INTRODUCTION
Daniel Patte
A Global Bible Commentary (or GBC) invites its users to expand their horizons by reading the Bible with scholars from all over the world and from different religious persuasions. These scholars have approaches and concerns that often are poles apart. Yet they share two basic convictions: biblical interpretation always matters, and reading the Bible “with others” is highly rewarding.
Each of the short commentaries of the GBC is a readily accessible guide for reading a biblical book. Written for undergraduate and seminary students and their teachers, as well as for pastors, priests, and adult Sunday school classes, it introduces its users to the main features of the biblical book and its content.
Yet each short commentary does more. It also brings to all its users a precious gift, namely the opportunity of reading this biblical book as if for the first time. By making explicit the specific context and the concerns from which they read the Bible, the scholars show the significance of aspects of the biblical text that readers in other contexts have often taken for granted or overlooked. (See below Suggestions for Using the GBC In Bible Study Groups and Classes.)
How This Global
Bible Commentary Came into Being
The contributors to the GBC are literally from all over the world. The associate editors, Severino Croatto, Nicole Wilkinson Duran, Archie Chi Chung Lee, Teresa Okure, SHCJ, and I have identified scholars on each continent—including Western Europe and North America—and from different religious persuasions. The balance of this GBC seeks to approximate the geographical, denominational, and gender balance of Bible readers around the world today. The GBC reflects the fact that almost two-thirds of the readers of the Bible are Christians in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania (ca. 1,178 billion, according to the World Christian Encyclopedia), as opposed to Western Europe and North America (ca. 661 million) and Orthodox Eastern Europe (ca. 158 million). Thus, approximately two-thirds of the commentators are scholars from the “two-thirds world,” with a proportional and thus smaller number of contributors from the Western world (including two Jewish scholars) and the Eastern Orthodox world. In order to keep this geographical balance, we had difficulty reaching the gender balance; twenty-eight contributions are signed by women, instead of the thirty-three (half) we wanted, because the number of female biblical scholars is still relatively small, though growing, in the two-thirds world.
We, the editors of the GBC, asked each of these scholars to address through their commentary the question: “What is the teaching of the given biblical book for believers in your specific social, economic, cultural, and religious context?” In order to give the scholars from the two-thirds world the opportunity to address issues that colonialist attitudes had prevented them from raising, we further specified that each of the commentators should ask: “What does this given biblical book say regarding the relationship of the people of God to the world?” This question is voluntarily open. It allows each commentator to define “people of God,” “world,” and “relationship” in ways that are appropriate for the scholar’s particular socio-economic, cultural, and religious context and for the particular biblical book.
Acknowledging the Contextual
Character of our Interpretations
The contextual character of this GBC was a challenge for many of us contributors, largely because we did not fully grasp why making explicit the contextual character of our interpretations was important. Similarly, readers of this volume, especially Western readers, will first be struck by the fascinating cross-denominational and cross-cultural insights these contextual interpretations of the biblical books bring. Yet, there is more than new insight to be gained. There are voices to be heard. First, each of the contributions involves a gentle call to stop and listen. When we listen, we hear voices that we are not used to hearing, those of biblical readers who in each context have long been silenced. These voices are soft, yet firm, and indeed most powerful and often troubling, because they articulate teachings, issues, and questions that the biblical text raises for its readers but that, on our own, we could not or would not hear.
It is when I heard such voices that my journey
toward this GBC began. In July 1999 in
My head knew that I have much to
learn from people reading the Bible from other cultural and religious
contexts. I knew that in any reading, in
order to make sense of a biblical text we use our language, our culture, our
religious perspectives, and our concerns.
This focuses and sharpens our understanding of the text as binoculars
do, but also narrows down our field of vision, becoming blinders. I also knew that only people from different
contexts could show us our blind spots—the many aspects of the text that we are
missing. This is why I was in this
Can Contextual
Biblical Studies Be Critical?
However, who would ask “pray for me
so that I might better understand the Scripture” in a church or in academic
circles in
These critical approaches have been
developed respectively in
All of us, contributors to this volume, struggled to make explicit the contextual character of our interpretations. We did it in different ways. But in the process, our vision of the relationship of our interpretations with other interpretations and with the biblical text began to change. As we want others to respect our (contextual) interpretations, so should we respect the interpretations of others, even when these are blatantly contextual—such as the mini-sermons of the sisters and brothers in Kasane. Consequently, the GBC invites its users not only to respect these “other” interpretations, but also to recognize and make explicit the contextual character of their own interpretations of the Bible. In this way, instead of belittling their own interpretations (waiting for a preacher or a scholar to give them the “correct” interpretations) the users of the GBC will hopefully recognize that they can respect their own interpretations and assume responsibility for them. (See the “Suggestions for Using this Global Bible Commentary.”)
This contextual awareness applies
to the reading of this volume: every reading of this GBC will necessarily be contextual.
Therefore, my presentation of it in this “Introduction”—a reading—is
also contextual. In what follows, my
goal is limited to introducing this volume to a specific audience: North
American undergraduate and seminary students and their teachers, as well as
pastors, priests, and adult Sunday school classes. Actually, I am writing this introduction while
keeping in mind the undergraduate and seminary students at
An Invitation to Read the Bible
as for the First Time
Most commentaries in this GBC will provide us readers of the Bible in
What was for us a familiar biblical book, which no longer had anything new for us, becomes once again a surprising, disturbing, challenging, prodding, demanding, or wooing address that we cannot ignore. The muffled, subdued, tamed biblical text with which some of us might have been satisfied becomes once again alive. Then, time and again, we find ourselves having to wrestle with the text in order to extract from it a blessing, often an unexpected blessing (as happened to Jacob in Gen 32:22-32, a significant passage in Clare Amos’ commentary on “Genesis”).
Reading a biblical book as if for the first time, as a strange and alien text, is oddly enough what happens both when scholars read it from a critical perspective and when believers read it as Scripture. This is understandable.
The more sensitive the scholars are about their own culture, the more aware they are of the historical and cultural gap that separates them from the biblical text. Thus, the critical outlook that we value so much in Western scholarship is sharpened when we read with scholars who make explicit the cultural and ideological perspectives from which they interpret the Bible in their part of the world—as each contributor to the GBC strives to do.
Similarly, the more believers read the Bible as a Word-to-live-by in all aspects of their life context, the more aware they are of the moral and religious gap that separates them from the biblical text. Thus, our ethical and scriptural sensibility is sharpened when we observe how scholars decide why choosing a particular biblical interpretation matters in their life context—which each commentator makes as explicit as possible. Accordingly, the GBC brings together—sometimes in side-by-side commentaries, sometimes in the same one—the critical readings of scholars and the scriptural readings of believers. As a result, the readers of this GBC are invited to assess scriptural readings from a critical perspective, as conscientious preachers should do when they prepare their sermons. (The practice of scriptural criticism is further explained in Grenholm and Patte, 2000, 1-54).
Biblical Interpretation Always
Matters
Biblical interpretation always matters because, for better or worse, it directly affects the lives of believers and the people around them. With this conviction, each contributor to the GBC begins by making explicit the specific context from which she or he writes. As a member of a community or a group, he or she asks two questions: How does reading a particular biblical book transform the common view of this life context? And, vice versa, how does approaching this biblical book with the concerns and insights arising from this particular context transform one’s understanding of this book?
Biblical
Interpretation Matters for Believers and Scholars
Biblical interpretation matters for
believers who read the Bible as Scripture, and for preachers who do so in
preparation for a sermon, because it involves choosing a Word-to-live-by. Both groups deliberately choose one of the
several potential teachings of a biblical text because they think it most
directly addresses concerns they have in their present life-situation. At times, this teaching simply confirms and
reinforces convictions that believers already hold, although they might have
some doubts about them: “I believe, help my unbelief!" (Mark
Scholars have long frowned upon this practice, because biblical interpretation also matters for them: “One should not pick and choose in a text what one likes.” We biblical scholars care so much about biblical interpretation that we have devoted our entire life to preventing misuses and abuses of the Bible. Thus, it is part of our role to be suspicious of all interpretations of the Bible and to assess them. To avoid misuses of the Bible we insist that any interpretation be properly grounded in the biblical text. We, the biblical scholars involved in the GBC as contributors and editors, strove to play that most important role. Yet, we disagree with the traditional objection mentioned above. Picking and choosing what is particularly relevant for our life context or what is most significant for us is what all interpreters do.
Biblical scholars should not be surprised to hear that interpretation always involves making choices. Actually, the more rigorous we want to be in our exegesis, the more we pick and choose interpretive options. In order to ground our interpretation in the text, we scholars choose one particular critical method among many different methods and we choose a particular aspect of the text as most significant (as shown in Patte, Stubbs, Ukpong, and Velunta, 2003, pp. 54-57). Furthermore, as I have illustrated in the commentary on “Romans” in this volume, in making these methodological and textual choices, self-consciously or not, we scholars also choose a particular teaching of the text for our life context—exactly as believers do-- although scholars and believers might disagree on the most appropriate choices.
In sum, nothing is wrong with picking and choosing in a text what one perceives as most significant and as most appropriate for one’s particular contexts. Indeed, nothing is wrong with picking and choosing features of the texts because they are more significant from the perspective of one’s religious convictions and ideologies. The most rigorous scholars do so. However, this is not to say that everything goes. The biblical scholars’ role remains; we still must strive to prevent misuses and abuses of biblical texts. Two strategies are essential for this.
First, we need to assess how each given interpretation is grounded in one or another aspect of the text. But because there is a plurality of legitimate interpretations, we biblical scholars have to be more democratic and less suspicious. Rather than considering a believer’s interpretation “guilty until proven otherwise,” biblical scholars should consider it “legitimate until proven otherwise.”
Second, we must ask the interpreters to be as aware as possible of their religious and ideological convictions. The more that interpreters make their presuppositions explicit, the less the risk that they will simply “read them into” the text. Interpretations that pretend to be objective or a mere presentation of “what the text meant” hide their presuppositions and inscribe them into the meaning of the text that should be universally accepted. Besides being narrow-minded, this type of interpretation is questionable because it denies any legitimacy to interpretations that presuppose religious or ideological convictions different from theirs—a problem further discussed below.
Therefore, in the GBC, the commentators do not hide their
religious or ideological convictions.
They readily disclose them in order to clarify the reasons for their
interest in one or another theological feature of the biblical text. A few examples are enough here. When commenting on “Hebrews: Sacrifice in
African Perspective” or on Jesus’ uniqueness as the only Savior of the World in
“Colossians,” Teresa Okure, SHCJ, explains why these
issues are important for her as a Roman Catholic sister in Nigeria by referring
to the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, to the 2001 “Declaration
of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” to the teaching of John
Paul II, and to the Vatican II Council. Petros Vassiliadis by commenting on “John in an Orthodox
Perspective” is led to emphasize what
this Gospel says about “the
liturgical character of the relationship of God’s people and the world . . .
through which this unity of humankind in God and the preliminary manifestation
of the future kingdom are made present.”
Similar Orthodox interpretations are found in Stelian
Tofanâ’s commentary on “Hebrews” and in Vasile Mihoc’s
“Jesus Christ: an Orthodox Perspective.”
Paul Swarup on “Zechariah” and Paul Kalluveettil, CMI on “Haggai”
make clear the struggle of their respective Anglican and Catholic communities
in
Biblical
Interpretation Matters Because of Its Powerful Effects on People
In view of the fact that any interpretation results from a choice among several legitimate interpretations, biblical scholars have to join believers and preachers in asking: Is this the most appropriate interpretation for a particular life context? This question is always important when one reads a biblical text in order to identify a Word-to-live-by. A better choice of interpretation might have considerable positive consequences for the believers and those around them. But another question is even more important, although believers and preachers might forget to ask it: Whom does the chosen interpretation help and whom might it hurt? Certain choices of interpretations have devastating effects. This is a second reason why biblical interpretation always matters.
We readily recognize unacceptable interpretations when we
look at history. Think of the biblical interpretations that were used as a
justification for the crusades and the massacres of “infidels,” or for racism
and slavery, or for the all-out attacks on indigenous peoples and their
cultures in the
We believers and scholars readily nod in approval. Such interpretations need to be rejected. But when we consider present-day uses of the Bible that justify other kinds of oppression, violence, and destructive attitudes, we hesitate. Part of our hesitation is due to our inability to imagine interpretations different from the one we are accustomed to. Too easily we are inclined to declare, “As everyone knows, this is what this biblical text says,” even when many other readers propose different interpretations. Another part of our hesitation is due to disagreements regarding what is oppressive, violent, or destructive.
Diverse groups denounce as most harmful quite different kinds of biblical interpretations: those that justify patriarchalism and violence against women; those that justify; those that justify colonialism, the violent exploitation of entire nations, and the denigration of their cultures ; those that justify isolationism and the refusal to intervene to protect innocent people from dictators; those that justify homophobia and the denial of basic human rights to persons with different sexual orientation; those that justify the rejection of family values; as well as those that justify classism and the marginalization of the poor with the assumption that they are responsible for their poverty. Yes, biblical interpretation matters, when it justifies injustice and abuse of innocents, instead of calling us “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Mic 6:8). But, as Huang Po Ho points out in his commentary on “Micah,” this verse does not provide us with clear-cut criteria; we need to wrestle with it so as to receive a blessing from it! We need to debate with the text and among ourselves who should benefit from justice and kindness, who should be defended against injustice and abuse, and what is justice.
This Global Bible Commentary invites
its users to such debates in presence of the concrete reality of economic,
social, health, and cultural crises all around the world. This crisis can be summarized in numbers that
are so staggering that they are beyond comprehension—“1.2 billion people live on less than a dollar per day; one billion people do not have access to
clean water; more than two billion people have no access to adequate
sanitation” (Serageldin, 2002, 217). But for many contributors of the GBC
this tragedy is a very concrete part of their life context. For them, a reading of the Bible that would
ignore the cruelty and starkness of poverty, hunger, devastating diseases,
injustices, cultural decompositions, social and political chaos would be both
meaningless and irresponsible. In an
AIDS context,
It is fascinating to see how each
biblical text focuses the attention on specific issues in the given concrete
situation of the commentator and conversely how this concrete situation brings
to light aspects of the text that otherwise do not appear to be particularly
significant. This is also true of
several commentaries that led several contributors to pay close attention to
issues of patriarchalism and violence against women in India, as Monica Melanchthon did when commenting on “Song of Songs”; in the African Amrerican context,
as Renita Weems did when commenting on “Jeremiah”; in the barrios of Brazil , as Tânia Mara Vieira Sampaio did when commenting on “Hosea,” and of Costa Rica,
as Elsa Tamez
did when commenting on “1
Timothy.” Similarly, other commentators
focus their studies on the cultural plights they encounter in their context, as
Madipoane Masenya does when commenting on “Ruth” as a South African; as Lai Ling Elizabeth Ngan does when commenting on
“Amos” as an Asian American; as Chen Nan Jou does
when commenting on “Jonah” as a Taiwanese;
and as R. S. Sugirtharajah does when
presenting the “Matthew 5—7, the Sermon on the Mount in India” as read by Raja R. Roy and Mohandas
K. Gandhi.
Facing the concrete issues of their particular life contexts, other commentators lead us to raise issues concerning the responsibility (or irresponsibility!) of the churches, in Brazil, when reading “Ezekiel 40-48” with Sandro Gallazzi; in Korea, when read “Philemon” with Jean Kim; in the Philippines, when reading “2 Timothy and Titus” with Daniel C. Arichea; in the United States, including among African American churches, when reading “Philippians” with Demetrius K. Williams.
In the GBC, certain commentators find that they
have to debate with the biblical text, because its taken-for-granted message
was and still is so destructive in their contexts. It is enough here to mention four
commentaries that struggle with books that were used to justify colonialism and
colonialist mission: Dora Mbuwayesango
reading “Joshua” from Zimbabwe and
Southern Africa; Jione Havea reading “Numbers”
from the South Pacific Islands; Justin Ukpong reading “The Gospel of
Luke” from Nigeria; and Danna Nolan Fewell reading “Ezra-Nehemiah”
from the perspective of a European American mother who keeps before her the
effects of colonialism on the children in the Two-Thirds World. Struggling with the biblical text, as Jacob
struggled with the angel!
Biblical Interpretations Engender Defensive
Attitudes
Biblical interpretation matters so much for all of us readers of the Bible that we often become very protective of our interpretations. We are convinced that, whatever they might be, our interpretations are the “best” from the perspective of our theological or ideological views and of the life contexts that are our primary concern. Because so much is at stake, we make sure that our interpretations truly express “what the text says.” We verify their legitimacy in discussion with others and by consulting appropriate resources. Then we feel that, in good conscience, we can ignore or reject all interpretations that differ from ours, and hold firm to our own interpretations.
This is a necessary attitude. Each of us needs to have a firm conviction (“naiveté,” Ricoeur would say) that our choice of interpretation is the “best” Word-to-live-by before living by it in our daily lives. We have much at stake in this choice. What we do in our lives depends on it—at times our very lives depend on it. We must reach a point in our reading of the Bible when we decide to act accordingly.
Acting—praxis—cannot be
indefinitely postponed, when urgent issues regarding justice for the oppressed
are at stake. This is what the
commentaries written from a “liberation theological” perspective directly or
indirectly intimate. Here I could list
most of the commentaries on the prophets. Be it enough to mention the commentaries on “Isaiah 40–55,” “Isaiah 56–66,” and “Fourth
Isaiah” by Severino
Croatto
from his context in
Yet, as liberation theologians have
long underscored, one must not stop the process. Finding a Word-to-live by, and living by it
is good. But we should not freeze our
choice of interpretation once and for all.
When we do so, we have, in effect, stopped reading the Bible. Rather we need to go back and forth between,
on the one hand, living by the teaching of the biblical text with full
conviction (with a first or second naiveté, Ricoeur would say) and, on the
other hand, reading the text anew, with the openness to find that another
choice of interpretation might be better in new circumstances or that we had
overlooked an aspect of the text which turns out to be most significant. Yet, this openness is difficult to maintain
by ourselves.
The Many Benefits of Reading the
Bible “With Others”
An Invitation to Read
the Bible with Others
In this GBC, each of the contributors offers us the opportunity to sit down and read with her or him a book of the Bible. What a precious gift!
These scholars take the risk of opening themselves up to us in order to expose the otherness of their views, cultures, and ideological and religious stances. They do so by making explicit how they see their life context from the perspective of a biblical book and this biblical book from the perspective of their life context. In the process, these scholars invite us to read with them. If we accept this invitation, we soon find ourselves reading this biblical book as if for the first time, astonished by unexpected treasures, frightened by dangerous teachings, unsettled by both the awe and the dread of an encounter with the text as a mystery.
Accepting these scholars’ invitation to read with them is greatly facilitated by their willingness to acknowledge that their interpretations are contextual. Because we know that the interpretation of a given biblical book is concerned with a context other than ours, we do not need to be defensive. It is clear from the outset that these commentators are not reading the Bible for us or to us. They are not telling us either how we should be reading the biblical book or what interpretation of the biblical book we should adopt. On the contrary, the commentator frees us to read and re-read the biblical text on our own, both with the sharp focus provided by critical tools available in our culture and with the insights gained from the theological interests and contextual concerns that reflect our life contexts.
Some of the commentators not only invite us to read with them, but also exemplify in their own commentaries what reading with others entails. Rather than presenting their own interpretation, they present what they heard when they read with others. In a sense, this is true of most of the commentaries—our interpretations reflect our discussion of the texts with our students or with other groups. Yet, five of the commentaries were deliberately prepared by reading with a group. These commentaries include: “Numbers,” which Jione Havea “read” in the South Pacific Islands with “a Tongan kava-drinking group called Kau pakipaki folofola (“breakers of scriptures”)” in which he told and retold the story of Numbers as an island-storyteller; “1 and 2 Samuel,” which Gerald West read with groups of southern African readers, including groups of African women; “Zephaniah,” which Shigeyuki Nakanose, SVD, and Fernando Doren, SVD, Enilda de Paula Pedro, RBP, read with their base community in Brazil; and “Ephesians,” which John Riches read with a contextual Bible study group in Scotland.
Why are the GBC commentators
inviting others to read with them, even as they themselves read with
others? To begin with, they are very
aware of the disastrous effects of reading
for others or of reading to others. This kind of reading has the effect of
reducing others to the demeaning rank of subalterns, just as speaking for others and speaking to others
do. As Spivak
pointed out (“Can the Subaltern Speak?” pp. 277-313), this is a typical
colonialist attitude that silences the “others,” stripping from them their
dignity as persons, denying any value to their culture, and depriving them of
their personal and communal identity.
Many of the commentators from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the
Pacific Islands, as well as the commentators who are women, have suffered from
this denial of their cultures and contextual concerns, when they were taught to
read the Bible as Western males do. Male
teachers, missionaries, pastors, and scholars from
Despite this demeaning experience, all the GBC scholars respect Western interpretations by male scholars, as the bibliographies and the comments make clear. Yet, as scholars in their own right they resist the temptation to do to others what others did to them. Thus, instead of reading for us or to us, they generously invite us to read with them, with the expectation that those who join them in reading the biblical text will have their own, distinctive interpretations for their own contexts.
Avoiding the negative effects of reading for (or to) others is one thing. Yet, reading
with others has additional important benefits, which are reflected in the
experience of the GBC contributors who have not personally suffered from
this denial of their cultures and contextual concerns. I am referring to the European/American male
contributors who are among those who represent
At first, several of us in this
position understood our scholarly role as reading
for (or to) others—teaching our students the “right” reading of the text,
as we were ourselves taught. But each of
us “turned” around. Through different
circumstances and paths, each of us was convinced to do so because feminist,
African-American, liberation, post-colonial, and other advocacy scholars
generously invited us to read with
them.
Often we European/American males had a hard time hearing this invitation—as was my case. We mistakenly thought that these advocacy scholars wanted to read for us—to teach us “the” right interpretation. To our mistuned ears, this is what they were telling us when they asked us to respect their interpretations and to acknowledge their legitimacy, plausibility, and validity. This was a misguided understanding of what advocacy scholars were telling us. In the same way, it would be a misunderstanding of the contributions to the GBC if they were to be read as reading for us—teaching us the right interpretation.
The contributors to the GBC, following in the footsteps of the pioneer feminist, liberation, and African-American scholars, do not want us to appropriate their interpretations or to mimic them. This would amount to co-opting them. Rather, they call us to recognize that our own interpretations are also framed by our own contextual and theological concerns—the first step in a long and ever ongoing journey toward abandoning our exclusivist outlook (be it imperialist, Eurocentric, androcentric, elitist, or religious) which gave us the nerve to claim that we were reading for everyone else whom we reduced to the status of subalterns—a strategy that European-American males unfortunately perfected.
In addition, by accepting to read with others, we begin to adopt a totally different attitude toward our own interpretations. As we learn to respect their interpretations, we find that the differences between our interpretations reflect divergent but plausible interpretive choices of three kinds: textual, contextual, and theological choices.
We have already noted that most of the commentaries of the GBC make explicit their contextual choices and that reading with the commentators helps us to perceive our own “contextual choices.” It remains to mention how reading with the GBC scholars helps us to recognize the roles of culture in our textual choices and of our view of Scripture in our theological choices.
By reading with others we recognize that our “textual choices”—our choices of
certain textual features as most significant—reflect not only the critical
exegetical method we have chosen, but also a particular hermeneutical theory
shaped by the intertextual dialogue in a particular
culture. We always, though often
subconsciously, read biblical texts in terms of familiar intertexts that lead
us to pay attention to certain aspects of these texts. The parochial cultural character of our
textual choices and the role of our own intertexts become most obvious when we
read with interpreters from other cultures who make explicit their own
intertexts. Several GBC
commentators exemplify for us this intertextual and
thus cultural character of biblical interpretations, among these: Archie Lee when he reads “Lamentations” in terms of Chinese laments; Tat-siong Benny Liew when he reads “The Acts of the Apostles” in terms
of Chinese-American inter(con)textual stories; Yeo Khiok-khng when he reads “1 Thessalonians” and “2 Thessalonians”
in terms of Chinese Marxist and Confucian views of hope and eschatology; Joseph
Pathrapankal, CMI when he reads “1 Corinthians” from the perspective
of the multi-religious culture in India; as well as David Tuesday Adamo when
he invites us to join him as he reads “Psalms”
with African Initiated Churches in terms of their African religious
culture. Each of these cultural
perspectives highlights the significance of certain textual features that in
our culture might not seem significant, exactly as our exegetical methods and
hermeneutical theories lead us to highlight the significances of certain
textual features.
Recognizing the Role
of Conceptions of Scripture in Biblical Interpretation by
By reading with others we also recognize that the “theological choices”—our interests in specific theological Fissues mentioned by the text—reflect not only our religious or a-religious interests, but also a particular conception we have of how believers relate Scripture to their lives as a Word-to-live-by. In the process we discover that we have a choice of views of Scripture.
As readers of the GBC, we North American readers of the
Bible are again and again surprised by the many different views of Scripture
that these commentators presuppose or implement. Since the authors often do not make it
explicit, I will not list specific commentaries at this point. Yet the users of the GBC need to be aware
that different views of Scripture are presupposed by the various
commentaries. Of course, quite a number
of commentaries presuppose that a quest for a Word-to-live-by involves looking
for a teaching that believers should implement in their lives: a moral teaching,
be it a way to walk (“a lamp to my feet and
light for my path,” Ps 119:105),
or a canon of behavior to assess who belongs or does not belong to the
community, or an expression of what God wants, for instance, “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [your]
God” (Mic 6:8).
Yet,
many other commentaries are reading biblical books for another kind of
Word-to-live-by: a Word of hope, where there is no hope; a Word of love and of
welcome as full members of the people of God, where there is exclusion, racism,
and marginalization; a vision-giving Word, where nothing makes sense any longer
and one needs to see one’s life context with God’s eyes; but also a troubling,
disturbing Word, which is so dangerous that we have to wrestle with it and
against it in darkness and with all our might to avoid being cursed by it and
somehow to extract a blessing from it.
This latter view of Scripture might sound sacrilegious. Does this wrestling indicate a refusal to
submit to the authority of Scripture?
This might be our knee-jerk reaction when we read with commentators who cannot but struggle with biblical texts
through which they and their people have been so deeply hurt. But this knee-jerk reaction is
unwarranted. Far from being
sacrilegious, such wrestling readings of Scripture reflect an encounter with
the Bible as “Holy.” It is also a
liturgical reading of Scripture, which can be a mysterious irenic Eucharistic
Presence (see Petros Vassiliadis) or a shattering Eucharistic Presence, a “breaking of
Scriptures” comparable to the breaking of bread (see Jione
Havea). Encountering
the Sacred as Mysterious Other is encountering a reality which shakes us up,
and which we cannot accept at face value without betraying it. Respecting this mystery of Scripture involves
refusing to reduce it to what is obvious, recognizing that it is always more
than what we understood, and wrestling with it as long as it does not allow us
to acknowledge and respect the mystery of those Others who are with us.
Each
of us who contributed to the GBC made
the contextual character of our interpretations as explicit as we could so as
to signal that we were not reading for
others, but inviting others to read
with us. Even though quite a few
commentators would find it difficult to use these words, this was our way of
asking from you, the users of the GBC:
“Brothers and sisters pray for me, so that I might better understand the
Scripture.”
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