Story, Ritual, Prophecy, Wisdom: Reading and Teaching the Bible Today by Mark Hamilton and Samjung Kang-Hamilton shares the four modes of Scripture and how they address real needs in the life of the church today. Enjoy this author guest post by Mark and Samjung and discover how studying the Bible can renew your church community.
The Bible in Four Modes
Mark W. Hamilton and Samjung Kang-Hamilton
If you don’t want to get lost in the city, you need to follow the signs. Street signs, store signs, subway-station-here signs. All those metal rectangles, circles, and triangles with or without neon lights give guidance about where to go or not go, what to do or not do, whom to meet and not. Those signs matter.
So also do less tangible signs, social cues from strangers and the advice of friends. If you want to survive in the city and not get lost in the endless circles of the subway until Jesus returns, you have to read the signs. If you want to live as a human being with all the accouterments of humanity—friends, family, religious community, meaningful work—you also need to read the signs.
Our new book Story, Ritual, Prophecy, Wisdom: Reading and Teaching the Bible Today addresses sign reading. We have written it seeking clarity about Scripture and through it, about our humanity before God. The book aims to help the church be more churchly and thereby more useful to the world. It stems from our conviction that the collapse of our old ways of reading the signs need not lead to despair but can make possible a new day of hope.
Our book argues that the Bible contains the texts it does because the reading communities need precisely those texts for their ongoing life. Christians share with Jews a large core of texts reporting the theological reflections and experiences of ancient Israel that continue to bear delightful fruit in both the synagogue and the church. The church, for its part, also reads gospels, letters, and an apocalypse as it bears witness to the work of its Lord, a descendant of Abraham who celebrated God’s promises.
Because the communities worshiping the God of Israel need them for their ongoing life, the Bible contains narrative, ritual, prophecy, and wisdom (under which we also put law, though that could be construed as a fifth category equally well). Texts match the contours of the church’s ongoing life, if not always smoothly, then in ways that constantly generate new life as we live out the implications of our baptism.
The church finds its identity in the story of Jesus of Nazareth pointing his disciples to the promises of the God of Abraham and Sarah. The centuries-old story of Israel and the church offers an alternative to other sorts of stories that disconnect humankind from both the creator and the rest of creation. Likewise, the church lives into that story in its prayers and rituals, notably eucharist and baptism. The story comes alive in practices of life that can be named wisdom and even law, both means of discussing justice and solidarity with others. And all of that practice, all of that reading of the biblical texts and living them out, needs constant interrogation through imaginative engagement with prophecy in ways that imagine alternatives to our contemporary context.
In short, the Bible’s shape coheres with the church’s need to be itself.
In our book , we explore the ways the biblical text itself tells stories, describes or calls for rituals such as sacrifice or eucharist or baptism, critiques and reimagines power structures and communal practices, and seeks to foster wisdom among its readers. The biblical texts never indicate that readers will find in them an infallible formula for faithfulness to God and their fellow humans.
The texts value the resolve of Abraham and Sarah to trust a God they do not understand. The texts also value Miriam and Moses singing and dancing, a crusty Qoheleth weighing wisdom on his scales, singers who love the ideas of birds nesting in the temple (Psalm 84), or John on Patmos imagining a heavenly city descending to earth to squash the new Babylon on the Tiber. Scripture offers the whole kaleidoscope of humanity, ancient and modern. Thoughtful engagement with the Bible through sermon and commentary, music and art, and in short all the media available to us will allow us to cultivate wise ways of living.
Anyone familiar with Christian history since the Reformations of the sixteenth century knows that the Bible has often fed division as Christian s disagreed about its authority, the roles of its teachers, the fittingness of some rituals, and the degree to which we can criticize those who came before us. William Tyndale’s famous dream of the plowman knowing more of divine writ than the bishop has on more than one occasion awakened the church in a cold sweat.
At the same time, the Bible is the book Christians all hold in common, and if Tyndale’s dream is not to become a nightmare, then even the bishops have to learn, along with the rest of us.
By engaging Scripture in intellectually serious and spiritually healthy ways, the church as a community can help repair social relationships and structures. We can become true heirs of Abraham and Sarah, and true followers of their offspring Jesus Christ.
In Through the Looking-Glass , Alice receives a job offer from the White Queen, whose disheveled appearance reflects her confused mind. The salary includes jam every other day, but with a caveat:
“You couldn’t have it if you did want it,” the Queen said. “The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to – day.”
“It must come sometimes to ‘jam to – day,’” Alice objected.
“No, it can’t,” said the Queen. “It’s jam every other day: to – day isn’t any other day, you know.”
“I don’t understand you,” said Alice. “It’s dreadfully confusing!”
Alice doesn’t understand because the queen has taken words too literally and made them do work they were not designed to do. Interpreters of the Bible know that practice.
Our book aims to help readers of the Bible identify the work it can do. What if the church reads and performs the Bible less to learn more about ancient texts and their creators or to work out a correct theology than to fashion a life of worship and service together? What if our careful literary and historical scholarship serves that higher goal and therefore takes on enormous value? How could the church grow in our capacity to hear the ancient texts speaking to us as well as to our ancestors, whose gift they are? Those are the questions that drive our book. We hope that our attempts to address them can help our readers do the same.
Order a copy of Story, Ritual, Prophecy, Wisdom
All Rights Reserved Book Blog