Scripture in Christian formation: Pedagogy,reading practice and scriptural exemplars

A history of engagement with Scripture

There are many ways to recount the history of the Church’s engagement with Scripture. ² Although any brief account is bound to be a simplification, it does seem to me that one can at least identify with some accuracy the basic reason why that history has been obscured in much of the actual practice of the teaching of Scripture in theological education today. Fundamentally, the modern rise of historical consciousness, which may be dated to a long period spanning from the Reformation right through to the high-water mark of modernity, has historicized our default understandings of texts. Whereas in the pre-modern era there was a variety of ways in which one might naturally understand the sense of a text, under the influence of historically orientated thinking there came to be one: what the text might have meant in its originating context as a matter of some sort of historical reference. Thus the well-known contrasts: the medieval fourfold sense of the scriptural text, which included the literal alongside the allegorical, the tropological (how one should act) and the anagogical (for what one should hope); as against the modern expectation that there is one right interpretation, historically and critically mediated through the reconstruction of the original context of the text. ³

In a masterly image, Hans Frei pinpointed one disastrous consequence of this as being The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. ⁴ On Frei’s account, the modern framework, which cast all texts into a descriptive mode, collapsed the options of what it could mean that a text was ‘literal’. Literal came to mean ‘historically accurate’, since texts were supposed to be in the business of referring to a historical world that was there to be described. But this, said Frei, was an ‘eclipse’ of biblical narrative, which was instead realistic in an ascriptive sense. Ascriptive texts create what literary scholars like to call a ‘secondary world’ within which the reader may learn to navigate according to the ways in which the revelatory text inculcates appropriate faith, hope and love. Such texts beget right action and right belief in an organic whole. The literal sense had traditionally been a complex mixture of historical and literary dimensions of the text – not least because part of the straightforward function of some scriptural texts included referring to things that had happened (a notable case in point being the preface to Luke’s Gospel, for instance). But once scriptural texts were assigned the task of measuring up to a notion of truth constituted by the canons of historically effected consciousness, it became irresistible to separate out a literal sense in a historical and referential mode from a literal sense in a literary mode.

The result of this eclipse was profound and far-reaching. The study of Scripture in professional biblical studies found itself drawn to historical questions rather like a moth to a flame. For of course there is no denying that historically framed and framing questions can be tremendously illuminating to any serious reading of scriptural texts. However, they do have a tendency to detain scholars indefinitely, deferring sometimes forever the moment of existential engagement with the text. The eclipse also created the possibility of a largely unfruitful stand-off between those who would critique and those who would defend Scripture: the question at issue became a matter of arguing over whether Scripture was historically accurate. For those who understood Frei’s point, this was a debate between two options both depressingly distanced from the traditional concerns with the literal sense of the text. In many ways it has been literary readings of biblical texts that have done much to restore the possibilities of traditional approaches, because they operate with renewed attention to the text as it has been received. In the increasingly fragmented state of professional biblical studies today, it is also noteworthy that attention has turned to the value of so-called pre-critical interpretation. However this is presented, it is clearly occurring at least in part because it is no longer self-evident to readers of the Bible in the twenty-first century that the canons of modern historical-critical enquiry should be the ones determining, to whatever degree, the rules of engagement with the text.

One of the disappointments of seminary education in the period under review here is that it has largely trailed in the wake of the prevailing moods of the academy, and has too often construed faithfulness as the exercise of the most conservative options among those licensed to the guild by academic fashions. What does it profit the Christian Church to argue for the historical reliability of scriptural texts if the historical reliability in view is simply a form of reducing the nature and function of Scripture to the task of describing what happened? For knowing what happened, while it offers many clarifying insights and important considerations, is not theologically constitutive of the tasks of knowing God and God’s ways among us, and how we should in turn live before God. It might be necessary (in part, here or there) but it is certainly not sufficient. Recent renewed attention to the ‘literal sense’ in the light of all the developments sketched above has generated a rich and still unresolved discussion that seeks to address ‘anything from the community’s reading to the interplay between verbal meaning and ruled meaning’. ⁵ It is that discussion into which seminary teaching needs to enter, but on the whole it has not noticeably been setting the pace.

A second disappointment of seminary education has been its remarkably underdeveloped pedagogical framework. Doubtless one factor underlying the strange triumph of modern modes of enquiry in biblical study was the perception, some centuries ago now, that the Church and its traditions were oppressive contexts within which the free pursuit of the meaning of the text was discouraged. In such a context, it could serve a useful pedagogical purpose to challenge the easy assimilation of the text to the prevailing theological orthodoxy. If all Bible readers felt impelled to believe in a seven-day creation, certain particular post-mortem scenarios awaiting the dead or understandings of the nature and role of slavery in human society that consigned some to submission at the margins of society, then any reading that might challenge such understandings could of course be helpful. To urge that the biblical text needed to be understood within the contexts appropriate to its production as ancient literature would be enormously liberating in such settings. Such an appeal also chimes with the tremendous sense of illumination and clarification that many students report when they are introduced to such critical readings. However, the critical impulse once unleashed has proved to be a voracious beast, and seems inevitably to push the epistemological bar higher and higher. How do we know? How can we be sure? Have we read enough possible parallel texts yet to understand the literary trope in view or the historical claim being made? And it needs to be considered whether, or in what sense, Christian formation is served by such agendas.

Thus a friend of mine went to a prestigious Scottish university some years ago to pursue a one-year MTh programme on ‘Discipleship in Mark’s Gospel’. He wanted to learn how one might shape one’s life according to the agenda of Jesus, but was willing to limit himself to Mark’s Gospel for the sake of a feasible research project. In his first supervision, with a New Testament scholar of some note, himself a Christian, he was informed that the pressing prior question was to ascertain to what extent Mark’s Gospel contained a reliable record of Jesus’ teaching anyway. One need not probe far to see that such a question is only prior if one assumes both that history is key to the enquiry envisaged, and perhaps also that the teaching of Mark’s Gospel would in some sense carry more weight if it faithfully recorded Jesus’ sayings. My friend wrote a thesis on some aspect of Gospel criticism as it related to Mark and the Synoptic Gospels. He returned to his African context to resume the work of pastoring, not much the wiser with regard to living as a Christian disciple. What does such a story – which could be multiplied many times over – tell us? Clearly there was no stultifying theological orthodoxy at work here from which my friend needed to be liberated. What he needed was to pursue the literal sense of the text to the point where he might be able to see what it was saying about life with God. Instead he was required to look at the historical reference of the text. Of course the literal sense cannot be accessed without historically informed imagination. But the shoe is on the other foot: it is critical enquiry that has become the limiting context when one cannot proceed to substantive engagement with the subject matter of the text as it pertains to church life and Christian discipleship. It should go without saying, but apparently does not, that seminary education needs to let Scripture loose to do its transformative work, and needs to appeal to critical orthodoxies only as and when they are illuminating (in whatever sense) for the interpretive task.

As a way of sketching out how Scripture might thus be permitted to do its work, we conclude with some examples of pedagogical practice that might be informed by Scripture itself, with the wager that this will be a better way of proceeding than the one we have been discussing so far.

Scriptural models for a pedagogy of the Bible

Dale Martin turned to Christian history to furnish examples of good practice in scriptural interpretation. This is undeniably worth doing, and a large number of publications today have begun to mine the riches of this material with an eye to renewing Christian biblical interpretation. ⁶ Another aspect that might perhaps be simpler to incorporate into the syllabi of Christian colleges as they currently stand, is to spend at least part of one’s time in any course on Scripture reflecting on scriptural texts that themselves indicate how one might go about learning Scripture. In my own teaching there are several texts where I invite classes to reflect on such matters. ⁷

Psalm 1 offers an elegant example of the hermeneutics at work in attention to Scripture.

¹ Happy are those

 who do not follow the advice of the wicked,

or take the path that sinners tread,

 or sit in the seat of scoffers;

²but their delight is in the law of Yhwh,

 and on his law they meditate day and night.

³They are like trees

 planted by streams of water,

which yield their fruit in its season,

 and their leaves do not wither.

In all that they do, they prosper. ⁸

Psalm 1, strategically placed at the front of the Psalter, and indeed at the head of the third section of the Jewish canon (Torah – Prophets – Writings), imagines scriptural interpretation as the process of meditation, inward digestion and, in due course, the bearing of fruit. The reader who meditates on Torah day and night will be like a tree planted by streams of water, yielding its fruit in season. The point is not that this verse of Torah or that command can suddenly be seen to ‘apply’ to a particular point at issue in the present day, but rather that the reader has been shaped, from the ‘inside out’ as it were, to be the kind of person who knows what to do in the present situation. The link between the text upon which they meditated and the action they then performed does not go via some ‘principle’ or method of application of the text, but by way of the transformed character of the one doing the reading and meditating. Text and action are bound together, we might say, in the reader.

A second text worthy of note occurs in the book of Daniel, the last book of the Old Testament to be written, around 164 bc. By this time some collection of sacred books already existed, though for our purposes it is not important to know what collection exactly. All we need to assume is that some notion of authority would have attached to some nascent collection of texts, still in the process of compilation as it would doubtless have been. In Daniel 9 we find a scene that is unusual for an Old Testament text: a man reading Scripture. When we examine this scene, what do we find?

Daniel is reading the sacred texts, and through them is seeing something about his present circumstances: ‘I, Daniel, perceived in the books the number of years that, according to the word of Yhwh to the prophet Jeremiah, must be fulfilled for the devastation of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years’ (Dan. 9.2). The reference to ‘seventy years’ clearly indicates that Daniel has been reading Jeremiah 25.11–12 (and 29.10 perhaps), and the subsequent vision from Gabriel in Daniel 9.20–27 shows that it is the recalculation of how such a figure relates to the end of exile and contemporary events that is the point at issue. A simple point may be made about this prototypical example of a man of God reading the holy books: we notice that Daniel is driven to prayer and confession by his ‘perceiving in the books’ the way in which the word of Yhwh relates to his own situation.

Significantly, Daniel has been portrayed throughout the book as a wise man, humbling himself in prayer, trusting God in the face of overwhelming odds (in the lion’s den and equally as Israel is among the beasts in chapter 7) and always obedient to the divine summons. Daniel’s life is implicitly a model for any attentive reader. Here, at the very (chronological) end of the Old Testament, we find Daniel as an exemplar of a virtuous reader. The book of Daniel does not tell us about his ‘hermeneutic’, but it tells a good deal about his character, and perhaps that is significant. We might say: to understand Scripture, consider the person of Daniel and what kinds of virtue he exemplified.

A third text, at a crucial point in the overall scriptural narrative, is Luke 24: the story of the road to Emmaus. Here the risen Jesus famously interprets Scripture to his disciples as they walk along the road. As Luke puts it, ‘beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures’ (Luke 24.27). This is, quite literally, scriptural hermeneutics recorded in Scripture itself. Jesus reads the canon – whatever state it was in, this is the reference to ‘Moses and the prophets’ – and demonstrates its hitherto unrecognized christological content. As is often observed, wistfully, it might have been helpful if Luke had shown us how he did it. Or perhaps the absence of such a demonstration is designed to require the reader to work at the task. But here the Christian Old Testament is brought into a permanent relationship with the witness to God in Christ. For seminarians, it will therefore remain as significant, if not more so, to read the Christian Old Testament in dialogue with Christ as it is to read it in dialogue with ancient Near Eastern texts. Christians can learn to do this in ministry in a way that fully respects the Jewish claim for these same texts as Jewish Scripture, but Christians (at least Gentile Christians) need not pretend to be Jewish readers. They are after all only reading these particular texts in their liturgy and worship because the Church has recognized that they form part of the witness to God in Christ. Again, traditional modes of reading the prophet Isaiah, say, as a ‘Fifth Gospel’ will be more appropriate to the needs of seminary education than the patient reconstruction of originating contexts for different sections of the book, although if time permits it may be possible to show how the latter task might aid the former. But beyond a certain point, such reconstruction will simply not aid the Christian task: and the Church cannot (and indeed need not) wait for scholars to finish their reconstructive work before it proceeds to a reading of the text.

There is not time to explore many other texts that offer valuable insights into the pedagogy of Scripture in ministerial formation. It is to my mind an encouragement to recognize that patient attention to the scriptural texts themselves already drives the reader towards pedagogical reflection. And at the same time it is sobering to realize that much seminary education has turned instead to less fruitful matters in its teaching of Scripture. (In passing, we might note that there is no prima facie reason why this argument should not apply to any careful critical engagement with the scriptural text, not just in the seminary but in any context where the text is to be read well; but that is an argument for another day.)

There is no reading of Scripture that is not hermeneutical through and through, but if the seminary trains people to read wisely, then the hermeneutics will come too. There is no reading of Scripture that is not historical and literary in manifold and complex ways, but if the seminary trains people to read attentively, then the requisite historical and literary knowledge sufficient for the task of wise reading will become knowledge that the reader desires to have and to understand, rather than an end in itself. Attending to the literal sense of the text, it turns out, brings the requirement of critical competence in its wake. But time at seminary is short, and thus it is not critical competence in itself that must be pursued, but the specific engaged practices of reading particular scriptural texts. Such reading will produce fruit in due season. ⁹