The Spirit Says God is For Us: A Personal Hermeneutic
Brandon Smee
Introduction
When I was an elementary schooler, I can remember my grandma taking me to Vacation Bible School at her church, where we’d read Bible stories and sing songs like: “The B-I-B-L-E, yes, that’s the book for me!” Like many children in America, I was introduced to the idea that the Bible was the bedrock of Christian faith. Everything it said was true, and disagreeing with it meant disagreeing with God. Even as a kid, I had questions though: where did evolution fit into the creation story? Why do we change the Sabbath to Sunday? Why do the rules in the Old Testament not apply to us, at least most of the time? I may not have known it at the time, but these are the sorts of questions that require us looking at our hermeneutics to answer.
In this short essay, I will set out my personal hermeneutic by looking at how I understand biblical inspiration and the role of scripture in the Christian community. My hermeneutic is based on the affirmation that God is “for us and for our salvation”, drawn from the Nicene Creed that my tradition uses. I recognize that my method comes from a particular standpoint. My reading lens has been formed by ideas from the Holiness Movement, historical-critical scholarship, Charismatic experiences, the Anglican-Episcopal tradition, literary criticism, and the experience of growing up as a white gay man in America. Each of these parts of me shapes me to see certain features in the text and to think in particular ways about how to apply them.
Human and Divine Fingerprints
The term “hermeneutics” itself refers to how we draw meaning from texts. So to talk about how I get meaning from the Bible, it will help to talk about what I think the Bible is. First, where does the Bible come from? Christians have usually acknowledged that both the Spirit of God and humans were involved in producing the Bible on some level. The work of historians in the last few centuries has highlighted the human fingerprints on the text. Scholars describe how Jewish and Christian scribes preserved stories, legal texts, poetry, hymns, prophecies, proverbs, and pastoral direction that were formative for their communities. These texts then went through a process of canonization, which involved leaders in these communities determining which texts were formative and essential for their people’s faith.
There are limitations in this canonization process that have to be acknowledged. While the Bible contains multiple voices, it tends to center the voices and perspectives of men with political, religious, and economic power. This is because these were the people with the resources to pay for the materials and professionals needed to produce and circulate the texts that constitute the Bible before the invention of paper or printing. On top of that, the people who were appointed to have the power to authorize a canon for the church were always men and usually selected from the higher classes of society. One of the consequences of this is that the Bible reflects the patriarchal realities of the cultures that produced it. The Bible texts suggest in many places that anyone who is not a man or does not conform to patriarchal customs is of low value or immoral. As a result, the Bible can be and is used in many populations to perpetuate violence and injustice against women and various kinds of marginal people (LGBT+ people, the poor, immigrants, children, the elderly, etc.).
On the one hand, Christians have acknowledged that the Bible is human, but on the other we have also called the Bible “inspired”. We believe that God is somehow involved in the Bible alongside humans. Some Christians take this to mean that every statement in the Bible is literally true in its plain grammatical sense, but many others understand inspiration in a more nuanced way. The famous German reformer Martin Luther once called scripture “the cradle in which the Christ child lies”.[i] Similarly, Karl Barth, an influential 20th century Swiss theologian, believed that inspiration doesn’t mean the words are inspired but that we encounter Jesus Christ when we read scripture.[ii] What’s common between these statements is that God uses the reading of scripture to meet us. Along these lines, I understand the reading of scripture to be a source of inspiration and deepening of our relationship with God as the Spirit communicates the word of God through it.
What the Spirit Says to God’s People
When I say that God is meeting us in our reading of scripture, I am locating the place where meaning happens in the audience. Different approaches to hermeneutics put the meaning in different places: some in the historical realities the text describes, some in the meaning of the text itself, and others in how readers perceive its meaning. My hermeneutic is a reader-oriented hermeneutic. I try to hold together several levels of analysis when I look at the text this way: how the original audience was intended to hear the text when it was read, how readers have understood it traditionally, and how people in different social locations hear it today. I look at the similarities and differences between how people in various times and places felt the Bible was speaking to them, and I look for analogies for myself and audiences today.
I ground my approach theologically in the belief that Jesus is God’s self-disclosure. The Spirit’s work is to keep revealing Jesus to us so that we can know who God is. The Spirit speaks to people across time and space, speaks through the reading of scripture, and continues to speak today across barriers of geography, culture, class, gender, and experience. The God that Jesus shows us is a God who is for us. This is the God that the Spirit is revealing to the church when we read the Bible. When I interpret scripture, I look for what the Spirit was showing people about God through the reading of these texts, and I judge an interpretation’s faithfulness by how well it helps us see the God that the church confesses to be God for us.
To say it another way, I am allowing space for tradition and experience to help me make meaning of scripture: not just any tradition or experience, but the tradition of the church as it responds to the God who is for us and the experience of God among the poor whom God is for. As an Episcopalian, my faith involves remembering and incorporating the traditions of past generations into my faith and practice, but as a gay man and an ally I recognize the ways tradition has been used to keep the marginalized in the margins and to keep the powerful in the center. So when I am interpreting scripture, I allow the definitive decision of God to be for us in Christ to be the measure for where the Spirit is speaking and where the Spirit is not. Readings that support patriarchy, heteronormativity, racism, imperialism, and economic injustice would reflect a god for some, not a God for us. The God who is for us and for our salvation was born of Mary, a poor woman of color, and executed by Pontius Pilate, a man in the center of society who used his power to oppress others. The Christian tradition ought not to be a “both sides” tradition, but one that recognizes the ways God is working in history.
Hearing the Spirit: How it Works
To see how this works in application, I might offer how I deal with a controversial passage like 1 Timothy 2:11-12, which reads in the NRSV, “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.” Many Christians site these verses as evidence that God does not allow women to teach or preach in church, and by extension that God does not call women to be pastors or priests. But I disagree with this way of reading and applying the verse. First, I consider what this text was meant to communicate to its audience. It is part of a pastoral epistle that whose author identifies themself as Paul, but is likely pseudepigraphal. This information doesn’t mean that the epistle isn’t scripture, but it helps me consider what the situation might be. It seems that a particular church leader in the Pauline tradition is seeking to stop women from teaching and speaking in his church. Subsequent content in the letter informs us that there have been concerns about outsiders from the community seeking to take advantage of widows and vulnerable women in the community. It seems to me that a man in leadership in a patriarchal culture is making a decision that disempowers women with the aim of protecting his community from people who intend to take advantage of them. Looking at the situation in the audience, we begin to see a few of the complexities surrounding what’s being communicated.
Looking further, we see across the tradition of Christianity that women have numbered among some of the great teachers of the church when afforded the opportunity. Though the church only officially extended ordination to men, women often used creative means to get their ideas out in ways that would not be censored, presenting their writings as mystical visions and prophetic revelations. Moreover, in the present day we hear the enlightening commentary of feminist and womanist scholars who help us to better perceive the equality and dignity of all people, including women, and the ways in which patriarchal ideologies have neglected that diginity. I recognize the gifting and calling of many female ministers I know in my own life. Having listened to these many voices, I consider which of these best seem to reflect the God who is for us in Christ. I consider Peter’s declaration in Acts 2 at Pentecost that the Spirit is poured out on all flesh and that men and women will prophesy. I think of the women across the canon of Scripture whom God called to do great deeds of faith. The fact that they are present despite the Bible’s patriarchal bias is significant. It seems to me clear that the Spirit is speaking in favor of the ordination of women and the recognition of their callings.
Thus, what I take from 1 Timothy 2:11-12 instead is a parable of the limitations of pastoral decisions. Even as we seek to shore up one weakness or challenge in our communities, we may unreflectively inflict other damages. What 1 Timothy’s author thought to be good guidance in his time may not be good guidance for us today. How then might we be open to change in our own practices, understandings, and policies? Moreover, what will I do when I sense that vulnerable people around me are being taken advantage of? What if my attempts to use my power to protect the community are further disempowering those same vulnerable people? As I decide that the Spirit is not speaking the barring of women from ministry in this text, I can hear other things the Spirit may be saying. The Spirit breathes new life into my theological imagination even through seemingly dead texts. This allows me to read scripture with both suspicion and desire. All of this is ordered toward encountering the God who is for us in Christ within the Bible’s pages.
Conclusion
By allowing these concerns to animate my hermeneutics, my hope is that reading the Bible will help me to deepen my love for the God who is for us in Jesus and my love for all the people whom God is for. For me, biblical interpretation is never just an intellectual exercise. Reading the Bible is an act of faith and devotion. The homiletician Anna Carter Florence uses the story of Jacob wrestling with God in Genesis 32 to describe the process of reading scripture. As Jacob grapples with God until he gets a blessing, the process of reading the Bible involves wrestling with the text, the various ways people have and do read it, and our own experience. The hope is that through this commitment to wrestle, we, like Jacob in the story, would get to see God’s face and live. My way of reading Scripture is absolutely informed by the weight I put on deepening my relationship with God and my understanding of the Christian call to love our neighbors and work for justice. Loving God and neighbor informs how I read the Bible, and my reading the Bible informs how I love God and neighbor. In this committed wrestling, I see more and more of who God is. Over time this back and forth transforms me, empowers me to witness to God’s work on earth, and draws me closer to God’s love.
Notes
[i] Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology, Third Ed. (Grand Rapids, MI; William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014), 59.
[ii] Migliore, 52-54.