More recently, re-reading some of the essays, I was surprised by the way they spoke, amplifying themselves, to the time and experience added to me since I read them last.

And yet explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable. Explanation is reductive, not comprehensive; most of the time, when you have explained something, you discover leftovers. An explanation is a bucket, not a well.

What can’t be explained? I don’t think creatures can be explained. I don’t think lives can be explained. What we know about creatures and lives must be pictured or told or sung or danced. And I don’t think pictures or stories or songs or dances can be explained.

I mean simply that I expect any writing to make literal sense before making sense of any other kind. Interpretation should not contradict or otherwise violate the literal meaning.

The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.

Scrutiny and interpretation are the gist of any intense interplay, and of love in particular.

i come to read them poems,
a fancy trick i do
like juggling with balls of light.
stand, a dark spinner,
in the grange hall,
in the library, in the
smaller conference room,
and toss and catch as if by magic,
my eyes bright, my mouth smiling,
my singed hands burning.

What if those pre-Enlightenment minds … knew how to take their foundational metaphors and stories programmatically, functionally, and seriously without asking too closely about literal and metaphorical distinctions?

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

Instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest forever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic.

It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and live for a time in the wilderness. If he is the proper sort, he will return with a message. It may not be a message from the god he set out to seek, but even if he has failed in that particular, he will have had a vision or seen a marvel, and these are always worth listening to and thinking about. (p. 163)

It was better, I decided, for the emissaries returning from the wilderness, even if they were merely descending from a stepladder, to record their marvel, not to define its meaning. In that way it would go echoing on through the minds of men, each grasping at that beyond out of which the miracles emerge, and which, once defined, ceases to satisfy the human need for symbols. (p. 178)

No place for grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among the noise and deny the voice

Alone in the library room, even when others
Are there in the room, alone, except for themselves:
There is the illusion of peace; the air in the room

Is stilled; there are reading lights on the tables,
Looking as if they’re reading, looking as if
They’re studying the text, and understanding,

Shedding light on what the words are saying;
But under their steady imbecile gaze the page
Is blank, patiently waiting not to be blank.

The page is blank until the mind that reads
Crosses the black river, seeking the Queen
Of the Underworld, Persephone, where she sits

By the side of the one who brought her there from Enna,
Hades the mute, the deaf, king of the dead letter,
She is clothed in the beautiful garment of our thousand

Misunderstandings of the sacred text.

FUGATIVE.  Well, I could use a book.

KEEPER.  What book?

FUGATIVE.  A Bible.

KEEPER. To find out how to get away from God?
Which is what people use it for too often—

Poetry is a language for thinking aloud in—not for putting thoughts into words.

The songs come at us first; and then the rhymed
Verses like speech that half-sings; then the tunes
Of summer evening—the train whistle’s sigh
Westering, fading, as I lay in bed
Sunset still creeping past the lowered shade;
The gossip of swallows; the faint, radioed
Reed section of a dance band through an open
Window down at the far end of the street;
And then the strings of digits that we learn
To keep like bunched keys ready to unlock
All the boxes we get assigned to us
By the uncaring sheriffs of life itself.
We play by ear, but learn the words by heart;
(Visions we have by head); yet even when
The sight of the remembered page has dimmed
The jungles that we gleaned from it remain
Lodged with us, useful, sometimes, for the work
Of getting a grip on certain fragile things.
We are ourselves from birth committed to
Memory, to broad access to a past
Framing and filling any presentness
Of self that we could really call our own.
We grasp the world by ear, by heart, by head,
And keep it in a soft continuingness
That we first learned to get by soul, or something.

A necessary part of our intelligence is on the line as the oral tradition becomes less and less important. There was a time throughout our land when it was common for stories to be told and retold, a most valuable exercise, for the story retold is the story reexamined over and over again at different levels of intellectual and emotional growth.

But in circular time, these stories are both history and prophecy, stories for a time yet to come.

Thinking about [the story of sleeping beauty] now, I believe that the tale is as impregnable and unassailable as its hedge of thorns. We can play variations round about it, imagine peasant trespassers, or rapist princes, happy or unhappy endings, as we please. We can define it; we can defile it. We can retell it to improve its morality, or try to use it to deliver a “message.” When we’re done, it will still be there:  (p. 114)

Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.  (p. 199)

In oral tradition the idea of an original is illogical.

The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently

is not silent, it is a speaking-
out-loud voice in your head: it is spoken,
a voice is saying it
as you read. It’s the writer’s words,
of course, in a literary sense
his or her “voice” but the sound
of that voice is the sound of your voice.
Not the sound your friends know
or the sound of a tape played back
but your voice
caught in the dark cathedral
of your skull, your voice heard
by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts
and what you know by feeling,
having felt. It is your voice
saying, for example, the word “barn”
that the writer wrote
but the “barn” you say
is a barn you know or knew. The voice
in your head, speaking as you read,
never says anything neutrally—some people
hated the barn they knew,
some people live the barn they know
so you hear the word loaded
and a sensory constellation
is lit: horse-gnawed stalls,
hayloft, black heat tape wrapping
a water pipe, a slippery
spilled chirrr of oats from a split sack,
the bony, filthy haunches of cows …
And “barn” is only a noun—no verb
or subject has entered into the sentence yet!
The voice you hear when you read to yourself
is the clearest voice: you speak it

Indeed, I took it to be my task to enter the poem, to become the speaker of the poem, to reenact the poem as if I were the experiencer.

… once a piece of news is subject to the verification procedures of a piece of knowledge, it simply ceases to be news.

Literature is news that STAYS news.

Illusions she didn’t know she had were shattered when
she saw in the text she was cleaning up—
the corrupt recension of the now lost text—
not the cypress of heaven
or the morphology of a recurring type
or the riverbank where a god dances
but her own self’s circumstances,

and not in the lover but the miserable sinner
who, as the poem trembled
to the death of its god,
drew back in fear
and so came to be noticed
by the demon who so resembled
her sworn enemy in her department,
with his bleak chin and his knowing look.
Though prodded by him she did write the book

that captured it all—god, demon, lover, avatar,
the ascension by night, the great battle,
the sobbing behind the ruined lattice—
and suspended it between her mother tongues
in the cat’s cradle of her scholarly apparatus—
made from shards, really, but mysteriously there.

Something was lost for literature, and maybe for life at large, when the Western mind gave up such ease of allusiveness. Of course, typology assumes an audience thoroughly steeped in Scripture and this is so far from being true today that an author would be utterly quixotic to depend on it.

loving words—
“be true
to the poem”
nothing will shake that
fine commitment down.

The entire problem with criticism … is how to keep the body alive while it is being studied.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes).

The prevalence of cliches is no accident, but inherent in the nature of information. Property rights in information suffer from the necessary disadvantage that a piece of information, in order to contribute to the general information of the community, must say something substantially different from the community’s previous common stock of information. Even in the great classics of literature and art, much of the obvious informative value has gone out of them, merely by the fact that the public has become acquainted with their contents. Schoolboys do not like Shakespeare, because he seems to them nothing but a mass of familiar quotations. It is only when the study of such an author has penetrated to a layer deeper than that which has been absorbed into the superficial clichés of the time, that we can re-establish with him an informative rapport, and give him a new and fresh literary value.

… the buried strangeness
Which nourishes the known:

Stories move us and move through us, become the conscience of a community.  (p. 90)

Trusting direct experience is the open door to revelation. This was my foundation for faith. It still is.  (p. 244)

… one who had embraced a truth he was meant to resist, or to perceive only glancingly.  There are such truths.  … the key to reading poetry.  You can’t let the flashes of insight harden into “knowledge.”  You have to remain true to these moments of truth.  …  Scripture itself often demands just this sort of indirect perception.

… and the King, with an instinct for the via media that the English church had trod since the Reformation—fighting Rome temporally but often cleaving to it spiritually—wanted a Bible that smoothed contention into majesty. It was the job of the translators’ rhetoric to elide doctrinal differences. “This is the heart of the new Bible as an irenicon, [Adam] Nicolson writes with typical suredness, “an organism that absorbed and integrated difference, that included ambiguity and by doing so established peace. It is the central mechanism of the translation, one immense lexical subtlety, a delicate carrying of multiple meanings beneath the surface of a single text. [referring to the KJV]

Intuition is immediate as perception of color is immediate. In its essence it is non-judgmental, amoral, non-verbal, and uncritical, although after the intuiting moment the spectator may be filled with scorn or praise, and so on. Thus I hold with Croce, Dewey, and other thinkers on aesthetic matters that any work of art can be enjoyed through this act of immediate perception without conscious effort or reasoning.

Just as we taste food with the mouth, so we taste the psalm with the heart. The soul that is faithful and prudent will not fail to grind it with the teeth of understanding, because if he were to swallow it as a lump, not having chewed it, his palate will not gain the desirable taste which is sweeter even than honey from the honeycomb. … Just as honey comes from the wax, so is devotion found in the letter. (p. 171)

It is not without reason that the spirit is described as manifold by the wise one [Wisdom 7.1], if only because it customarily conceals many different meanings under the one shell of the letter. (p. 174)

The Bible is often quite uninterested in, or unable to comprehend, the questions pressed upon the text from modern perspectives and experiences.

For the truth does not lie in the rationally verifiable history but in a life—a life which, out of an unpretentious and derided history, breaks forth as the life of God, while history according to the flesh is left behind as a useless shell.

After all, in the Scriptures we are in our Father’s house where the children are permitted to play.

THE SUBSTANCE AND STRUCTURE of this book are an argument that liberated, imaginative interpretation and disciplined, committed obedience depend upon and require each other for faithfulness.  Interpretation that seeks to let the old word be the live, authoritative word, if it is faithful to the material interpreted, must be an act of obedience. Obedient interpretation in the social context of the Western church is to see how the Bible authorizes, evokes, and permits a world that is an alternative to the deathly world of our dominant value system. This question of an alternative world is intrinsic to our affirmation of biblical authority.  (Kindle Locations 43-46)

The twin dangers we face are that our interpretation will become autonomous and cease to be obedient, and that our obedience will become “mere” and cease to be interpretive. (Kindle Locations 53-54)

The narratives of Elisha have suffered in critical assessment. They are sometimes thought to be legendary derivatives from the Elijah narratives, which themselves are legendary. They are thought to be of little historical value. That judgment, however, is itself an assessment made by the canon of certitude which seeks to recover the world “behind the text.” The practitioners of such a footnote as the Elisha narratives, however, who generate such texts, are not much interested in “the world behind the text.” They are not interested in knowledge that records, controls, and chronicles. They are interested rather in the world “in front of the text.” They ask, What does this narrative give us in order that we may survive? Are there alternatives natives for us in the face of royal power? The Elisha narratives, as with all narratives of amazement, are told not to preserve past miracles but to generate present awe and to anticipate future astonishment among people not excessively subservient to their rulers. The narrative does not just remember a world that was. It creates a world that could be—even though the kings wanted to insist that such a world is not possible. The narrative playfully probes to see what kind of world might exist were the canon of control, the authority of kingship, and subservience to established power not taken too seriously. (Kindle Locations 375-382)

The textual memory to which I appeal has great porous openness to other renderings, as long as those renderings remain attentive to the story line.  (p. 3)

But, of course, we take it as “Scripture,” as a disclosure from elsewhere, as a gift that keeps on giving.  For that reason I suggest that while not generic, the script is paradigmatic and may be given concrete replication at other times and places.  (p. 103)

The text is saturated with the odd, the hidden, the dense, and the inscrutable—the things of God.

Scripture is “commentary” on the reality of the risen Christ.

’Tis a dangerous thing to engage the authority of Scripture in disputes about the Natural world … lest Time, which brings all things to light, should discover that to be evidently false which we had made scripture to assert.

To interpret allegorically is to read expectantly, to listen to the text with a certainty that it will carry meaning for the reader. It is a hermeneutical strategy based upon not suspicion but critical trust of the text. The practice of allegorical reading requires the reader’s receptivity to the text’s continual ability to generate meaning in the present. (p. 171)

Our distrust of allegory signals our loss of confidence that meaning may be present even when it is not obvious to us. … We often approach the difficulties of texts not as mysteries to be savored but as problems to be solved, resisting passages that hide from us and refuse to reveal themselves to our critical reasoning. (p. 176)

We are never to put the book between us and God, to give us second-hand knowledges of him, and there accept our limit.  The book is given us to carry us beyond the book, and put us in the way of finding God as others have found him, then and there to be in the Spirit as they were, and know Him by such private interpretation as he will give us.  The mine is given, not that we may have the gold already dug, but that we may go a mining for ourselves.  And as these great saints of holy scripture were men of like passions with us, it is to be our glorious privilege that they pilot us on by telling us how to know and grow as they did.

It will be a great day, I must add, for the scriptures, when the dull soul of dogmatism has done with its undiscerning inflictions; when poetry is taken for poetry, passion for passion, and the hyperbolic intensities of interjection, never again for propositional statements.

The bells ring out around a monastery to alert people around us that we are listening to the Word of God, to put the world on notice that we may be different now …

… When we start listening to the Word of God, people have a right to expect something new of us.

I am commanded to search the Scriptures; now that is not to be able to repeat any history of the Bible without book, it is not to ruffle a Bible and upon any word to turn to the chapter and to the verse; but this is the true searching of the Scriptures, to find all the histories to be examples to me, all the prophecies to induce a Savior for me, all the Gospel to apply Christ Jesus to me.

This is to search the Scriptures, not as though you would make a concordance but an application; as you would search a wardrobe, not to make an inventory of it but to find in it something fit for your wearing.

     … people sometimes try to make the Bible seem like a big book full of easy answers, but it isn’t.  It’s a bunch of voices from the past that ask us a lot of questions about why we do things the way we do … (p. 29)

     With eyes and ears for this sort of thing, we will have to resist the temptation to read the scriptures flatly, as if any verse can be extracted and deployed to say “what God says,” as if there is no ethical progression or moral development or widening eschatology within the collection.
…  Will the how of our reading and the practice it engenders be a just and faithful witness to God’s way in the world?  (p. 156)

…  the act of interpretation makes us nothing less than conduits of revelation. (p. 158)

     Jesus often refused what was in his time the reigning interpretation of scripture. As is the case with the prophetic tradition he draws on, I believe his refusal was an act of faithfulness that transcended the insufficiently faithful readings of his contemporaries.  He insisted that the words mean more than they had up to that point (“Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing”).  (p. 159)

However you need to interpret the scripture to do right by others and thereby love God, have at it. You aren’t doing the one if you aren’t doing the other.
  … Move your interpretations in the direction of more righteous practice, and don’t look back.  Read as you need to read to be invigorated and encouraged to do justly. Do what you need to do. Love your neighbor. Think what it takes. This is the text. Let it mean love. The rest is commentary.  (p. 169)

I could learn to ask ancient questions of the Bible rather than impose my own, trust God rather than myself, and embark on a long journey that would lead who knows where.  (p. 19)

     God has invited us to participate in a wrestling match, a forum for us to be stretched and to grow.  (p. 22)

     In the Bible, we read of encounters with God by ancient peoples, in their times and places, asking their questions, and expressed in language and ideas familiar to them. Those encounters with God were, I believe, genuine, authentic, and real. But they were also ancient—and that explains why the Bible behaves the way it does.  (pp. 23 f.)

I believe God encourages us to explore this land—all of it—the Bible is more a land we get to know by hiking through it and exploring its many paths and terrains. This land is both inviting and inspiring, but also unfamiliar, odd, and at points unsettling—even risky and precarious.  …
    I believe God encourages us to explore this land—all of it—patiently, with discipline, in community, and above all with a sense that we, joining the long line of those who have gone before, will come to know ourselves better and God more deeply by accepting that challenge.  (p. 24)

I am respecting the Bible’s ancient voice, trying to understand what that ancient voice is saying, and then (and only then) make a decision, as best as I can, about what to do with it.
     …
     …  we need to step outside of the Bible and into the world of the Bible.   (p. 54)

     The Bible—from back to front—is the story of God told from the limited point of view of real people living at a certain place and time.
     …
     The Bible looks the way it does because “God lets his children tell the story,” so to speak.  (p. 63)

     … the fact that they are in the Bible doesn’t mean they are automatically timeless and have permanent staying power.  (pp. 68 f.)

     The biblical storytellers recall the past, often the very distant past, not “objectively,” but purposefully. They had skin in the game. These were their stories. They wove narratives of the past to give meaning to their present—to persuade, motivate, and inspire.  (pp. 75 f.)

Perhaps by the time they wrote their Gospels, some forty years after Jesus’s life, after the resurrection, the bigness of it all, not fully grasped at first, had begun to come into its own.  (p. 85)

     Christians believe by faith that the real Jesus is the Jesus of the full story—the resurrected Jesus. That Jesus was not and could not have been understood by walking with Jesus in and around Galilee. The disciples themselves—those Jesus handpicked to carry on his work—were utterly clueless about the big picture.  (pp. 85 f.)

     I want to try, as best as I can, to watch how the Bible behaves and then try and understand what sorts of things the Bible is prepared to deliver.  (p. 128)

     The Bible, then, is a grand story. It meets us and then invites us to follow and join a world outside of our own, and lets us see ourselves and God differently in the process.  …  The biblical story meets us where we are to disarm us and change how we look at ourselves—and God.

    The Bible calls that change repentance. Maybe stories are where repentance can happen best.  (p. 129)

     … the Bible doesn’t capture a freeze-frame of God and bind him to it.  (p. 149)

  Another portrait of God in the Bible, at least as common, usually doesn’t come to mind as quickly when we talk about God: God is more “one of us.” He figures things out, changes his mind, regrets his own actions, reacts to what others do, and has to be calmed down.
     …
     …  God seems to be making it up as he goes along.  (p. 156)

     … they also saw that God was pushing them beyond the boundaries of Israel’s story, because Israel’s story wasn’t set up to handle the unexpected story of Jesus—of a messiah who was executed by the Romans and then came back to life.  (p. 164)

     Revering the Bible and handling it creatively might sound like a contradiction to us, but it wasn’t to ancient Jews.  (p. 171)

     As the generations passed, Jews needed to bridge that gap between their past, with its diverse and binding document, and the ever-changing present, to stay connected to what God was saying to them now within the pages of their ancient scripture.

     Bridging this gap required a creative handling of scripture to find deeper meaning than what the words on the page say on the surface.

     …  Indeed, it was God himself extending that invitation to them to dig deeper.  (p. 173)

Debating the Bible, especially Torah, and coming up with creative readings to address changing times was a mark of faithful Judaism. Jews were not “legalistic” about handling the Law, which is still a common Christian caricature.

     …  The debates of the day were about how to be flexible and creative, not whether scripture was still binding.  (p. 174)

     “Fulfilling Torah,” ironically, means going beyond the words on the page and to another level.  (p. 181)

     … it’s always a bad move to invent a Jesus who agrees with us rather than challenges us.  (pp. 187 f.)

Isaiah has a context and he is speaking out of it and into it.

The Bible deconstructs from within what the church has made of it.

If there existed only a single sense for the words of scripture, then the first commentator who came along would discover it, and other hearers would experience neither the labor of searching, nor the joy of finding.

This is why it’s especially important for those of us who come to the Bible from positions of relative social, economic, and racial privilege to read its stories alongside people from marginalized communities, past and present, who are often more practiced at tracing that crimson thread of justice through its pages. (p.41)

Job’s friends make the mistake of assuming that what is true in one context must be true in every context—a common error among modern Bible readers who like to trawl the text for universal answers. …
Wisdom, it seems, is situational. It isn’t just about knowing what to say; it’s about knowing when to say it. And it’s not just about knowing what is true; it’s about knowing when it’s true.
…
To engage the Bible with wisdom, then, is to embrace its diversity, not fight it. (p. 98)

[The Bible’s] saga of the Exodus and the conquest of the Promised Land offered a shared vision of solidarity and hope for every individual in the community—in a way that royal or heroic mythologies could not.

… Nowhere else in the ancient world had such a powerful, shared saga been crafted: the Greek epics and myths spoke only by metaphor and example; Mesopotamian and Persian religious epics offered cosmic secrets but neither earthly history nor a practical guide to life. The Hebrew Bible offered both … [and] became the world’s first fully articulated national and social compact, encompassing the men, women, and children, the rich, the poor, and the destitute of an entire community.

If the afterlife of Elvis illustrates in parody form how resurrection myths get started, the afterlife of the Beatles shows how it was that people came to write the Gospels: Don’t tell me what it means, just tell me again what happened.

If Wilfrid Mellers … with his book, Twilight of the God, was the Beatles’ Mark, narrating the story while it is still hot, Hertsgaard is their Luke, supplying a Gospel for the Gentiles and doubters, and MacDonald is their St. John, the mystic chronicler.

[Review of A Day in the Life by Mark Hertsgaard, and Revolution in the Head, by Ian MacDonald]

Sometimes
like a mighty river
that thunders and echoes
through weathered canyon walls
Your Word floods my soul, Lord,
surging with power
to cleanse away debris.

Sometimes
like a quiet stream
that meanders sparkling
through a sun-dappled vale
Your Word flows gently, Lord
through my aching heart
to comfort and to heal.

Sometimes
like a swift deep current
that rushes to the sea
Your Living Word flows on
through me to others, Lord,
in leaping, pulsing waves
and sounds the depths of love.

Truth is lived narrative. And the goal of story-telling is not simply to extract the truth that it supposedly illustrates, but to “inhabit” the story.

… The modern thinker is interested in answering questions such as, What universal, transcultural “truth” was Jesus seeking to convey to his disciples? Or what point does Matthew want his readers to gain from the story? These questions treat the text as a pointer to a deeper “truth,” rather than as being the truth itself.

[Rules for interpretation:] 3. Follow the law of love. This is mentioned in all of the confessions of the 16th century, but by the time you get to the confessions in the 17th century, when people were fighting, the rule of love lost out. No interpretation with hostility, contempt, or indifference toward any person can be a right interpretation.

A life that becomes the gospel. [Title of the book.]

After my mother’s father died,
she gave me his morocco Bible.
I took it from her hand, and saw
the gold was worn away, the binding
scuffed and ragged, split below the spine,
and inside, smudges where her father’s
right hand gripped the bottom corner
page by page, an old man waiting, not quite
reading the words he had known by heart
for sixty years: our parents in the garden,
naked, free from shame; the bitterness of labor;
blood in the ground, still calling for God’s
curse—his thumbprints fading after the flood,
to darken again where God bids Moses smite
the rock, and then again in Psalms, in Matthew
every page. And where Paul speaks of things
God hath prepared, things promised them who wait,
things not yet entered into the loving heart,
below the margin of the verse, the paper
is translucent with the oil and dark
still with the dirt of his right hand.

… you were upheld
on the strong wings of the Psalms before you died.

Ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ.

Throughout the speeches of Acts, the apostles argue two intertwined points: The proper way to read scripture is as prophecy (2:30-31; 8:34-35; 13:34; 24:14-15; 26:22,27; 28:23); and when so read, scripture points toward the resurrection of the Messiah as the means by which the blessings of Abraham are bestowed on the people.

That is to say, the moment the word, as a result of centuries of education, attains universal validity, it severs its original link with the divine person.

Once we talked about the life to come.
I took the Bible from the nightstand
and offered John 14: “I go to prepare
a place for you.” “Fine. Good,” he said.
“But what about Matthew? ‘You, therefore,
must be perfect, as your heavenly Father
is perfect.’ ” And he wept.

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?

Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.  (p. 201)

What must you do to look honestly in the mirror of the Word? The first requirement is that you must not look at the mirror but look in the mirror and see yourself.  (p. 219)

Such a theology should grow out of and be related to the life of the grass-roots church—the koinonia or gemeinde. Its data will be the ongoing experience of the disciple community under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the light of the Scripture. It will begin with and bear witness to the reality of the Spirit of Jesus Christ alive and present in His body. Because the Spirit is precisely the Spirit of Jesus, the biblical materials remain its primary source material.

To refer to the data of theology in the above order does not make the Scripture secondary to present experience, but rather gives theology its proper setting and approach to Scripture. Theology should describe and point to a present reality and not present theory, past experience, or eschatalogical prediction. When it deals with past reality it is for the sake of the present life of the church. When it enunciates theory it is to provide a framework for understanding experience. When it explores eschatological dimensions of the faith it is in order to gain perspective on and provide a strategy for the present.

… Its purpose is for “discipline in right living” (2 Timothy 3:16-17, NEB). In these respects the Bible itself should be a model for the disciples’ theology.

There’s a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, “Why on our hearts and not in them?” The rabbi answered, “Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your hearts, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.”

People are sometimes kept from reading the Bible itself by what they are taught about it,  (p. 52)

… it will never become transcendent for us unless we are first of all allowed to take it at its literal level.  (p. 180)

… the fact of transforming the obvious meaning of texts in order to facilitate a particular reading of Judaism is not illegitimate but part of the tradition itself. In fact, this process is inevitable, given the fact that different parts of the texts or different strands and sensibilities in the tradition are sometimes openly contradictory and reflect ways in any given era in which different views subtly contend for what Judaism should or could be. (p. xi f.)

Some of what Moses heard as the voice of God was … the voice of cruelty coming from inside Moses and mistakenly attributed to God. …

Ultimately, though, there is no escaping our obligation to be the interpreters of what we hear, to separate out what is the voice of God from what is the voice of human distortion in Torah. (p. 32 & 33)

Biblical scholars often imagine themselves as merely detached and objective readers unpacking the nuances, complexities, and contradictory elements of the text. Yet this style of reading is itself a political choice. All too often, the enterprise of Bible scholarship becomes the enterprise of taming the Bible so that it no longer sizzles with revolutionary power. (p. 100)

The value of what we have learned through psychoanalytic thought, Marxist thought, feminist thought, critical theory, music, art, poetry, and meditation is that these methodologies assist us in detaching ourselves from our conditioned psychological inheritance, distancing ourselves from the chains of anger and cruelty that are passed from generation to generation.

So here is how we listen to the voice of God: using every intellectual and emotional and spiritual tool at our disposal; refracting what we think we are hearing through the community of others similarly committed to hearing God’s voice, constantly engaged in prayer and meditation to help us recognize new forms of self-deception; reminding ourselves in humility that no matter how hard we try, we are self-deceptive in the way we apprehend reality, asking for God’s guidance, aware of the ways that others who have honestly asked for this guidance have nevertheless been shaped by their own inner legacies of anger and cruelty; and doing our best to stay true to what we hear or what we get as we open ourselves to God’s presence in the universe. (p. 101)

… biblical scholars could be consultants to the preacher but that they could by no means fully describe the force of a text running loose in a particular congregation. …

Moreover, the great diversity in biblical hermeneutics today can surprisingly provide support for what the preacher has intuitively known, that good biblical exegesis (and preaching) is local, eclectic, and driven by the use of the text in the particular community of faith. …

… there is more going on in a biblical text than any one interpretive methodology can encompass. (p. 2)

… the form of the biblical text—that is, the literary structure—despite being often overlooked in exegesis, is, in fact, one of the authoritative, meaning-drenched aspects of a text. (p. 3)

Scripture can only function as norm if we are allowing it to shape all of our thinking, allowing Scripture to be the framework of all our living, the lens through which we see the world and our place in it.

This has become difficult for us because the main thrust of biblical scholarship during the past decades has been in the direction of critical analysis … Analysis is valuable as one step in the effort to understand.

The All-wise, All-knowing God cannot speak without meaning many things at once.

[The Bible] cannot be mapped, or its contents catalogued … after all our diligence, to the end of our lives and to the end of the Church, it must be an unexplored and unsubdued land, with heights and valleys, forests and streams, on the right and left of our path and close about us, full of concealed wonders and choice treasures.

… lectio divina is not so much a technique of reading as a way of life. It is the freedom to ask anything of scripture without requiring an answer or expecting to reach a conclusion.

So many distractions!–the angels crooning
next door, the organ throbbing down the hall,
out on the Sheep Meadow where she likes to stroll
crowds demonstrating at the fountain, chiming
like crystal. She’s tuned out the singing, the groaning
virginal, the shouting colors of the parade,
and the jeweled gravity of her brocade
hangs on her like air. What can she be reading?
She happens to turn, happens as she turns
the page an old hand chances to have written,
her index finger marking what must happen.
Lips parted–chanting or astonished–she
happens to read the one book whose one story
chances inevitably to be hers.

We avoid this necessary and creative tension when we try to resolve and end it with old shibboleths like “In the real world…” or “On the bottom line…” Much of the Gospel has been avoided by such easy dismissals of soul wisdom, which is seldom first of all practical, efficient, or revenue generating. The bottom line of the Gospel is that most of us have to hit some kind of bottom before we even start the real spiritual journey. … You just want to breathe fresh air. The true Gospel is always fresh air and spacious breathing room.

A thorough knowledge of the Bible is more important than a college education.

The Master never wrote anything down, nor did he ask his followers to record his teachings. His words are spirit and life. Spirit can only infuse spirit. Life can only infuse life. The Master’s teaching cannot be contained on the pages of a book.

… we also need to be continually studying the biblical texts together in our local churches, seeking to know Jesus better in order that we might embody him more faithfully in our particular place.

The bulk of what became the Hebrew Bible represents the faith which created Judaism, but it is not the product of Judaism.  The Jews transmitted the Hebrew Scriptures and produced the manuscripts, but their sacred library reflects Mosaic and prophetic Yahwism far more than it reflects the ritual cultus of the Second Temple.  From the standpoint of its oral tradition, the Old Testament is more a Hebraic than a Jewish document, for the core of its constituent materianb existed in a fixed form before the birth of Judaism (sixth century B.C.)

If such an immersion in historical reality confers credibility on the Gospel picture, and the patchy portrait drawn by the evangelists begins to suddenly look, sound and feel true, this enquiry will have attained its primary objective.

The early Christian pesher, like the Qumran pesher, was not primarily an interpretive exercise. Its aim was to furnish biblical sanction to disturbing details in the life of Jesus and of his associates. It also sought to demonstrate that these details fitted into, and were and integral part of, a chain of happenings arranged by God for the salvation of the Jews (and of mankind).  (p. 135)

Yet instead of conceding that the Synoptic evangelists were popular storytellers, a large number of New Testament experts prefer to see them primarily as conveyers of a doctrinal message disguised as history.  (p. 158)

One approached scripture rightly not by seeking to dissect it and thus presumably gain power over it, but by entering into it with the entire heart and mind, and ultimately with the whole of life. The truths of scripture revealed themselves to those who so immersed themselves in it as to have their hearts re-formed in its image.

But it is no part of my design to save either learned or unlearned men from the trouble of thinking . . . On the contrary, my intention is to make them think and to assist them in their thinking. This is the way to understand the things of God: “Meditate thereon day and night”; “so shall you attain the best knowledge, even to know the one true God and Jesus Christ whom he hath sent.” And this knowledge will lead you to love him because he has first loved us.

The Christian ‘New Testament’ includes significant sections—most of James and the Apocalypse as well as some sections of the letters of Peter (as at the other end, most of the teachings of Jesus)—which are not uniquely messianic and could have been written by non-Christians. (p. 60)

What Scriptures mean in the life of a community is that people can gather around the physically tangible representation of the fact that they are not taking orders from contemporary authorities alone. In this sense a book represents transcendence, far more than does an ecstatic utterance or a voice from heaven or from the tomb, or an ancient ritual. (p. 78)

The word of God is heard in the assembly, known by the unity brought about when the Word is heard.

The kind of certainty which such unanimity provides claims no universality. It does define the obedience which is imperative today. (p. 125)

Yet “reform’ … trusts the existing structures to set the rules for Scripture’s pertinence. Radical reformation biblicism is different in kind, whatever be the logical puzzles or circularities involved in seeking to let a book interpret itself. Interpreted by the community which its very proclamation in the Spirit creates, the Scripture itself legitimates and empowers a new apostolicity, accredited as such not by juridical succession but by consonance of method and message. (p. 138)

… ‘canonization’, i.e. the process whereby a body of people come, over time, usually over a long time, to regard a particular body, not an unmanageably large body of literature, as the literature the reading of which defines who they are.

… The action of selecting is itself a testimony to the normative self-understanding of the community which did it. The Hebrew scriptural canon was selected in the dispersion, and it is best understood as throwing light on the diaspora identity into which God’s people have been sent. (p. 185)

… the meaning of ‘canon’ is not in how the texts come to be (so as to make us study authorship and accuracy) but in how (and in what setting) the disciples came to be guided by them (so we should study the diaspora). (p. 201)