"Do You Understand What You Are Reading?"
Tools for Reading Well
Saying this is the easy part. The challenge lies in knowing how to do it. Particular pedagogical practices will inevitably have some differences, but almost all instruction geared toward Christian training will focus on the acquisition of tools and the development of habits. By tools we principally mean learning such things as the languages in which the majority of Scripture was written (Hebrew and Greek), the most salient features of the cultures in which the various scriptural texts were composed (ancient Palestine, Babylon, or the Roman Empire, for example), the basic facts about the individual biblical books (who wrote them and when, what their most prominent concerns or arguments are, and so forth), and the manifold ways that contemporary questions relate to ancient ones. Strictly speaking, such tools are not prerequisites for encountering God’s word through Scripture—as if God’s freedom to speak is constrained by our ability or opportunity to learn Greek. But these tools are a necessary part of a serious education into Scripture’s depth and complexity. Reading the New Testament in Greek, for example, not only slows one down and forces one to pay attention to every textual nook and cranny, it also opens a range of scriptural meaning that is often otherwise unavailable. The “Greek tool” does not create the meaning; Scripture is inexhaustibly meaningful, after all. But knowing Greek does allow a further and potentially more patient exploration of Scripture’s inexhaustibility. Acquiring these tools and the ability to use them takes an enormous amount of time and effort, study and memory, writing and testing. It is far from easy.
The Habits of Reading Well
Forming good habits for reading Scripture is considerably more difficult. This is so not only because habits are hard to form (or reform) but also because many of the habits needed to read Scripture well run counter to much of the way we do daily life. Though there are many candidates for mention, four in particular stand out today.
First, reading Scripture well requires us to be slow and patient rather than fast and immediate. Scripture’s patterns and treasures are often seen only with the slowest, most patient engagement with the text. If we read the Bible as we read our email or daily news, we almost guarantee a shallow and impoverished reading. Skimming email is fine in its own way, but this manner of reading will never lead to a scriptural imagination. Of the things we do to combat our speed, perhaps nothing is so basic as study. The French thinker and mystic Simone Weil once argued that study helps us to pray inasmuch as it helps us to learn how to concentrate our attention (an indisputable necessity—see the next point). It is no less true that study requires us to take time with the material we are to learn and to read slowly, carefully, and with considerable patience.
Second, and inseparable from the first habit, is the need to nourish the habit of paying concentrated and prolonged attention. The riches of Scripture cannot be found, let alone mined, with scattered attention (multi-tasking) or a short attention span (which commercials or sound-bites both depend upon and reinforce). The entire Gospel of John presupposes and requires a reader who can mull over complex images and their various dimensions of christological significance. John 10, for example, is long, reflective monologue in which Jesus turns the figure of sheep over and over and meditates on its christological significance: first, it is to the shepherd that the door of the sheepfold is opened. The sheep hear the shepherd’s voice, know his voice, and follow him (10:1–6). Next, Jesus becomes the door of the sheepfold; only those who enter by this door (i.e., through him) can be saved (10:7–10). Then Jesus is the “good shepherd” who “lays down his life for the sheep” and says, “I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep” (10:11–15). He adds that there are “sheep that do not belong to this fold” and that he will bring these, too, “so there will be one flock, one shepherd” (10:16). Finally, Jesus concludes by saying that the Father loves him because he lays down his life, and that he lays it down of his own accord and has power to take it up again (10:17–18).
Reading John 10 well is simply impossible to do quickly. Despite the continuity in image (sheep/shepherd), the image is not simple. Rather, it requires the reader to ponder different dimensions of Jesus’ significance. Indeed, the metaphors are comprehensible only on christological premises and an understanding of the church’s mission. In John 10 Jesus is both the way in (door)—which is also to say the mediator between the Father and the believers—and the leader of his followers (shepherd). His language about the shepherd’s willing sacrifice and power to rise again refers, of course, to his resurrection, but such a reference is only obvious after the event itself (i.e., later in the story world of John). So, too, only after the mission to the church has begun does it become evident who the sheep are that are “not of this fold”; they are those whom the church seeks to bring in. In short, John presupposes Christian readers who can concentrate and train their attention on the connections between what they already know of Jesus and the church and what the Gospel is trying to teach them through its imagery.
Third, we need to cultivate the habit of reading in community. The emphasis upon reading in community (or communion) has received much attention of late, but for many understandable reasons the habit of reading alone is hard to break. By reading alone, I do not mean as much the simple act of reading a book silently by oneself as I do the more damaging notion that reading is what occurs between a text and an individual—an individual who encounters the text and makes of it what he will in and through his individual judgments, mind, or life. We read alone when we think that Scripture is a matter of the text and me. Scripture, however, was written both to and for Christian communities, and the theological logic of the texts presupposes a community of readers. The church is the place where reading all the different biblical texts together as one book makes interpretive sense. Anytime we read something called “the New Testament” or “the Old Testament” or “the Christian Bible,” that is, we are already reading inside the community that has made the theological judgment about the unity of these various texts and passed down this judgment in the form of the Bible itself. Not only is it historically the case that we have the texts that form the Bible because the church has transmitted these texts through time, it is also the case that the Bible makes sense as one book only in one hermeneutical place, the church that has received it as its Scripture. In Christian thinking, this community includes not only those whom we now know but also the dead (“the communion of the saints”).
Finally, then, reading Scripture well requires us to remember the past—habitually. With some exceptions, ours is not a culture in which historically deep memory is developed. But we are not the first to read the Bible; indeed, it has reached us only because it has been handed down from generation to generation. Habitually attending to the past is thus not only a way to read with those whose lives have been formed by Scripture, it is also a way to understand how Scripture has shaped—or failed to shape—its readers. Habitual remembrance teaches us, in other words, how Scripture looks when it is lived powerfully and well.
The intersection of habits and tools makes the education at Duke an education in scriptural imagination—a patient training in how to read Scripture and, thus, how to be in the world in a scriptural way. But, in truth, exactly because a scriptural imagination is not a “thing” we possess—as if our diplomas could tell us that we now have it—but a whole life, Duke is only one part of a much larger trajectory of transformation. Yet it is a crucial part: a sustained induction into the lifelong practice of reading Scripture well is indispensable for those who serve the church and, we believe, a gift to a world that desperately needs it.
About the Sidebar Image
The Lindisfarne Gospels are the legacy of an artist monk, Eadfrith, who lived in Northumbria in the early eighth century. It was made and used at Lindisfarne Priory, a major religious community that housed the shrine of St Cuthbert. Apart from its intrinsic value as an ancient and beautiful work of art, the manuscript displays a unique combination of artistic styles. Eadfrith blended Celtic and Anglo-Saxon elements with Roman, Coptic, and Eastern traditions to create a unified artistic vision in these Gospels. The Lindisfarne Gospels are now part of the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts in the British Library, as are the other manuscripts showed in this article. This image is of "The Lindisfarne Gospels: Gospel of St Matthew the Evangelist," initial page. Lindisfarne, late 7th or early 8th century. British Library Cotton MS Nero D.IV, Copyright © The British Library Board.