10 principles for reading the Bible in a postmodern context

Implicit in these principles is a process of deconstruction followed by reconstruction. Deconstruction is necessary because there are certain ‘invisible’ structures present in our thinking as believers, many of them relics of an earlier, embattled period, which now constrain and distort our attempts to understand and articulate the truth that lies in the Bible. But there must be a corresponding reconstruction with the goal of reinstating the Bible as a valid public text for the emerging culture.

1. Reading honestly

We need to develop a visible intellectual integrity – keeping in mind that intellectual integrity is not just for intellectuals. Traditionally we have treated Christian truth more or less as an inviolable and definitive set of truths. Built into the formulation of truth, however, must be something of the hesitancy or doubt or provisionality that we experience as we seek to make sense of the story about God. The belief system which we advocate must reflect something of the imperfectness, the incompleteness, of our belief.

2. Let’s pretend it’s not inerrant

There has been considerable debate over whether it is acceptable to take a more historical-critical stance towards the truth status of Scripture. Should we regard the factual content and coherence of the Bible to be divinely guaranteed? Or should we accept more public criteria for truthfulness and deny that the Bible is an epistemologically privileged text?

For the purposes of this site we might suggest a compromise: we will set aside claims to the predetermined inerrancy and sanctity of the Bible, at least insofar as such claims force upon us standards of truthfulness that conflict with criteria of thought that we are not prepared to abandon in other areas of discourse (scientific, historical, literary, social, etc.). In other words, we will read the Bible as though it were a profane text, on the ‘pretence’, so to speak, that its truthfulness is an emergent quality, to be discovered through the process of reading, not to be superimposed from above.

There are some important advantages to this approach: it allows us to read the Bible as the unbeliever reads it; it helps to defamiliarise the Bible for us, which will be an essential aspect of the deconstruction process; it keeps open the possibility that a more robust and persuasive truthfulness will emerge as we grapple with the fact of the Bible’s historicity; and we keep in view the significance of the Bible as the Word of God for the church.

3. Forgetting what we’ve been told

We must let go of the need to define truth dogmatically. The transition we are going through has shown our dogmatic systems to be very inadequate containers for biblical truth. They have become the fragile and lifeless chrysalis from which the butterfly of a more vital understanding is struggling to emerge. If we are to rediscover the truthfulness of Scripture, if we are to find a way to restate the Gospel within a postmodern intellectual environment, we must go back to the source and come to know the Bible for what it really is.

The problem with the traditional propositional theological model is not that it is propositional but that it is inflexible; it is reluctant to acknowledge and review its presuppositions; it is unwilling to wipe the dogmatic slate clean and start again. We do not need to abandon propositionalism in favour of a narrative theology, but we do need to demonstrate that our more or less systematized conclusions are genuinely connected not only with the story of which they are a summary but also with the dynamic process of the church’s continuing interpretation of that story.

4. An intrinsic biblical theology

We can make a useful distinction between an intrinsic and an extrinsic biblical theology.

An extrinsic theology is generated outside the original historical context. Although it is a product of the text, it becomes more importantly the means by which the text is subsequently interpreted. An extrinsic theology is generally well-adapted to a set of contemporary social and religious conditions, but it is likely to misrepresent the original meaning.

An intrinsic theology arises in relation to the complex historical situation of the text: it belongs to the circumstances of its production and reading. It is their theology, not ours. Such a theology is by no means inaccessible to the modern reader, but it requires some effort to place oneself in the world of the original community and hear what they heard. I would suggest that this constitutes the right sort of hermeneutic for a postmodern biblical theology: it is the act of standing outside ourselves, it is an act of intellectual self-displacement, of theological humility. It is also an effective means of deconstructing modernist theological discourse without succumbing to historical and theological relativism.

5. Spirit-driven theology

A postmodernized theology must be pentecostal, in that it must fully take into account the activity of the Spirit in the life of the believer; and it must be charismatic, in the sense that the capacity to re-envision, reinvent, to make sense of the gospel in a postmodern context, must be experienced not purely as an intellectual competence but as a gift of the Spirit.

6. Reading the big structures

Meaning will be found primarily in the large literary structures of the Bible rather than in isolated, dogmatically selected proof-texts. These natural structures include historical narrative, theological argumentation, sustained prophetic analysis. The reliance of popular Christianity on proof-texts is a pseudo-rationalist strategy that is likely to sound artificial to the postmodern ear.

7. Reading the community of the texts

It may suit a postmodern orientation to think not only in terms of reading the text but also of reading the community that generated and used the texts. Such an approach recognizes that for postmoderns truth comes alive as it is expressed and lived out in community. It would require less imaginative dependence on the New Testament texts, an openness to other literary, historical, archaeological resources.

It might help to think of the New Testament community rather as we think of other Christian communities-for example, the Celtic communities that have proved to have a strong affinity with postmodern spirituality.

8. Eschatology at ground level

The New Testament needs to be interpreted much more deliberately and consistently in relation to the eschatological crisis that marked the end of the age. But we will also need to affirm as far as possible the historical and realistic dimension to eschatological teaching.

We need to develop an eschatology that hovers near the ground of history, that is marked out by the crises of history. Whereas seekers may be struggling to get off the ground, believers tend to have the opposite problem of not being able to keep in touch with reality. Having discovered the thrills of eschatology they are inclined to soar off into orbit either to disappear forever or burn up on re-entry.

9. Being read by the text

One problem that arises when we emphasize the historicality and contingency of Scripture is that we make it somewhat remote from personal experience. As sacred text the Bible has an inherent universality and may speak quite naturally to a twenty-first century readership if it is disposed to listen. If we strip away the sacredness, we are left with an ancient document that may lack immediacy and authority. Part of the answer to this is that the reader must learn to enter imaginatively into the ancient world of the Bible. But there is also a need for the church to speak prophetically today, drawing both on the ancient texts, which it is endeavouring to interpret with increasing accuracy, and on the understanding given through the Spirit.

10. Practical usefulness

Our reading of the Bible must be practically useful for the church. We need a discourse that can empower worship, teaching, pastoral ministry, evangelism, and so on.

All Truth is God's Truth... or...

My maxim has long been that "All truth is God’s truth" and I’ve attempted to live in such a way to demonstrate that belief. I was responding to a friend’s blog the other day when I suddenly stopped and questioned one of my core beliefs. I asked:

Surely our ability to deal with the truth we have (what we do with knowledge) is more important than what knowledge we have?

Now that I phrase it like that, I wonder how it fits into the creation stories. What do people in the community think? Is knowledge (such as ‘’the knowledge of good and evil’‘) sinful in itself or does it take willfull action based on that to become sinful?

Original post here

I began to consider knowledge and sin in light of James 1:13-15:

When someone is tempted, he should not say, ‘I am being tempted by God,’ because God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone. Instead, each person is tempted by his own desire, being lured and trapped by it. When that desire becomes pregnant, it gives birth to sin; when that sin grows up, it gives birth to death (ISV)

I originally considering that James’ theology would have us believe that thought processes, such as desire or knowledge, are not sin. But James doesn’t seem to want me to read that into his work…He is clearly talking about temptation rather than knowledge.

I don’t know the creation stories (Gen 1-3, John 1:1-18) as well as I would like, but a casual reading in English translations leads to the belief that an act of disobedience caused the fall, and that disobedience was gaining knowledge (cf the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil). So, does knowing all God’s truth constitute sin? Without the fall, would it have been possible for humanity to gain all of God’s truth?

Are knowledge and disobedience intrinsically linked?

Back to the main point, in light of all of this and our post-modern context, does anyone else agree that "all truth is God’’s truth"? What are your experiences in dealing with issues of righteousness and knowledge? and what praxis can we build from it?

Could you say the Apostolic Creed with conviction?

A striking feature of the Emerging Church is its apparent lack of conviction. So much twisting and turning on the hook of Scripture. This said, can they honestly say that, without reservation they subscribe to the ancient creeds of the Christian Church without disputing the details?

How will postmodern evangelicals read the bible?

Listen! A sower went out to sow… Some seed fell on critical ground, where it grew quickly – but before it could bear fruit, it was dug up and dissected by botanists in white coats curious to know what species of plant it was. Some seed fell on pre-critical soil, but gardeners came and built a high wall around the patch of ground and tended it according to their esoteric traditions. Rumours spread about genetically-modified crops and strange mutated fruit. And some seed fell on post-critical soil, but gusting winds of suspicion blew the seed around so that it could never take root, and the ground remained barren. He who has ears to hear, let him hear…

At this point, as you might expect, an interpretation is required. These areas of ground are three hermeneutical environments in which the Bible may be read. The schema is, of course, grossly simplified as is usually the way with allegory; more importantly, each approach is presented in negative terms.

1. Modernism is commonly understood as the product of a rationalist reductionism, and the modernist hermeneutic, derived from this larger worldview, consists of an historical-critical reductionism.

2. If for the purposes of this analysis we may label the traditional evangelical approach to scripture as an uncritical ‘biblicism’, it may be characterized as the implementation of a theological reductionism. It tends to remove scripture from the sphere of history and ordinary human experience, emphasizing instead the divine origins of the text, its theologically guaranteed integrity, and its immediate personal relevance to the reader. Despite being in many ways at odds with modernism, this position has made selective, and often inconsistent, use of modernist forms of argumentation, principally for apologetic reasons.

3. Just as modernism questioned traditional religious and philosophical accounts of the world, postmodernism has in its turn pulled the rug out from under the feet of the rationalists by questioning the very possibility of knowing anything at all – at least with any measure of certainty. This amounts to an extreme form of epistemological reductionism – in the sense that meaning and truth are never allowed to take root; everything is kept up in the air by an almost obsessive suspicion of socially constructed knowledge.

An integrated hermeneutic

The question that we are faced with is: where is the good soil in which to grow a productive postmodern-evangelical reading of scripture? My view is that our hermeneutic will relate in a rather complex and ambiguous way to each of these positions. We are not looking for a piece of clear and pristine ground apart from them in which to sow the seeds of a ‘postmodern-evangelical’ mode of reading the Bible. We are looking for an area of overlap that is in creative and critical tension with its hermeneutical surroundings.

1. We will need to engage seriously with the historical-critical programme – probably now with the expectation that we have rather more to gain than lose by doing so.

2. We will agree with the biblicist conviction that the Bible must be regarded as the primary and normative means by which we remain in continuity with the faith and commitments of the people of God.

3. We will share something of postmodernism’s sensitivity to the universalizing and controlling influence of meta-narratives. We will learn to be more hesitant about the semantic and referential functions of texts; we will be less certain about the power of language to fix truth for general consumption. We will accept that reading and responding to the Bible are not straightforward activities.

An expansive hermeneutic

This attempt to define a hermeneutic in relation to historical criticism, biblicism and postmodernism is arguably itself a reductionist procedure insofar as it subordinates these three programmes to the task of synthesizing a substructure for a postmodern-evangelical reading of the Bible. I think this is probably unavoidable; but I would also suggest that each position remains the starting point for exploration out from the hermeneutical centre. A postmodern-evangelical reading of the Bible should be expansive, inquisitive, communicative, busily trading with its intellectual hinterland.

1. A postmodern-evangelical hermeneutic that has engaged properly with historical-criticism should not be narrowly selective in its use of the historical-critical methodology. On the one hand, there will be a candid recognition of the difficulties that this engagement – even in its most benign forms – continues to pose to conventional readings of scripture; on the other, there will be a willingness to venture out into the unfamiliar landscape that has been constructed by historical research in search of a more authentic understanding of the story about Israel and YHWH.

2. Our commitment to the Bible as ‘Word of God’ should not be so constrained by its openness to historical-critical and postmodern readings that we cannot allow the text to motivate worship and mission or have an direct, transformative impact people’s lives. We will need to find new ways of articulating trust in scripture.

3. Nor should the ‘modernist’ practices of historical-criticism and biblicism inhibit the postmodern instinct to exploit the ambiguities of the text, the elusiveness of meaning, the potential for multiple readings, and so on.

Distinctives of a postmodern-evangelical reading of scripture

It seems to me that we are moving towards a fundamental realignment of the evangelical hermeneutic, by which I mean not just the way the Bible is interpreted by scholars but how it is read by ordinary believers – how it is studied, preached, taught, discussed, blogged on, meditated upon, used in worship and prayer, packaged by publishers, retold publicly, and so on. It would be difficult to guess in every respect what this realigned hermeneutic will look like, but I would emphasize three main distinctives.

A community-driven reading

The reading of scripture will be conversational and community-driven – a creative engagement of different perspectives and interests, not the autocratic dissemination of an official orthodoxy. There will be a high level of community-ownership of the process of reading, interpreting and responding to scripture. The conversation will include groups that have been marginalized by modern evangelicalism – not least the academics.

If this is perceived to jeopardize the integrity of Christian truth, the response will be to learn, on the one hand, to recognize authoritative voices within the conversation, and on the other, to develop a methodology (perhaps an implicit methodology) that will maintain and manage the different commitments that we have as the people of God. With the pluralism will come a heightened self-awareness and humility: those who join in the conversation – being good postmoderns – will be conscious of the presuppositions that have shaped their perspective, of the problematic nature of discourse, and of their capacity to get things wrong.

An alienating reading

Evangelicalism has always sought to modernize the Bible – through translation, paraphrase, packaging – in search of relevance. I would suggest that an engagement with both historical-criticism and postmodernism will have the welcome effect of making the Bible appear strange again. On the one hand, by returning the Bible to the flow of history, we will regain a sense of distance from the texts. On the other, postmodernism continually exposes the accommodating, harmonizing power of extrinsic interpretive structures such as canon, creed, statements of faith, and so on. We will find ourselves confronted with the particularity and vulnerability of the biblical stories.

A narrative reading

Texts will be located within, and interpretation will take its bearings from, a narrative rather than a systematic framework. This is not a merely formal or inconsequential shift of emphasis: the retelling of the narrative is likely to force a significant reorganization of our systematic theology. At the moment the task of reconstructing the narrative is strongly under the control of an historical-critical methodology. At a later stage we may find that a more characteristically postmodern interest in narrative as a literary form may displace the historical-critical agenda.

The interpretive framework that is usually brought to the evangelical reading of the Bible consists of a dogmatic-experiential grid. Along one side is a set of beliefs that makes up the underlying argument of Christian faith. There is certainly a narrative component to these beliefs but I would argue that the story that is told functions much more like myth than history: God sent his Son to die for the sins of the world so that those who believe in him might go to heaven. The story is readily schematized and easily adapted to systematic forms of theology. Along the other side of the grid are a set of categories drawn from our experience of the Christian life, both personal and corporate. The grid, as a result, is essentially a-historical: it deals with the immediacy of the text and is subordinate to a mainly pragmatic spiritual and ecclesiological agenda.

A narrative hermeneutic, on the other hand, will place the text – or texts – of scripture in an interpretive framework that has not been collapsed into an abstract, universalized, formulaic orthodoxy but stretched along a disjointed, fragmented, realistic historical axis.

This will have major implications for how we contextualize what we read: we will be more aware of the heterogeneity of the texts; we will learn to read the New Testament against the background of the Old Testament in a way that preserves their historical integrity and does not reduce the latter to a body of atomized proof texts and prophecies; we will need to understand how the Bible itself interprets history eschatologically.

At issue here, though, is not the question of whether we may arrive at something like an objective historical truth. Postmodernism has persuaded us that the most we can hope to do is dab away at the canvas with an impressionist’s brush from the limited vantage point of our prejudices. The issue is whether the way we read the Bible and draw conclusions from it is consistent with the way we read other texts (literary, historical, scientific, journalistic) and draw conclusions from them.