You are what you eat, said St Augustine.
Well, he said ‘you become what you consume’ in the context of teaching on the Lord’s Supper. Nevertheless, the point is important. Consumption of the Supper has a formative effect into Christlikeness. The how and the why might be interesting, and I suspect Augustine and I part company somewhat in that explanation, but nevertheless the principle is vital.
Marshall McLuhan famously said that we become what we behold. Paul says that’s its by beholding Jesus’ glory that we become like him (2 Corinthians 3). Kevin Vanhoozer argues, along those lines, that the way Augustine spoke about the Lord’s Supper is therefore the same for reading the Bible.
For Vanhoozer, reading the Bible theologically involves seeing Jesus in his glory in the text in a transformative manner. This is a significant thread of the thesis of his Mere Christian Hermeneutics.
We might want to ask what it means to read the Bible theologically: I’d want to answer that it’s an attentiveness to both what the text says about God and to the literary form that it says it in. In other words, theological reading is (or includes) orthogonal reading.
Vanhoozer answers simply that to read the Bible theologically is to attend ‘to the divine address for the purpose of knowing God in the face of Christ,’ (319). In other words, choosing to read the Bible with the purpose of meeting Jesus in the pages. There is an expectation that when we meet Jesus in the text, we will be transformed.
That’s what successful preaching is: offering us Jesus in the text so that we meet/eat/see him and are changed by that encounter. Vanhoozer says all Bible reading should, ultimately, have the same end. I agree.
It isn’t as simple as deciding to read in that way and then doing so, it isn’t as simple as the words of the pages just changing us as we let our eyes passively run over them, if it were Mere Christian Hermeneutics would not be a complex book.
What I find most interesting is that part of Vanhoozer’s answer is an insistence on what John Webster calls an ‘anthropology of the reader.’ That means less emphasis on a set of tools to read the Bible with, useful though they can be (a book like Biblical Reasoning can be useful on the more theological end of that scale), and more of an emphasis on what kind of people we need to become in order to read well.
I’ve argued before that we should consider the Bible an instrument, in Borgmann’s device/instrument paradigm for understanding technologies. That means mastery isn’t immediate but requires practice for us to become the kind of people who can read the Bible well. That is in essence what we’re talking about.
Good Biblical interpretation acknowledges that we’re reading the word of God and that any interpretation we do is a reply to what God has first said to us. While there are occasional insights to be gained from interpreters who don’t know Jesus—some Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament can be very useful, Adele Berlin on Lamentations is superb, Rabbi David Foreman is a careful reader of the text and can be usefully read—we must admit that the activity they are engaging in is not the same as Christians reading the Bible. Academic work that doesn’t approach the Bible on its own terms is typically of less use to Christians.
We need more careful theological work that takes John Webster’s requirement, that we first become the kind of people who seek the face of Christ in the text of the scriptures, seriously. We need to foster, even among the British New Churches springing from the various charismatic renewals of the 20th century, intellectual enquiry that is distinctly Christian in character. We must assume the Bible transforms us as we read and read with transformation in mind. As Vanhoozer argued, if we want to do that we read with Christ front and centre.
The Bible is written by Jesus, to Jesus, about Jesus. That statement needs some theological unpacking, not least with careful application of the doctrine of inseparable operations, but is, I think, a good rhetorical summary of how we should understand the Bible. I’ll unpack it in a future post.
We should, therefore, read confidently expecting to find Jesus as we read. We preach the gospel from every text because we expect to find it, and its subject—the exalted Christ—in every text. ‘Where’s Jesus’ is a good question to teach people because we want to become the kind of people who expect to be changed by encountering the God in the face of Christ.
Photo by Marc Schulte on Unsplash
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