with what the writer was saying. If it didn’t make sense, you could stop the person who was reading and say, “Help me understand this.”
When we’re serious about dealing with the Bible as the communal book that it is, then we have to be honest about our interpretations. Everybody’s interpretation is essentially his or her own opinion. Nobody is objective.
Several years ago I was in an intense meeting with our church’s leaders in which we were discussing several passages in the Bible. One of the leaders was sharing her journey in trying to understand what the Bible teaches about the issue at hand and said something like this: “I’ve spent a great deal of time recently studying this issue. I’ve read what the people on the one side of the issue say, and I’ve read what the people on the other side say. I’ve read the scholars and the theologians and all sorts of others on this subject. But then, in the end, I decided to get back to the Bible and just take it for what it really says.”
What was she really saying?
Now please understand that this way of thinking is prevalent in a lot of Christian churches, so I don’t mean in any way to single her out. But this view of the Bible is warped and toxic, to say the least. The assumption is that there is a way to read the Bible that is agenda- and perspective-free. As if all these other people have their opinion and biases, but some are able to just read it for what it says.
Think about that for a moment: This perspective is claiming that a person can simply read the Bible and do what it says—unaffected by any outside influences.
But let’s be honest. When you hear people say they are just going to tell you what the Bible means, it is not true. They are telling you what they think it means. They are giving their opinions about the Bible. It sounds nice to say, “I’m not giving you my opinion; I’m just telling you what it means.”
The problem is, it is not true.
I’m actually giving you my opinion, my interpretation of what it says. And the more I insist that I am giving you the objective truth of what it really says, the less objective I am actually being.
Obviously we think our interpretations are the most correct; otherwise we’d change them.
Or as one of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott, put it, “Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn’t, they’d get a new one.”19
The idea that everybody else approaches the Bible with baggage and agendas and lenses and I don’t is the ultimate in arrogance. To think that I can just read the Bible without reading any of my own culture or background or issues into it and come out with a “pure” or “exact” meaning is not only untrue, but it leads to a very destructive reading of the Bible that robs it of its life and energy.
I have heard people say their church is growing because they “just teach the Bible.” As if other churches don’t. And what about the church that teaches the Bible and shrinks? The church that’s growing in numbers is probably growing for a lot of reasons, but the teaching-the-Bible reason is that they are teaching a particular understanding of the Bible. A yoke. They aren’t objective, and they aren’t just telling people what it says. They have interpreted it and made decisions about it, and this particular yoke they’re spreading resonates with people. This version—their version—is striking a chord with people, and so they are coming to hear more of this take on the Bible.
The Bible has to be interpreted. Decisions have to be made about what it means now, today.
The Bible is always coming through the interpretation of someone. And that’s because binding and loosing require awareness.
Awareness that everybody’s understanding of the Bible rests on somebody’s binding and loosing.
When was the last time you saw a Christian greet another Christian with a holy kiss? But it’s right there in the Bible. I can show you verses in Corinthians and Thessalonians and in one of Peter’s letters that say we should greet each other with a holy kiss.20
Or how about women having to wear head coverings?21
Or cursing people who don’t love the Lord?22
Or selling all your possessions and giving everything to the poor?23
Or men raising their hands when they pray?24
Or slaves having to obey their masters?25
These are all commands that appear in the Bible. And yet they are rarely followed. This is because someone somewhere made a decision about those texts; someone decided that Christians didn’t have to greet one another with a kiss or wear head coverings or curse people who don’t love the Lord.
All of these verses have been interpreted by someone, whether it was a priest or a denomination or a pastor or a council somewhere—somebody somewhere engaged in the difficult work of binding and loosing. Somebody in your history decided certain Bible verses still apply and others don’t.
At one point in church history, a group of Christians decided that the Sabbath is not Saturday but Sunday. If you go to a mass or service or house church on Sunday, then you are, in essence, agreeing with their binding and loosing.
Now some people may get a little uneasy about this discussion on interpreting the Bible and say, “We shouldn’t make it say what we want it to say.”
I agree, but everybody is resting on a set of interpretations, and we need to be honest about it.
And not only is everybody resting on someone’s binding and loosing, but that binding and loosing was new for its day. When people stepped forward and said, “You have heard it interpreted this way, but I tell you it really means this,” it was progressive for their day. They were making new claims about what it means to be true to the Bible. What is accepted today as tradition was at one point in time a break from tradition.
This truth about interpreting the Bible extends all the way to the simple reading of it in English. If we don’t read the Bible in its original Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic, then we are reading someone’s interpretation of the Bible. Just the work of translating requires the translator to make decisions about what the Bible says. Certain Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic words do not have an exact English equivalent, leaving the translator with a challenge of how to best represent the text using English words.
Here’s an example: The word hell is found fourteen times in the Bible, twelve of those occurrences being found in the teachings of Jesus. The word hell in English is the word gehenna in Greek. Gehenna is a reference to the Valley of Hinnom, a ravine on the south side of the city of Jerusalem. This valley was the site over the years of many violent and horrible deaths, and it came to be viewed as cursed. By Jesus’s day it had become the town dump. Garbage, trash, wild animals fighting over scraps of food, a fire burning—a place of waste and destruction. Some referred to it as the place with the gnashing of teeth where the fire never dies. So when Jesus uses gehenna, it is loaded with meaning and visual power—everybody knew what he was talking about. The translator is faced with a decision about how to translate the word. If he or she uses the word hell, later readers might miss the fact that Jesus
