How to Read the Bible with the Historic Church

“A text cannot mean what it could never have meant for its original readers/hearers.” This quote from Gordon Fee, frequently regurgitated on social media, exposes an emerging fault line in evangelical protestant Biblical interpretation. On Fee’s side are those who insist that the true meaning of any Biblical passage is limited to what the author intended to convey to their original audience. The goal of Biblical scholarship is thus to reconstruct the “world behind the text,” in order for contemporary Christians to accurately hear the words of scripture as it would have been received at its writing: One must read a text, grasp its original meaning and context, then attempt to apply the meaning of that text to their life today.

This approach is advocated in the popular Biblical interpretive text book Grasping God’s Word by Scott Duvall and Daniel Hays, and remains standard for a bulk of evangelical seminaries in the West. Scholars such as Gordon Fee, John Walton, and NT Wright dominate this field, and the majority of contemporary Biblical commentaries—those utilized by both scholars and pastors—are written with the ironclad assumption that interpretation must begin with historical reconstruction.

But a rebellion is afoot. Over the past 50 years, a contingent of scholars, including Ephraim Radner, R. R. Reno, Hans Boersma, and others have chipped away at the supremacy of the historical-critical approach to scripture. A large portion of these critiques center upon time. These scholars assert that Biblical texts are not just individual documents written at a particular point in time, but also texts breathed by a God who is outside of time. God is the author of all of scripture and has orchestrated all of the events documented in scripture, and so the meaning of individual passages can be more than what their human authors intended. Scripture is thus marked by multi-directionality and simultaneity.

As Ephraim Radner states, each individual passage of scripture refers to “a range of entities, time bound or not, and often at once; and Scripture’s language serves to open up ourselves to this multivalent reality.”  Stories, images, persons, and symbols can mean many things at once, and that meaning can be discerned not only in past events, but future events as well. For instance, the story of the Israelite crossing of the Red Sea is indeed a historical event that tells a real story about a miraculous God and the faithfulness of his people. But it is also an event about the baptism of Jesus and Christian baptism. In His providence, God arranges these events so that the readers of his word would see these connections and see these events as related and mutually interpretive.

Most who challenge the dominance of the historical-critical method accept that the critical tools of the academy can be helpful for understanding scripture, and that faithful Christians like Fee and Wright have helped many encounter God’s Word. The problem, however, is that this approach tends to limit scripture to one specific meaning, which is itself dependent on the academy for verification. Far from providing stability to interpretation, this approach can serve to destabilize the Biblical text, since academic consensus is constantly changing. In addition, many of the authors of the New Testament interpret the Old Testament in ways that clearly violate Fee’s rule limiting meaning to the original audience of a specific Biblical text. Paul, for instance, speaks of the crossing of the Red Sea as a baptism and insists that the Israelites drank from the rock of Christ (1 Cor 10:2-4). Such interpretations would have caused Paul to fail an Old Testament exam if he were to take one at a contemporary evangelical seminary.

In contrast to this approach, challengers seek to recover early Christian exegetical practices that took as an assumption the multi-valent reality of the Biblical text and grounded interpretation in the doctrine and discipline of the church in contrast to the academy. While there are substantial differences in their approaches, movements under the monikers such as figural exegesis, spiritual exegesis and (to some extent) theological interpretation all share in common an attempt to recover ancient reading practices for contemporary Christians. 

The latest academic monograph in this vein is Kevin Vanhoozer’s superb Mere Christian Hermeneutics, which ends with a clarion call for churches to establish reading cultures that engage in what he calls transfigural interpretation, an approach to scripture that “neither privileges nor excludes any particular critical method, though it cautions against reducing textual meaning to any single frame of reference,” and “forms its members to right minded and right-hearted answerable subjects, responsible for and responsive to the divine address of the biblical text.”

Vanhoozer’s call for ecclesial based reading cultures serves as an inflection point, as it highlights the major issue plaguing all of these attempts to recover early Christian approaches to scripture: the inability to successfully implement such practices within the local church. Despite a growing consensus among contemporary scholars of the need to recover these ancient practices, very little has changed in the pews. The lack of substantial changes in the ways that churches approach scripture has led Ephraim Radner to suggest the possibility that figural exegesis might simply become another academic fad, intriguing for a small cloister of scholars but never leading to a “living retrieval” performed within the active life of the local congregation.

As I see it, there is a glut of academic articles and monographs that have successfully critiqued the historical-critical method and articulated ways forward that reincorporate early Christian approaches to scripture. In contrast, there are relatively few contemporary examples of individuals actually exegeting scripture along these lines. There needs to be sermons, Bible studies, and reading groups that are grounded in this approach and accessible to those outside of the academy. 

To borrow terms from the missiology world, what is needed is translation and inculturation: Pastors able to glean the spiritual and figural dimensions of scripture must translate their knowledge into exegetical artifacts that are intelligible to those who have never heard of the terms “exegesis” and “hermeneutics.” They must also teach their parishioners to do likewise in order to create a live reading culture, one which does not require its members to attend a seminary or get advanced education in hermeneutics.

When I was a pastor of a small congregation in State College, PA, I engaged in several attempts to cultivate the kind of reading culture that would constitute a “living retrieval” of ancient approaches to scripture. I offer up the following synopsis of my attempt as well as some of the practical principles I developed along the way. 

Integrating the Story

One cannot engage in figural exegesis without first grasping the one to whom all figures are fulfilled: Jesus Christ. In order to do so, one must have a basic grasp over the overall story of scripture, what Augustine calls the narratio. Rather than trying to teach ancient exegetical practices as a kind of method to be deployed at the outset, I decided that it was best to simply integrate these practices into an overall telling of this biblical story. This had the advantage of making scripture accessible to those who were not Christian or new to Christianity.

In order to do so, I formed a “Bible in Two Semesters” study with Penn State students, most of whom were new Christians who had never read the Bible. These studies took students through the story of the Bible through a select chapter of scripture each week, beginning with Genesis and ending with Revelation. I used mountain theophanies as a framework to bind together these various chapters, foregrounding figural and Christological readings of scripture from the outset, using a handful of the following principles and heuristic devices to train students to read scripture along the same vein.

Closing the Critical Distance Gap

The ever-present danger in reading the Bible in community today is that such studies will devolve into a discourse about the Bible rather than an encounter with God through the Bible. Moderns like us, who breathe the air of the historical-critical method will always be prone to approach it from a certain critical distance. In order to close this gap between reader and Bible, I committed to engaging in teaching and discussion that was free of technical academic terminology. I did not use words like exegesis, figural, eschatology, and theophany, even when dealing with passages that touched on these specific theological concepts. Keeping this principle allowed students of various educational and theological levels to participate in the same study together. This principle foregrounded the ways that God’s Word was encountering them within the text. It kept students from distancing themselves from the text and kept the study from devolving into puerile discussion of academic minutiae.

Enfolding History

The historical-critical method teaches us to approach the Bible as a critic, but also as a historian. Here, time is purely linear, and the reader can only reconstruct this history and glean whatever lessons they can out of it. But for early Christians, time was both linear and multidirectional, secular as well as sacred. An encounter with scripture enabled readers to see the past, present, and future as one, and to see themselves as taken up into its story, to experience it in the present tense. Reading scripture is like pumping accordion bellows back and forth—seeing the story stretch out in time, then seeing how all the events compress together to make a pleasing sound. In order to teach students how to read scripture in such a manner, I committed to putting them directly into the text, personalizing the passages so that they could see their own lives within the pages of scripture. This often involved simply demonstrating spiritual readings of scripture without telling students that I was engaging in spiritual readings. 

For instance, in discussing the crossing of the Red Sea, I did not say “Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth century theologian, thought of this passage as a metaphor for Christian baptism.” Instead, I would say “this passage is about Jesus’ Baptism and your baptism. When you were baptized, you were baptized in the Red Sea.” The purpose was to stress the immediacy of the text to bring one into the presence of Jesus Christ.

A Focus on Symbol

While the aforementioned rhetorical choices helped to close the critical gap and helped students enter into the sacred time of scripture, the final step was to help them engage in figural and spiritual readings of scripture themselves. In order to aid in this process, I developed a heuristic device for orienting students around the various types in the Old and New Testament. A host of images drawn primarily from Old Testament mountain narratives and tabernacle worship were utilized as threads to bind together the various books of the Old and New Testament.

Such images include water, trees/wood, bread, wine, clothing/garments, fire, and oil. I also included an illustrated symbol guide, a kind of map legend, to orient students. When one of these images appeared in a Biblical text, it became a moment to pause and reflect on the significance of that image, and to see how that image had appeared in both earlier and later passages. I called this the horizontal reading of the symbol—it helped readers see the Bible as a complete and unified narrative. In addition, these same symbols are associated at some point with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. I called these associations vertical readings of symbols. The use of horizontal and vertical were somewhat akin to the literal and spiritual senses of scripture.

A Living Retrieval

Did a living retrieval of ancient exegetical practices emerge from this little reading culture in rural Pennsylvania? Here is what I discovered in these Bible studies.

First, the study enabled participants with little Christian background, including self-described agnostic students, to encounter the basic Gospel message solely through an examination of the Old Testament. My approach to scripture assumed that Jesus is at work directly in the pages of the Old Testament, and that Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Isaiah are books that communicate core Christian truths.

The Trinity was discussed in Genesis 1, the sermon on the mount in Exodus 20, and the Eucharist in Leviticus 9. Students did not have to wait for the New Testament portion of the study to understand the truths of Christ’s death and resurrection, and were given opportunities along the way to respond to the Good News of Jesus Christ. Through encounters like this, we had several students become Christians without ever getting to the New Testament portion of the Bible study.

Second, there was modest progress in the ability of students to engage in the kinds of spiritual/figural readings associated with the ancient Christian church. By the midway point of the Bible study, students began to draw typological connections without guidance: wood and cross, water and baptism, fire and spirit, became instantaneously associated with each other. Furthermore, students were able to see the triune God as active throughout the Old Testament. Students heard the voice of Jesus thunder the Ten Commandments on Sinai, and saw him as he passed by a shielded Moses on Mount Sinai. One of the highlights of these studies were the unique insights made by students themselves as they drew connections between image, event, doctrine, and principle. For instance, one student instantly connected the red robe placed on Jesus with the bloody animal skins given to Adam and Eve, a connection I had not made. This allowed us both to delve deeper into the depths of human sin and divine mercy. Within these Bible studies there was, in a real sense, a living retrieval of ancient exegetical practices. Since many of the participants were new to the Christian faith, this approach to scripture became normative and intuitive: It is the only way they had read the Bible.

In order for a larger scale retrieval of ancient exegetical practices to occur within the local church, more work needs to be done beyond a Bible study. To that end, I have embarked on three interrelated projects. First, I have written a book based on these Bible studies (Four Mountains: Encountering God in the Bible from Eden to Zion), which can be read on its own, in an introductory Bible class, or as part of a local church Bible study. The approach is similar: simplified language, written in a style familiar to readers, and using symbols to help guide horizontal and vertical readings of scripture. The hope is that this book can generate the similar kinds of small scale, living retrievals that I experienced with Penn State students. 

A second related work aims to help pastors and those in liturgical churches engage in this approach to scripture through the Sunday lectionary readings. It was the intention of many of the compilers of the Lectionary for Mass and the Revised Common Lectionary to center the recitation of scripture on the risen Christ while helping listeners draw connections between the Old Testament, Psalms, Epistles, and Gospels. They developed a lectionary that lends itself well to a retrieval of ancient reading practices. However, many preachers miss these connections, focusing instead on one particular text each week. Fewer laity are able to naturally draw these connections on a given Sunday. This forthcoming book (tentatively titled The Lectionary, Lexham Press) will help readers draw connections between Old Testament, New Testament, and the worship of the church.

The third major project will be the compilation of a modified lectionary based on the Revised Common Lectionary, which aims to strengthen the thematic and typological connections between Sunday readings, as well as provide an option during Ordinary Time to encounter more of the overarching Biblical story.

The goal with these projects is not to produce a comprehensive method of interpretation. My assumption is that reading cultures that retrieve these practices will generate a variety of faithful interpretations of scripture. Instead, I aim to contribute to a (hopefully) impending groundswell of reading cultures and exegetical artifacts in harmony with the early Christians and which serve to wrestle scripture back from the claws of academia.