Reading the Bible Badly. Karl Allen Kuhn
of others, and lack of love. Then the final words of Jesus’ sermon underscore the ramifications of failing to interpret God’s will with humble, justice-guided, other-centered hearts (7:13–20), and failing to truly live out the truth revealed by Jesus:
Everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock . . . and everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand (see 7:24–29).
As Matthew emphasizes throughout his Gospel, it is Jesus’ interpretation of the Torah and prophets that is to empower the lives of the righteous. More than just reading Scripture is required. One must read it guided by the one who fulfills the very purpose of Scripture and, unlike the scribes and Pharisees, truly opens the way into God’s realm.
Jesus’ Followers Interpreting Their Traditions
Examples of various characters interpreting their sacred traditions abound throughout both testaments, but are especially prevalent throughout the New Testament as the early believers sought to make sense of their experience of Jesus. Many of these examples indicate that the relationship between Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection and the Israelite Scriptures was not—as many Christians today often assume—self-evident. It needed to be explained. In Luke 24, the resurrected Jesus repeatedly corrects the disciples’ misapprehension of the events that have just taken place by turning to Scripture. For example,
Then he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. (See also Luke 24:44–47.)
In Acts of the Apostles, we find the early believers taking up Jesus’ ministry of interpretation and proclamation. The speeches of Peter in the opening chapters, and those of Paul and others to follow, aim to help both Jews and Gentiles make sense of a crucified and risen messiah, a reality that radically conflicted with Israelite expectations of how God would redeem Israel and the world.3 Consider this moving scene from Acts 8.
26Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Get up and go towards the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is a wilderness road.) 27So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship 28and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah.29Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.” 30So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” 31He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. 32Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this:
“Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter,
and like a lamb silent before its shearer,
so he does not open his mouth.
33 In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who can describe his generation?
For his life is taken away from the earth.”
34The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” 35Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. (Acts 8:26–35)
The eunuch read an eloquent, profound, and penetrating piece of Scripture. But his act of reading—just reading—wasn’t nearly enough. “How can I understand this unless someone guides me?” he laments. Then Philip begins to speak.
The Challenge of Biblical Interpretation
Any act of discerning meaning is an act of interpretation (again, my apologies).
I hope that the preceding discussion has also made it quite evident that the act of discerning meaning from Scripture also necessitates interpretation. We never “just read it.” In fact, interpretation is an essential part of our vocation as followers of Jesus.
But the biblical examples of biblical interpretation that we glanced at above also make it clear that there are helpful and unhelpful ways of interpreting Scripture. Furthermore, the history of Christianity has also made it clear that Christians themselves have often disagreed over what are helpful and unhelpful, faithful and unfaithful, ways of reading Scripture.
And sadly, throughout our history, there have been ways of reading Scripture that have resulted in horrific acts of injustice against others. In our own American story, scores of Christians have used Scripture to justify the practice of slavery. We have also used it to promote the doctrine of Manifest Destiny—the notion that white colonists were destined by God to “settle” the west and lead indigenous Americans to civility and faith, even at the cost of their lands, liberty, lives, and children. Even today, many use Scripture to justify discrimination against members of LGBTQIA+ communities, women, Jews and Muslims, and ignore Scripture’s ever persistent call to choose love over fear.
But Christians have also been inspired and empowered by Scripture to rail against slavery and the physical and cultural genocide of native Americans, and to name homophobia, patriarchy, Islamophobia, and racism as the injustices they are.
How are we to account for these incredibly disparate ways of reading Scripture by Christians, beyond saying that some are clearly the result of human selfishness, anxiety, and short-sightedness? How are we to account for the multitude of disparities in how Christians today read Scripture?
Factors that Complicate Our Interpretation of Scripture
Interpretation is a human endeavor. Like all human endeavors it can be blessed by human ingenuity, creativity, brilliance, and openness to the guidance of God, or it can be marred by human fallibility, small-mindedness, and ignorance. Perhaps more common still, it can be influenced by some combination of several of those tendencies, both good and bad.
Our own personal histories and cultural settings also impact the meaning we discern from a biblical passage. New Testament scholar Mark Allan Powell has investigated, catalogued, and reported on differences in the ways readers understand scriptural passages. Particularly illuminating is a study Powell conducted on Luke’s parable of the “Prodigal” Son (Luke 15:11–32).4 In the study, Powell asked one hundred Americans of diverse gender, race, age, economic status, and religious affiliation to read the parable carefully, close their Bibles, and then recount the parable as completely as possible.
All of the American respondents (100 percent) remembered the detail of the son squandering his father’s wealth. This makes sense. What a loser! But, incredibly, only a small fraction (6 percent) were able to recall the detail of the famine. And this was not a run-of-the-mill famine—it was a “severe famine.” Many were starving, and many were likely dying (see Luke 15:14). But the American readers Powell surveyed just didn’t seem to take notice.
Powell then conducted the same study with fifty diverse respondents in St. Petersburg, Russia. In sharp contrast to their American counterparts, 84% of the Russian respondents remembered the detail of the famine. Interestingly, only 34% recalled the son squandering his father’s wealth. Wow.
Powell presumes, rightly, I think, that the reason the Americans surveyed remembered the detail of the squandering and did not (except for a few) recall the famine is that they understood the son’s squandering of his father’s wealth as the only, or primary, cause of the son’s plight. In other words, the narrative function of the squandering was just too essential to ignore, whereas the famine (the severe famine) was regarded as an ancillary detail that could be easily forgotten! In sharp contrast, the vast majority of the Russian respondents did not consider the detail of the famine superfluous, but essential to understanding why the son was in need.
This raises the question of why the American readers would focus on the son’s squandering and the Russian readers on the famine. Powell proposes,
One