An Antidote to Religious Hucksterism: Ellen Davis’ Call to Confessional Reading of Scripture
In today’s social media driven world, where supreme value is given to thoughts and ideas that can be hard boiled down to 140 characters or less and where click-bait headlines shape the cultural discussions for a day only to be replaced by the next hyperventilating article the following day, the idea of reading anything slowly and with wonder, let alone Scripture, is truly counter-cultural. American culture demands immediate answers to immediate questions and has lost much of its ability or desire to imaginatively engage with any task that requires commitment, thoughtfulness, and ambiguity.
The tendency towards seeking out quick answers to complex questions is particularly evident in the rise of the Christian blogger and self-help author. While there are certainly thoughtful Christian authors publishing books and on the internet worth reading, there is also myriad voices proclaiming miraculous quick fixes for renewing Christian life and bolstering ministry leaders with such blog/book titles as “Reclaim Your Marriage Today!” “How to Grow Your Church in 3 Easy Steps!” and “5 Reasons Why Your Relationship with God is Stale”. Many of these articles could easily forego using Scripture altogether as they are based primarily on modern psychology, business, and marketing strategies, but seeing that they are Christian writers after all, they find clever ways to declare with absolute certainty that their programs for ministry and religious wholeness are right there in the words of Scripture. One example of this trend that I have seen often is the treatment of the book and story of Nehemiah as a “Leadership Guidebook for Christian leaders”. While there may be wisdom to be gleaned from Nehemiah’s action and leadership, I find that this kind of usage of Scripture leads to a flattening of the message of Scripture. Lost is any sense of wonder, discovery, or transformation of the reader. Instead, any part of the Bible that does not offer immediate practical advice on how one should act in today’s world is dismissed. Instead of approaching Scripture with an anticipatory hope of God’s character being revealed and the reader being transformed, we frantically search its pages for bits of “wisdom” or “insight” that can be expanded upon and layered with pop psychology, standard business practices, and slick marketing mantras.
Those who have professionally taken this path have traded an encounter with the God of all Creation for the pathetic idol of book sales and blog hits. The sad result is that the masses eagerly buy these books and pour over these articles desperate to find the answer to their questions about real life struggles, ministry strategies, or to find clarity about their identity in this world, and are never satisfied. The quick hit of the Christian self-help drug leads to a short period of perceived well-being but the next book or next conference always comes along promising even more insight, even more answers, an even better life, guaranteed or your money back! The poor seeker thus spends more cash and more time hoping to reach that spiritual high yet again and the cycle repeats ad infinitum. The seeker of insider information continues on in this way of life unaware that they have fallen prey to a form of gnosticism that never died but seeped its way deep into the dominant Christian culture today.
So it is into this dire situation that I see Ellen Davis speaking with her article “Teaching the Bible Confessionally in the Church”. Her call for the church “to learn afresh to acknowledge the Bible as the functional center of its life, so that in all our conversations, deliberations, arguments, and programs, we are continually reoriented to the demands and the promises of the Scriptures.” is vital and culture-challenging for several reasons. One, it reclaims a vision of Scripture that speaks to the whole life, not simply a means of self-improvement or self-aggrandizement in a limited scope of life. Two, it encourages a movement of individuals from spiritual seclusion into a community of faith, for only in community can conversations, deliberations, arguments, and programs exist. I would also state, and I’m sure Davis would concur, that it is only within community that personal transformation is possible. And it is regarding transformation that Davis’ proposal stands in starkest relief to today’s Christian self-help obsession. For this model of reading Scripture is no self-help. The promise of God found in Scripture, particularly highlighted by the Old Testament, is “not salvation, either personal or corporate, but rather revelation of the nature and will of God.” We therefore must resist the temptation to view Scripture as our own personal handbook. For when we treat it thusly, we will inevitably discover that it verifies every self-deception we might hold. If we approach Scripture believing our experience and personal baggage does not color our interpretation, we will find exactly what we want to find and sadly miss the transformation God wishes to work in us through the revelation of God’s own nature and being.
The movement towards a confessional reading of Scripture that Davis proposes is broken down into three actions: reading with a theological interest, reading with openness to repentance, and reading with an understanding of the Old Testament witness to Christ. I wish to highlight here how these three movements can help our church communities reclaim the locus of engagement with Scripture away from the popular but ineffective Christian self-help industry.
Reading with a Theological Interest. While there is a variety of genres of writing contained within the Bible, from poetry to history to apocalyptic, Davis’ assertion that “the Bible’s aim is to do theology” speaks to the fullness contained within Scripture. For no matter how much we wish to dissect the Bible into segments that can then be incorporated into our own philosophies of life, buttressing our beliefs about marriage, business, politics, or any other matter of the human experience, when we spend even a short time exploring the Bible in depth, we frequently encounter passages that refuse to fit into our neat categories. The Bible, when read confessionally, cannot serve solely as a repository of practical information. Instead, it requires imagination and wonderment regarding “the ultimate facts of life: love, sin, redemption, forgiveness— facts that can be pondered and confirmed as true, yet never really explained, and certainly not explained away.” When we, as a community, engage with Scripture as primarily a book about an infinitely complex God, then easy answers and prescriptions for life cannot be the end result. Davis thus encourages us to intentionally slow down as we read it, pondering and wondering over passages that confuse us or challenge our preconceptions. She encourages engagement with original Biblical languages, for that process slows us down even more as we struggle with even basic vocabulary and syntax. This “cultivated unsettledness” will restrain us from jumping to quick conclusions and instead encourage us to loiter amongst the complexity and diversity of God’s word through Scripture. The slow revelation of God to us through our loving engagement of Scripture simply will not allow us to make it fit into our image of life, but instead forces us to consider whether our life fits within God’s vision of reality.
Reading with Openness to Repentance Reading the Bible confessionally challenges our desire to contain its message. Anytime we say with certainty that the Bible says this or that, we will encounter another voice, a different focus, or even outright disagreement within the text itself. As Christians, we would be wise to discover ourselves again and again within the deeply flawed characters outlined in Scripture, particularly in the Old Testament. Consider Nehemiah, whom I mentioned earlier. Reading Nehemiah as a paragon of leadership fails to account for later chapters where we discover that Nehemiah, in concert with Ezra, adopts an incredibly xenophobic ethic of marriage and participation in the newly rebuilt city, going so far as to condemn and divide mixed marriages and deporting foreigners from the city. This is certainly not an example that I believe fits a vision of compassionate leadership. But when we read the Bible with an openness to repentance, we are able to recognize the deep flaws of its characters within ourselves. We can recognize that our view of reality is also deeply flawed and thus maintain a “hermeneutic of suspicion” about ourselves and our interpretation of Scripture. We can find ourselves, not already like Jesus, but instead moving ever closer toward Jesus.
Reading with an Understanding of the Old Testament Witness to Christ When we read the Bible confessionally we must respect and inspect closely the symbols and language found throughout the Old Testament. The temptation for Christian readers has been to rush to connect passages in the Old Testament to Jesus in a short hand way. But reading confessionally asks us to take our time more fully understanding the actual witness that is presented within the Old Testament. For instance, again within the story of Nehemiah, we might miss the symbolic nature of his project to rebuild the walls and temple in Jerusalem. This heavy focus on the centrality of the Temple in Jerusalem fits within a wide framework set out throughout much of the Hebrew Scriptures. That understanding takes on incredible significance when we come to Jesus declaring in the Gospel of John to “tear down this temple and I will rebuild it again in three days.” We see Jesus now claiming to take the place of the Temple as the center of worship and audaciously using the vision of its destruction as a testament to his coming death, and its rebuilding as a witness to his own resurrection. This is powerful stuff indeed. It will also be missed entirely if we do not engage with the Bible in its entirety and complexity.
Conclusion There are no shortcuts with God. The path to and with God is long and winding and often shrouded in mystery and uncertainty. But when we trust this long and slow footpath laid before us in the Bible and resist the temptation to seek out the freeways of the world, we will encounter a journey that changes us fully and completely. This is the promise of God through Jesus: a holistic life full of wonder, imagination, and discovery with no part of ourselves left unchanged. There’s no self-help book that can ever hope to match that.