Pastor as Interpreter of Scripture: Pastor, Chapter Five

Interpreting New Worlds

by Chad Holtz

I was reminded of a story while reading this chapter that I heard several years ago.  I do not remember who it is from but if I had to guess I’d say Karl Barth.  It goes like this…

Imagine yourself in a warehouse full of people, crates, antiques, and various odds and ends.  It’s dark and musty in the warehouse, most of the items have long been covered with dust.   This is your home.  Your world.  You know no different, for this is where you and the others have always dwelled.   The darkness and mustiness and dust are natural to you.   What more could there be?

Until one day a group of kids are playing on top of some boxes alongside the wall of your “world” and one of the children slips and rubs up against the wall, leaving a smudge, causing a pin-prick of light to shine through.  Inspecting further, the kids start wiping away the dust only to expose a window.   As the peer outside this window they see trees and grass and flowers.  Looking up they see clouds and blue skies and an air plane flying overhead.  On the sidewalks are children like them riding bikes and in the fields they are flying kites and enjoying a picnic.   Colors abound.  Joy is evident on their faces.  It’s a whole new world.

This story (which as I type it sounds like a retelling of Jim Carrey’s movie The Truman Show) is a parable that depicts the role of the pastor.  The pastor is the one who dares to peer through the dusty window into the bold, odd, disturbing world God has formed through words (Scripture) and invite the church to align their lives alongside this world, this story.   The Bible serves as a window into true reality and we as pastors serve as tour guides.  Willimon writes, “The pastor, in preaching, leads the church in stepping into the text, trying on the text, assuming a world in which the text’s description of reality is more real than that which we typically privilege as ‘real’” (127).   Thus, the pastor opens the strange new world of the Bible before the church and invites them to jump in and live.  It is here, unlike any other place or world we construct for ourselves meaning that salvation lies.    The Bible does not seek to impart information (although it does that at times), creating some world from the past for us to decode and transplant into our own context but rather, Scripture “wants to form a new world in the present, to recreate us” (117).   It seeks to form and reform her hearers.  The truthfulness of the Bible, then, is not to be found within the text itself.  Rather, the “truthfulness of Scripture is in the lives it is able to produce” (130).   If our lives are not performing the text, and if pastors are not calling congregations to perform the text, to re-imagine the world and then embody that world, than we have misunderstood what it means to say Scripture is true and authoritative.

To conclude I want to share a poem that was introduced to me in preaching class at Duke Divinity.   This poem is by Billy Collins and is tittle, “An Introduction to Poetry.”   As pastors being confronted by an ancient text it is good to hear this poem and where we see the word “poem” replace it with the word “text” or “scripture.”     May we rediscover what it means to be a people of the Book.  Amen.

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Living in the Scriptures

by Thomas Parkinson

Is there any more vital and important aspect of pastoral ministry than the interpretation of the scriptures?  As Willimon asserts, it is the scriptures that create and critique the church (115).  Through the scriptures God calls the church into being, challenges her to deeper levels of faithfulness, and reveals to the church God’s truth.  The scriptures are the heartbeat of the church.

That said, it is striking how difficult it is for pastors to lead the church in interpreting the scriptures today.  Every year, countless energy is spent developing new Bible study curriculum and fancy study Bibles for all ages.  The main objective in most of these projects is to “make the Bible relevant” by placing it alongside current cultural fascinations.  And so Christians have at their finger tips thousands of resources for Bible study – from Study Bibles for Black Women to cutting edge DVD Bible studies.  And yet, while many of these products are the result of a genuine desire to lead the church in Bible study, the contemporary church is on the whole biblically illiterate.

Following Willimon, perhaps this approach to Bible study is wrong is flawed.  By trying to make the Bible relevant, we misuse the scriptures by trying to make them “normal.”  Instead of allowing the scriptures to challenge and uproot our current cultural norms, we do our best to make them fit into our current way of life.  Yet, the very nature of the scriptures is such that they are “countercultural, provocative, and strange” (111).  To read the scriptures is to open an ancient text, written thousands of years ago, and to discover inside a new world.  A world that Karl Barth described as the strange new world of God.

Perhaps one of the greatest weaknesses in biblical interpretation today is our desire to make the Bible less strange to the average person.  Thus, we begin to imagine a Bible that blesses current understandings of the family, marriage, and civil government.  We imagine a Bible that recounts scientific and historical facts.  And in doing all of this, we lose sight of the strange new world within the Bible.

The only proper way to make the Bible less strange is to live in the world of the Bible.  To read the scriptures on their own terms and to listen closely for the voice of the Holy Spirit.  To live in the Bible is countercultural – it entails reading an old old book over and over again in a world that sees the old as outdated and that detests anything that requires time.  To live in the Bible is provocative – it will challenge our basic assumptions about God, ourselves, and creation.  To live in the Bible is strange – we will find ourselves being called to do things and to live in ways that are far different from anything we’ve ever known.

And yet, it is only by living in the Bible that the church can truly be the people of God.  And one of the great privileges of being a pastor is to invite people into this countercultural, provocative, and strange way of life.  And no pastor can take advantage of this great privileged until she has first lived in the Bible herself.

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