Psalm 19:7-11 (NLT)
The instructions of the Lord are perfect, reviving the soul. The decrees of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple. The commandments of the Lord are right, bringing joy to the heart. The commands of the Lord are clear, giving insight for living. Reverence for the Lord is pure, lasting forever. The laws of the Lord are true; each one is fair. They are more desirable than gold, even the finest gold. They are sweeter than honey, even honey dripping from the comb. They are a warning to your servant, a great reward for those who obey them.
2 Timothy 3:14-17 (NLT)
You must remain faithful to the things you have been taught. You know they are true, for you know you can trust those who taught you. You have been taught the holy scriptures from childhood, and they have given you the wisdom to receive the salvation that comes by trusting in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right. God uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work.
Over the coming weeks, we will be focusing our thoughts on the Bible. You might say “but we think about the Bible every week”, and of course you would be right. Reading and reflecting on scripture is at the heart of our shared worship, but rather than homing in on a single passage or theme, for the next little while we will be taking a step back to look at the bigger picture. Think of it as a kind of back to basics for the Bible, as we ask “what kind of book?” We will be thinking about the different kinds of writing it contains, and different ways of approaching it. Even for those of us who have been reading scripture for a long time, these are important foundations which we shouldn’t take for granted, so I hope this will be a chance for us to think more intentionally about the what and why and how of our most sacred texts.
The first point of the Declaration of Principle of the Baptist Union of Great Britain says that “our Lord Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh, is the sole and absolute authority in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as revealed in the Holy Scriptures, and that each Church has liberty, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to interpret and administer His laws.” It's not the most elegant of wording, but essentially it means that we look to Jesus as God incarnate, that we find him revealed in the Bible, and that we are to read the scriptures together in the power of Spirit. Jesus is the primary source of our faith, and the scriptures are the primary text through which we learn about him, so we need to read them with the kind of wisdom and discernment we thought about last week as we reflected on the church meeting. That active engagement is really important, because as pastor to the Pilgrim Fathers John Robinson said, “the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth from His holy word”. The words on the page may not move, but the Bible is a living witness to a living God, and the text speaks afresh when we are open to hearing the voice of the Spirit through it.
You may have heard me say before that I take the Bible seriously but not literally, and I spoke just a few weeks ago of scripture containing truth that is more than fact. I believe this book is a record of humanity’s relationship with God, inspired but not dictated by God, written from our flawed perspective with our partial understanding. And so I do not believe it is perfect, but I do believe it contains important truths about God and about people and about what it means to be God’s people. I do not think it is God's only or final word to us, but I do see it as a kind of anchor point, the word we return to to test all other words. On which point, those of you who have been listening to me preach for some time may have spotted that one of my favourite refrains is “the Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love”. This for me is a foundational text, and all of my understanding of scripture has to make sense in the light of it.
These are some of the assumptions and biases I bring with me to all my reading and interpreting and teaching of scripture. I am not saying they are the right ones or the best ones, but they are mine. It is important for me to recognise them, so that I do not become entirely blinkered by them, and it is probably helpful for you to know about them, so that you can take my lenses off and experiment with others. We all have these kinds of assumptions and biases, and the more honest we are about them, the better they serve us and the more easily we can engage with those who have different ones.
I've offered some of my own thoughts, but now let's draw on the wisdom of others. A former co-minister of mine has written about reading the Bible honourably, saying “by that, I mean honouring the text, the people that created the text, the people in the room with me right now as we read the text together, and the millions of fellow-followers who have wrestled with the text over 2,000 years.” I love that sense of honouring not only scripture, but also the communities that shaped and have been shaped by it. If the whole of the law is summed up by “love God and love neighbour”, then our reading of scripture must surely be such an act of love. But what does it really mean to honour others in our reading of scripture? I think in part it means being willing to accept that most people read scripture in good faith, even if they come to conclusions different to our own.
Because scripture can lead us to very different ideas. Perhaps the clearest divide in biblical interpretation is between liberalism and fundamentalism. Both seem to have been a reaction to the Enlightenment, which prioritised scientific fact and called into question the more fantastical and miraculous elements of scripture. This will be caricatures of the extreme ends of these positions, but liberalism accepts that not everything in scripture is verifiable and is willing to let go of those parts of it, while fundamentalism insists that everything in scripture is absolute fact and clings fast to all of it. There has always been a spectrum between them, and we will each be somewhere on it, although I think it is probably helpful to avoid digging too deep into one position. That’s how we end up in trenches, seeing those in other camps as fools or heretics, which is not very honouring at all.
So we’ve started to think about how we may approach the Bible, but what about the book itself? How did we come to have this particular text? That is thousands of years of history, but here are some edited highlights:
8th century BCE - earliest biblical texts (Isaiah, Amos) written
2nd century BCE - most recent books of Hebrew bible (Book of Daniel) written
49-62 CE - earliest Christian literature (Pauline letters) written
70-95 CE - earliest accounts of Jesus’ life (gospels) written within living memory of his death
Early 2nd century CE - final biblical texts (Johannine epistles) written
1st and 2nd century CE - texts start to be collected and there is shift from scrolls to books
2nd century CE - oldest NT fragment we currently have
4th century CE - earliest complete Bible manuscripts
15th century CE - invention of the printing press allows mass production
1611 - King James Bible published as one of first authorised English translations
20th century CE - new translations (including audio, braille etc) increase accessibility
And within all of that history there was oral transmission, and there were written texts, and there was collecting together of manuscripts, and there were debates over what was in and what was out, and there were (some not entirely neutral) decisions about translating. God's fingerprints may be all over the Bible, but there are plenty of other fingerprints too, and it is not truly a book but a library, curated over many years by many hands.
Libraries contained many types of book, so that leads us to think about the types of writing the Bible contains. I want you to think back to your GSCE (or O Level) English. You may remember talking about genre, which is all about the style and purpose of a text. A poem is trying to do something very different to a newspaper article, so we need to come at it with a different set of expectations. It also uses language very differently, so we need a different set of tools in order to interpret it. Genre helps shape the way we approach and understand what we are reading, and so if we want half a chance at getting to grips with the Bible, we need to know what kinds of literature we are dealing with.
A standard categorisation of the Bible by genre looks something like this:
The first five books, sometimes called the Pentateuch, are law.
The next twelve books, Joshua to Esther, are history.
Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon are poetry.
The rest of the Old Testament is taken up by the major and then the minor prophets, the designation being more to do with the length than the quality of the prophecy.
The gospels are the gospels.
Acts is church history.
Romans to Philemon are the letters traditionally attributed to Paul, in order from longest to shortest.
Hebrews to Jude are the remaining letters, again in order from longest to shortest.
Revelation brings us back to prophecy according to this graphic, although it is often designated as apocalypse.
It’s nice and neat and fairly easy to remember, but there are a number of complications and variations:
Genesis is classed as law, but it doesn’t actually contain any laws. There are some important instructions – “don’t eat the fruit”, “go forth and multiply”, “build a big boat” to name a few – but nothing codified. In fact the laws don’t appear until the latter part of Exodus. Everything up until then is narrative, and there are more tales to come once we get to the laws. Essentially, one of the most striking features of biblical law is the fact that it is set within the story of a people, making it quite a task to untangle history and law.
Poetry is sometimes split with wisdom, so that the Psalms are classed as poetry and the others in this category are identified as wisdom, but that ignores the wisdom in the psalms and the extensive use of poetry in the other books. And to confuse things even further, Lamentations gets bundled up with the prophets but really sits better with poetry or wisdom.
Daniel is sometimes separated from the rest of the prophets and designated as apocalypse. The only other biblical apocalypse is Revelation, but as we know from our study last year, it is written in the form of a letter.
Speaking of letters, there is much scholarly debate over Paul’s letters, with some academics holding that a number of them (Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus) were not written by Paul but by a follower or imitator. And whoever wrote the letters, they contain snatches of poetry and storytelling and instruction and end times stuff, putting them at the centre of a venn diagram of biblical genres.
And that’s before we even get to the issues with the genres themselves, or at least with our understanding of them:
The purpose and character of historical writing has changed over time. We’ll say a little more about that later in the series, but using the word history to describe chunks of the Bible sets up certain expectations that aren’t necessarily going to be met. Using the term ‘narratives’ may sidestep some of those problems, although it may create new ones of its own.
Prophecy and apocalypse are no longer categories we are familiar with, or at least not in the form they took in the cultures the Bible grew out of. People still share words from God, but we tend to treat those messages as intensely personal and they rarely reach an entire nation. (Although having said that, I have seen a number of people talking about prophecy in the light of Bishop Budde’s sermon.) And there are still some who devote time and energy to thinking about the end times, but I wouldn't describe it as particularly mainstream theology.
The gospels are a genre all of their own, combining biography and teaching in a way that has little if any parallel. That can make it tricky for us to know what to expect from them, and it doesn’t help that each of the gospel writers had their own distinctive approach.
It is interesting to remember that there is no separate biblical genre of theology, because theology just means “words about God”, and so in that respect it is all theology - except perhaps Esther and Song of Songs which make it into the Bible without mentioning God once, although that doesn’t mean there is nothing of God in them. The difficulty with reading all of scripture as theology is that this can lead us to (what I think is) the mistaken assumption that every word carries equal doctrinal weight. The passage from 2 Timothy that we heard earlier said that all Scripture is useful for teaching, but it isn't all teaching in the same way or with the same urgency. Some stories will be positive examples of how to live as God's people, while others will be cautionary tales. Some writings will be quite systematic in their approach, while others will be much more like someone wondering out loud.
All of this is to say that the way we designate and define genre is problematic, and genre can only give us the broad strokes of a text anyway, so we must avoid a tendency to approach a text with very fixed ideas about it. and we need to consider more specific details such as context and authorship if we want to start filling in the details. But for all that, the genres we have mentioned are in the Bible, even if they are woven together in a slightly more complicated arrangement and have a few more nuances to them, so over the next couple of weeks we will look at each of them in turn.
Comments