Goal and Outline of the Course

I am offering an 8-10 week course on Biblical interpretation that aims to welcome laity back into the community conversation in (not merely "of" or "about") the scriptures, validating the many ways we  read, experience, and interpret the texts in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit as well as expanding our repertoire of reading and interpretive methods as a way of appreciating the vast treasure of scripture in our faith.

We will accomplish this validation and expansion by:

1. Exploring various methods/practices of reading scripture (as well as other forms of literature) in order to appreciate and evaluate the interpretive theory and process, and
2. "Christianly" evaluating the readings that result from these various reading and interpretive strategies in terms of their fruitfulness and faithfulness in our life together as well as the ethical/doctrinal implications of each particular method. We will use as a model for this kind of evaluation the Wesleyan "Quadrilateral" (scripture, tradition, reason and experience).

The methods and practices of reading scripture we will survey include:

1. the ways scriptural writers and characters interpret scripture
2. examples of ancient/pre-modern interpetation in sermons
3. examples of Wesleyan interpetation (Enlightenment) in his sermons
4. the practice of Lectio Divina
5. examples of literary criticism (from Alan Culpepper's Anatomy of the New Testament: A Study in Literary Design)
6. evaluating modern and post-modern sermons and the ways preachers interpret and incorporate scripture to buttress an argument
   
7. devotional reflections and readings in order to make explicit their interpretive methods
   
8. examine some of the ways scripture is used in art - including movies, paintings, poems, songs, dramas, novels, and works of non-fiction
9. introduce the various methods of historical criticism, including archaeology, history, anthropology, sociology and linguistics and textual study
10. experience Biblical storytelling (dramatic reading of scripture) as a method of interpretation

Throughout this survey, we will also experience a variety of ways of experiencing scripture:

1. reading aloud and to ourselves
2. dramatic reading - Biblical storytelling
3. dramatizations
4. Lectio Divina - praying the scriptures
   
5. singing (and dancing) the scriptures
6. hearing the scriptures in their original language
7. scriptural commentary/reference and following a topical "chain"
8. liturgical reading 

It is my hope that by the end of this course, participants will incorporate a new way of appreciating and understanding scripture and the many ways we interpret it - not as a mysterious (magical) monolithic Word of God, but as a catalyst for communion with God and the Body of Christ throughout human history. I pray that this new way of understanding what these sacred texts are and our role in engaging and interpreting them will foster a deeper love of scripture and will equip and encourage all of us to take our place in the ongoing community conversation with God and each other through the sacrament of the scriptures at Skyline Church.

Bible Reading Strategies

As promised, here are some links that might help you get a handle on reading the Bible. I've placed a link of this info on our church website but I'll recap it here.


A cycle of daily readings from the Old Testament, New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs that takes you through the entire Bible in a year can be found here. This week's readings are here. You can also purchase a One Year Bible in your favorite translation, with the daily readings arranged by date.

The prayer readings of Phyllis Tickle's The Divine Hours we used to begin the conversation yesterday can be found here. They consist of prayers for morning, noon, and evening. Corinne Ware's Saint Benedict on the Freeway: A Rule of Life for the 21st Century offers another take on the concept of praying at specific times throughout the day. Another resource for this kind of prayer throughout the day that involves a focus on scripture is A Contemporary Celtic Prayer Book by William John Fitzgerald.

The Upper Room produces print and online devotional resources you might also like to use. These are typically daily devotions surrounding a weekly theme. The format highlights a particular verse, offers an accompanying reflection and then closes with a short prayer. The advantage to using this resource is that it makes devotional time highly accessible and focused. Each devotion for the day is also short - you can typically read the offering for the day in five minutes or less. Here also is the disadvantage - there is a temptation to breeze through the meditation and ignore an invitation from the Spirit for further reflection and engagement.

Another daily/weekly devotional guide I have used in the past is A Guide to prayer for All God's People, compiled by Rueben Job and Norman Shawchuck. The Guide uses scripture readings that follow the Revised Common Lectionary, and adds prayers and readings from other devotional authors. This type of devotional activity involves more time and reflection than a typical daily devotional guide with a verse and reflections. It also presents a highly structured form of devotional reading and prayer. The devotional readings collection includes a variety of ancient and contemporary theologians and mystics whose wisdom and passion for God compliments the readings for the week and for the day. Each week is organized around a common theme.

This year, I have also been using a devotional guide by Trevor Hudson and Morton Kelsey titled Journey of the Spirit: Meditations for the Spiritual Seeker. The guide includes a weekly meditation, short quote, prayer and journal suggestion on a theme covering an aspect of the Christian life, plus daily readings of verses of scripture pertaining to the theme. These daily scripture verses are short and lend themselves to memorization (so that you can carry them with you throughout the day) and contemplation. Hudson, in particular, advocates a "less is more" philosophy about Bible study and contemplation, advocating spending more time with shorter, more manageable verses in scripture. 

Vicki and I typically put the sermon notes online Thursday or Friday before the Sunday we will preach the text. You can find these online sermon notes (that we print in the weekly bulletin) here. These sermon notes compliment the sermon (also available online) so that you can use the weekly scripture and theme as a regular devotional that you can meditate on throughout the week and engage more fully with the "take" or reading presented by the pastor during the sermon on the weekend.


I'll be sharing more print and online resources, and look forward to hearing about the resources that help you read and experience the scriptures. Please feel free to share them as a response to this entry.

What Does it Mean to you to refer to the Bible as the "Word of God"

We talked this Sunday (Jan. 17) about the things we learned about the Bible as children and the way our understanding of the Bible changes as we grew into adulthood. I was struck by the ways we identified we moved from a passive observer in the community conversation about scripture to playing a more active role. I also liked the analogy of a movement from mystery to intimacy. And though none of us may feel very active in the process of community interpretation of scripture, our presence in a Bible study certainly indicates movement in our lives beyond passive observers.

I asked you to consider what it means in the church (both big "C" and at Skyline, specifically) to call the scriptures "God's Word" to you. I look forward to learning about your perspective. Please feel free to share your thoughts as a response to this entry.

Impetus for the Course: Communal Interpretation and Formation

Dale Martin's book of essays, Sex and the Single Savior, Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation employed an imaginative freedom in Biblical interpretation that encouraged and validated innovative and creative readings of Scripture.  These readings are bounded not by any one of these reading strategies (historical criticism) or even Scripture itself, but by the leavening presence of the Holy Spirit in the members of the Body of Christ.

Thanks to Carl Gregg (whom I met at a conference in Nashville last fall), I was inspired to read Martin's Pedagogy of the Bible: An Analysis and Proposal, which further articulated Martin's invitation to experience scripture as "a vast space of textual echo chamber, like entering... a huge cathedral" (p. 62). Martin also writes that "the interpretation of scripture builds on and reinforces truths also taught elsewhere in Christian culture and community" (p. 69).

In "Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally", Marcus Borg asserts that to survive over time, it must become "a cultural-linguistic world in its own right" having emerged in a particular culture and drawing from "the language and symbols from that culture" (p. 29). Our scriptures, Borg suggests, are the "foundation [or constitution] of the Christian cultural-linguistic world" that transcends the cultures of ancient Israel and the early Christian movement and becomes "a world in which its followers live" (p.29).

When most Christians think about Biblical authority, they assume what Borg calls a monarchical model, in which the Bible stands over the Christian community, dictating doctrine and ethics. The primary trouble with this model is that the scriptures do not speak - and the monarchical model inevitably involves self-proclaimed interpretive experts who presume to speak not only for scripture but for God. What many Christians take to be the "literal Truth" of scriptures is the voice and interpretation of these "experts". Far too many Christians read the Bible regurgitated.

Borg describes another way of defining scriptural authority: a dialogical model in which the Bible is "our primary ancient conversation partner" (p. 30). This conversation between the community of faith and the stories and writings that the ancient community of faith collected into a canon of scripture involves what Borg calls a "critical conversation" that (1) discerns what "parts of the Bible" the community will honor and will not honor, as well as (2) "allow[s] the texts to shape and judge us".

Martin calls scripture "an instrument used by the Holy Spirit mainly to reinforce Christian doctrine and ethics we have imbibed by several different sources: preaching, liturgy, music, even our parents and grandparents and our friends" (p. 70). Martin rightly sees the Holy Spirit as the guide of this ongoing dialogue between scripture (the collected voices/stories of the ancient Jewish and early Christian communities of faith) and every subsequent generation of the Christian community of faith. Scripture is not in this understanding the source of our faith understanding but a powerful resource - a confirmation of truth the Holy Spirit teaches us in many ways.

Exegesis is a world Bible scholars use to mean the ways in which we "mine" the scriptural texts for meaning. It derives from the Greek word exegesthai, which means "to lead out". In the introduction to her wonderful book, The Bible: A Biography, Karen Armstrong calls exegesis a "spiritual discipline rather than an academic pursuit" (p. 6) in which the exegetes "[continue] to make the Word of God audible in each generation" (p. 5). Armstrong also writes about this dialogue between the community of faith and its scriptures, asserting that "the truth of scripture cannot be assessed unless it is - ritually or ethically - put into practice" (p. 2).

This process is what Martin calls confirmation and what Borg calls critical discernment. Armstrong describes the conversation in this way: "the Bible 'proved' that it was holy because people continually discovered fresh ways to interpret it and found this difficult, ancient set of documents cast light on situations their [human] authors could never have imagined. Revelation was an ongoing process..." (p. 5). As with Borg, this proving process works in both directions. Armstrong quotes an early Christan exegete Philo who liked to describe "his exegesis as a 'conversion' of both the text and the interpreter" (p. 51).

But Armstrong also connects with Martin's assertion that scripture reminds us of truths "we already know". She writes that Philo "experienced knowledge as remembrance, as known to him already at some profound level of his being" (p. 53). In this way, scripture does not merely reflect what we want it to mean, but resonates with the part of our being that God created. For Philo, "the story became suddenly fused with a truth that was part of himself" (p. 53).

By exercising our imagination (and expanding our imagination) we can inhabit a realm of of story and symbol that welcomes us with comfort and confirmation (reminding us of truths we already know) and that also constantly surprises and challenges us to experience the mystery of God anew (swinging us constantly to turn, turn, turn to a place of more of God's presence, power and love).

Martin's message to me involves the recovery and validation of my imaginative freedom - which has long lain dormant under the oppression of the historical-critical method of exegesis I learned at the divinity school. He calls me not to abandon this practice of interpretation, but to move beyond its exclusive (or even primary) use. and here is where the people of Skyline will be blessed: they will also be freed from the burden of a method many of them cannot use (because of the barrier of graduate education) and welcomed to their rightful place in the communion gathered by and in scripture.

These books have inspired me to offer an 8-10 week course on Biblical interpretation that aims to welcome laity back into the community conversation in the scriptures, validating the many ways we  read, experience, and interpret the texts in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit as well as expanding our repertoire of reading and interpretive methods as a way of appreciating the vast treasure of scripture in our faith.