Notes: Being Read by Scripture
Breakout Session Notes from Revoice23
A month and a half ago, I had the honor of leading a breakout session at the Revoice conference titled “Being Read by Scripture”; in it, I attempted to address the difficulty many of us (especially LGBTQ+ folks) have in engaging with the Bible, shared about what it might look like to move from emphasizing an informational approach to the Bible to emphasizing a formational approach, and then gave some practical suggestions for how to do so. What follows is only a partial manuscript; the session was recorded, and you can watch the full thing by subscribing to access the full Revoice Digital Library.
Introduction
Hello y’all, my name is Grant Hartley, and welcome to “Being Read For Filth by Scripture.” It has been a few years since I have had the pleasure of speaking at Revoice, and you may be encouraged (or discouraged) to know that this year I have chosen to speak on something much less controversial, so no one can get mad! I want to talk with y’all today about the Bible.
I know many of us have chosen to submit our lives to the authority of God through the Bible at great personal cost, but I also know (from personal experience) that this does not always make for a pleasant relationship with the biblical text. As I wrote in the description for this breakout session: “How can we cultivate a love for Scripture again? How can we enter into the story again, and be transformed by it?”
Speaking for myself, I have had several different understandings of what the Bible is and the role it should play in my life over the years. One of my earliest memories is of my father reading a bedtime story to me from one volume of a set of illustrated Bible stories; one image I still remember is that of the patriarch Jacob wrestling with the angel, which captivated me. At the time, the Bible for me was a collection of comforting fairy tales which were also somehow miraculously true. My parents encouraged me to read whatever I wanted, and there was a real similarity between the fantasies I was drawn to and the Bible. The Bible was also about magic (or miracles, whatever). Biblical stories began to form the structure of my life.
As I got older, I started to understand the Bible more along the lines of an instruction manual. My parents took me to Sunday School before worship every Sunday and youth group meetings every Wednesday night, during which my peers and I would turn to the Bible to find a bit of doctrine or moral lesson which we would then apply to our daily lives; the biblical text held the secrets to living a righteous life and knowing all the right things to believe. Now, this is not to say that these excursions into the Bible were devoid of the gospel—the truth of what Jesus accomplished through his incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension—but just to say that when I read the Bible, I mostly understood it as telling me what to do and think—which is probably why around this time it ceased to captivate me.
Later on, after realizing that I was gay and beginning a years-long crisis of faith and identity (we can fast-forward through all that, I think), I became aware of other ways the Bible could function: it could be used as a weapon to judge, to condemn, to silence. Gay people had rarely been discussed in my home town, but when they were, it was either with hushed tones that communicated shame, or derision. At the tender time in my life when I was discovering my sexuality, a few passages of Scripture—a bit of the holiness code in Leviticus, portions of the Pauline epistles—became extremely painful. The story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was especially frightening, as it seemed to show that my attraction to men made God irrationally angry, violent, and destructive.
Later, after coming out of the closet in college and beginning to reconcile my faith and sexuality, the Bible became a shield; I sought to understand it and master it so that I could use it to defend myself. It is interesting how experiencing so much hatred and opposition from siblings in Christ has had the unintended consequence of making many of us into biblical scholars—at least when it comes to seven or so passages (think about how quickly so many of us discovered Ezekiel 16:49-50, about “the sin of your sister Sodom” being inhospitality, or all the nuances of what Paul might mean by malakoi in 1 Corinthians 6:9). A few years ago, the Bible as a shield played a role in my exploration of gospel contextualization at the first and second Revoice conferences: I found a rationale in the biblical text for engaging with LGBTQ+ culture in a nuanced way, and suggested that certain aspects of LGBTQ+ life and culture (like the closet, coming out, and chosen family) could provide a fresh perspective on themes like baptism and the Church.
Over the course of several years of religious studies and theology classes, the Bible has often become homework, the book I turn to in order to write papers or study for exams (I know some of you relate to this as well). While I have consistently struggled to get into a habit of regularly reading the Bible, I have often found myself flipping through it (or rather, scrolling through it online) to find the specific text I need to support my argument. The Bible has sometimes become a collection of statements or facts that could be plucked from the page and used to make a point.
My point in listing these various understandings of the role of the Bible is not necessarily to condemn them all (the Bible as an instruction manual and as a shield remain helpful perspectives, and the Bible as homework remains maddeningly necessary). I just want to point out that most of these understandings of the Bible have a deficiency in common: in them, the Bible becomes an object to be comprehended, grasped, and mastered. I want to suggest that essential to coming to grips with the Bible, and coming to love the Bible again, is coming to see how it grasps us. It is important to read the Bible—but it is even more important to be read by the Bible. My very first understanding of the Bible, as a collection of true fairy tales one could enter into and which could structure one’s life, might be on the right track!
I am also not saying all our modern ways of approaching the Bible are unimportant, unhelpful, or immoral. Studying the Bible in the original languages, placing it in its original contexts, and seeking out interpretive perspectives across time and in various cultures are essential, and incredibly helpful tools. But these tools, on their own, can leave us in the driver’s seat, insulated from the transformative power of the Bible.
So in our time together, I want to discuss what it might look like to put the Bible in the driver’s seat, and how we might be transformed as a result. I cannot discuss everything that needs to be discussed when it comes to our relationship with the Bible, but I will do my best to offer some perspective and practical advice. It feels weird to start a breakout session on the Bible without reading some of the Bible, so we’ll start by looking at a biblical passage together. We’ll then explore the difference between reading the Bible for information and reading it for formation, and I’ll give a fuller explanation of what the latter might entail. Then, I’ll offer some suggestions on how to change our engagement with the Bible, and we will put those suggestions into practice with another biblical passage.
Let’s pray first, and then we can dive in.
God, we thank you that you are a God who gives us your word: both the words of the Bible through which you speak to us, and your Word, Jesus the eternal Son of God, through whom all of creation was spoken into being. We thank you for your willingness and your desire to communicate with us and commune with us, and we long to listen to and be transformed by you. As we explore together what it might look like to encounter you in the pages of the Bible, we ask that you fill us with your Holy Spirit, so that we learn exactly what we need to learn. I ask that if there is anything wise that is said in this session, that my friends and I remember it, and if there is anything unwise, unhelpful, or silly, that my friends and I forget it, and quickly. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
Information and Formation
A reading from the Epistle to the Hebrews:
For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double- edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account. Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need (Hebrews 4:12-16 NRSVUE).
The word of the Lord.
Now, to get all the information out of the way: the “word of God” here cannot refer to the Bible as we know it today, as the author of Hebrews, whoever she was, did not have a codified New Testament. It also seems that the “word of God” here does not even refer to any part of the biblical text directly, but a broader category: God’s communication with us, in whatever form that may take. But if we take the Bible to be the word of God, and I think we should, then this passage can speak to how we might think about the Bible: alive and active, sharp, penetrating.
The author of Hebrews introduces here a potentially dangerous tool which is desperately needed by us: God’s word. She likens it to an impossibly sharp scalpel, one which is able to cleanly split our bones, separate our soul and spirit within us. There is no fooling God, no way to hide our thoughts or attitudes. And it is as if we are lying on our backs on a physician’s table, our skin peeled back, our organs on display. We are here faced with our vulnerability in the truest sense—an openness to being wounded.
This way of thinking about the Bible is frightening. It may strike those of us who have experienced the Bible as a weapon (that is, most of us) as too familiar, and for that reason it may be difficult to submit to this kind of operation. Being on the receiving end of hatred and persecution has had its benefits—it has forced many of us to turn to the Bible for protection, and to become familiar with its contents. But it has also trained us in becoming masters of the text rather than being mastered by it, in grasping it rather than being grasped by it. Reading about the word of God as a sharp sword can remind us of the many ways the Bible has been used to hurt us—and consequently we may find ourselves keeping our distance.
But as if to comfort us in the face of our fears, the author of Hebrews here moves beyond the tool to the God who wields it, and to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the great high priest who has ascended into heaven. We have, as the author of 1 John writes, “an advocate with the Father” (1 John 2:1 NRSVUE). Just as any physician spends years studying the human body in order to learn how it can be both hurt and healed, Jesus spent years—an entire lifetime—in intense study, so he knows our nature intimately, including our weaknesses and temptations. More than that, as the apostle Paul writes elsewhere, “all things have been created through him and for him,” and “in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16-17 NRSVUE). We were created through Jesus, and so he has an intimate knowledge of us, and is able to use that potentially dangerous tool for our good and not for our harm. We can approach the physician’s table confident that the physician is full of mercy and grace.
Now, you will notice that what we have done so far is to comprehend and grasp the biblical text—to master it. Like I said earlier, I am not against this kind of reading of the Bible, and I think it is important, even essential. But interestingly, this kind of approach can lead us to approach the Bible in another, deeper way. In his book Shaped by the Word: the Power of Scripture in Spiritual Formation, M. Robert Mulholland, Jr. discusses at length what he calls the “informational” approach to the Bible.1 He writes:
We have a deeply ingrained way of reading in which we are the masters of the material we read. We come to a text with our own agenda firmly in place, perhaps not always consciously but usually subconsciously. If what we start to read does not fairly quickly begin to adapt itself to our agenda, we usually lay it aside and look for something that does. When what we are reading does adapt itself to our agenda, we then exercise control over it by grasping it with our mind. The rational, cognitive, intellectual dynamics of our being go into full operation to analyze, critique, dissect, reorganize, synthesize, and digest the material we find appropriate to our agenda. Thus our general mode of reading is to perceive the text as an object “out there” over which we have control. We control our approach to the text; we control our interaction with the text; we control the impact of the text upon our lives (p. 21-22).
It is easy to see how this approach to the Bible can prevent us from being transformed by it; we remain completely in control, and can decide exactly how much impact the Bible can have on us. But ironically, if we take this informational approach to the passage we just read, it can lead us to the conclusion that it is we who should be dissected and reorganized. The informational approach points beyond itself to another approach to the Bible: what Mulholland calls the “formational” approach. While you have gotten a taste of what this approach might look like by attending to this passage from the book of Hebrews, it will be helpful to lay it out more clearly. Mulholland lists six characteristics of the formational approach:
First, the formational approach “avoids quantifying the amount of reading in any sort of way” (p. 53).You are not concerned with how quickly you are making their way through the text, only concerned to engage with a portion of it, however small; you feel free to take your time. This cuts against the tendency to rush through a reading in order to ensure that it “counts,” that you can say you have read it (I know I’m guilty of that) or to skim through a passage to find verses to prove your points. In other words, the formational approach to reading the Bible is slow. Second, formational reading is about depth, uncovering “multiple layers of meaning,” rather than merely following the surface meaning from beginning to end (p. 53-54). Yes, the Bible was written by a human author who put forth an argument and some of those meanings. But it was also written by God, so we should expect to find that there are other meanings in the biblical text the human author may not have intended, meanings which the Holy Spirit reveals to her people over time.
Third, formational reading involves a reversal of our subconscious master- servant relationship with the Bible; we must come to the biblical text with an openness “to hear, to receive, to respond, to be a servant of the Word rather than a master of the text” (p. 54). This is all about posture: we must submit ourselves to the text rather than force the text to submit to us, to fit it within our conceptual system. And the fourth and fifth characteristics are related to this: the formational approach involves becoming the object of the Bible’s address, and it requires humility and love (p. 54-56). We might ask, what might God be saying to me through the Bible, and am I willing to humble myself to receive it, and to grow in my love for God?
And sixth, the formational approach is characterized by “an openness to mystery,” rather than striving for perfect comprehension or constructing a perfect theological system (p. 57). Yes, comprehension of the biblical text and systematic theology are important, but at the end of the day, God will always be bigger than any of our theological systems, and beyond our complete comprehension. Can we find rest in this awareness?
So, to review: the formational approach to the Bible can afford to be slow, and avoids quantifying the text, it goes deep, seeking to uncover multiple layers of meaning, forces us to take on the posture of a servant and recipient of God’s communication, requires humility and love, and involves an openness to mystery. Taken together, these six characteristics enable us to approach the Bible differently than perhaps we have been used to: rather than standing over the text with a scalpel in hand, ready to dissect and digest it, to master it with our mind, to cognitively comprehend it, we can come to submit to the Bible—to be dissected, mastered, read by it. Rather than seeking merely to understand the Bible, we can stand under it—because it is a tool used by God to heal and transform us.
M. Robert Mulholland, Shaped by the Word: the Power of Scripture in Spiritual Formation (Nashville, TN: The Upper Room, 1985)