A Tool for Resisting Abuse and Tyranny?

Reconsidering my Aversion to Personal Reading of Scripture.

This post is a sidebar of sorts to my ongoing series on Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman argues that the written word is vitally important for the flourishing of society. But if this conviction is right, then the questions of how and why we read merit some exploration, and these questions have been knocking around in head recently thanks to Postman and a recent sermon that I heard.

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My book, The Virtue of Dialogue, is now available, and is a helpful backdrop for understanding the sorts of reflections that get posted here on The Conversational Life.

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Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I was visiting a church recently, and as a part of the sermon, the pastor made a case for personal Bible reading. I rapidly got distracted from the sermon, however, by a deluge of my own thoughts, as I was surprised by how compelling I found his argument to be, and I needed to examine my surprise. What follows is a condensed version of my recent thoughts in the wake of this sermon.

Allow me to begin with a confession, I don’t have a daily practice of reading scripture. I am not, of course, opposed to reading scripture, and I do often read portions for my work as a writer and editor, and as I participate in many facets of the life of our church. Many Christians that I deeply respect read scripture daily, so why was I resistant? First, I don’t think I ever had a knee jerk reaction that made me adamantly resistant to this practice. Rather, my resistance – as best I can tell – was formed in me gradually over time. It seems the biggest factor in my resistance was a response to the radical individualism of American society, and particularly the ways in which it has been absorbed into Evangelical culture. I didn’t want a “Me and Jesus” sort of faith, and daily devotional habits seemed too reminiscent of that individualistic kind of Christianity. Additionally, the shared life of the church played (and continues to play) a significant role in my theology. In this regard I was strongly influenced by the work of Stanley Hauerwas. In his book Unleashing Scripture, Hauerwas writes clearly and directly about the hazards of personal Bible reading:

Most North American Christians assume that they have a right, if not an obligation, to read the Bible. I challenge that assumption. No task is more important than for the Church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America. Let us no longer give the Bible to all children when they enter the third grade or whenever their assumed rise to Christian maturity is marked, such as eighth-grade commencements. Let us rather tell them and their parents that they are possessed by habits far too corrupt for them to be encouraged to read the Bible on their own…

To suggest that the Bible should be taken away from North American Christians will strike many as absurd. They may assume that I am not serious. Is it not the very hallmark of Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, to encourage people to read the Bible? I certainly believe that God uses the Scripture to help keep the Church faithful, but I do not believe, in the Church’s current circumstance, that each person in the Church thereby is given the right to interpret the Scripture…

The reformation doctrine of sola scriptura, joined to the invention of the printing press and underwritten by the democratic trust in the intelligence of the “common person,” has created the situation that now makes people believe that they can read the Bible “on their own.” That presumption must be challenged, and that is why the Scripture should be taken away from Christians in North America. (15-16).

One of the key shifts of the Reformation was the work of Martin Luther, William Tyndale, and others in translating scripture into the vernacular languages of the early 16th century. These reformers wanted the texts of the Bible to be made accessible to ordinary laypeople. They had seen the Bible become a tool of theological and economic exploitation in the medieval Catholic church. Because ordinary laypeople did not read scripture and know it personally, they reasoned, they were not equipped to speak out against the church’s abuses, including indulgences.

I still largely agree with the essence of Hauerwas’s argument, but am less certain that the Bible should been taken out of people’s hands. To put it another way, I, like Hauerwas, am opposed to private reading of scripture, but I am rethinking personal reading of scripture. To read privately is to read and interpret scripture for one’s own ends and with one’s individual agenda. While from the outside, personal reading might look quite similar to private reading, the reader encounters the text not for their own individual ends, but as a member of an interpretative community (that is, the church). Personal reading at its best is reading for the common good, reading that is guided by and attentive to the communities to which we belong. The guiding narrative and agenda is not my own private one, but that of what is best for all neighbors in our place. Almost a decade ago, I wrote a book entitled Reading for the Common Good, [ you can get a FREE ebook copy here ]. In it, I imagined what a healthy sort of personal reading that is oriented toward the flourishing of the church and the neighborhood might look like:

Although we are often inclined to think of reading as an individual practice, and although most of our reading will inevitably be done alone, the social way of reading that I envision here is guided by choosing books and other reading materials that are intimately tied to our communities—especially our church communities. We all are called to follow in the compassionate way of Jesus, and central to that calling is the work of carefully reading and meditating on the scriptural story to understand who Jesus is. Not everyone likes to read—indeed, not everyone can read—but a vital part of our work as the church is equipping everyone to read to the best of their capability and to participate as fully as possible in our shared work of discerning the shape of our shared life. (20)

Five hundred years after the Reformation, we find ourselves again in an age in which there are prominent abuses in the church: sexual abuses in both Catholic and Protestant churches; abuses of authority; financial abuses and many more. Abuses have to be dealt with directly, and as

Scot McKnight

and

Laura Barringer

have argued in their important book, A Church Called Tov, we need churches that cultivate the sort of goodness that can resist abuses. Although personal reading of scripture is not a magical solution to eliminate abuse, widespread reading of scripture and practices of corporate discernment and interpretation are a vital part of a culture of Tov. A lack of access to scripture (as in the pre-Reformation era) can allow abuse to run rampant, but so can a culture of individualism that reads and interprets scripture privately and has little motivation to confront and address abuses.

Rather, what is needed is a community in which scripture is read both personally and corporately but interpreted in communion for the sake of the congregation, its place, and the world. Members of our churches need to be encouraged and empowered to read scripture, but also to use it continually in conversation with other members to examine the health and well-being of our congregation. Neil Postman is right, I believe, that we must retain an emphasis on reading, but merely having access to texts – especially in our age of information overload – is not sufficient, and private interpretation does not benefit the social orders of church or democracy, both of which function most healthfully and have the capacity to resist abuse and tyranny when their members are reading, interpreting, discussing, and discerning together.

I’ll close with a familiar metaphor. The apostle Paul often imagined the church as a body, and each person in it as a member of that body. The human body is the primary way that any of its parts can make sense of the world. If a member of the body autonomously decided to ignore the larger body and function on its own, that body would not be healthy or function well. It’s good, I believe, for each of us – as members of social bodies including churches, neighborhoods, nations, etc. – to learn how we have uniquely been created to function, but that learning always happens in community and is best done with attention to the social bodies that situate us within a particular time and place in the world.

In this season, reading Amusing Ourselves to Death and reflecting on how a literate and conversational populace is essential to cultivating flourishing communities – in churches, as well as nations – I am reconsidering my own aversion to personal reading of scripture. Habits take time to form, but I am going to try to read scripture more regularly, and use it to illuminate my participation as a member of my local church and neighborhood, and the many other social bodies to which I belong.