Many people read the Bible with faith, and many people read the Bible critically. The task we face at Fuller is to combine these approaches. We feel the urgency of this when we consider the state of the church, in which it is all too common to encounter appeals to Scripture that “use” the Bible to validate particular, predetermined commitments. Such uses of the Bible can emerge from simplistic appeals to the plain-sense meaning of the Bible or through complex reconstructions. In the end, whether through simplicity or complexity, the result is the same: The sermon or the article or the book simply confirms what a person already thought or wanted to think.
When I arrived at Fuller five years ago, I learned the term “believing criticism” as a shorthand for the kind of critically engaged interpretation that Fuller brings to the study of the Bible as Scripture. It is not always straightforward how to balance the theological commitment to Scripture as an inspired, even infallible, word of God to humanity with the challenges that emerge from close reading and attention to both the Bible and the world around us. In this past week, others’ close reading of the Bible have brought to me questions about (1) commands about mass killings in the book of Joshua; (2) slaves and slavery in many biblical texts; (3) the relationship between conversion to Christianity and ethical transformation in the early church, particularly with regard to sexual ethics; and (4) what Jesus means when he offers “abundant life” (John 10:10).
When these questions arise, biblical study is like working a knot: Tugging at one end of the string can create tension somewhere else. Convenient answers too often come at the expense of creating greater tension elsewhere (such as, for example, ignoring or excising certain passages or resolving one problem but creating another). It is precisely the commitment to the Bible as our trustworthy guide to faith and life that prompts us to keep coming back to the Bible, reading the text closely, engaging its complexity. We read in this way in order to love God more and to be transformed into the image of Christ. The wise use of tools in our reading is a way to nurture our attention and to keep our own preferences in check.
A key word with regard to the use of scholarly tools is “wise.” In On Christian Teaching, a late-in-life instruction on preaching and communication, Augustine outlines seven stages through which readers of the Bible should advance (2.16–23).
A significant proportion of On Christian Teaching is spent at stage 3: knowledge. We struggle to understand the words of Scripture because they are often offered in “signs” that are either unknown or ambiguous to us. To resolve ignorance or ambiguities, interpreters need to learn the original languages, consider text-critical solutions, and study literary context. (Augustine argues you must learn biology, mathematics, music, astronomy, history, logic, and the arts—because without them, how could you hope to understand the Bible?!)
Yet even after readers have learned all this, they still need to exercise discernment in order to know when to take a passage literally and when to take it figuratively. For Augustine, it is possible that a command will be heard by one person as literal and another as figurative, and that both interpretations are correct insofar as they correspond to the spiritual maturity of different hearers.
At Fuller, we also spend a lot of time on stage 3. In Bible classes, we teach languages, contexts, close reading, text criticism. We study the literary and theological structure of texts. We consider how they were composed and how early readers might have heard them. We also rely on colleagues across the seminary to illuminate the Bible, as other disciplines are part of the collective knowledge of our community.
Yet with all of this knowledge at hand, it is of crucial importance for us to remember that stage 3 is not the goal. Unless knowledge opens into hungering and thirsting for righteousness, into wholehearted love for God and neighbor, we will have failed.
Greek Orthodox theologian Mary Ford thinks that we have, in fact, failed—not Fuller, specifically, but Protestantism as a whole. From her view, our movement promised a clarified and vital faith through renewed attention to God and to the gospel as revealed in Scripture. It instead has resulted in chaotic disagreement. We try to explore the Bible vis-à-vis our knowledge, but we end with competing claims, each asserting its “authority,” usually based on the “historical” “expertise” of the “interpreter.” (Ford’s book The Soul’s Longing: An Orthodox Christian Perspective on Biblical Interpretation challenges what each of these words mean.)
Mary Ford’s proposal is a return to reading within the great tradition of the church, toward the end of seeing a vision of God by means of the text. She encourages contemporary interpreters to find those who have come before us who hunger and thirst for righteousness and to read the Bible with them. We have made stage 3 the beginning and end of biblical interpretation, but we would do well to find someone further up the ladder and learn with that person. This is good advice. We might hear it well alongside Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “When simple obedience is fundamentally eliminated, there again the costly grace of Jesus’ call has become the cheap grace of self-justification” (The Cost of Discipleship, 81). With this word, Bonhoeffer is warning readers against becoming too clever with the Bible. Read like someone in stages 1 (fear) or 2 (holiness) before you trust yourself and your knowledge (stage 3) to find a novel meaning.
This is where believing criticism comes in. It is not any one thing, but rather a constellation of practices, especially investigations that utilize certain forms of knowledge that are themselves chastened by the Christian confession of faith. Believing criticism is a way of paying attention to the Bible and keeping our own preferences in check. It arises from faith and it leads into faith. The test of the right deployment of knowledge is in the lives of fear, holiness, fortitude, purity of heart, sight, and wisdom among God’s people. “Believing criticism” is shorthand for all of that. When we remember the larger context in which it is set, we see that its success or failure lies in how it forms us as a people who are shaped by a Word we did not speak to ourselves.
Chris Blumhofer is Associate Professor of New Testament