Simon

I want to say something very rude. Dear listener, whoever you are, there is not one verse of the scriptures that was written for you.

All

Yeah.

Simon

I’m just remembering being at a Christian conference and a lovely young lady standing at the front. She was going overseas and she was sharing her testimony about how she knew where God was sending her. She told us that every time she opened the Bible, it mentioned Israel. So she ‘knew’ that God was calling her to go to Israel.

And, you know, she was part of a somewhat narcissistic culture that you can get in charismatic churches in which you are encouraged to believe that this is the way God speaks personally. God wrote the Bible just for you, just in the same way that Jesus came and died just for you. 

I had my eyes opened by getting to know a rabbi here in Leeds. There’s a sizeable Jewish community here and she… I’m telling you that she’s a she because if you know anything about Judaism you’ll know that means she’s at the liberal end, the reform end, of Judaism.

I asked her, what’s the weirdest thing about the way that Christians treat your scriptures? And she said, well, these are our family stories, and we love to tell our family stories to each other. Just like we love to tell about how Uncle Frank got drunk at a wedding and felt up Auntie Flo from the other side of the family. But none of us would ever then think, oh, well, that means God is telling us that we should be like Uncle Frank! We’re not looking at every verse of every story for this eternal life message. These are just our family stories that we love to tell each other. Some of them are funny, some are tragic, but we don’t think we should copy every one.

The theologian Tom Wright said we should imagine history to be like an unfinished Shakespeare masterpiece, and we’re in the final act. If that final act was just a repeat of the previous acts, it wouldn’t make any sense as a drama. Now the main character in this drama has promised how this story is going to end, and we are working with the director, with the script writer, with the other actors. We are working in a creative, innovative way to get to the promised end of the story. I find that a more helpful way of understanding how to read the scriptures. 

So, yes, God does speak to me. I’ve had amazing experiences of God speaking to me powerfully through the scriptures. But it wasn’t written for me and I think that’s something that we have to understand. So we have this incredible dynamic responsibility to get from the end of the book of Acts to the promised restoration of heaven and earth. Yes, we’re part of the story, and we’re writing our part of that story, not just following a script.

Craig

Yeah, that’s really good.

Roy

I love Tom Wright’s analogy of the five-act play. He’s saying that as we improvise, live out our lives as co-creators with God, we are fulfilling the fifth act. It’s still remaining true to the narrative, the spirit of the previous four acts, so it won’t contradict the nature of God that we’ve seen in the previous four acts will it?

Julie

Yeah, I see a link here with Richard Baukham’s trajectories – that God moves from the particular to the universal, so to broader, wider spaces and to more people.

I’ve interpreted the question a bit differently, so I’m going to do a bit of a gear shift. My thoughts were from a feminist perspective, because most commentaries and commentators come from a white, male, European, educated perspective, so I’ve learned to explore the idea of reading through the eyes of different cultures and listening to different perspectives.

I’m always interested in reading familiar passages, but seeing them in a different way, by hearing from theologians who approach a passage with a feminist, or different racial or disability perspective. So for example, take the biblical stories where slavery is the context, an audience whose ancestors have experienced slavery have an interesting perspective and see things in the text that I might not initially see.

Another passage that springs to mind is a feminist reading of the widow and two small coins, where Jesus says she has given more than everyone else. It’s often preached on to say you should give everything you’ve got to church. But perhaps Jesus was criticising the Pharisees who went round in their flowing robes (which is in the text immediately before this in Luke’s gospel).

The collecting containers would be shaped like big metal trumpets, and when people put coins in, they made a massive sound, so when a rich person put a load of coins in, it was like they were sounding their own trumpets – “Look at me. How rich I am? and how generous?”

You can imagine this widow – who perhaps wasn’t even that old – with two small coins, maybe shyly or maybe really angrily dropping them in and announcing: “That’s all I’ve got”.

Craig

We’ve explored this interpretation question from a number of different angles and have also recognised the fact that Jesus was an interpreter of texts. So we should take confidence from that. He was editing stories and he was choosing the bits that he wanted and he was interpreting them according to known traditions and experience. They would also have interpreted them within community, and certainly not as individuals, because it’s only during the last few 100 years that individualisation has even been a thing, and then mainly within our own Western culture.

And so it would have been impossible for Jews in the first century to have personalised it as we do. So Jesus is saying yes, God is personal, but you can’t personalise him. And there’s a real difference between those words. It feels like our Western culture is personalising the personal in ways which rip scripture out of its essential context.