INTERPRETING THE BIBLE AMID

CULTURAL CHANGE
B R E V A R D S. C H I L D S

1
would like to address the question of why the understanding of the
Bible within the Christian church appears to change from generation
to generation. I want also to use this broad question to see whether it
sheds any light on our particular situation regarding the Bible for today and
for the future. For over three decades at Yale Divinity School, I have taught
courses in the history of biblical interpretation extending from the earliest
period of the church to the modern era. One of the most perplexing issues
in this study has been trying to understand why there is this phenomenon of
change as each new generation seeks to understand and to use its Scriptures
authoritatively.

SCIENTIFIC AND HUMANISTIC M O D E L S

There are several classic models by which scholars have sought to
explain the problem of change in understanding. First, the older, nineteenth-
century scientific model saw change as a natural part of a cumulative effort
at fact gathering and observation that moved toward a goal of progress. The
basis of change in understanding was caused by obtaining new evidence,
by developing new tools for accurate observation, and by improving
critical skills in their use. The early scientists considered it inevitable that
the accumulation of the facts would alter our approach to the world as the
frontiers of knowledge in every field exploded.
Certainly, this scientific model serves to explain in part the change that
took place in relation to the Bible. There were indeed new discoveries of
hitherto unknown biblical texts, fresh historical evidence from thefieldof
archaeology, and new critical skills acquired in interpreting ancient lan-

Brevard S. Childs is Sterling Professor of Divinity at Yale Divinity School. His most
recent book is Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on
the Christian Bible (1993). This essay is based on his Cheney Lecture, given at Yale
University on October 8,1996.

200
 Interpreting the Bible Amid Cultural Change 201

guages. When the Qumran manuscripts were first discovered, W. F.

Albright, the renowned ancient Near Eastern scholar from Johns Hopkins
University, pronounced in a burst of enthusiasm that all interpretations of
the Gospel of John would have to be completely revised in the light of this
new information regarding Hellenistic Jewish sects. Whether he was right
or wrong, the effect of the new material was to unsettle the New Testament
guild for at least a decade.
While the role of objective, empirical knowledge should not be underes-
timated as an important factor in effecting a change in perspective,
increasingly it has become clear that far more is involved in shaping new
understanding. There are also important nonobjective factors involved. In
his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn
pointed out the role paradigm shifts play in the field of science.1 Often
quite suddenly, the accepted scientific assumptions within which research
was conducted begin to lose credibility, and a new model emerges that
evokes different questions and offers a different perception of the evidence.
The shifts of paradigm evoked by Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein are
classic examples of change in understanding. Such changes are not simply
cumulative in nature; rather, a shift evokes the imagery of scales falling
from the eyes, of suddenly grasping what was formerly inexplicable. In
sum, the subjective side of understanding has penetrated deeply into
scientific research. Every scientific fact has to be construed in some fashion
within the ongoing enterprise of learning.
There is a second model for understanding change, which has been even
more aggressive in asserting the effect of subjective factors. From the side
of the humanities, it has become a truism that all human knowledge has
been constructed by means of human interpretation. The philosophical
"turn to the subject" that occurred in the early nineteenth century empha-
sized not only that knowledge has a subjective component but that the very
structure of reality is determined by the active function of the human mind.
But what was at first a philosophical theory of German idealists soon was
expanded to cover the full extent by which human culture was formed from
private and corporate forcessociological, economic, and psychological
determining the way the world is perceived.
Obviously, the effect of modern humanistic studies on the understanding
of the Bible has been enormous. Hans Frei once described the nature of this
revolution in perspective as follows: Traditionally, the Bible was the means
by which the world was perceived. Following the Enlightenment, the world
became the means by which the Bible was understood.
As a result of this new understanding of the nature of reality, the Bible
has emerged as just another expression of human culture and, as such, is
subject to constant changes of interpretation as the cultural perspective
from which it is viewed undergoes alteration. One of the hallmarks of
modern biblical studies is the unending search to recover the sociological,

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1962; 3d ed., 1996).
202 Theology Today

historical, and psychological forces that allegedly shaped the message of

the biblical authors. By uncovering the empirical forces underlying the
biblical text, the full dimension of the Bible's time-conditionality can
emerge with clarity.
For example, in the fields of both Old and New Testaments, there has
been a striking shift away from the church's traditional focus on biblical
theology to that of a phenomenology of comparative religion, where, it is
thought, a better and more accurate understanding of the religious dimen-
sions of human life can be assessed. Thus, in the Old Testament, one
pursues the question of what economic and political crises in the diaspora
caused postexilic Judaism to formulate its doctrine of monotheism by
means of which to establish its own social identity. Or again, in the New
Testament, a major interest now lies in determining what features of
Hellenistic city life caused certain urban Christians to stress Greek bour-
geois moral rules as normative for Christian behavior.

"For the average, devout Christian, whose life is shaped in

some measure by the preaching and liturgy of the church,
there is a sense of great uncertainty. "

It is not my purpose in setting out these two dominant theories of

changethe scientific and the humanisticto minimize their important
insights. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to deny the force of
these two models for understanding, which often flow together in modern
society. Nevertheless, I would strongly argue that far more is involved
when it comes to explaining the changing interpretation of the Bible, and
that these suggested resolutions of our initial question are far from
adequate. Often, they can be both superficial and misleading in the
extreme. In a word, the true theological dimension of the problem has not
been dealt with.
For me, an initial sign that these explanations of change are inadequate
arises from the uneasiness and confusion such interpretations evoke in the
average Christian congregation. I am not talking about extreme fundamen-
talists who reject any change as demonic. Rather, for the average, devout
Christian, whose life is shaped in some measure by the preaching and
liturgy of the church, there is a sense of great uncertainty. Has the church's
confidence in the Scriptures as the enduring word of God been sorely
mistaken? If the Bible is just another cultural artifact that is totally
conditioned by its historical context and vulnerable to endless alterations of
meaning through reinterpretationthe mode word is contextualization
how can it serve as an authoritative rule of faith? How can one speak of
Jesus Christ, "the same yesterday, today, and forever," if the figure of
Christ is really only an empty symbol without afixedprofile and is merely
a convenient construal to buttress group identity?
 Interpreting the Bible Amid Cultural Change 203

Perhaps the best place to begin seeking a theological understanding of

what is involved in biblical interpretation is to offer two examples from the
modern history of the church and to see whether the actual use of the Bible
within a concrete context provides any access into the heart of the problem.
The first is a historical example of the recovery of a sense of the Bible's
authority within the church; the second, an example of a loss of authority
and a decline in significance.

REDISCOVERY OF BIBLICAL AUTHORITY

My European teachers were very much shaped by the events that

occurred between the two world wars. A few had served in World War I, but
most had been trained in theology in the 1920s and early 1930s. In the
period before 1914, German historical-critical study of the Bible had
dominated thefieldand had become the envy of the world. In such brilliant
scholars as Ritschl and Harnack, German high culture had been fused with
critical reinterpretation of the Bible in a modern synthesis in which a
carefully purged Bible provided an affirmation of Protestant cultural
Christianity. However, in the wake of the deep crisis evoked by the debacle
of the war, new voices began to be heard. Usually, textbooks on this history
point to the role of Karl Barth, but there were many others involved as well.
Barth spoke of the strange new world of the Bible. He announced that the
Bible was not about humanity's search for God but God's search for
humanity. The Bible was unconcerned with human religious aspirations
but rather spoke of a merciful disclosure of God to a rebellious creation.
Barth saw humanity not as valiantly striving for truth but asfleeingblindly
from God's truth already plainly revealed. In the place of a path moving
toward progress, Barth spoke of the eschatological crisis evoked by God's
judgment of human arrogance.
In addition, there was a powerful political element that played a decisive
role in the new vision of the Bible for theology and church. I am speaking,
of course, of the rise of National Socialism in Germany and the crisis
evoked for a church that was totally unprepared for the intensity of the
challenge to its faith. In the famous Barmen Declaration of 1934, Barth
brought to bear the full force of his confessing theology in a resounding
rejection of all attempts to compromise with apostasy. Like an ancient
Hebrew prophet, he thundered out: "We have but one Fhrer who is Jesus
Christ, the Lord."
The rediscovery of the role of the Bible spread far beyond the writings of
Barth. In thefieldof Old Testament, the Swiss theologian Wilhelm Vischer
sought to reclaim the Bible for Christian faith in his powerful book The
Witness of the Old Testament to Christ (volume 1), which led to his
deportation from Germany.2 Particularly in the local parishes, the alarm
wasfinallyheard and a badly divided church braced itself before the fierce
tidal wave of brutal paganism and terror. My concern at this juncture is not

2
Wilhelm Vischer, The Witness of the Old Testament to Christ, vol. 1, The Pentateuch
(London: Lutterworth, 1949; German original, 1934).
204 Theology Today

to rehearse the details of this history but rather to use this example to
pursue the theological implications for our larger question. How do you
explain this sudden paradigm shift in the 1920s and 1930s represented by
the German Confessing Church?
Of course, it is possible to interpret the phenomenon merely as a cultural
experience. Under the pressure of political events, people turned to the
traditional assurances of faith. Perhaps there is an element of truth in such a
theory, but this psychological interpretation does not strike to the heart of
the issue.
In terms of the first of the two models previously discussed, the change
in attitude did not proceed from the introduction of new texts or from fresh
archaeological discoveries. Rather, the perspective was sharply altered.
One spoke of hearing an alarm, of suddenly coming to one's senses. There
was indeed a paradigm shift, to use Kuhn's terminology, but how and why?
I suggest that the political crisis gives only a part of the answer. One of the
recurring themes of those who sought to move in a new direction was that
the new vision of the Bible was not actually an innovation but rather one
that had often sustained the Christian church in the past. Old images
suddenly took on new life and power. It was as if suddenly, the church
fathers and the reformers were also being rediscovered. Augustine, Luther,
and Calvin, from strikingly different cultural traditions, together spoke of
responding to a powerful force from Scripture itself. The coercion of the
biblical text occurred in different ways, often matching the unique person-
alities of each interpreter, but theirs was always a stance of reception. They
were hearing a divine word, encountering the direct presence of God,
celebrating an overwhelming joy from the power of the gospel. In every
case, the Scriptures were the vehicle for the transformation of perspective.
In the period of the 1920s, the rediscovery of the Bible also took on a
polemical note as the new scriptural vision was set in stark contrast to the

"At the center of this massive paradigm shift was a new

perception of the reality of God and afresh grappling with the
substance of the Bible/9

prevailing liberal-theological assumptions of the dominant, historical-

critical method of interpreting the Bible. In a word, there was a massive
paradigm shift. Not only was the prevailing methodology challenged, but
above all, the perception of Scripture and the goals of its interpretation
were radically altered.
Compare, for example, the shift of vision regarding the Old Testament.
Hermann Gunkel, a leading Old Testament scholar in Europe, had written
the definitive commentary on Genesis and, with an unmatched brilliance,
brought to bear on his interpretation the full range of ancient Near Eastern
parallels. For Gunkel, chapter 1 of Genesis was a reworking from a
 Interpreting the Bible Amid Cultural Change 205
Hebrew perspective of the Babylonian creation myth, a reworking that
retained much of the mythology in a broken, vestigial form. Gunkel
emphasized Israel's unique ideological construal of a common cultural
tradition, and he sought, in the spirit of German romanticism, to instill an
aesthetic appreciation for the creative genius of this ancient, primitive
document.
Then, in the winter semester of 1932, a young Privatdozent in Berlin,
who was not especially well trained in Old Testament, Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
gave a series of lectures entitled Creation and Fall with the subtitle A
Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1-3. Bonhoeffer began his lectures
not with JEDP but with Genesis 1:1 : "In the beginning G o d . . . " He wrote:
The Bible begins with God's free affirmation, . . . free revelation of him-
self. . . . In the beginning, out of freedom, out of nothing, God created the
heavens and the earth. This is the comfort with which the Bible addresses us
. . . who are anxious before the false void, the beginning without a beginning
and the end without an end. It is the gospel, it is the resurrected Christ of
whom one is speaking here. God is in the beginning and he will be in the
end.... The fact that he lets us know this is mercy, grace, forgiveness and
comfort.3
What a different vision from that of Gunkel! Were they even reading the
same text? What caused Bonhoeffer to plunge suddenly into a new
dimension of reality?
Again, consider the radical difference of how Jesus has been perceived.
In 1927, Shirley Jackson Case, Professor of New Testament at the Univer-
sity of Chicago and perhaps the dean of the American school of critical
research, wrote his well-known book Jesus: A New Biography. At the
outset, he informed his readers of the remarkable scientific advances now
possible through new historical and sociological evidence. It was now
possible from the Gospels and contemporary Judaism to reconstruct a
picture of Jesus in his own distinctive environment. And what is this Jesus
like? "At the very core of his religion was Jesus' feeling of personal
relation to G o d . . . . For J e s u s , . . . religion was essentially an experiential
affair rooted in the spiritual impulses of the inner life." 4
In contrast, let me point you to another New Testament scholar, Martin
Kahler, a professor at Halle, who had written a little-observed book in 1896
entitled The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christy
which was rediscovered and reprinted in the 1930s. Let me quote just a few
lines:
The reason we commune with the Jesus of our Gospels is because it is through
them that we learn to know that same Jesus whom, with the eyes of faith and in
our prayers, we meet at the right hand of God, . . . because he is God's
revelation to u s . . . . The risen Lord is not the historical Jesus behind the
Gospels, but the Christ of the apostolic preaching, of the whole New

3
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1-3
(London: SCM, 1959; German original, 1937), pp. 11, 16.
4
Shirley Jackson Case, Jesus: A New Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1928), pp. 386-387.
206 Theology Today

Testament The real Christ... is the Christ who is preached. The Christ
who is preached, however, is precisely the Christ of faith. He is the Jesus
whom the eyes of faith behold at every step he takes and through every
syllable he utters... ourrisen,living Lord.5
Again, I raise the question how is such a change in perspective possible?
I submit that lying at the center of this massive paradigm shift was a new
perception of the reality of God and a fresh grappling with the substance of
the Bible as providing the true content of the Christian faith. Quite
unexpectedly, in the examples of Bonhoeffer and Kahler, the Bible had
regained its own voice, which now spoke and confronted its readers with
an overwhelming existential power. The Bible was no longer describing
the religion of some ancient, curious culture, but the past was transformed
into a voice of the present. Karl Barth's famous phrase of discovering "the
strange new world within the Bible," namely, the world of God, came best
to represent the revolutionary way in which the Bible was seen by a
confessing, struggling church of Germany in the 1920s.

Loss OF BIBLICAL AUTHORITY

In striking contrast to these examples of the rediscovery of the Bible in a
major paradigm shift, it is equally clear that a shift can also represent the
loss of understanding of the Bible. When I entered Princeton Theological
Seminary in 1947 following my discharge from the army at the end of
World War II, most American Protestant theological seminaries and divin-
ity schools had been shaped to some degree by the recent European
experience. The so-called neoorthodox movement was led by giants such
as the two Niebuhrs, Paul Tillich, and John Mackay, among others. What
was strange about this movement was that the European crisis of faith had
been, in some way, vicariously appropriated. America had experienced no
deep philosophical dissolution from World War IIrecall Eisenhower's
Crusade in Europe.6 It had suffered no real political or economic crisis. In
spite of the veneer of neoorthodoxy, which was espoused in popular
journals such as Theology Today, Christianity and Crisis, and Interpreta-
tion, the preaching in most mainline Protestant churches was still more
akin to William James's "religion of the healthy minded" than to Kierkeg-
aard's "sickness unto death." Throughout the decade of the 1950s, dozens
of books appeared with such titles as The Rediscovery of the Bible or the
like, but increasingly there was a sense of charade as the substance became
thinner and thinner.
Along with the period of theological imitation, there was a new sense of
impending cultural change in the United States signaled by a growing
restlessness in many different areas that began to erupt in the 1960s. Of
course, I have in mind America's deepening involvement in the Vietnam
war, the intensification of the Cold War, the black revolution, and the rise

5
Martin Kahler, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ (Philadel-
phia: Fortress, 1964), pp. 60-61, 65, 66.
6
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City: Doubleday, 1948).
 Interpreting the Bible Amid Cultural Change 207

of feminist and liberation theologies, to name only a few. Again, my

concern is not to review this cultural history of the 1960s and early 1970s
but to focus on the paradigm shift respecting the understanding of the
Bible.
Quite suddenly, there arose a generation of theologians, all of whom had
been trained in the neoorthodoxy of the pre- and post-World War II period,
who within a few years dramatically announced that they could no longer
"see the emperor's clothes." J. A. T. Robinson's famous Honest to God
began by caricaturing the so-called God out there as a mythical vestige of
the Bible to be replaced by an impersonal "ground of being," a concept
borrowed from Paul Tillich.7 Harvey Cox attacked the church's traditional
definition of ethics as catalogues of vices and virtues, and proposed instead
to define truly authentic life as "wherever the action is." Langdon Gilkey
dismissed the stress on the "acts of God"a phrase vaguely related to
Barthand replaced it with a focus on the empirical world of human
experience as the vehicle to the transcendent. Finally, James Barr argued
that interest in biblical theology was muddled-headed, and he appealed to
the cool clarity of British rationalism to escape from Christian orthodoxy.
In the period immediately following the end of World War II, the World
Council of Churches was still convinced that the diversity of the churches
within Christendom could be overcome through a negotiated consensus
regarding the unity of the biblical message. Ten years later, the approach
was abandoned as many began rather to agree with Ernst Ksemann's
dictum that the Bible is not the cure for disunity, but rather its cause.8 In
1971, in celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversity of the journal Interpre-
tation, the invited speakers, Ritschl, Gordon Kaufman, and Barr, de-
nounced as misleading the very assumptions regarding the Bible on which
the publication of the journal had been based.

THEOLOGICAL EVALUATION OF THESE SHIFTS

What are we to make of these two radically different examples of
biblical interpretation within our recent history, of the rediscovery and then
of the loss of the authority of the Bible? How is one to interpret these shifts
in vision and perception of the Bible? I would argue that the usual
interpretations, which focus on the changing effect of shifting culture,
while true to a minor degree, are inadequate. Any simplistic identification
of an appeal to the Bible in bad times and to self-reliance in periods of
optimism is superficial in the extreme and patently wrong much of the
time. Nor do the sociological effects associated with shifting population
patterns, urbanization, and economic globalization within a technological
society touch the core of the problem.
Moreover, I would judge as hopelessly inadequate the ideological theory
that serious religious conviction is necessarily a thing in decline before the

7
J. A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963).
8
Cf. Ernst Ksemann, "The Canon of the New Testament and the Unity of the Church," in
Essays on New Testament Themes (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), p. 103.
 Theology Today

inevitable forces of modernity. Recall the sophisticated supporter of the

Persian shah who ridiculed the Iranian ayatollahs as a fading vestige from
the past, doomed shortly to oblivion before Western secularism. The
problem of change in religious perception is far more complex than usually
suggested and emerges ultimately as a profoundly theological problem. For
an example, I would recommend the recent book by George M. Marsden,
modern church historian at the University of Notre Dame, entitled The Soul
of the American University.9 He studies in some detail the history of Yale
University's growing ambivalence regarding its traditional commitment to
the Christian faith and its substitution of the study of religion in general as
a cultural phenomenon, objectively analyzed by means of scientific re-
search. But is it so obvious that religious pluralismone of the most
theologically inert words in our vocabularycan even begin to grapple
with the nature of divine reality?
Perhaps a place to begin in seeking some illumination of the changing
interpretations of the Bible is to offer a few observations from the two
historical examples I have introduced.
First, it seems clear that shifts in perception occur often quite suddenly,
almost without warning. The new paradigm is not simply a development of
the old, but the new stands in some discontinuity with the old. The shift is
not primarily set on the purely rational level, as if derived from logical
deduction. Rather, the language of the new signals a different sort of
change. One speaks of a radical reorientation often in the language, say, of
Christian conversion: scales falling from the eyes, seeing the light, a sharp
turnabout.

"/* almost appears that in those very periods when God is

confidently pronounced dead or impotent by some, others
experience divine intervention as never before. "

Second, in historical terms, it is striking that the great breakthroughs,

such as the Reformation, are sustained with much difficulty by the next
generation. Frequently, there are some modifications, but even when the
next generation tries its hardest to repristinate the past exactly, a new
context tends to blunt the initial sharpness. It is as if each new generation
were called upon to rewin the battles once fought or to risk losing its
theological legacy. Recall the tremendous power that Luther's discovery of
justification by faith alone exerted on the first generation; but within thirty
years, the dynamic had begun to wane, not just because of Melanchthon's
increasingly scholastic formulations, but also because the emergence of

9
George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establish-
ment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
 Interpreting the Bible Amid Cultural Change 209

Lutheran confessionalism in response to attack appeared to domesticate the

evangelical doctrine.
Third, the great shifts in the interpretation of the Bible turn on one's
overall understanding of the nature of God. The issue is not merely the
introduction of newer exegetical techniques that change the vision; usually,
the newer methods are shaped by one's expectations of what or of whom
one is seeking. How one defines the substance of the Bible is largely
dictated by how one perceives the identity of God. For example, at the
heart of Pascal's controversy with the scholastics of his time lay not
primarily a debate on the logical, conceptual level of discourse. In fact, it
was only after Pascal's death that a small parchment was found sewn in the
lining of his coat that gave the key to his understanding of the Bible. He
had written the following as his life's testament: "Fire, fire . . . God of
Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacobnot of philosophers and scholars."
Then there followed a catena of biblical verses concluding with the line
from John: "This is eternal life that they might know thee, the only true
God, and the one whom thou hast sent." In a real sense, one can say that
Pascal's use of Scripture was determined by his religious experience; but
his experience was always defined as a response to a divine impact that laid
hold of him through the Scriptures and offered him a new grasp of divine
reality.
Finally, there are those periods in which the Bible appears to have lost its
power to convince, in which its authority ossifies, erodes, and proves
illusory. Again, one can offer plausible philosophical or sociological
explanations, which are certainly not without some truth. The changing
culture that emerged in Victorian England in the wake of Darwin, Huxley,
and others nurtured a religious skepticism that wrought a devastation to the
faith of an entire generation of England's intellectual elite. No one should
underestimate the religious impact of Immanuel Kant on Europe even
though it took several generations to penetrate to a level intelligible to
ordinary people. Yet here again, the loss of confidence in the Bible is
connected with an understanding of God. God first becomes distant
throughout a person's whole life before God finally becomes hidden to
view even within the Bible.
In terms of a theological formulation, the point to make is that the God of
the Bible is not a static, unchangeable figure, seated somewhere in heaven,
to be found or lost depending on human disposition. Rather, the God of the
Bible is one who makes God's self known but who also hides God's self.
The prophet Amos speaks of God's terrifying withdrawal:
... I will send a famine on the land;
not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water,
but of hearing the words of the LORD.
They shall wander from sea to sea,
and from north to east;
they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the LORD,
but they shall notfindit.
(Amos 8:11-12)
210 Theology Today

It almost appears that in those very periods when God is confidently

pronounced dead or impotent by some, others experience divine interven-
tion as never before. At the very moment that the Scottish philosopher
David Hume could find no empirical evidence for the existence of God,
John Wesley found his heart strangely warmedsurely a miracle that
escaped Hume.

BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD

The thesis I am proposing is that the changing understanding of the
Bible, although peripherally influenced by cultural factors, is ultimately
rooted in the theological perception of God. Yet at the same time, there are
some characteristic features that point to a logic within the Christian rule of
faith. The shifts in perception are not purely irrational or arbitrary. There
emerges both from the Bible and from the experience of the church certain
pointers, even rules, for understanding the ways of God in the world.
(1) Genuine rebirth in the history of the church has always been
accompanied by a rediscovery of the central role of the Bible as the vehicle
for encountering the living God. Moreover, spiritual renewal has usually
resulted in a greater intensity in wrestling with God's word. In sum, there
has never been a serious form of Christianity that has divorced itself from
scriptural authority. The Bible is the source of the church's life; it provides
the content for its liturgy and worship. To speak of moving beyond the
Bible always signals a return to the wilderness and a loss of divine
blessing.
(2) Scripture functions properly within the life of the church only if it is
heard addressing issues of life and death. Of course, we all play games with
ourselves and with others. In this context, even the Bible is not immune
from trivialization and can even block passage to God. Little of lasting
value came out of William Rainey Harper's highly organized propaganda
for the study of the Bible as a scientific enterprise. Rather, Scripture
accrues its proper authority when it is read and celebrated in the commu-
nity of the church. The Bible is the book of the church, but not in the
erroneous sense that it belongs to the church; rather, when received as a
divine gift to believers, the Bible becomes a guide for faith and practice.
Especially, it provides the church with a critical theological norm against
all our pretenses of piety and spirituality. The constant threat involved in
the Bible's ecclesiastical use is that the church may domesticate its
message and accommodate the divine word to various forms of human
self-fulfillment.
(3) There is a family resemblance among the ways in which faithful
response to the Bible occurs. One can see it in those moments of genuine
understanding and insight, in spite of different ages and cultures, in the use
of the Bible by Augustine and Bernard, Luther and Calvin, Pascal and
Wesley, Kierkegaard and Kahler. The likeness arises from the serious
encounter with the selfsame God who shapes obedient response into
Christian likeness. Conversely, I would also surmise that there is a family
resemblance from the side of unbelief and skepticism. No one can deny the
 Interpreting the Bible Amid Cultural Change 211

brilliance of much historical-critical research of the Bible. Yet there is a

tragic sameness to so many descendants of the Enlightenment when God is
diminished and human pride exalted. One of the great ironies of the
so-called third quest for the historical Jesus, which is presently a fad in
many academic circles, is that the same old heresies raised first in the
nineteenth century are again surfacing in dreary monotony.
(4) The Bible calls for faithful reflection, but it also demands faithful
action. Where there is true understanding of the Scriptures, by necessity,
there arises an imperative for evangelism and mission, a care for the
impoverished and suffering. It is hardly surprising in today's world that
Christianity is spreading most rapidly in the non-Western world. It seems
to be part of God's design that those faithful scholars who have spent their
lives in translating the Bible into every known language have been largely
forgotten, but their translations have taken on a life of their own, bringing
the word of God to those who have eagerly responded to its gospel. Clearly,
the full history of the impact of the Bible in the world will not be told until
its influence can be registered on Africa, Asia, and the distant islands of the
sea.
(5) Finally, built into the New Testament's proclamation of the gospel is
the promise of growth and fresh understanding. Especially John's Gospel
lays emphasis on the coming of the Holy Spirit as a continuing guide in
faith. Change in the sense of growth in the knowledge of God is built into
the Christian faith. Likewise, the apostle Paul strains forward to greet the
promises of God for the future. In this sense, our understanding of the Bible
can never be static. Its pages continue to radiate fresh guidance into the
knowledge of God and his Son, Jesus Christ.
How then can the church decide what in the new is faithful to the old,
and what is a repudiation of the faith? There is no formula to invoke, but in
Scripture, the church has been given the parameters of a rule of faith.
Within this arena, there is the full freedom of the Spirit to quicken, deepen,
and form Christian understanding through dynamic transformation. Out-
side the rule of faith, there remain the threats of heresy and confusion. At
the heart of the Christian confession lies a sharp distinction between church
and world, between faith and unbelief, between truth and error. The author
of the First Epistle of John warns his congregation that there is a struggle
that will persist until the end but assures them, "you are from God, and
have conquered them; for the one who is in you is greater than the one who
is in the world" (1 John 4:4).
To conclude, the role of the Scriptures for the Christian life was first
described in the New Testament. Jesus' disciples were confused and
disheartened. Their expectations for the future had not materialized. Then
they were met on the road by a stranger who unlocked the Scriptures for
them, and in his presence, their eyes were opened and they recognized the
risen Christ. Later, in Jerusalem, they reflected on that moment: "Were not
our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while
he was opening the scriptures to us?" (Luke 24:32).
 ^ s
Copyright and Use:

As an ATLAS user, you may print, download, or send articles for individual use
according to fair use as defined by U.S. and international copyright law and as
otherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement.

No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without the
copyright holder(s)' express written permission. Any use, decompiling,
reproduction, or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be a
violation of copyright law.

This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permission
from the copyright holder(s). The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journal
typically is the journal owner, who also may own the copyright in each article. However,
for certain articles, the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the article.
Please contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specific
work for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or covered
by your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement. For information regarding the
copyright holder(s), please refer to the copyright information in the journal, if available,
or contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s).

About ATLAS:

The ATLA Serials (ATLAS) collection contains electronic versions of previously

published religion and theology journals reproduced with permission. The ATLAS
collection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association
(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc.

The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the American
Theological Library Association.