If you're a serious Christian, you've read the Bible. And according to Glenn Paauw, chances are you've been reading it wrong. In Saving the Bible from Ourselves, Paauw looks at seven practices that tend to distort our approach to and interpretation of Scripture. These are discussed at a high level below; any quotes are from the book.
Book Overview
Paauw argues that we've messed with the Bible in 7 principle ways:
1. Distorting the Presentation
"Marking divisions in the text is perhaps the key intervention made through the Bible's history." Originally the books of the Bible were presented without division (they didn't even have punctuation or spaces between the words). We added spaces and punctuation to aid reading of the text, and then took it a step further. The modern chapter system was developed around 1200 by Englishman Stephen Langton; numbered verse divisions took common hold in 1551 (thanks to Robert Estienne, a French printer, though the concept had been tried earlier). The result? A fragmented Bible where the form has changed. "If you change the form, you change the content." Fragmenting is an artificial segmentation that lends itself to misunderstanding key passages by breaking them up in unnatural ways that the authors never intended. In addition, different literary forms like poetry, letters, and historical narrative all tend to merge together because they're presented identically.
The Bible is a collection, not of verses, but of books. The locus of meaning in the Bible is the individual book. Each book has a unique purpose and point of view, addresses a unique situation or need, and employs a definite literary type, or genre. These books have long been hidden from view and it’s past time they were revealed in all their rich, diverse and complex-yet-simple glory.
2. Snacking
Too often, our modern approach to the Bible is by reading only short passages. In short, we 'snack' on Scripture rather than 'feasting' on entire books. This approach makes it easy to take verses out of context. We believe verse-by-verse dissection of supreme importance, but many nuances can be lost here. The danger? "It filters the Bible into predetermined categories of things we already know we want to hear." We look for stand-alone verses to comfort or win arguments without considering the context or bigger picture of Scripture. We need to read entire books- and we need to read all 66 of them. "My understanding of any one of the books will be limited without a comprehension of the shape and movement of the whole collection." We need to read the Bible at length.
Once we begin with whole books, we can work our way both up (to collections of books and on to the entire story) and down (to the parts that make up a book—a single story, parable, oracle, vision, or one of the points in the body of an instructive letter). But both of these secondary steps are dependent on getting this first step right. When we read whole books we will be equipped for looking more broadly at other levels of meaning.
3. Ignoring the Historical
The Bible is "historical in its subject matter- it all revolves are what God has done and is continuing to do in history." Yes, "the Scriptures are the revelation of a personal, relational, incarnational God to actual human communities of men and women with names in history." And yet we often underplay or ignore entirely the historical nature of the Bible. We've "inherited a suspicion that too much history (that is, too much attention to the human side of the Bible) is bad for the Bible and for our faith."
Why do we do this? Perhaps because "we intuitively want the Bible to speak directly to us. But it doesn't. It spoke directly to its original audience (and not as an easily-indexed handbook of religious topics either). It speaks indirectly to us. What it says about anything and everything it says in the language, literary forms and patterns of thought common to ancient worldviews and cultures." We needn't be dismayed about this; instead, we should rejoice when we realize that "God has wed his story to ours, and ours to his. He is intimately involved. God is a God of history. Therefore the Bible is a book intertwined with history, and understanding it aright includes the good, hard work of historical investigation." The Bible is divinely inspired, and "the whole Bible is for us, even if it wasn't written to us. But appropriating the message for ourselves, now, means first doing the necessary due diligence on what the message was for others, then." We must recognize that "God worked in and through the regular ways people communicated in antiquity to bring his particular message into the world."
God has chosen to use existing human forms and elements—language, culture, history and literature—as his means to communicate. Thus our good reading will mean accepting, learning and accounting for these human elements. At the same time, since these are God’s inspired, authoritative writings, we are assured the Scriptures will express his intentions for us, reveal our salvation, guide our living and give birth to our hope.
4. De-dramatizing the Story
"We live in stories." "We relentlessly try to connect the dots of our experiences." To be sure, the Bible is a story. "Stories essentially make the claim that one experience, one event, one thing, is related to the next one that follows it. Stories are series of links that posit meaning." Our history, therefore, "is not a random series of actions and speeches, signifying nothing. The story has a plot." In the Bible, we see "both unpredictability and teleology: we don't know what will happen next, but we believe our lives are headed toward some goal."
When we look at the Bible as just an 'instruction manual,' we lose the story; we miss the point. "To lose story, to try and read the Bible in some other, lesser manner is to lose the connections between things. Pieces of teaching and wisdom and law and praise and lament and the telling of individual events were never meant to stand aloof, disconnected from each other." We need to learn two fundamental things about the Bible: "(1) there really are different acts in the drama, so things change, and (2) it really is a single story, so the acts are related to each other and there are abiding patterns that persist over time." It's important to discern both elements in the story of Scripture.
'Scripture as story' tells us that the hope and promises of Scripture are not abstract, groundless ideas; they're based in what has happened, what is happening, and what is to come. At the highest level, "the story of the Bible is the ongoing interplay between a faithful God and his unstable children. This is what used to be called progressive revelation, but can be even more helpfully identified as the dramatic movement of a story." "The narrative of the Bible contains all the standard elements of the classic five-act drama, which [N.T.] Wright defines succinctly as Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus, and Church." The "whole story turns on how God is in Christ reconciling the world to himself." What is our role in this story?
"What the Bible does not do, though there are many who wish it did, is script our parts in any kind of detail. It's not as though we can simply go to the Bible and look up our lines for the day. So how does the Bible speak to, inform, direct, guide- in short have any authority in- our lives today?" In short, the Scriptures "are inviting us to take up our own roles within the community of the new creation. We are being called to enter the story." "We learn early on in the Bible that the world is ours to run, to shape, to manage, to rule. And we learn later on in the story that we are to do so as servant-leaders in the pattern of our self-sacrificing King Jesus." We live in "a world in which the renewal of all things in Christ has already begun," and "we've been given a multitude of gifts to help us keep the redemption story going in our world." So may we remember that "we are real players in the story," "our actions matter," and "God honestly responds to them." We are in "a Christ-centered story that is as yet unconcluded."
5. Neglecting this World
We tend to read the Bible "as the story of salvation based on escape from this world." Some have even called the Bible "Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth." Yet this perspective is disastrously wrong, as this thinking "redirects us from the crucial message of restoration and renewal that is actually in the Bible."
It's clear from the work of Christ that "escape from creation was never the plan. Confronting and defeating evil within creation was." "The story is one of restoration and life and not defeat and retreat to some other realm." It's about recovery, "not an abandonment of the original purpose." In the end, this "is a new creation story, not a post-creation story . . . God will come back to his now rebuilt temple and make his home with us, here." Scripture's contrasts aren't about "down here [earth] and up there [heaven];" they're about "now and then"- "this present evil age and the hope of the age to come." And "we are outposts of the kingdom of God in the territory he has reclaimed as his own."
If the goal is no longer escape from the world but engagement with it in the interest of God’s reclamation project, then we have reason to listen more carefully to what the text tells us about things like the nature of the created, the false ways of the rebellion and the path to life renewed. We will be more intimate in our Bible reading in order that we might be more attentive in our life in the world.
6. Privatizing the Experience
Let's face it: in western culture (America in particular), there is "a modern emphasis on the free, independent and self-determining individual." And we tend to approach Scripture this same way. We want to interpret the Bible completely on our own, and deny interference "by any outside authority, whether ecclesiastical or historical." We think we can do this alone, and this "is too often reinforced by preaching that also assumes the big takeaway is always the purely individual application." We've got it backwards, and there's a real danger here.
Nobody approaches the Bible (or anything) from "a neutral position or as a blank slate open to all that it has to offer." We all have filters (due to sin, culture, and personal experiences). "When my primary practice is to sit and read the Bible alone, the only filter I get is the one formed by my current circumstances, my personal history and my prior influences. I will be blinded to certain aspects of the text because I'm bringing only myself to the text. My own tendencies, my own interests, my own agenda will dominate." Indeed, "ongoing isolation from others in my Bible engagement simply allows my own idiosyncracies free rein" when we "cut ourselves off from the valuable resources of a wider interpretive community." It was not always so.
We must remember that "for the vast majority of Christian history people did not even have the option of studying the Scriptures in private." Widespread illiteracy and scarce availability of the texts (before mass printing) made this the reality for centuries. "The Bible was written by communities, for communities, about communities . . . most of the addresses to "you" in the New Testament are plural, even though we regularly read them as singular." "There was an ongoing communal immersion in the Scriptures . . . Jesus, his first Jewish followers, and then Paul all made a point of going to the place where the Scriptures were regularly read in community and where people were used to interacting over them together." So what if "we think of ourselves as the body of Christ first, and as individual Christians second?"
There are many benefits to the community approach to the Bible. We will profit from varying perspectives- this is a "gain, not a threat," for "God's spirit has been working through all of his people through all of his ages." In the end, "hearing from others who are differently situated will aid us in our desire to hear all that the Scriptures have to teach. God’s people have been gathered from every nation, all tribes, the full range of socioeconomic groups, and they’ve lived across a long historical arc . . . we must welcome the participation of others in our Bible conversations." This doesn't mean the Bible is subjective or relative . . . its truths are absolute. But we need a community to learn, appreciate, and apply those truths.
I am too small a person to read the Bible only by myself. I don’t see, hear, experience or know enough to read the Bible sola me. Saving the Bible in our day necessitates the rediscovery of truly communal engagement. The Bible assumes that the only way to be properly human is to find one’s identity in a community, and the Bible has one on offer.
7. Downplaying the Presentation
Beauty matters; art and artistic expression is important. Throughout history, "most lay people gained their knowledge of the Bible through such communal events as open recitations, sermons, publicly available art (especially in churches), and the sharing of stories and songs at festivals and gatherings." Indeed, the Bible's "overall story-turned-drama is begging for our artistic response, our beautiful participation in the project of setting all things right." Yet in our modern information age, we often fail to realize this.
Our Bibles are not flat presentations of information; there is beauty, elegance, and variety. "When we devalue the expression of truth in other than just-the-facts ma'am propositional forms, we close ourselves off to much of the Bible." "We would do well to pay attention not to just what it says, but how it says it." "The surprising diversity of kinds of writing in the Bible should help us realize that certain kinds of things can only be said well with certain kinds of writing."
It’s a serious deprivation that we’ve not been taught to look for and appreciate the Bible’s manifold use of literary characteristics, because they’re employed precisely in service to its expression of truth. Art is not the enemy of the Bible’s knowledge. The problem, rather, is our limited view of what constitutes knowledge. The Bible we actually have welcomes a wide variety of ancient literary forms as allies and partners in telling God’s story, revealing God’s instructions, sharing God’s wisdom and singing God’s songs. This kind of fully human Bible is not a problem but a gift to us—it uses our own native art forms to communicate.
Review
Amazing, enlightening, transformational, humbling, encouraging . . . it's hard to find words that do this book justice. That I highlighted 238 passages in a 214-page book tells you what I thought about this. But of all things this book did for me, what I appreciated most was the excitement it gave me to approach the Bible anew.
I confess, after years of reading the Bible over and over and over, I grew tired and proud. I knew the stories, the teachings, and the warnings (or thought I did). I encountered little that was new to me or blew me away (I say this to my shame). After reading Saving the Bible from Ourselves, I now eagerly yearn to read the Bible through this new approach. And, in keeping with the book's recommendations, I plan on reading it without the distorted presentation. On that note, the Books of the Bible was produced for just this reason. Pick up a copy at your local bookseller today and get back to the basics of Scripture.
Rating: A+
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