Reading the Bible confessionally in the church

Recently I spent a day sitting around a table dreaming with a group of theologians, biblical scholars, and scholars in secular disciplines who regularly enter into dialogue between their own disciplines and theology. We were Catholics and Protestants across a broad spectrum of reformed traditions. Our enviable task was to identify the kinds of theological inquiry that should be pursued and funded in order to provide solid intellectual grounding for this stage of the Church's life. We did not need to worry about raising funds or administering projects; we were asked only to imagine what would most benefit the Church. Somewhat to our surprise, we quickly agreed on the most fundamental need: namely, to learn again to read the Bible confessionally within mainstream North American and European Christianity. By 11 confessionally," we did not mean interpreting the Bible in accordance with a particular confessional statement (e.g., the Westminster Confession or the 39 Articles). Rather, we meant acknowledging the Bible as the functional center of the Church's life, so that in all our conversations, deliberations, arguments and programs, we are continually reoriented to the demands and promises of the Scriptures. Reading the Bible confessionally means reading it as the Word of God-i.e., recognizing it as a Word that is indispensable if we are to have a realistic orientation to the world, a Word that is uniquely powerful to interpret our experience and tell us who we are in the world.

I believe that the work of teaching Christians to read the Bible confessionally needs to be pursued at every level of the Church's teaching, from the parish (in pulpit as well as in classroom), to the seminary, and even unto the Society of Biblical Literature/American Academy of Religion, the "academic guild" which every year brings together thousands of North American theologians to swap scholarly papers, and thus indirectly sets the writing and even the teaching agenda for many of them. In this essay, I reflect on that work in light of my own particular responsibility for teaching seminarians to read the Old Testament. What follows is based upon my final lecture in the introductory lecture course (OT 1-2) at the end of my first year of teaching at Virginia Theological Seminary.

In brief, reading the Bible-and specifically the Old Testamentconfessionally means three things. It means first, reading theologically; second, reading as a community that confesses our sins in response to God's call to repentance; and third, reading as a community that confesses Christ.

Reading Theologically

This year the entry in the course catalog for the introductory course in Old Testament reads: "The Old Testament will be examined as a rich and complex witness to Israel's faith." This represents a change from the description found in previous catalogs, which stated that the course would emphasize the historical background of the biblical text, presumably referring to both social-historical studies of ancient Israel and to a study of the literary history of the biblical text. The new catalog entry, which I wrote, may reflect some difference in personal background between my predecessors and me-a difference in our particular interests and skills. But more than that, I believe it represents a generational difference in our perceptions of where the present struggle is for the Church as it attempts to read the Bible as the Word of God.

An earlier generation of biblical scholars rightly perceived that people who read the Bible were looking for theological meaning but did not take with sufficient seriousness the historical character of the Bible-or perhaps, were ignorant of it. The challenge facing that generation was to demonstrate convincingly how it is that the "Words of Torah [come to us] through human language," as the ancient rabbis said, how deeply the biblical texts are embedded in a particular culture, how they reflect current events, how they are shaped and in some ways limited by the Zeitgeist as well as by the Holy Spirit.

I am myself profoundly indebted to this historical work and believe it must continue-not least because, speaking in sociological terms, there has probably never been a culture so far removed as our own from the largely agrarian, kinship-based social structure represented in the Bible. The distance is so great that large parts of the Bible are unintelligible to a "naive reading." For example, how can a post-agricultural people understand the cursing of the fertile soil in Eden (Gen. 3:17)? To us who have become accustomed to living in permanent alienation from the land on which our life depends, the connection between obedience to God and a blessed connection with the land seems wholly arbitrary.

While I endeavor to help my students toward a historically informed reading of the Bible, I see the greater struggle elsewhere. Indeed, I believe that it is possible to read "too historically," that the Church today-or at least the professional guild of biblical scholarsis in danger of forgetting that the Bible does not aim to give us insight into ancient ideologies and events. Rather, it aims to tell us about God and ourselves in the presence of God. The Bible aims to do theology.