16. Interpretation: The Hermeneutics of a Bible falling apart

If I had been on the attack while studying Dante and Milton, my study of biblical interpretation had me back on my heels in defensive mode.

So much so that the professor called me a fundamentalist—in frustration, as an insult—in front of the rest of the class. She was brilliant and beautiful and had sharp eyes full of experience, and for a brief time, I was the bane of her existence.

My professor once told me in a private conference that maybe I should have considered vocational school, as they do in Europe. (Maybe I could have ended up writing technical manuals instead of theology!)

As part of my ongoing, under-the-radar theological education at super-liberal liberal arts college, my next stop was philosophy class called Introduction to Hermeneutics.

Despite having approximately 500% more knowledge of the actual contents of the Bible than anyone else in the class, I was otherwise 0% prepared for college-level philosophy. I had not studied any of the basics of philosophy, nor entry-level philosophers (aside from a high-school reading of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”), nor the rules of engagement.

I might as well have been dropped off outside the class by a truck hauling corn from Indiana.

Although I will say, one observation I made then—and which still rings true—is that intellectuals from the Northeast and other wealthy urban areas are so progressive and so far away from many of the basic academic questions that many people in other parts of the country still haven’t engaged with, that they are completely out of step with the concerns of the rest of the United States and have little to no idea about it.

In fact, I think this is one of the main reasons for our political divide, and why the progressives think conservatives are so ignorant and far behind, and conservatives think progressives are so elitist and out of touch. They are having completely different conversations, with most of the country still wrestling with questions that academia thinks were solved decades ago.

Immutability, Credulity, and Reason

One example of the pre-established intellectual rules (that the rest of us hadn’t exactly figured out yet) was simply the assertion that my professor made in one of our early classes that God—or at least the laws of God—were immutable, meaning unchanging over time.

One of the reasons that my professor said the Bible was a troubling document—full of meaning—perhaps too full of meaning—and requiring interpretation, is that the Bible, when read in a flat, literal way, is full of contradictions. God is described in a hundred different ways, with so many different personality traits—many of them tainted with humanity, such as wrath and jealousy—that it cannot be a 100% true portrait of God.

Because God had to be unchanging.

To which I replied, “God can be anything God wants to be. If God wants to be jolly one day and angry the next, who are we to tell him what to be?”

My professor merely put her head in her hands.

She had two magic words which often came up in class. I’ve noticed this with people who study a topic deeply—they latch onto certain key concepts which become the bedrock of their knowledge. For my Hermeneutics professor, it was the concepts of Reason and Credulity.

The battle we were waging against the Bible—or at least against the people who used the Bible as a weapon or a battle standard or a rulebook—was against credulity, which is our natural tendency to want to believe someone who presents themselves with authority. For centuries, clergy and those in power had used the Bible to lead the credulous.

Our only weapon against this Credulity was Reason. This was the first time in my life that I realized that Reason was not simply the brain’s ability to sort things out using evidence. Reason was a sacred faculty, set apart from others, like the way that the Proverbs revere Wisdom or the Pauline Epistles revere Grace. Reason was an elevated faculty that allowed us to cut through credulity—as the Bible says, to “rightly divide the word,” and begin to use our skills of Interpretation to begin to feel out what the text was really saying.

How the Bible was built

It was in this class that I really first got the sense of how the Bible was constructed. I don’t know how I had thought about it before—maybe that it was a document that got passed down from generation to generation, starting with the 5 books of Moses, then the priests and scribes would simply add on books as they were written, like people adding onto a chain email (does anyone know what those are any more), or adding comments to a viral social media post, until we received the fully fledged, leather-bound editions on our bookcases and pulpits today?

This was the first time I got the sense of the need to see these books in context. I learned that the Bible was a collection of books, written by a great many people, in different situations, to different audiences, in different genres, to achieve different effects, over a period of around 1600 years, in which time various oral traditions were passed down until they were committed to writing, and different written versions were copied and re-copied and translated and re-translated until at a few key points in history, committees of religious authorities at a remove of hundreds of years from the original writers and storytellers and historians and theologians decided which books would be IN and which books would be OUT—and even then, they didn’t agree on what was Biblical and what was not.

Given that state of things, it became clear that knowing what the Bible said—and, behind that, knowing what God had intended the Bible to say—was not as clear as opening it up and reading a passage from the page in a current English translation and saying, “I know exactly what that means.”

It might be possible with a quote like “Thou shalt not kill,” or “Love your neighbor as yourself” to interpret it on the spot and still be in the ballpark (although even then, a simple interpretation doesn’t account for how to apply the former verse in wartime or how far the latter verse should go in providing for your neighbor versus expecting them to be self-reliant).

However, there is much complexity, subtlety, and yes, contradiction in the Bible that requires a careful, open, humble mind to approach and still be able to receive the revelation of God which shines through it. The Bible can be used to support many good and noble actions, and can—and has—been used to defend great evil, including slavery, genocide, misogyny, subjugation, homophobia, and other violence of human against human.

As my professor said, “The Bible has a surplus of meaning.” It takes interpretation to sift through it to find that which is good and true.

As much as I had been at war with the Bible through the preceding semesters, this path began to feel dangerous. When I began to scrutinize the Bible, I don’t think I thought it would actually yield to the pressure. I thought my pursuit would prove to be fruitless, like jousting windmills.

Here I was with this ancient book, realizing how many parts it had, how many authors, how many different circumstances, how it was carried in the imperfect human memories of so many, passed around, copied and recopied, translated, spun this way and that by faithful teachers and unfaithful manipulators, and landed in my hands, almost 4,000 years of the varied human experience with the monotheistic God of Jacob, Isaac, Abraham, and Jesus, trying to make some sense of it in the late 20th century in an America that thought it had it all figured out.

As I stood there, it felt like the Bible was falling apart in my trembling hands, the tattered pages falling to the floor.