undue enthusiasm, I thought at the time) by the Dean of one of the Episcopal seminaries as well as by the clergy bureaucrats from national headquarters who had, they explained, a program to design and administer.
[To me, the implication of the group's] decision not to engage in Bible study is that the Gospel, in its biblical embodiment, is of an essentially pedantic character – a static body of knowledge which, once systematically organized, taught and learned, has use ceremonially, sentimentally, nostalgically, and as a source from which deductions can be made to guide the religious practice and ethical conduct of contemporary Christians. If that is what the Bible is, then it is generically undistinguished from religious scripture of any sort and, for that matter, is of no more dignity than any secular ideology or philosophy. If that is what the Bible is, then it is a dead word and not the Living Word…”
You can read the whole of Greg’s post here.
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