Sacred Text

Last night our daughters informed me that they had finally grown too old for me to read to them at bedtime. Granted, the younger was in a grumpy mood, having generally gotten too little sleep over the holiday break. But as they are in fifth and seventh grade respectively, I can’t say that they’re entirely off-base. I knew this day would come.

Our son was in seventh grade when he likewise asked me to stop reading to him, and I still view that as something of a bittersweet milestone. Together we had read about medieval Japan and World War I and chocolate factories and New England whaling and the Native American invention of lacrosse. I miss those bedside adventures.

For as long as I can remember, books have been holy to me. Credit this to my parents, both lifelong educators, and especially to my mother, who read to me from day one—and who taught me to read on my own when, at three years of age, I grew frustrated with my inability to do so. Frugal as they were when I was growing up, my parents never skimped on books. It was one expense that they were ever happy to indulge.

Books are astonishing things. They transcend space and time. A person living today, anywhere in the world, can pick up the complete works of Plato and be taught, directly, by the father of Western philosophy. Thucydides, a general in the Peloponnesian War, has left us his eyewitness analysis of that momentous conflict. We hear in his own words Caesar’s account of his conquest of Gaul. Shakespeare, the greatest of all English playwrights, is available to all, and in innumerable adaptations.

With internet access, a library card, and nose for used books, one can for a pittance accrue an education that would be the absolute envy of any previous human generation. Frederick Douglass worked as a porter to learn the letters of the alphabet. Abraham Lincoln walked miles in the snow to borrow a volume of law. John Wycliffe died a martyr so that people could read the Scriptures in their own language. They would weep for joy to see the works at our disposal. We can learn almost literally anything.

It is true that the greatest of humanity’s teachers—Socrates, the Buddha, the Christ—left no writings of their own, yet their disciples certainly did. You can hear their words, if not from their lips, then from the pens of those who knew them best. How then can one hold a Bible and not be overcome with awe? Voices now thousands of years old, as fresh as they were when first spoken! Emperors, poets, sages, soldiers, still alive in their texts!

In Chinese spirituality, paper is understood as deeply mystical. Paper makes real that which has no form or body: marriages, borders, degrees, laws, taxes, ownership. Thus a paper trail seems to exist halfway between the physical and the ephemeral. Think of our birth certificates, death certificates, drivers’ licenses, social security cards. Without proper documentation it’s difficult to prove that we exist. Writing makes us real.

Such is how I often view the Bible: not as some inerrant text dictated by an angel, nor as golden plates descending from on high, but as the living record of one people’s difficult, ecstatic, confusing, enlightening, and ever-evolving relationship with God—one people’s story, and so the story of us all. For indeed, it is the very particularity of a text, so human in all its respects, that establishes its universality.

When we read the stories of Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Isaiah, and the rest, they become our own: as much our own as they were Jesus Christ’s. We study the Hebrew Scriptures because they were important to our Lord, because they made Him who He was, an integral part of His Incarnation. Jesus became human for our sake, not by taking on humanity in the abstract, but by becoming this one specific Man, within His particular place and time, in His particular culture and language and family and faith.

The point of Christianity is to be conformed to Christ, and to do so we must read the stories He read, know the history He knew, understand the context in which He was born and raised. Whenever Christians read the sacred Scriptures, our primary concern should not be its historicity or even authorial intent but to read Jesus in it: both how He might have read it, and how others find Him in it. For us the Bible is the record of the life of Jesus Christ, and that includes the parts of it that were written centuries before His birth.

Here I seek to steer us between Scylla [Greek mythos: a legendary monster who lives on one side of a narrow channel of water opposite her counterpart] and Charybdis [the two sides of the strait are within an arrow's range of each other—so close that sailors attempting to avoid Charybdis would pass dangerously close to Scylla and vice versa]. On the one hand, I do not want Christians to limit our educations only to the pages of our Bibles. All truth is God’s truth, after all, and it is our duty to seek the Christ in all that is beautiful, good, and true. “Test all things and keep the good,” as St Paul has enjoined us. Any given Christian ought to be as open-minded, well-read, and teachable as his or her situation will allow.

On the other hand, the Bible is our home. We may visit worlds unknown, exploring every venue of knowledge in every conceivable publication, but we return to the Scriptures of our people, the Scriptures of our Lord. I love novels and histories and philosophy and poetry and the sacred writings of other faith traditions. But it’s the Bible that I strive to read in each and every day, at Matins and at Vespers, our morning and evening prayers. With Christ as our anchor, we can voyage anywhere.

Remember that reading the Bible and interpreting the Bible are two very different if inseparable tasks. Historically the Church has ever encouraged Christians to interpret any given text in many different ways, and to do so within a community. We must turn it like a diamond, examining its facets. The Bible’s infallibility rests not upon any single-minded literalistic interpretation, but solely on the fact that the Scriptures give us Jesus, and Jesus Christ will never fail.

Read the Bible. Hold it sacred. And through it, read everything else.

In Jesus. Amen.

By: Reverend Sir Knight Ryan Stout