I had one of those this morning when my friend Ann (who is in the middle of a really cool project, read about it here) sent me a link to this blog:
http://rachelheldevans.com/bible-made-impossible-biblical
The problems the author works through on this post, particularly the stuff about “biblical womanhood” are things I’ve been working through for a helluva while. It’s just so great to see that I’m not alone on this. Plus, she uses the word “deconstruct” when reading the Bible. It’s Derrida week over here in grad school and so the timing is impeccable.
RE: the word “biblical”– yes! There’s too much sloppy use of a meaningless word. “Meaningless” in the sense that it is used to mean whatever people want it to mean, but it pretends to represent great and non-human (divine) authority.
I found myself wondering lately where in the Bible we are told to read the Bible. This is not a rhetorical question– I’m sure people are aware of passages advocating the reading of scripture. But I can’t think of any New Testament calls to “scholarliness”– the advice given has to do, instead, with faith, prayer, morality, behavior, etc.
None of this is intended to in any way suggest that there is no value in studying the Bible. Certainly people whom I respect testify to the value of it, and I know for myself what can be gained from it. In other words, I’m not looking for testimony about the Bible’s greatness; rather, I’m looking for where the Bible states that the Bible is or should be our primary way of encountering God.
The answer to those questions was kind of a sub-theme of my history of the Bible as a Book class I had last semester. I wish you could have been there for the first lecture, about what kind of Bible Jesus had, what Paul was referring to when he said “All scripture is God breathed.” We forget that people didn’t have their own Bibles until Gutenberg and the Reformation. What were their faiths like without “God’s Word” at their fingertips?
*most* people. The rich and the pious had their own after people started canonizing stuff.
So, what was the answer?
“Whose Bible Is It” by Jaroslav Pelikan has your answers, but essentially, there were Hebrew Scriptures that were around in Jesus’s day but the faith wasn’t based, necessarily, on people’s relationship with them–it was more about ritual. Only a selected few, I guess, read the scriptures but they probably taught them to the people. You probably know this. It wasn’t until the Reformation that a relationship with Jesus hinged or even involved an ordinary person’s reading the Bible regularly. But if you’re wondering how the Bible came to be and the different arguments/discussions/splits that got us to where we are today in terms of the relationship between reading the Bible and practicing Christian faith, I recommend reading that book. BTW, Pelikan is a Christian.
The Pelikan book is absolutely wonderful. It was recommended to me by H. Martin.
Joshua