MINISTERIAL MUSINGS: "Reading with the Heart"

There once was a preacher who wasn’t prepared to deliver a sermon one Sunday morning. He prayed to God for inspiration and decided that he would open the Bible to two random sections — one in the Old Testament and one in the New — and that would be the focus of his homily. His finger first landed on Genesis 4:8: “Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.” OK, he thought. Then he flipped open to Luke 10:37: “Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’"

That’s the problem with proof-texting — trying to use the Bible to say what you want it to say.

Exegesis is the scholarly method of trying to understand what the writer of a particular passage was trying to say and to whom he was speaking. It requires literary and historical scholarship to unearth context and meaning. (Literal readings of Scripture irresponsibly avoid doing this necessary and faithful work.) Eisegesis is a bastardization of that method; it reads a preconceived meaning into the text. In other words, someone who practices eisegesis knows what he/she wants the text to say and makes it say exactly that.

So where does this leave us? Does it mean that Scripture is meaningless (at worst) or irrelevant (at best)? Do we have to have a PhD in Biblical Studies or Literary Theory in order to appropriate the lessons from the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels? Obviously not.

I like what Karl Barth had to say on the subject. Paraphrasing the great Swiss Neo-Orthodox thinker, Barth said that the words on the pages of Scripture are not the Word of God (in the sense that God wrote them or dictated them to some scribe). However, Barth maintained that God’s Word (God’s eternal truth) spoke to believers through the words on the page. This is fascinating. It aligns quite nicely with the ancient Jewish belief that God exists in the blank spaces on the pages of the Torah: between words and in the margins.

So, back to my last question: where does this leave us? Maybe it suggests that instead of using Scripture to prove a point, we should read it with an open heart and an open mind. Maybe we should let God’s Spirit speak to us through its narrative, rather than assuming that we have cornered the market on God. Maybe then we will encounter something more life-giving than our own agendas. Maybe then, we will hear the voice of truth, the voice of God.

John Tamilio III (JT3) is the Religion Columnist for The Lakewood Observer and is the Senior Pastor of Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ in the Tremont neighborhood.  He and his wife, and their three children, live in Lakewood, Ohio.

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Volume 5, Issue 21, Posted 12:16 PM, 10.21.2009