Let me be clear: I'm not a fundamentalist. I don't endorse reading the Bible literally all the time -- as if a solely literal reading were even possible. I characterize my own reading as pneumatological -- with the Bible's Spirit is breathing life into our deaths -- but I know lots of folks will argue it's really a Christological reading (I've been hugely influenced by Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer). So I encourage folks to read the Bible, a lot even, and listen and wait for God.
Listening, I think, is the primary act of love. In any relationship, when we're given a person's word, making ourselves available and vulnerable to that word is the first act of love. This is why we place such a huge importance on communication in relationships.
It's exactly like that when we come to the Bible. We must first listen. We put aside, for the time being, issues of credibility, or significance, or even consistency. Sure, those questions are important, but they aren't primary. The first question is, What am I hearing here? So the first act of reading the Bible is one of listening.
I'm sure lots of my seminary-trained friends will say this is a naive view. And I guess it is. It's a view in which I simply affirm that the Bible has content, integrity and life that belong to God himself, and that those things can be comprehended by we humans because of God's love for us. My view is that the Bible is more than a newspaper. It's more than an encyclopedia of religious doctrine. It's more than an ethics textbook. And it's definitely more than some esoteric mythology. In short, the Bible reports God's love for we humans in the very muck and mush of human history. The Bible recounts God having gotten dirty and messy -- even as messy so as to share that humanity -- and this is a story that's accessible and lucid and edifying to those who are willing to take the time to listen.
That all sounds abstract and too theological, though. So I want to share an episode from William Stringfellow's Count It All Joy that demonstrates what I'm talking about.
Stringfellow recounts his experience of being put in charge of a Sunday School class for a group of rebellious and unruly urban teenagers in New York. Finding the assigned curriculum unsatisfactory Stringfellow does something strange. He asks for everyone in the class to secure a Bible (they don't) and then he just starts reading the Bible aloud to the teens:
All that happened, and all that was allowed, in the brief sessions of the "class" following that first Sunday, was that I read, aloud, the entire Letter to the Romans.Stringfellow allowed no interruptions or questions. He just read Romans aloud. Predictably, the class rebelled -- for example, a boy created a disturbance by bringing a case of beer to class -- but Stringfellow patiently persisted.
[T]he essential event each week remained the same--all of us simply heard a reading of the entire Letter to the Romans. It was only after the group had suffered this exercise a dozen or more times, week after week, that the tactic was changed and I proposed that the Letter be then read sentence by sentence, in its given sequence, and that after reading each sentence aloud, we all pause and ask one question: What does this say? Not, what do I think? Not, do I agree? Not, is this relevant to my life and circumstances? But, straightforwardly, first of all, What is this word?Eventually, a change came:
So we persevered. It was a laborious enterprise. But we did continue, meeting each Sunday, and, as it were, reading and listening to each sentence of Romans, in turn, and asking, What is being said?
Silence--utter, unequivocal, radical, dumbfounded silence--greeted this practice for weeks. But I insisted upon it and the members of the "class" acquiesced in it, as much out of bemusement at this unorthodox "Sunday School" as anything, I suppose.
It was around Christmastime that the change came. The same boy who had brought the case of beer to "class" turned up one afternoon at my tenement in East Harlem. He was, it seemed to me, embarrassed to appear to have deliberately come to visit me, belabored a number of excuses for dropping in. Finally, after his protracted and circumloquacious introit, he mentioned that he had obtained a copy of the New Testament (he had stolen it, he boasted, from the premises of some other church) and confessed that he had been listening in "class," though he had not spoken out there, during all the weeks in which Romans had been repeatedly read aloud. He thought, he said, that I must have plenty of other things to do and would not bother to take time for this "class" or persist in reading the Letter in "class" unless I was convinced there was something important in the Letter. His curiosity was engaged and he had procured a New Testament, he admitted, in order to read the Letter on his own in his privacy. He had now some reflections about his own comprehension of Romans that he wanted to discuss because he had wondered if my own understanding of the Letter corresponded with his.From that beginning, a discussion about the Letter of Romans, the relationship between Stringfellow and the boy was transformed:
For the remainder of the afternoon he and I tried to talk with one another about our respective experiences of hearing the Word of God in and through the Letter of Romans.
This tough, brash, aggressive kid from the streets turned out, in that encounter, to be a most sophisticated exegete, although I am pretty sure that if I ever called him such to his face his impulse would be to hit me for cussing him. Somehow it had lingered in his conscience that the original, indispensable and characteristic question to ask, in reading the Bible, is the very question that seems so seldom to be asked in church or seminary or layman's conferences, namely, What does this say? Somehow, thus, he had come, reluctantly, against his will, with his customary hostility and suspicion, to confront the Word of God in the Bible in a way very similar to that which he would face another person.
Among the gifts of that afternoon with this most remarkable exegete was the illuminating candor of our relationship. Now, for the first time, we met, under the aegis of the Word, in a new way. Now we were set free from from the roles consigned to each of us or adopted by either of us in the prior contacts in "class." We were no longer restricted by differences of education or learning or race or age or class or whatnot. Now, by the virtue and initiative of the Word of God, bespoken and attended to in our respective experiences in the Letter to the Romans, each of us became at liberty not only to praise the integrity of the Word of God but to be accused and convicted in our own identities as individuals. It was, in that afternoon, not just that the Word of God was, as it were, recognized as a name, but that each of us also were named ourselves in the very same happening. Now the Word of God, in the testimony of Romans, had become evident as the event in which each of us were certainly and fully our selves (cf. James 1:18; 1:21).All that might be a bit of a stretch for those of us who have issues with the Bible. Regardless, it gives you a sense of how I'm talking about reading the Bible. This passage in Count It All Joy shows how, for the the Word of God becomes active in our lives -- a location of Divine agency -- when we listen and ask "What does this say?"
Part of the wonder of the occasion was and is that when and wherever the Word of God is heard and honored, human life acquires context, people are radically distinguished and identified, community is wrought, and reconciliation happens.