“Learning to read the Bible well and developing a scriptural way of living requires slow reading, sustained attention, and community.”
One of the most interesting courses I took while studying at Duke Divinity School was a semester-long close-reading of Luke’s Gospel in the original Greek. The professor, C. Kavin Rowe –now Vice Dean of the Faculty and the George Washington Ivey Distinguished Professor of New Testament– is not only a remarkable scholar and teacher, he is also a deeply committed Christian.
The bulk of the course consisted of independent study of the Greek text of Luke, which resulted in fresh translations of each passage and rich in-class discussion. In addition to translating Luke’s Greek and reading vast swathes of Joel Green’s commentary, we were also required to do something else: to read Luke in English… a lot.
With syllabus in hand, looking ahead to next week’s assignment, we all felt relatively comfortable with the course’s workload and rhythm. But right before we were dismissed at the end of session one, Dr. Rowe said, “Oh yes, in addition to translation and commentary reading, I’d like you to read the Gospel of Luke in English… three times.”
Now, in the King James Version, Luke’s Gospel totals 25,939 words, making it the 10th longest book in the King James Bible (if you count the number of “words” in Hebrew/Greek, it’s the 12th longest book in the Bible). It is the longest book, by a considerable margin, in the New Testament. If one page of single-spaced text amounts to about 500 words, then Luke’s Gospel in English hovers around 50 pages. And we had to read it three times… every week.
One thing Professor Rowe stressed was that each reading must be completed in one sitting. Now, of course you’re all thinking: Well, what if I have to use the bathroom?! Dr. Rowe was (reluctantly) open to such an excuse but encouraged us to use the bathroom before we sat down to read!
Over the course of the semester (about 14 weeks), we probably read Luke over thirty times. And I have to say, the process was deeply formative, both academically and spiritually.
Dr. Rowe recently published a little book called Leading Christian Communities in which he asks questions such as: “What does it mean to be a Christian community? And what does it mean to lead one? How does a pastor address today’s challenges, from lack of faith in institutions, to conflict in the church, to the tension between tradition and innovation?”
In one chapter, “Becoming a Christ-Shaped Leader,” Dr. Rowe discusses the vital importance of cultivating a “fundamentally Christian background” in one’s institution or organization such that “Christian thought and practice are second nature.”
“Having a Christian background,” he writes, “makes it easier to think and behave in ways that are Christian and harder to think and behave in ways that aren’t.”
The crucial question is “what kind of background provides the salient features needed to develop or extend Christian institutional patterns so that our work is organized Christianly as a matter of habit.”
In the following chapter Rowe writes: “Nothing is so crucially important to the Christian shape of this background as a scriptural imagination.”
Now, anyone who has walked the halls of Duke Divinity School or has read anything from the pen of Richard Hays (Dr. Rowe’s teacher) will be familiar with the phrase “scriptural imagination.” By imagination we do not mean the capacity for “certain kinds of play or fantasy that we have in abundance as children and often lose as we age” (Rowe’s words).
“Imagination, rather, means the way the total person is involved in interpreting and being in the world –the part we actively play in constructing a vision of life for ourselves and for others.”
The reality is: we are always actively involved in the interpretation and (virtual) construction of our world. “Our imagination [thus] helps to structure the concrete patterns of daily, lived existence.”
To speak of a Scriptural imagination, “is to speak about the scriptural shape of a whole life, a way of being in the world that evidences a lifelong process of transformation by the power of Holy Scripture… Scripture aims at the formation of the total pattern that is the way we are in the world –thought and practice together in one life.”
Forming such a Scriptural imagination is precisely what Dr. Rowe had in mind when he required us to read Luke three times each week. In his book, Leading Christian Communities, Dr. Rowe provides four habits of reading Scripture well.
Apart from the acquisition of tools which allow for a fuller and more patient exploration of Scripture’s meaning (i.e., Hebrew/Greek, cultural background, literary background, etc.), Rowe provides the following four habits.
“Reading Scripture well requires us (1) to be slow and patient rather than fast and immediate. Inseparable from this is the need to nourish the habit of (2) paying concentrated and prolonged attention. We also need to cultivate the habit of (3) reading Scripture in community. Finally, reading Scripture well requires us (4) to remember the past –habitually.”
In the book, he provides brief but helpful discussions of each of these four habits, but for the sake of space, I will treat them together.
Many forces in our media-crazed, technologically advanced world push against the slow and patient reading that is required to form a Scriptural imagination. Paying concentrated and prolonged attention to anything is somewhat rare in 21st century American culture.
For this reason, Dr. Rowe required his students to stop what they were doing, sit down with Luke’s Gospel for two hours, and read the whole story through with no interruption. Doing this over and over again helped us internalize the content of Luke’s Gospel and develop a tolerance for long, sustained study of Scripture, which is vital to any vibrant Christian life.
As we now know, social media has afforded unprecedented opportunities for public, individual expression. Human beings today, arrayed with various personal accounts, pages, and devices, are quite used to thinking and speaking individually and independently.
Such individualism has penetrated the church, as Christians across America view their faith as “something between me and God.” The potency of their faith, their positions on a host of issues, their interpretations of Scripture are often individually based, a rather “new” phenomenon when considered historically!
Dr. Rowe targets this trend, drawing attention to the following key reality: Scripture, from the very beginning, was intended to be read by communities not individuals.
“The theological logic of the texts,” he writes, “presupposes a community of readers. The church is the place where reading all the different Biblical texts together as one book makes [the most] interpretive sense.”
Lastly, Rowe notes the importance of history, or remembrance as he calls it.
As mentioned above, the Bible was meant to be received by living communities who were in turn formed by the text itself. Christians today must remember that “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.”
Studying the ways in which Scripture formed the living communities who then passed on certain interpretive habits (tradition) to their descendants, is thus vital in forming a Scriptural imagination today.
That is why it is essential to study the church fathers and mothers, the medieval theologians and monks, and the reformers and modern interpreters of these texts. Seeing how the Bible has been received by Christians throughout history is essential to our reception of the same texts.
Reading Scripture well, then, is not a matter of knowing Greek and Hebrew, having a high IQ, and “figuring it out” on one’s own. It’s a matter of submitting oneself humbly and devotedly to a lifelong process of formation which takes time, attention, energy, and, of course, a living community.
The object is to immerse oneself in Scripture such that Scripture becomes the very background of one’s life.
Only then will Christian habits and patterns of thinking “make sense” and become second nature, which in the end is what we’re all really after.
Jonah Bissell
Pastor