ST ANDREWS BAPTIST CHURCH

EXPLORING APPROACHES TO INTERPRETING THE BIBLE: SESSION 2

SO FAR IN SESSION 1…

  • The Bible as a coherent story that we may helpfully think of as a yet-to-be-completed drama in which the Author invites us to participate. In our daily lives we faithfully (or less faithfully) ‘improvise’ our scene in the final act, taking into account (or not) the acts that have gone before, the closing climax of the drama and the Author’s intentions throughout. Everyone we meet in the Bible is ‘improvising’ his or her part.
  • ‘Faithful improvisation’ depends on faithful interpretation.
  • Our experiences and worldview inevitably colour our understandings of the Bible. They may do so in helpful or unhelpful ways.

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THINKING ABOUT THE ‘AUTHORITY’ OF THE BIBLE

Scripture is God’s word that can rightly expect a response, a word intended to bring about action and change.

‘The phrase “authority of scripture” can only make Christian sense if it is a shorthand for “the authority of the triune God, exercised somehow through scripture”… it can only have any Christian meaning if we are referring to scripture’s authority in a delegated or mediated sense from that which God himself possesses, and that which Jesus possesses as the risen Lord and Son of God’ (N T Wright, Scripture and theAuthority of God).

BUT… much of the Bible doesn’t seem to fit the ‘authority’ category: poetry, letters, stories, parables. So how does this strange kind of authority work?

2 Samuel 12:1-13

  • In this crisis, why do you think Nathan takes time to tell David a story?
  • In what ways is Nathan’s story ‘authoritative’ in David’s life?

The literature of the Bible is primarily narrative, story. Story has the power to engage our imagination. But surely it's our will that needs to be engaged if our interaction with the Bible is to be truly transformative? The key idea of Paul Ricoeur that it is our imagination that shifts the cogs of our will, that 'obedience follows imagination'. 'If we wish to have transformed obedience (ie, more faithful, responsive listening [to God in Scripture]), then we must be summoned to an alternative imagination, in order that we may imagine the world and ourselves differently. The link of obedience to imagination suggests that the toughness of ethics depends on poetic, artistic speech as the only speech that can evoke transformed listening... It is poetic invitation that holds the only chance of changed behaviour, a point understood and practised by Jesus in his parables, which had such ethical bite, but such artistic delicacy' (Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet, p 85).