A metaphor about scripture

So lately a lot of religious questions have been on my mind, and at the root of all of them is this fundamental question about how Christians approach scripture. This question is so basic that it usually just gets passed over.

But I have seen a lot of different approaches to scripture. Arguably, there is one for every person, but practically we can say that many people agree on a certain approach or another.

The evangelical approach that I've mostly been surrounded by in the churches I've attended is attractive in its simplicity: the Bible is true and authoritative, so take every word and try to make sense out of it.

As I understand it, this approach was solidified by the Reformers, such as Martin Luther--unless you can prove something by scripture and plain reason, the Church shouldn't believe it. I'll say why I have problems with this approach in just a bit.

There are many other approaches. The liberal approach is to treat scripture with either skepticism or sometimes patronizing--as if our primitive ancestors in the faith didn't understand God as well as we do now. There are some liberal interpretations I sympathize with, but I find the basic approach problematic, and a bit arrogant.

The Catholic approach is attractive for its continuity: the Church has been interpreting scripture for centuries, so you might as well start where they've left off. I don't agree that we should simply start where someone else has left off, but I do think it is a tragedy how far our culture tends to get from remembering where we came from.

And now there's this "post-liberal" or "emergent" way of interpreting scripture, which perhaps I most identify with, but I'm not sure. As I understand it, this way looks at scripture as a story, one which we enter into so that it becomes our story.

So, what exactly is my problem with the good old evangelical approach to scripture? A number of people who are close to me have been wondering, so I thought I'd compile some of my thoughts into a nice little metaphor.

The scriptures are really not just one voice, but a choir of voices singing various parts. The more I read, the more I learn about just how much scholarship goes into understanding these different voices.

The voice of Qoheleth ("the Teacher") in Ecclesiastes is different from the voice of David in the Psalms. The voice of Paul in his epistles is different from the voice of John in Revelation. The voice of the Prophets is different from the voice of the Proverbs.

The voice of Jesus towers over all of them.

There are harmonies among these voices, but there is also dissonance. Sometimes different parts of scripture just don't seem to say the same thing. Personally I find it hard to reconcile God telling Moses to kill a man for breaking the Sabbath law (Num 15:32-36) with Jesus having his disciples pluck grains on the Sabbath (Mt 12:1-8) and advocating nonviolence (Mt 5:38-29, 26:52).

But dissonance can be a beautiful part of music, and tension can be a beautiful part of the Bible. If you were thinking as you read those scripture references about how you can easily reconcile those different passages, then that's a sign you don't want to see any such tension in the Bible. You don't want dissonance in your music.

Whatever the particular merits of your method of harmonizing these different texts (and we could go through hundreds of examples), that's not what I'm really getting at. I'm really just asking, why exactly are you set on making it harmonize? Or worse, why force all of scripture to sing in unison?

What I see as I learn about the amazing number of different Protestant traditions is that a huge number all come out of this same mentality: the Bible simply has to fit into exactly one stream of thought from beginning to end. The scriptures have to sing in unison.

So then what you get is a bunch of people arguing over which melody the Bible is singing. Only one melody is allowed, so if there's any dissonance, someone is wrong.

But the sheer number of Protestant denominations in existence points to the fact that this task is impossible. The scriptures aren't singing in unison.

Of course, there are many many people I love and respect who will continue to hold out hope that one day we'll have all of these theological controversies figured out, and the One Interpretation of scripture will be commonly accepted by all "true" believers.

That's fine if you want to believe that, but then I worry that we'll get into wars not only about what scripture says, but who's really "in" and "out." It's so easy to think that maybe those people don't agree with my doctrine because they're just not really faithful to God. That would explain everything! But it would be horribly wrong in a great number of cases.

So I feel compelled by my conscience to listen to all the dissonance as well as the harmony (beyond just the unison) of scripture. And just as listening to music is both active and passive, so it is with reading scripture; we bring our own experiences and learning to the texts, and we respond to them, and we are shaped by them. It's interactive, not one way.

It's just a lot more complicated than taking the Bible seriously or not taking it seriously. If those were the only two options, that would make life simpler, but life is more complicated. Whether that's good or bad I can't tell. Maybe it's a good thing--God seems to like richness and complexity.

But after all, it really is all quite simple. Love God, love your neighbor as yourself. What more is there, really?