Thinking Out Loud: How United Methodists Read Scripture

    Sometimes I think of my years in ministry as a long quest to share with others my love affair with the Scriptures. I’ve always hoped people would see in me what I saw in my Old Testament professor, Fr. Roland Murphy. What students of his recall is that he would read something from the Bible, and then make a deep, guttural Hmmmmm, like a bear having just swallowed a delicious hunk of meat. The best thing about me is my abiding affection for this book.

   How puzzling, slightly offensive but mostly exasperating then to find myself and so many friends who share my love characterized by those disaffiliating from our denomination as lacking reverence for or taking a dim view of Scripture, or recklessly believing what we wish while shoving Scripture aside, or resorting to twisted interpretations. We United Methodists revere the Bible as the inspired Word of God.

   We are honest, humble, and even hopeful as we acknowledge that faithful Christians can and do disagree on how Scripture speaks to us, the church and the world. Being fallen, sinful creatures, we Christians have a nasty habit of reading our biases into the text; we have blind spots, which is good reason to seek and delight in disagreement. We read, and listen with humility, intense curiosity, wary of agendas, especially those that mimic the political ideologies of the day.  {Parenthetically, a new and wise theology of how to interpret Scripture that spans the gap between conservative and progressive biases – and is winning prizes now from both, is Christopher Watkin’s brilliant Biblical Critical Theory.}

   Many of us pastors were schooled to adopt a “hermeneutic of suspicion.” For me, I have suspicions about how we’ve harmed others in our spin on texts, and about how we may have mis-read things unwittingly – or self-indulgently. Marilynne Robinson perceives a “hermeneutic of self-protectiveness,” which is ultimately a “hermeneutic of fear,” a “hermeneutic of other-ing,” which does not long for and is not open to fresh winds of the Spirit.

   Ours is a “hermeneutic of grace,” or at least we strive for this. Like a Geiger counter seeking out good (Fr. Greg Boyle’s image), we look for reasons to embrace, to encourage, to welcome any and all into the family of God – which we see clearly as the heart of Scripture. “There is no condemnation in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). And so we never weaponize the Bible. It is bread for the hungry. It is, as Luther envisioned, the swaddling clothes in which the Christ child is to be found.

   God gave us Scripture, not as a blunt instrument of judgment, or a batch of escape clauses for modern people who want to live as they wish. The Bible is an invitation to holiness, to the freedom the Spirit gives us to be who we really are. How do we discern the Bible’s perspective on this or that issue? The Bible, clearly, engages in conversation with itself. We do our darnedest to weigh all of Scripture, Scripture interpreting Scripture, to nose out the heart of it all, the big canvas, not just one brushstroke.

   In the Bible’s conversation with itself, we regularly notice a wariness of the Bible as a smorgasbord of rigid rules and judgments passed. To ask How do we read Scripture? is actually to ask, What kind of Church is God asking us to be? Many churches, over the centuries, have assumed God is asking us to be the Moral Police of the world. We’re no good at being the Moral Police, and truth be told, no one out there is waiting for the church to dictate to them what is right and what is wrong. No one is listening. Many out there will forever be alienated from such a church that reads the Bible for such a purpose.

   What kind of Church is God asking us to be? The documentary, “Finding Harmony,” follows choral conductor David Brown as he shows up in Springfield, Ohio, tacking up signs in windows saying “Come and Sing With Us,” with date, place and time. He invites passers-by, the checkout guy, the waitress, any and everybody. All kinds of people show up, old, young, white, black, conservative, liberal. They sing – together. He gets them talking, and people are surprised to find themselves listening to stories they’d not heard from people like themselves, and sharing stories with former strangers. They listen, they love, they sing – and they work on a Habitat house together.

   God asks us to be a Church that joyfully says “Come and Sing With Us,” a church that listens, shares, and digs into the Bible together, not looking for ammunition, but a meal to be shared. This is how we can reach the disenfranchised, the skeptics, the non-believers, the jaded, the wounded. The Bible is all about finding them and bringing them to the table, as Jesus tantalizingly portrayed things so marvelously in Luke 14. It is only reading Bible well that will help us get beyond the polarization in all those debated terms, like racism, inclusion, immigration. Scripture unburdens us from the endless debating with the simple affirmation that, in God’s realm, there are no debated people.

   As Christians, we are blessed by listening carefully to how non-Christians read our texts. If I confer with a rabbi friend in sermon preparation, I'm always wiser. Then also, as Christians, we take Jesus as the key to our hermeneutic. What in Scripture is in sync with Jesus, who is the heart and embodiment of God, and what is out of sync? No genocide, no burning of adulterers, no passing judgment on others, all in Scripture - and why? Not because we don't like it, but because it's just so out of kilter with all Jesus was about.

   We aren't fundamentalists, or literalists - although we try as best we are able to read a given passage as it was literally intended. Of course there are mistakes, dates, some misspelled names, and even theological confusions - which we know based on Scripture's own conversation with itself! 

   We United Methodists resonate with what Rowan Williams wisely wrote – that what is in the Bible is what God wants us to read and hear – which doesn’t mean Jesus is endorsing everything that every character in the story says or thinks. God is saying “This is how people heard me, saw me, responded to me; Where are you in this?  We do not have to work on the assumption that God likes those responses.” Genocide, polygamy, slavery and the devaluing of women are all supported by voices in Scripture. But we know God doesn’t like those – not based on our feelings, but on the rest of and the heart of all of Scripture.

   To the issue of the day: is LGBTQ+ inclusion only possible if we set aside Scripture? Or do we welcome and bless them (or affirm they are already blessed!) by our reading of Scripture? Conservative rabbis, who read Scripture way more fastidiously than any Christians I know, affirm same gender relationships based on the same book many Christians use to debate and judge them.

   For us, we state at the outset that we are speaking of holy people striving to follow Jesus, and holy relationships of commitment before God. We see the fruit of the Spirit on clear display in the lives of our LGBTQ+ members and couples. We need one another in church, reading Scripture together.

   All of Scripture leads us to a robust theology of Creation, and a deep trust and delight in its diversity. Willie Jennings (in his Acts commentary): “Differences among people do not occasion God’s anger but God’s delight... Difference is not an impediment for relationship , but the very stage on which God will create a deeper and richer reality of communion with the divine life…. Pastors and church leaders have made themselves the high priests of segregationist practices. They have settled for the love of their own people instead of a love that creates a people.”

   And he is careful to clarify that we aren’t jettisoning holiness as the singular pursuit of life with God. What might the Spirit reveal to us about what is holy and what isn’t? “Obedience must take flight with the Holy Spirit into an uncharted world where distinctions between holy and unholy have been upended, in a moment where purity is expanded to cover what had been conceived as impure.” This is the project of the entire New Testament, isn’t it?

   There’s no avoiding the fact that the Bible which we love so dearly was written on the other side of the planet from where I live, and 2000+ years ago, in a very different culture. The average listener to Paul, at the mention of homosexuality, would have thought of those Romans who creepily endorsed older, wealthy men having a young slave partner. And, of course, some United Methodists would conclude this fits into Rowan Williams's category of things Bible writers simply heard wrongly. But if we are talking holy, committed relationships, then we are willing to err, humbly, on the side of hospitality.

   I suspect many, though not all United Methodists would resonate with the way Paul Chilcote summarizes things: “With regards to our siblings in the LGBTQIA+ segment of our family, scripture reveals three things in particular. 1) All people, regardless of their sexual orientation or identity, are God’s beloved. 2) Relationships based on love among our siblings in the LGBTQIA+ community can be expressed in sacredness, fidelity, permanency, and monogamy. These high standards apply to all those created in the image of God. 3) As beloved children of God all LGBTQIA+ siblings are invited to use their gifts to the fullest possible extent in the embodiment of God’s vision of shalom. Just as in the case of women, the doors to ministry in the life of the church should be opened to these faithful siblings as well.” Such is our best, humblest and most hopeful reading, taking hospitality in hermeneutics and ecclesiology as the indispensable key.