Engaging the Word

Peter M. Phillips

• Publisher: BRF
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780857467041
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Bibles

Peter Phillips is convinced that the Church in the West is not devouring the Bible, it's not meditating on the word, as it should. As a result, Jesus' followers are spiritually malnourished and failing to thrive. Engaging the Word will transform the Bible engagement habits of Christian disciples and leaders. It will make an impact on the spiritual health of the Church and those who follow Jesus-opening up new opportunities for drawing on God's word and new flows of life as a result. Engaging the Word sets out what we mean by biblical literacy and what it looks like in contemporary Western culture, exploring the benefits of biblical literacy for Christian disciples, and focusing on the benefits for Christian leaders as local theologians and preachers. A series of practical explorations of the role of the Bible will help us reach up to God, reach in to develop our own identity in Christ, and to reach out to others.

1

The Bible and the word of God

What do we mean when we talk about the Bible? Or when we talk about the ‘word of God’ or the ‘Word of God’ or ‘The Word of God’. Or how about ‘scripture’ or ‘Holy Scripture’ or ‘The Holy Scriptures’? Are all these things the same thing? Even if they are, do they suggest different things about what we are talking about? Does ‘Bible’ emphasise the book we might carry to church or have on our smartphones or be given to swear upon in court? Does ‘scripture’ emphasise the use of that object in church, when we explore our faith with it, when we quote it in hymns and prayers? Does ‘word of God’ refer to God’s part in bringing the Bible into being, inspiring it, breathing into the words written (scripted) by the various authors? And does the Bible contain scripture or is it scripture? Does the Bible mean the same as the word of God or is the word of God just the nice bits of the Bible that we all agree with? And what about Jesus as the Word?

Words are really important. But one of the joys of human speech is that we often blur distinctions. We might want to talk about the same thing but use different words in different situations. We might talk about the Bible in an academic setting, the scriptures in a Catholic Church and the word of God when we are talking about preaching or Bible study. It’s interesting that whereas John uses ‘the Word’ to talk about the second person of the Trinity at the beginning of John’s Gospel (John 1:1), elsewhere in the New Testament that same word often means the message preached about Jesus. In parallel passages, different Gospel authors use other words that make this clearer (‘teaching’ or ‘spoken word’). In fact, in the other 15 times the word is used in John’s Gospel outside the first verses, the word means ‘teaching’ or ‘message’, and twice that includes references to God’s word in the Torah (the Law). But this ‘word’ or ‘message’ about Jesus is separate from Jesus as the ‘Word of God’. Gradually, the early Christians merged the message about Jesus, Jesus as the word, and the word of God as the Torah (and gradually the Christian scriptures) into the same thing and the ‘Word of God’ became a kind of catch-all phrase for them. And then we begin to ask questions about whether all of the Bible was the same as the Word of God!

Moreover, how do we interpret this word? There are countless methods of interpretation: a whole science called hermeneutics. In a recent book, Searching for Meaning, Paula Gooder marshals 23 different methodologies trying to bring out different aspects of the meaning of the Bible, and points out in the introduction there could have been many more. When the Methodist Church wrote a report on how to handle the Bible, A Lamp Unto Our Feet, it proposed a whole range of different possibilities, some totally contradicting others. The conclusion to the report said that faithful Methodists followed some or all of those possibilities and advocated acceptance of them all.1

To some extent all this diversity and ambiguity could lead to confusion and the sound of ordinary Christian people running for the doors! But authoritarian approaches to the Bible are just as scary. Why do we give power to one person (usually a man) to interpret the text for us, to tell us how we must read it? The Reformation was about destroying that kind of power and about us being able to read and interpret the word for ourselves and to allow God to speak to us through his word. Why ever do we hand that gift to someone else to unwrap?

So let’s be sensible. Let’s limit our exploration to five aspects of the Bible that might help us understand biblical literacy a little better.

1 The Bible as a sacred text or sacred artefact – as biblia sacra (sacred books) or simply as hē graphē (scripture).

2 The Bible as an object of study.

3 The Bible as the engine of discipleship, full of examples of how to respond to our engagement with God or how to live our lives as disciples.

4 The Bible as God’s drama.

5 The Bible as word of God.

At the end of the chapter, for this fifth aspect, introduced so innocently above, I want to do a bit of theology about the Bible – to look at the Bible as having characteristics that are both divine and human and to ask whether the Bible is a different kind of text to the other books we may put on the bookshelf, physical or virtual, alongside it. I want to argue that the Bible is not the same as a Dickens novel or a C.S. Lewis paperback or Marx’s Das Kapital. I think this will help us to understand why we need to treat the Bible a whole lot differently to all other texts around in our world.

1 A sacred artefact

The Bible is one of humanity’s greatest treasures: a collection of ancient writings sacred for millennia within the Judeo-Christian tradition and given high esteem in many others. They are sacred texts, documenting a history of encounter between Yahweh and his people over all of time: from the garden of Eden; through the nomadic wanderings of the early Jewish tribes; the establishment of an Israelite state in Syria–Palestine and its political and military engagement with its powerful neighbours; the prophets and priests, in high places and temples; the birth, ministry, life, death and resurrection of Jesus; the establishment of the early church; and then on to the second coming of Christ and the establishment of a new heaven and a new earth.

These texts, these biblia sacra, were gathered together into collections of codices, an early form of the book developed especially by the church in the first century. In turn, these were eventually wrestled into two testaments: a canonical list of texts – the Bible. But that was really only the beginning. The Bible and the Christian faith became foundational to European culture during the decline of the Roman empire and was also foundational through other streams of ancient Christian tradition in Armenia, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Ethiopia, Russia and across swathes of western and southern Asia. The Bible became the source book for so much of society, especially in the West, from legal codes to social interaction and to political engagement – just as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey had been for Greece and Virgil’s Aeneid had been for Rome (and which TV culture may well be assuming for the contemporary age).

The Bible is so embedded in our culture that it has become a kind of totem, a symbol representing the whole of a culture. In a groundbreaking book, Rethinking Biblical Literacy,2 a number of scholars explore how the Bible has become part and parcel of our society – its images, words and ideas embedded within every aspect of our lives – visual, textual, aural, artistic, political, sacred. We live in a society infused with the Bible. In courts and in official ceremonies, people still give oaths on the Bible. We maintain blasphemy laws. The Bible remains a bestseller. Moreover, the Bible acts as a connection back into the tradition, into the bedrock of our civilisation. The Bible takes on both the sacred status of a religious text, but also the privilege of an ancient authority within the realm. It is a symbol of power and importance; a symbol, even, of the presence of God.

That totemic role of the Bible can be seen in the private realm as well. In biblical literacy research, we find that many more people own a Bible than those who read it. In fact, most people in the UK own a Bible, but very few actually read it at all. People still gift Bibles – at christenings and baptisms, at school or as a family heirloom. But the book is then left on the shelf, perhaps to be brought out for family weddings and funerals. The Bible takes on a kind of totemic presence in the house, perhaps a kind of amulet of protection. It remains important and takes on some sense of sacredness – a holy book for those who know where it is and what it means; more precious perhaps than those old cookery books that sit alongside it. This sacredness is not because of the words it contains but because it is a symbol of tradition; a symbol of the civilisation’s code of practice; a passport to that civilisation’s past and possibly into its future.

But the Bible easily becomes a symbolic artefact rather than a living text. In 2013 the Lindisfarne Gospels came back to the north-east of England. The Lindisfarne Gospels is a beautifully illustrated manuscript of the four Gospels in Latin with an Anglo-Saxon interlinear gloss created on Holy Island, Northumberland, over 1,300 years ago. It is a national treasure, one of the best surviving examples of Anglo-Saxon Insular art. As part of the exhibition, visitors were allowed to see the manuscript itself – open on different days on different pages – as well as lots of other artefacts of the northern Celtic saints and Anglo-Saxon spirituality. Everything was carefully laid out under glass, in carefully controlled atmospheric conditions. In various rooms in the gallery, you could see how the manuscript was made and marvel at the craftsmanship of Eadfrith’s textual work, Aethelwold’s binding and Billfrith’s ornamentation. You could even try writing your own version of the Gospels. But nothing in the exhibition told you what the Gospels said, nowhere was the Latin translated into contemporary English. The Gospels had become a jewel to be seen rather than a text to be read.

After all, few modern readers can read illuminated Latin or any other form of Latin. Even back in the tenth century, there seemed to have been a problem with reading Latin, as between the lines Anglo-Saxon words have been scrawled. The Lindisfarne monks, settled for a time at Chester-le-Street as refugees from the Vikings, turned this sacred artefact into a little piece of biblical literacy. They realised that this beautiful manuscript needed to be more than just a jewel; it needed to be engaged with, read, understood. It was not just a sacred relic to increase the holiness of the place where it was kept, but the very living word of God which needed to be set free into the lives of the believers.

2 An object of study

I want to push this idea of the Bible as an artefact a bit further. We’ve explored the idea of the Bible as a totem, something we regard as holy often without really understanding why – a kind of amulet to ward off evil or attract good. I think this is the way many people still think of the Bible today: something which is good to have in the house, a kind of spiritual insurance certificate.

But as a sacred object, as an artefact, the Bible affects the wider society. Its historical importance to art, architecture, legal codes and literature has meant that it is far more active than a mere amulet in affecting the whole of society, in infusing contemporary culture with biblical ideas and principles. It is as if the Bible were living and active. It is almost as if, straight from a fantasy novel or comic book, the Bible emanates a sense of its own presence, seeping its tendrils out into the world, oozing sacredness even while it remains passive on the bookshelf, on the altar or in the vaults of the national library. Perhaps that’s just mythological language, metaphorical language. Post-Enlightenment culture prefers to be governed by rationalism rather than concepts of the sacred or myth. For many in our society, the Bible is just an object. It is something we can pick up and handle. It can be touched and held and read; part of the material culture of our day.

Indeed, the Judeo-Christian tradition has created this object. Ever since God wrote on those tablets of stone, the Bible has been shaped into a written text: ...