sola scriptura

Scripture.

Having spent most Sundays in the pew of one Protestant church or another, the role of daily Bible reading was impressed upon me at an early age: “Thy word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against Thee.” In this early presentation of Bible study, I learned that our wrongdoing and imperfections separate us from God, and so studying God’s words in Scripture could help strengthen and repair my broken connection with God, and guard me from future trespasses. When I was older, I also learned the more positive motivations for learning Scripture: “How sweet are thy words to my taste! Yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” I learned in this that what God had to say could be life-giving, enriching, and pleasurable. I always found this easier to sense when reading the beautiful, poetic passages of Old Testament wisdom and prophets, or the spine-tingling simplicity of John’s, “In the beginning was the Word.”

At first, the translation did not matter to me, did not interfere with the goodness I read, or the sustenance it gave me. Later, however, the language itself could become a bad taste in my mouth, depending on the connotations I had forged with it. King James could either evoke the parlance of Shakespeare and lead me to weep, or it could cause me to avoid, at all costs, letting the words pass through my lips. I suspect much of this had to do with how I heard those words read by others, too: if read with the wagging finger of a heavy Southern accent, I might read condemnation with no hope of salvation, and become sick at hearing them. Mostly, the churches I attended pursued topical study of Scripture that darted around in search of unifying themes on a particular subject. Occasionally, I experienced a more deliberate, inductive approach that took a passage in the context of the surrounding verses and historical scenario.

At some point, a gnawing suspicion began in me that I was not very good at routine, dedicated study of Scripture on my own. I also began to suspect that some people who claimed to practice this discipline faithfully were not my favorite people to be around. Still, for short spurts of time, I could be swept away in private by opening my Bible and engaging what I found there. There are other times where, hoping for the refreshment of a Messianic prophecy or early church exhortation, I find instead the stench of death: God ordering what looks like genocide, or Paul telling me that women should be silent in church. I take comfort in knowing I am not the first to wrestle with these passages, and that I will not be the last. As my experience of God evolves, my faith must undergo the arduous process of being continually renewed--in a kind of reptilian molting, I think through these things in the presence of the Holy Spirit and other Christians, my old understandings stretch until they break and slough off, leaving a shiny new one to begin the cycle again. I can never be sure this side of heaven that I have grasped everything, that there will be no more room for growth. Many people would agree with this in theory, but their lives and their conversations prove so inflexible it’s hard for me to believe that they really do prefer the lively “anxiety of becoming” to a stasis that starts in adulthood and carries them through, far too certain of everything, until death.

Because of this, Scripture may comment directly on something, and I still am not sure of it. Many of the voices in Scripture questioned God after direct encounters with him, and I am no exception. It is their example--Abraham, Moses, Job, David, Zachariah, Mary Christ’s mother, Mary Magdalene, the woman at the well, Thomas, Peter-- that convinces me that God and his words can withstand my doubtful discourse. It would accomplish little for me to pretend that “I know that I know that I know,” as some claim to. Absolute certainty of God and God’s purposes in Scripture inspires awe in some, but ridicule in many others, and is does not communicate the winsomeness of friendship with Jesus to those who don’t know him. It doesn’t deceive God, either. Perhaps some really are given the that gift of surety. I rarely receive it, and then only in hindsight, after embarking on a journey that is really a hypothesis--an act of faith, undertaken with “fear and trembling.” I will, then, pray: “Lord, I believe; help me in my unbelief.”

At present, I recognize the value of daily Scripture study as an act of devotion, and I struggle to regain momentum in its practice. I also, however, squarely reject the notion that reading Scripture every day is always necessary or even possible, without allowing spiritual pride to creep in. Sometimes falling back on those verses that are hidden in the heart is preferable (and more portable) on a daily basis, depending on one’s activities and disposition. For centuries, faithful Christians have not always had regular access to Scripture. While that reality has spurred some useful technical innovations, political reforms, and spiritual revival movements, it surely doesn’t justify a swing toward the opposite extreme, where we are all bound to a particular practice of how/when/where/why we read the Bible. The classic guilt trips ring empty after awhile: “People in China don’t even have Bibles! Can you imagine living before Gutenberg and not having your own copy? We should consider ourselves fortunate to read it every day!” These ring with truth, to be sure, but are useless when neither devotion nor enjoyment can compel us to read and study, and do little to restore our hope or joy in the process. Reading the Bible should not be always an act of desperation, or a guilty obligation, but should be given the chance to become a real delight; it cannot do this under the duress of being compared to everyone else’s reading habits. The people who were chosen as God’s linguistic instruments to record Scripture would certainly approve of our reading and re-reading it in public and in private. Still, I think they might be shocked by how quickly our most useful and necessary debates about translation and study techniques turn into petty sibling rivalries that violate the spirit of the the very words we are trying to lay hold of.