By Peter W. Marty


A Lutheran Christian life for today


Digesting Scripture It’s one thing to know what it says, another to grasp the meaning


S


tatisticians tell us that 92 percent of Americans own at least one Bible. Never mind the numbers for a moment. Focus instead on the verb, to own. It seems that ever since the Bible became available for individual purchase, human beings have fallen into the trap of believing that God’s word could somehow be owned like a personal possession. We take it apart and dissect it so commandingly. We wield it to defend our personal beliefs so commonly. Before we know it, this mouthpiece of God starts to function like our


private mouthpiece. This servant of Christ begins to look like our loyal servant. A healthy understanding of Scripture will always be fed by that daily vitamin containing two essential minerals for the Christian life—mod- esty and humility. Who are we to presume we know the precise meaning of a given passage? It’s one thing to know what it says. We may have the basic story line down. It’s quite another to know fully what it means. One of the surprises of Scripture is the fresh meaning that continues


to spring from such an ancient word. Unlike an early 19th-century ortho- pedic surgery textbook, whose primitive techniques would do a modern patient no favor, the Bible actually grows in value with the witness of each new generation. As a married couple discovers thousands of new meanings to the words “I love you” with each new experience of shared sorrow and exhilaration, so Spirit-led people gain new insights from liv- ing with ancient words that remain holy and sustaining. It’s not as if God halted all conversation with us the day our Bibles rolled off the press. Our spiritual assignment is to receive the biblical text as a gift that keeps on accumulating meaning. A teacher of mine left me with a reminder I’ll never forget: “If you


read a passage of Scripture and find yourself immediately on the side of Jesus, you have probably misread the passage.” What he hoped to con- vey was the danger of over-presumption when interpreting holy words. Somewhere along the way we got the idea that our job was to eliminate mystery from divine speech and to read the Bible as a one-dimensional book.


In their worst form, these tendencies promote a kind of bibliolatry, a mindless devotion to every verse in Scripture as if each was an authorita- tive decree from God. Nothing in the Lutheran tradition allows for a wor- ship of the Bible in this way. Our joy is in worshiping the One whom the Bible reveals, not the book itself. As Jesus would point out at one juncture in his ministry: “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life .… Yet you refuse to come to me to have life” (John 5:39-40).


Rather than selecting verses that conveniently confirm a particular


worldview, Lutheran Christians are at their best when they are busy sniffing for Christ hidden all over the Old and New Testaments. “What is it in this passage,” we may keep asking ourselves, “that leads us to


Christ?”


Like the Beth- lehem shepherds who figured out a way to worship the child within the manger instead of the straw and rusty nails sur- rounding him, we know that par- ticular portions of the Bible deserve more attention than others.


When my brothers and I were young and impatient worshipers in church, our mother would pacify us with the allotment of one candy Lifesaver per child. Our weekly con- test was to see who could savor his mint the longest. That exercise of dangling a tiny ring from the tip of our tongues is now for me a metaphor of how I want to appreciate Scripture. It deserves to be eaten, or at the very least, digested reverently.


Like the prophet Jeremiah who once ate a scroll containing the word of God, we have to find our own way to savor Scripture and make it internal to our lives. If we can get it into our blood- stream and metabo- lism, there is that chance we will quit reading the Bible less to be informed and more to be formed— formed into the ways of Christ. M


Marty is a pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church, Daven- port, Iowa, and the author of The Anatomy of Grace (Augsburg Fortress, 2008).


Rather than selecting verses that conveniently confirm a particular worldview, Lutheran Christians are at their best when they are busy sniffing for Christ hidden all over the Old and New Testaments.


February 2011 3


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