Grabbing the Bible with Both Hands

In about eighth or ninth grade, I began a spiritual discipline of regular Scripture reading.  Throughout high school and college, it was a powerful mainstay for my faith as it developed and grew.  I didn’t discover powerful insights every day, but spending time daily (or almost daily) in God’s word helped me learn about and explore God’s place in my life and my place in his will.

Then I went to seminary.

Suddenly, the Bible was no longer a resource for my devotional life; it was an object of analysis and study.  I was taught to read the Bible in an entirely different way.  It was no longer simply God’s message to my heart; now I explored its historical setting, the literary forms that it contains, and a whole host of other “critical” skills.  Things that I had taken for granted were called into question.  Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the other patriarchs were “eponymous folk heroes” who very possibly weren’t actual historical people.  The Pentateuch wasn’t written by Moses, but by a nameless committee called “the redactors” who pieced it together from at least four different sources.  Two or three different people wrote Isaiah.  Daniel didn’t write Daniel, John didn’t write John, and Paul didn’t write Ephesians.  I was taught not simply to read what the text said, but to explore the historical, literary, and social issues that underlie it.  I learned that the “unique word of God” was surprisingly similar to tales from other cultures of the time and region that we call myths.  I was getting to know the Bible in a new way and on a different level from how I had ever read it before.

In the process, something troubling began to happen with my daily devotional times.   When I picked up the Bible to discover God’s message for me, it had become an object for analysis instead of a resource for spiritual development.  Instead of hearing what the Spirit had to say to me, I could only hear the voices of my professors and seminary textbooks, pointing out the underlying tradition streams and historical nuances of the text.  My time with Scripture was no longer a spiritual retreat; it was a time for analysis and criticism.

It took me years to find my way out of this quandary, but it’s a struggle that many seminarians, and college students who take religion courses, encounter.  As my student pastor put it, “When I pick up the Bible with one hand to read it devotionally, my other hand knocks it away.”  Our devotional “hand” and our critical-thinking “hand” are at odds with each other.  One wants to pull the Bible into myself and identify fully with it.  The other holds it at arm’s length to examine like a rare fossil or exotic gem.

I suspect that many people who find themselves in this situation choose one hand or the other with which to hold the Bible, and ignore or cut off the other hand.  One choice is to repudiate everything we pick up from our academic study of the Bible.  We may write it off as an irrelevant distraction or react against it as an attack on our faith.  Those professors and egg-head scholars are just trying to tear the Bible apart!  We can seek to reclaim the simplicity and innocence with which I read the Bible in high school and college.  Another choice is to embrace critical insights and dismiss our earlier encounters with Scripture as foolish ignorance.  Maybe that was helpful when I was a youth, but now that I’m wiser and more mature I can put such childish things behind me.  In other words, we can either be intellectually dishonest, or we can turn our back on our spiritual heritage.  I can tie up one of my hands (either the devotional one or the critical one) and hold the Bible with the other.  But this is our challenge: how can we grab the Bible with both hands?

Before ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) took away much of his manual dexterity, my brother was a highly skilled head and neck cancer surgeon.  Part of why he was so skilled was because he had taught himself to be ambidextrous.  He grew up right-handed, but discovered that some surgical procedures are very difficult to execute with the right hand.  After he learned to be adept with both hands, he could approach situations and be able to use the hand that made the most sense for what was in front of him.  In the same way, when we are able to grab the Bible with both hands, we are more adept at understanding it and what it has to say to us.

When my brother faced a particular situation in the operating room, he would decide which hand it made the most sense to use in order to accomplish whatever it was he wanted to do.  Because he could use either hand, he could efficiently and effectively do wonderful things for his patients.  In the same way, if we are skilled at using both of our “hands” when reading the Bible, we will be much more effective and successful at whatever we seek to gain from that time.

Grabbing the Bible with both hands is different from being a switch-hitter: gauging your approach the Bible according to the situation and then using the suitable “hand” to do it well.  It means that you use both hands, both your critical and your devotional self, when you engage with the text.  My brother used both hands to operate.  In a particular situation, it may make more sense to make the incision with his left hand, but he would still use his right hand during the procedure, to do things like set a clamp (or whatever else surgeons do during an operation).  When he stopped doing surgery because of the effects of ALS, he still had full use of his left hand.  But he was too wise of a surgeon to think that he could get the job done with only one hand.  In the same way, we who approach the Bible with both devotional and critical skills are able to “get the job done” better than if we did it with only one “hand” or the other.  But we need to keep in mind what “job” we are trying to “get done,” and make the decision about which hand should be primary.

It takes time to become ambidextrous and be able to grab the Bible with both hands.  At first, our two hands aren’t able to work well together.  One hand tries to pick up the Bible, and the other one slaps it away.  Our devotional attitude and our critical skills work at cross purposes with each other, and we are clumsier with the Bible than we were when we only held it with one hand.  But, as in most situations, time and practice help.  We learn how to read the Bible devotionally, with our critical insights helping us to discern more of God’s message for our lives.  We learn how our devotional relationship with the Bible enhances our critical analysis.  It takes time, and it takes patience.  But if we are hasty and impulsive, we end up being one-handed Bible-readers.

Hermeneutics is a philosophical discipline that explores how we can gain understanding from things that we read.  My two favorite hermeneutics philosophers both offer insights into how we can grab the Bible with both hands.

Hans-Georg Gadamer explained that when you  read a book, it’s like making a decision to play by the rules of a particular game.  You “enter into the world” of the text, just like a basketball player enters into the world of basketball when she decides to play the game.  Basketball creates its own little world with its rules, and you’re only playing basketball if you play by those rules.  You can’t tackle someone from the other who has the ball (that’s the world of football) and you can’t kick the ball down the court (that would be soccer).  When we held soccer practices in our church gym, the ball would occasionally go through one of the basketball hoops on either side of the gym.  It was a source of amusement when that happened, but it had nothing to do with the game-world of soccer.  When the basketball players got the ball through hoop, however, that was the point of the whole game.

Gadamer compared reading a text to playing a game because it only makes sense if you enter the world of the text you’re reading.  You can only appreciate the book it you set aside your objections to things that you think are silly or false about it; if you suspend your judgment about that world.  To pick a much less profound example than the Bible, the “Twilight” book series creates a world in which vampires sparkle in the sunlight, make treaties with werewolves, and fall in love with teenage girls.  In order to appreciate and enjoy these books, you can’t keep complaining that vampires, if they exist, would never act like that.  It’s like watching an action movie in which the hero should probably be dead or critically injured after what he goes through, but keeps going full speed without even a limp.  You can complain that “this could never happen!” but you can only enjoy the movie if you suspend judgment.  In the same way, we can enter the world of the Bible, a world that we understand more completely because of our critical analysis of it, by making the decision to “play by its rules.”

Paul Ricoeur described the process of understanding a text as the process of moving from a “first naiveté” to a “second naiveté.”  The “first naiveté” is the initial innocence we have about the book we’re reading.  This is how I read the Bible in high school and college.  I accepted at face value the world that it presented.  I entered its world, as Gadamer  would put it, without really understanding it or grasping the nuances of it.  To use another analogy, I was like an audience member at the magic show who believed that the volunteer from the audience actually was sawn in half and that the pretty lady really was changed into a tiger.  What Ricoeur calls “explanation” is the pursuit of discovering what’s really going on.  This is where academic-style critical study of the Bible comes in.  We become more savvy about what is being presented to it.  We question it, we dig deeply into it, and we learn more about the situation.  We learn more about the magician and know that somehow he’s tricking us.  We may even learn some of the secrets of the magician’s craft.  But then we can enter into Ricoeur’s “second naiveté.”  We can use the insights we’ve gained from “explanation” to have a richer, more informed appreciation of what the text is presenting to us.  Even if you know that there’s some trick to the magician appearing to make a freight train float in mid-air, you can still marvel at what he’s done.  Even when you know the historical-literary-social factors that underlie the composition of the Bible, you can still hear God speak to you through it.  And in fact, your awareness of these factors will help you hear God more clearly.