The Blue Parakeet, 2nd Read online

  Reading the Bible is the same: context is everything. Until we learn to read each text in its context—who said what, when, why, how, etc.—we run the risk of misunderstanding the Bible. I’ll give an example. Do you pay interest on your loans? Do you participate in (or with) a company that charges interest? The Bible says some clear things about charging interest in Leviticus 25:35–38:

  If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and are unable to support themselves among you, help them as you would a foreigner and stranger, so they can continue to live among you. Do not take interest or any profit from them, but fear your God, so that they may continue to live among you. You must not lend them money at interest or sell them food at a profit. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan and to be your God.

  It’s about as clear as the lenses on my glasses (which for some obsessive reason I keep clean). But, and I’m willing to bet on this one, none of us obeys this commandment. Interest was prohibited, full stop, no questions asked. God put his reputation on the line for this one. (That’s the point of the last verse quoted above.) You might start fiddling around and say that since it was for fellow Israelites, this only means that we shouldn’t charge interest or pay interest to fellow Christians. This only pushes us further into the corner, because—and I’m willing to bet on this one too—we don’t bother to check on our mortgages to make sure Christians aren’t charging us interest. Besides the effort it would require, we don’t care because we aren’t interested in this commandment in the Bible. Why is this? It all has to do with how you and I read our Bibles.

  You probably read this prohibition of interest the way I do: that was then, and this is now. Reading the Bible like this is reading the Bible as Story. It unfolds and propels us to live out the Bible in our day in our way. But how do we know when the principle of “that was then and this is now” applies? It’s easy when everyone agrees, and we all seem to have concluded without much conscious effort that charging and paying interest is how the system works (though we’d all be surprised how debated charging interest was in Europe in centuries past). But what happens when some disagree with the status quo? It’s not so easy then. When some disagree, we suddenly notice the blue parakeet in our presence and begin to rethink how we read the Bible.

  I believe those seven words are the secret to reading the Bible: “That was then, and this is now.” They reveal that we have learned to read the Bible as Story, even though most of us never give this a minute’s thought. We need to. That is why this first section of the book, devoted to “the Story,” needs to be given the attention we give it. Until we learn to read the Bible as Story, we will not know how to get anything out of the Bible for daily living. We need to read each passage in its location in the Story, and then we will see how it all fits together. And unless we read the Bible as Story, we might be tempted to make “that was then” into “it’s also now.” But it isn’t. Times have changed. God spoke in Moses’s days in Moses’s ways (about interest), and he spoke in Jesus’s days in Jesus’s ways, and he spoke in Paul’s days in Paul’s ways. And he speaks in our days in our ways—and it is our responsibility to live out what the Bible says in our days. We do this by going back so we can come forward, always proceeding into our world organically connected to what is in our past.

  It’s a Story!

  As we go back to the Bible, we ask a big question: How would you classify and shelve the Bible in a library? Using the Dewey Decimal System, where would you put it? Since the architects of the DDS have already assigned it to Religion (200), where it has its own number (Bible: 220), the answer to our question might seem easy. But if we think about how people treat or read the Bible, and we think back to our third chapter where we talked about shortcuts, we might find ourselves in an interesting conversation. It seems to me that here is where some folks would shelve the Bible in a library:

  Lawbook: 320 (Political science) 340 (Law)

  Blessings/promises for the Day: 150 (Psychology) 158 (Applied)

  Rorschach: 158 (Applied psychology) or 126 (The self)

  Puzzle: 110 (Metaphysics) or 120 (Epistemology)

  Maestro: 227.06 (Paul) or 232.092 (Jesus Christ)

  Each of these locations on the shelves of the library tells us something true about the Bible. In fact, it is amazing how many locations could contain Bibles! Apart from its obvious location with Religion, the Bible properly belongs with History of the Ancient World, Palestine/ Israel (933), and also in the Life of Jesus (232.092); and because the gospel spreads from the land of Israel throughout the whole world, it could also be moved to World History (909). But there’s one element about the Bible that makes the DDS inadequate: the Bible claims to be God’s telling of history. The Bible is the story of God’s people. It is “his” story, and I doubt any library wants to assign a number to “God’s Story”!

  Going back to the Bible teaches us to read the Bible as God’s story. Read, as an example, Acts 7. Here we have someone who puts the whole Bible together for us. Stephen, an early Christian deacon, was about to be put to death for following Jesus. The future apostle Paul (then called Saul) chimed in with his judgment and approved the capital sentence for Stephen.

  But first Stephen was put on trial. He was asked if the charges against him were true. Stephen’s answer is an example of how to read the Bible. He didn’t do anything other than tell the story of Israel that had opened a new chapter—a chapter called Jesus the Messiah. With Jesus, everything changed. Everything! Stephen had to follow Jesus even if it meant dying for him. If you follow along with Stephen’s story, you are sucked into the Story, just as the Pevensie kids were drawn into the picture and onto the Dawn Treader. If you are looking for an argument, a kind of “point one, point two, point three, therefore do this,” you may not find your Magic Eyes in Acts 7. It’s there for those with eyes to see.

  All across the spectrum today, experts are saying we need to read the Bible as Story. Robert Webber, formerly a Wheaton professor, offers us an invitation: “So I invite you to read the Bible, not for bits and pieces of dry information [pieces in a puzzle], but as the story of God’s embrace of the world told in poetic images and types.”1 I add another voice, namely, the excellent Old Testament scholar John Goldingay: “The biblical gospel is not a collection of timeless statements such as God is love. It is a narrative about things God has done.”2 For a third voice, consider a Jewish scholar, Abraham Joshua Heschel: “The God of the philosopher is a concept derived from abstract ideas; the God of the prophets is derived from acts and events. The root of Jewish faith is, therefore, not a comprehension of abstract principles but an inner attachment to those events.”3

  Each of these scholars points us in the same direction. In your hand is a Bible that God gave you to read. God asks us to read the Bible as the unfolding of the story of his ways to his people. Stephen was killed for telling that story.

  So was William Tyndale. Tyndale was put to death because he wanted to make a reality the Reformation’s most dangerous idea4—putting the Bible and its powerful story in the hands of every Christian so each of us could read it. The Bible in your hand is there because of William Tyndale. You may not know what a privilege it is. For most of the first 1,500 years of the church, the average person did not have a Bible, and even if they did, most could not read. Tyndale was the vanguard for English translations.

  I want to pause here to pay homage to one of our greatest Bible translators, because we need to be reminded that the Bible I am writing about in this book, the Bible that you and I hold in our hands, is a Bible that cost some people their lives just to translate.

  William Tyndale Gives Us the Bible

  I am surrounded by books and Bibles. Most of us read the Bible in English; I have a number of translations, and you probably do too. The roots of all English translations go back to William Tyndale.5 Tyndale had a goal in life: “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Sc
ripture than thou [a learned man] dost.” His goal? To translate the whole Bible so clearly that even farm boys could read and understand it.

  The Roman Catholic establishment of England was opposed to translating the Bible for fear that what was happening in Germany, namely, the explosive Reformation led by Martin Luther, might come to England. What was there to fear? The Bible. Nothing but the Bible. The clergy’s knowledge of the Bible at that time would shock the reader today. Some did not know which book of the Bible contained the Ten Commandments (many thought they were found in Matthew’s Gospel), some did not know where to find the Lord’s Prayer (which was said constantly in Catholic services), some did not know who originally said it, and some could not even recite it. Tyndale’s dream ran headfirst against the establishment. What Luther had done in Germany was about to take deep roots in England.

  Tyndale began work on a translation of the Bible into plain English but could not find support for his work in England, so he crossed the English Channel to Germany, hoping to be carried by Luther’s steam. In Cologne, Germany, in 1525, as Tyndale was translating Matthew 22 (he was on verse 12), he and his companion William Roye escaped an attempt to arrest and imprison them for their supposedly seditious work of translating the Bible.

  Five years later, a certain Thomas Hitton was arrested in England for preaching heresy. “At his examination he confessed that he had smuggled a New Testament . . . from abroad. After imprisonment he was condemned . . . and on 23 February burned alive at Maidstone.” The religious establishment meant business when they prohibited translation.

  Tyndale translated most of the Bible, but before he was finished he was tricked “by a vicious, paltry and mean villain” who revealed Tyndale’s location. In October of 1536, Tyndale was tied to the stake and strangled by an executioner. His last words were an expression of nothing less than his simple vision to translate the Bible into plain English: “Lord! Open the king of England’s eyes!” We wonder if the crowd behind the barricade that watched the gathering of brushwood and straw, the crowd which stepped aside to watch Tyndale mount the place of execution, heard his prayer. Did they hear what he said when the authorities asked him that last time to recant his stubborn ways? They would have seen him tied to a stake and the rope gathered around his neck. After signaling that it was time to tighten the rope and letting it do what it was designed to do, the authorities judged him dead. They set the kindling afire to consume the body of a man who had but one goal—to make the Bible readable for everyone.

  You and I have a Bible, and most of us read it without fear. To quote Augustine, tolle lege: “take, read.” Tyndale’s biographer said, “The bare text [of the Bible], if given whole, will interpret itself.” But we must read it—and that means from Genesis to Revelation—as it is meant to be read.

  A Confession

  For many years, instead of grasping the Bible as Story, I was a maestro Bible reader. I learned to tame the blue parakeets—and there were plenty in the Bible to tame—by making them all sound like Maestro Jesus, the über-Rabbi. At times I sneaked into the cabins of others for a meal or two with other cooks; that is, I wrote commentaries on Galatians and 1 Peter. During this time I nursed a grudge against two authors who, for me, were blue parakeets: the apostle Paul and the apostle John. Why? I believed they had ignored the kingdom message of Jesus.

  I was upset with Paul and Peter for using words like “justification” and “church” and “eternal life”—not that there is anything wrong with their terms. So devoted was I to the Maestro’s verbal vision that I thought these other New Testament writers should have used Jesus’s pet expression, namely, “kingdom of God.” I could not understand why Paul dropped terms like “disciple” or why he seemed to ignore the Sermon on the Mount or why John translated “kingdom” into “eternal life.” So I tamed them by using only Jesus’s words.

  Furthermore, as a maestro reader of the Bible, I also nursed a grudge against the puzzlers of this world, and my grudge emerged from two convictions about how to read the Bible. First (and I still sense this at times), those who have a solved puzzle rarely let Jesus’s kingdom message be what it is. Second, every approach I’ve read by puzzlers somehow managed to avoid the Story and the Plot as the central categories for knowing the message of the Bible. Instead of creation and fall, exodus and exile, as well as community and redemption, the Story was flattened out. Categories like God, man, Christ, sin, salvation, and eschatology were pieced together from various authors. Unfortunately, the authors themselves were not given their day before the jury. I congratulated myself for being hyperbiblical about Jesus’s message of the kingdom, which I thought was better than the puzzling approach. But while I was fair to Jesus, I didn’t have an approach that let each author in the Bible tell their own story. In attempting to be faithful to the Bible, I was being unfair to the Bible as we have it.

  But that all changed when I realized more theoretically that God chose to communicate with us in language. This may seem either profoundly obvious, on the level of the person who says the sky is above us, or “profoundly profound.” For me this was profoundly profound. Since—and this is why it changed how I read the Bible—God chose to communicate in language, since language is always shaped by context, and since God chose to speak to us over time through many writers, God also chose to speak to us in a variety of ways and expressions. Furthermore, I believe that because the gospel story is so deep and wide, God needed a variety of expressions to give us a fuller picture of the Story.

  This liberated me from the maestro approach and drove me to the Story approach of reading the Bible. I now know that the various versions of the Story in the Bible need to be seen for what they are: “wiki” stories of the Story. (I’ll get to this “wiki” idea if you’ll read on to the next section.) To illustrate how often this Story is (partly) summarized, notice these passages in the Bible: Exodus 15; Leviticus 26:3–13; Deuteronomy 6:20–24; 26:5–9; 29; 32; Joshua 23:2–4; 24:2–13; 1 Samuel 12:7–15; 1 Kings 8; 1 Chronicles 1–9; 16:8–36; Ezra 5:11–17; Nehemiah 9:6–37; Psalms 78; 105; 106; 135:8–12; 136; Isaiah 5:1–7; Jeremiah 2:2–9; Ezekiel 16; 20; 23; Daniel 9:1–27; and Habakkuk 3:1–16. And now to the New Testament: Matthew 1:1–17; Acts 7:2–50; 10:36–43; 13:17–41; Romans 9–11; Hebrews 11; and Revelation 12:1–12. How can one not also include 1 Corinthians 15:1–28 and Revelation 21–22? Others might add other passages, but this list should make abundantly clear that the Bible has oasis stops that summarize where the Story has gotten to thus far.

  In our Bible, God did what God has always done: he spoke in Moses’s days in Moses’s ways, in Micah’s days in Micah’s ways, and in Jesus’s days in Jesus’s ways. Which meant, when Paul came around, Paul got to speak in Paul’s ways for Paul’s days, and when John put quill to parchment, he was freed up to speak in John’s ways for John’s days. This discovery liberated me, and (to use some puns now, so catch them) it justified Paul and gave new life to John to take Jesus’s kingdom story and make it their own story of the Story. I’ve come to see these stories of the Story to be like the seventh day of creation—very, very good. No single story, not even Jesus’s story, can tell the whole Story. We need them all.

  Why Wiki-Story?

  So, you ask, why see the various authors as “wiki” stories? We are all familiar (if not intimate) with Wikipedia. Those who say they aren’t will be sentenced to read Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics for ten consecutive hours for not telling the truth! Wikipedia has its detractors and its problems, but that won’t keep the world or our students (or any of us) from using it. It is a collaborative, democratic, interactive, developing encyclopedia to which anyone in the world, ostensibly, can make a contribution.

  Wikipedia is not like your father’s encyclopedia, whether that was World Book or Britannica. Instead, an entry in Wikipedia can change daily: paragraphs can be deleted and entries can be completely rewritten or new entries added. It’s sometimes called “open source.” (Here’s the path to the Wikipedia entry for “O
pen Source”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source.) Because it is truly “open,” bad information can filter into the entries and render their quality suspect. In calling the Bible a Wiki-Story I will bracket off the problems of bad contributors to Wikipedia. All I want to focus on here is one element: the ongoing reworking of the biblical Story by new authors so they can speak the old story in new ways for their day.

  If you’d like a more Jewish way of saying that each author is a writer of a wiki-story, I’d say the Bible contains an ongoing series of midrashim, or interpretive retellings, of the one Story God wants us to know and hear. Each biblical author—whether we talk of Moses and the Pentateuch, or the so-called Deuteronomic histories, or the Chronicler, Job, or Ecclesiastes, or the various prophets, or Jesus or Paul or John or James or the author of Hebrews or Peter—each of these authors tells his version of the Story. They tell wiki-stories of the Story; they give midrashim on the previous stories. Sometimes one author will pick up the story of someone else, as when the Chronicler picks up 1 and 2 Kings, and will recast it, or when Isaiah picks up Micah and Hosea. But other times we have more or less a new story, as with Daniel or Jeremiah or Ezekiel or the apostle Paul or the writer of Hebrews.

  If you’d like to see this process in action, open your Bible to Matthew 4:1–11, Matthew’s version of the temptations of Jesus. Matthew here tells a wiki-story, a new version, of an old story. Many—far too many, in fact—have been taught this passage in a blessings/ promises or Rorschach approach. They’ve been taught to read this text for themselves—as a method for responding to temptations to sin. The supposed biblical answer, which is never even remotely mentioned in the text itself, is to quote the Bible at Satan when we are tempted. This makes sense, but it has nothing to do with the text itself.