Reading Theologically

3. Reading Biblically

3 Reading Biblically Amy L. B. Peeler As a champion of the Epistle to the Hebrews, I often find myself citing Hebrews 4:12, “Indeed, the Word of God is living and active,”1 to affirm that God speaks today through the Scriptures. My colleagues who study other “texts”—Shakespeare, poetry, the events of history, or the movements of nature—would testify that they hear God speaking to them in their disciplines, a claim I readily affirm as a proponent of the liberal arts who believes that all truth—wherever it is discovered—is God’s truth. At the same time, they would also acknowledge that the Bible holds a unique place in our studies. It is—to use a theological turn of phrase—God’s special revelation to us, different from and elevated above the general revelation apparent in all other mediums. The Bible, however, is not just a different kind of thing we study. Instead, because it is living and active, we soon realize that we are being studied by it. Scripture never remains a mere object; it 1. All citations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the New Revised Standard Version. 49 becomes an agent, searching out the divisions of soul and spirit, joint and marrow, to disclose the thoughts and intentions of our hearts (Heb. 4:12). Paul uses this double affirmation several times when he begins to discuss knowing God, and quickly corrects himself: “Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God” (Gal. 4:9) and “then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12). To read the Bible theologically is to read humbly, ready to have Scripture challenge you even as you endeavor to investigate it. I organize the following suggestions for reading biblically around Jesus’ admonition that we love God with all the aspects of our humanity (Luke 10:27). The mind navigates the academic challenges of studying the Bible in seminary, the heart joins with new communities who read Scripture, the soul purposes to discover God in the text, and the exercise of strength translates the individual effort for the good of the congregation. It takes the exercise of all these aspects of interpretation to take up and read the Bible well. With All Your Mind: Reading Academically Very few beginning seminary students have thought deeply about Karl Barth, or transubstantiation, or apocalyptic eschatology before coming to seminary. And yet these same students want to know more about the Bible and its meaning. In fact, reflection on the Bible—and joy in doing so—is often a reason why seminary became an option in the first place. “Here I will have ample time and resources to study the Bible!,” the burgeoning student thinks, but sometimes the reality falls short of the expectation. This rude awakening often stems from the differences between what she has done in the past, reading the Bible Reading Theologically 50 as a devotional or liturgical discipline, and what she must do in the present, namely, approach the Bible as an academic discipline. Several suggested “best practices” for reading the Bible academically follow, organized in concentric circles beginning with the smallest details of the text and proceeding to the broader concepts. Following them leads you along the road toward good exegesis, a biblical studies term that simply means to draw out the meaning of the text. By using the tools of science and art, the seminary student can discover and then communicate some of what this amazing and awesome text is saying. Reading Historically Before focusing on the text itself, the interpreter must situate the text in its original context, and to do so he must use the resources of history. Without question, God speaks today through the Scriptures (Heb. 1:1-2), but God has done so in a very particular way by having those Scriptures composed in specific times and places that are now distantly removed from the present time and culture. If we as interpreters want to know what the Bible is saying—and what it isn’t saying, sometimes the more important point—we must know as much as we can about the setting in which it was written. We can be thankful that a vast amount of resources exists to help the student in this endeavor. In fact, more has been written about the history of the...