What Do We Do With the Bible?

Richard Rohr

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780281083213, 9780281083213
• eBook ISBN: 9780281083220
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

What do we do with the Bible? Does an ancient, sometimes violent and contradictory text that has been used to justify violence, racism, misogyny, homophobia and more, really have anything to teach us today?

In this small but powerful book, Richard Rohr explores how we can read the bible in a contemplative and intelligent way. Focusing on Jesus' own method of using the Hebrew Scriptures, he shows us a way of interpreting the Bible that follows God's mercy, inclusion and compassionate justice, and creates a foundation for a hopeful vision from the beginning to the end of time.

Warm and accessible, What Do We Do With the Bible? will give you a deeper, more genuine understanding of the Bible and transform your experience of Scripture - whether you are reading the Bible for the first time or returning to it over and over.

THE JESUS HERMENEUTIC

Given the above, even if you only partially agree with what I have said, I can now present to you what I think is a way of interpreting Scripture that is faith-filled, often quite inspiring, self-critical (without which all things become idolatrous), and also available to the ordinary person on the street, with just some basic goodwill and what I earlier called “spiritual common sense.”

I promise you that this is anything but an elitist, academic, or seminary-textbook approach to the Bible. Here it is, in one naive, straightforward line:

Let’s use the Bible the way that Jesus did!

If that sounds like I am saying nothing, just know that is exactly what we have not done in most of our Christian history! (This is despite a common aphorism in most churches that said, “We understand the Old Testament in the light of Jesus.”) In point of fact, we have largely ignored Jesus’ pattern and style of using his own Jewish Scriptures. We often quoted many of his one-liners, but seldom imitated his underlying worldview or assumptions, or recognized his rather clear biases. When we watch his pattern of interpretation, we could even say Jesus “played light and easy” with the only Bible he knew—the Hebrew Bible. Jesus was anything but a fundamentalist or a legalist. This is not hard to demonstrate; in fact, it is culpable ignorance not to see it now.

Such constant daring is surely what got him killed by the priests, the scribes, and the teachers of the Law. After healing a sick man, Jesus says this to the Bible quoters of his day: “You pore over the Scriptures, believing that in them you have life, but now you have Life standing right in front of you, and you cannot recognize it!” (see John 5:39). Instead of recognizing with their own eyes the obvious good fruits of a healing, they constantly created pretexts (usually working on the Sabbath or acting like God) to hate and reject Jesus—who does fully identify with God (see John 5:18–19 and 10:30–38). Jesus is never hesitant to call himself, or allow himself to be called, God’s “son.” But we have not imitated him well in that regard. Instead, we made Jesus into an exclusive child of God, rather than the inclusive model for all the rest of us, as sons and daughters too—which, I believe, was his exact point!

Jesus largely ignores the Sabbath prohibition of work. We see him picking corn and both touching people and working with people rather regularly on Saturday, almost as if to flaunt this exaggerated, human-made law. But we now know that any pre-existent dislike of a person will always find its justification. According to Jesus, our eyes create what they want to see, and do not see what they do not want to see (e.g., Matthew 7:1–5). Jesus taught quite clearly on projection, denial, and reaction formation two thousand years before Freud, who thought he was the first to recognize these common defense mechanisms. This pattern has become overwhelmingly and sadly clear in the food fights of American partisan politics today.

We wanted Jesus for “orthodoxy” or correct content (that could then be mandated and compliance-enforced), but we thus lost sight of his distinct process for getting us there: his life stance; his recognition of social order, economy, and class as places to hide; his clear recognition of the disguises of the human shadow. These, of course, are much more threatening to the ego, so we tended to concentrate on the usual “hot sins,” through which people could more easily be shamed and controlled. We soon made Jesus into a purveyor of private rewards and punishments, inside a frame of mere retributive justice—which was itself conveniently put off until the next life. Delaying those rewards and punishments kept us from basic self-awareness and simple self-observation. I am convinced that Jesus is presenting rewards and punishments as inherent and present-tense. Goodness is its own reward, evil its own punishment. Humans seem to prefer the zero-sum game of reward and punishment, in which our very “reward” is the assurance of someone else’s punishment—or escape from our own. This does not create great or loving people—at all.

JESUS’ OTHER BIASES

Let me try to reveal the largely hidden assumptions of the Jesus hermeneutic, which led him to a truly very dangerous approach to sacred texts. Here are some of the major ones:

♦ Relative to all the words recorded in the four Gospels, Jesus actually does not quote Scripture that much! In fact, he is criticized for not doing this: “You teach with [inner] authority and not like our own scribes” (see Mark 1:22).

♦ Jesus talks much more out of his own experience of God and humanity instead of teaching like the scribes and Pharisees, who operated out of their own form of case law by quoting previous sources. It is amazing that this did not give us more permission to do the same. This is probably what made him so edgy and dangerous to the religious establishment.

♦ Jesus often uses what appear to be non-Jewish or non-canonical sources, or at least sources we cannot verify. For example: “It is not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick” (see Mark 2:17, Matthew 9:12, and Luke 5:31), or the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (see Luke 16:19–31). His bandwidth of authority and attention is much wider than sola Scriptura. He even quotes some sources seemingly incorrectly (e.g., John 10:34)!

♦ Jesus himself wrote nothing that persists. He did not appear to want us to rely on his exact formulations. He knew the danger and legalism of “by the book” people. (St. Francis did not want to write a Rule for us Franciscans for the same reasons, but Rome forced him to do it.)

♦ Jesus never once quotes from nineteen of the books in his own Scriptures. In fact, he appears to use a very few favorites: Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Hosea, and Psalms—and those are overwhelmingly in Matthew’s Gospel, which is directed to a Jewish audience. He quotes his own Scriptures very seldom in Mark, Luke, and John, which would seem to indicate that they each knew how to use the appropriate authority to suit each audience.

♦ Jesus appears to ignore most of his own Bible, yet it clearly formed his whole consciousness. That is the paradox. If we look at what he ignores, it includes any passages that appear to legitimate violence, imperialism, exclusion, purity, and dietary laws—of which there are many. These are the very ones we love to quote! Jesus is a Biblically formed non-Bible quoter, who gets the deeper stream, the spirit, the trajectory of his Jewish history and never settles for mere surface readings.

♦ When he does on...

Table of contents

• INTRODUCTION
• HERMENEUTIC
• WHAT THE BIBLE IS NOT SAYING
• THE JESUS HERMENEUTIC
• NOTES