The Church is Scripture’s True Home

Photo by Rosemary Williams on Unsplash

A few weeks ago I made my way through the frigid streets of Denver with my old friend Doug Koskela, trying to find the front door of the Sheraton. Every year, the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) and the American Academy of Religion (AAR) hold a joint meeting. Thousands of scholars from all around the world gather in a North American city to read and listen to papers, learn from one another, see old friends, network, and, of course, buy books—lots and lots of books. In a feat of almost inconceivable self-restraint, I made it out having bought only one this year. 

Doug and I, however, were headed not to one of the SBL or AAR sessions, but to an affiliated group: the Institute for Biblical Research (IBR). According to its website, “The Institute for Biblical Research is an organization of evangelical Christian scholars that fosters excellence in biblical studies within a faith environment.” I became a fellow of the IBR this year. I have participated in IBR events in the past, but recently I have felt compelled to become more involved. I will clarify the reasons for this, but I can summarize them in short: the true home of the Bible is the church, and the truest interpretation of the Bible is within the church. 

As we walked into the Sheraton we were blasted with warm air and the noise of hundreds of scholars chatting, laughing, and making their way to their various meetings. We took the escalator down to the ballrooms. The session we were looking for was in a massive space. Perhaps some 1,500 scholars had gathered for the IBR’s plenary session. We prayed before the session—not to some nebulous, unidentified god, a “god of many names,” but to the one true God who came to us in Jesus Christ for the salvation of our sins. This is a confessional group, the members of which consciously identify both as scholars and Christians. The main speaker was a biblical scholar and fellow Methodist for whom I have great admiration, David A. deSilva of Ashland Theological Seminary. Professor deSilva gave an outstanding lecture on Paul, sanctification, and assurance—a topic near and dear to Wesleyans, though assuredly of interest to other Christians as well. 

As I sat in the crowd, I felt gratitude and wondered why I had not become more involved earlier in my career. What had I been waiting for? At least part of the reason was that I didn’t know about the IBR during my graduate work and the early years of my academic career. I do wish I had learned of it sooner, though. Ever since I was a seminary student, I have wrestled with the tension between academic biblical studies and the church. Many scholars throughout the twentieth century insisted that for a scholarly reading of biblical texts, one must set aside one’s faith commitments and proceed from a position of detached skepticism. Some would even call this “methodological atheism.” The writings of Ernst Troeltsch and Van Harvey have been important for those who wish to proceed in this manner. A historical reading, Harvey argued in The Historian and Believer, necessarily precludes the confessional affirmations of a faith tradition. The moment one begins to enter into a confessional reading of Scripture, one abdicates the role of historian. 

Back in the 1990’s and the early 2000’s, the Jesus Seminar was all the rage in academic circles, and in many churches as well. I was serving a church in which many people were reading the likes of John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and Robert Funk. PBS put out the very popular “From Jesus to Christ” series featuring historical Jesus scholars, a few of whom were becoming rather significant pop-culture figures. As a young seminary student, I read Crossan’s Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. My eyeballs almost fell out of my head as I did. Here was a renowned scholar whose knowledge of the ancient world and the biblical texts seemed almost limitless, and who was quite compelling in his larger argument that the church has gotten it wrong about Jesus over the centuries. Was Jesus the incarnate God? Was he born of a virgin? Did he heal the sick and raise the dead? Did he rise from the dead after three days in the tomb? His answer to all of these questions was no: these stories about Jesus that we might call “miraculous” are the stuff of myth and metaphor. After his death, Crossan said, Jesus was likely thrown in a ditch and eaten by dogs, just like every other criminal who died on the cross. Jesus’ real significance was not that he lived a perfect life, died for our sins, and conquered death. Rather, it was that he taught and embodied an ethic of radical egalitarianism. We could learn this ethic too, if only we would read these texts in the right way. 

I now know that Crossan stands in a long line of biblical interpreters who have attempted to demythologize the Bible, and in so doing, identify its true message and real significance. I didn’t know this when I was twenty-three years old. At first, Crossan’s arguments seemed almost irrefutable to me, so expansive was his erudition. I began asking questions—lots of questions. I probably drove my professors batty. Perhaps the most important set of questions I began to ask, though, had to do with the ways in which his presuppositions (methodological, epistemological, metaphysical) came to bear on his analysis. To put this more concretely, if your approach to the gospels presupposes that miracles such as healings are impossible, then you cannot but conclude that these stories are mythical. If you presuppose that no one, under any circumstances, can rise from the dead, then it will be impossible to conclude that Jesus rose from the dead. 

Much of my career since this time has involved sorting through the kinds of questions that Crossan, Borg, and others raised for me. That is probably why I have published more in the area of theological readings of the Bible than any other area. A friend and senior colleague once told me I was shadow boxing with my own training in biblical studies. Perhaps he was right, but that shadow packs a wallop of a punch. 

Most often, doctoral programs in biblical studies teach us how to engage in research based upon methodologies that are recognized and represented within the guild. We develop proficiency in historical, literary, and social-scientific tools. Additionally we have seen in recent decades the emergence of explicitly ideological critical approaches (feminist, queer, etc.). Most often, however, doctoral programs do not teach us how to engage the texts theologically. I received excellent training at SMU in biblical studies, and I am exceedingly grateful for my time there, but it was not, by and large, theological training. Perhaps the guild of biblical studies has resisted confessional readings of biblical texts in order to maintain its distinctiveness from the fields of systematic and historical theology. Whatever the case, this tendency has had a profound effect on the church in North America. 

When I was serving on the staff of a church, I was in charge of adult Christian education. I would browse the church library (remember those?), and time and again I was struck by how many volumes in our church library undercut the very teachings of our tradition. We had populated the shelves with academic or semi-academic works that assumed the presuppositions and methods of the scholarly guild, rather than the presuppositions and methods of the church. Keep in mind that it is only in the last couple of centuries that biblical scholarship has attempted to distinguish itself from the church. Prior to that time, biblical scholarship was carried out by the church, for the church. In the period following the Enlightenment, however, biblical scholarship gradually became a distinct guild. 

I should offer three qualifications here. First, there are many fine, dedicated, pious Christian scholars in the guild of biblical studies. Even if they may not always write from an explicitly confessional perspective, I know they wish for their work to edify the church. This leads to the second point: the church can benefit from reading works of biblical scholarship that do not presuppose the validity of Christian doctrine. We can still learn a great deal about the history, culture, literary contexts, and meanings of these texts by reading such works. And third, theological interpretation of the Bible is now more common than it was, say, thirty years ago. There are outstanding scholars who are doing just this kind of work. (For two Methodists engaged in this project, check out the works of Joel Green and Rob Wall). 

Now back to Denver. What struck me in that room of 1500 scholars was that I was sitting in the midst of a community committed to reading the Bible within its proper context: the church. A friend recently chided me for saying on a podcast that the Bible is the church’s book. I had, he said, romanticized the notion of “church.” There are many churches, many different communities within the body of Christ. Neither of us is Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. We are Methodists, and so part of that fractious group of denominations we call Protestantism. To clarify then, I mean that the most appropriate and useful setting for reading the Bible is within a community of believers committed to living out the lordship of Christ in both word and deed. The church adopted the Septuagint as her Scripture. She gave birth to those books now comprised within the New Testament. She compiled them and included them among those works she called ta Biblia. Her scholars preserved these works across the centuries. These writings have formed the basis of her teaching and preaching day after day, week after week, for two millennia. She has wrestled with these texts, fought over them, reconciled because of them, rebelled against them, and repented through them. The Bible is a product of God’s work within Christian communities, and such communities—the Church—are its proper locus of interpretation. Others may interpret the Bible, and we may learn from their interpretations, but these texts are never at home except where two or three are gathered in Jesus’ name. 

Recently I heard an interview with R. R. Reno on the First Things podcast. Reno was talking about “ecclesial” interpretations of Scripture, or, more simply, “churchly” interpretations. I had been searching for language for some time to describe what I think is the proper approach to Scripture, and when he spoke of “churchly” interpretation, a light bulb must have appeared over my head. The Bible is most naturally interpreted according to a “churchly” approach. No doubt Reno’s understanding of this term would be more Catholic than mine. He’s Roman Catholic. I’m not. I suggest that a churchly interpretation for Protestants begins with a commitment to and dialogue with the consensual tradition of Christian faith—those truths, embodied in creeds,that have been confessed across time and throughout the globe. In the words of Vincent of Lerins, these are the truths confessed “everywhere, always, and by all.” 

Some biblical scholars would suggest that, in approaching the Bible in this way, I am doing violence to the text. They would insist I am imposing upon it theological ideas that are foreign to the texts themselves. After all, the writer of say, 1 Samuel, had no concept of the holy Trinity whom Christians confess today. That is true. The doctrine of the Trinity did not develop until after the time of Christ. But we nevertheless believe that God is, and always has been, the holy Trinity. Thus the God who was at work in 1 Samuel was in fact the holy Trinity, even if it took those who worshiped this God centuries to understand him as such. 

Further, Christians have long believed that God has at times fulfilled Scriptures in ways that were beyond the scope of the original writer’s or prophet’s vision. 2 Peter 1:20 teaches us that “no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things” (NIV). Thus David may not have understood the full implications of a psalm he composed, but God’s work in history has helped us understand its meaning. Perhaps Isaiah didn’t understand the fullness of the “servant songs” he prophesied, but God nevertheless brought these to fulfillment in Christ. Thus the meaning of a passage of Scripture may only become clear over time as God continues to reveal himself in history. 

One more point: the reason that the church compiled a canon of Scripture to start with was to teach the message of salvation, both what it is and what it is not. Put in more Wesleyan terms, the purpose of the Bible is to teach us how to be saved. This is its telos, and it will never achieve that telos outside of the church. Remember: Scripture’s original setting was not the library, but Christian liturgy. 

By a “churchly” interpretation, then, I mean one that (a) understands the church and its teachings over time as the proper context for reading and applying the works of Scripture, and (b) views Scripture’s purpose as to teach us how to be saved. This doesn’t mean we turn off our critical faculties, nor that we stop learning from those who interpret Scripture apart from the church. It is simply an insistence that the church is the Bible’s true home, and that we should treat it as such without embarrassment. Every method has its presuppositions, and the presuppositions of this one are that the faith we proclaim is true, and that Scripture bears witness to this faith. 

I once attended an academic seminar in which a very prominent scholar asked if the virginal conception meant that God is a rapist. The other people in the room seemed unfazed by this remark, but I thought to myself, “I don’t belong here.” My calling is to be a scholar of the church, for the church, within the church. Years later, as Doug and I sat in that room of Christian scholars, I felt that was where I did belong. I mean no disrespect to those who interpret the Bible from other perspectives, but that is not my calling. Rather, it is to interpret the Bible within its true home, which is also my true home, the true home of all those who profess faith in Christ: his holy and blessed church.

David F. Watson is Lead Editor of Firebrand. He serves as Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.