The Bible Happens Now

The past is a divine mode of the present

I’m preaching on Revelation 10 this coming Sunday, a passage with a precursor in the initial part of the prophet Ezekiel:

Then the voice that I had heard from heaven spoke to me again, saying, ‘Go, take the scroll that is open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.’ So I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll; and he said to me, ‘Take it, and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth.’ So I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach was made bitter.

It’s an image that recurs in both testaments. God elects a prophet to ingest scripture so that the saying of scripture might become God’s chosen means of self-revelation to the world.

The image impacts how we understand the nature of God’s presence and activity in the world; the image also frustrates any attempts to conceive of the Bible as a historical record of God’s speech in the past.

The saying of scripture just is God’s word in the world.

And, as all of God’s attributes are reducible to one another, God’s word in the world just is God’s work in the world.

Because I had recently become a Christian, I enrolled in a New Testament studies course during my first year as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia. Our guiding textbook was Bart Ehrman’s The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. I recall one stuffy fall afternoon when the teaching assistant for our precept group (who happened to be a clergyman) explained that we would investigate the Christian scriptures as though they were no different from any other historical document or work of literature. “We’ll be reading and studying the New Testament the same way they’ll approach Beowulf down the hall from us.”

His comment about Beowulf sticks in both my memory and my craw because it ignited a small rebellion among my evangelical classmates, who resisted the idea of reckoning with scripture the way one would any other historical document. I also recall the titters of patronizing laughter set off by one classmate’s protest: “But it’s not like the Iliad; it’s God’s Word.”

At the time, I was new to Christianity. Only much later did I learn that a workaday pastor who deals with biblical texts in pulpit, prayer, and pastoral calls needs to develop a second naïveté with regard to scripture. Only then did I realize that my evangelical classmates in college had been right to push back against our teacher.

Ehrman’s historical-critical work exemplifies the dominant approach to the study of scripture in mainline churches today. From Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan to Rob Bell’s What Is the Bible? to N. T. Wright’s critical realism, the horizon of history determines the meaning of scripture. But to interpret scripture exclusively according to historical situation, cultural context, and linguistic nuance not only collapses scripture’s meaning into what it meant, it also assumes that history is sufficiently knowable to reveal scripture’s meaning. Even more problematic, it eclipses the belief that God is still the living agent of revelation. What scripture means is not reducible to what scripture meant. Scripture does not merely contain testimony of the times when God spoke; scripture is the plane on which God yet chooses to speak.