In times of change, whether personal or cultural, how do we stay rooted and grounded in the love of Christ? I’ve been asking this question as my family has been in a season of change. As one who studies political and cultural conflict, I’ve also been reflecting on it in light of the larger political and cultural turmoil that has become increasingly evident in North America.
When I look around at the wider landscape, I wonder to what degree the rise of anxiety, anger, and fear in the public sphere is connected to significant cultural, economic, and political change. Truly, the pace of change that we have experienced in Western society in recent decades is unprecedented. As a general rule – as the business literature around adaptive change reminds us – humans do not do well with change. We crave the comfortable and the familiar. For those of us for whom the good old days worked, we can be prone to long for a return to what was. For all of us, the uncertainty that change introduces can be hard to navigate.
Christians ought to have resources to navigate times of change. As our Scriptures attest, God’s people throughout the centuries lived through profound change, experiencing many different forms of political, economic, and social turmoil. In the generations since the advent of Jesus Christ, we’ve seen many different kinds of political, cultural, and economic life and through it all Christ has remained Lord. Jesus Christ’s rule of the Heavenly City is not dependent upon what happens in our earthly cities, as Augustine learned many centuries ago when he lived through the unimaginable sack of the city of Rome. Jesus Christ is the King upon the throne, come what may, as the book of Revelation reminds us.
While there are a number of gifts that the Spirit can use to keep us anchored and rooted in these deeper truths, I’ve been thinking a great deal about the role Scripture can play in providing this kind of grounding. But as much as I want to point to the Bible as a means of grace that God can use to keep us rooted and grounded in the love of Christ in times of change, I can’t ignore the fact that we are in the midst of a crisis when it comes to the Bible and Christian formation. In the context of Christian participation in politics in the United States, questions related to Christian engagement with the Bible have become increasingly urgent.
I’m reminded of Russell Moore’s interview with a reporter about his book, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America. In this interview, Moore relays that multiple pastors have told him that after quoting the Sermon on the Mount in their preaching, people in their congregation would question them for incorporating “liberal talking points.” When the pastors responded that they were quoting Jesus, these congregants told their pastors that the weak words of Jesus did not work in this cultural moment. From Moore’s perspective, “when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis.”
How do we respond to this crisis? What role can our local churches and places like Wycliffe College play in cultivating engagement with Scripture that encourages a deeper rooting and grounding in Christ in this moment – and beyond?
This fall, when I was invited to respond to a new book on Christian interpretation of the Bible by theologian Kevin Vanhoozer, I took the opportunity to ask Dr. Vanhoozer and the others present if we could wrestle with these very questions. In Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Vanzhoozer writes that we ought to judge approaches to biblical interpretation, at least in part, by the kind of readers they form, and in support of this argument he cites Matthew 12:33, “the tree is known by its fruit.” Putting it more strongly, he argues that, “a Christian reading culture must be deemed a failure if the readers it begets are not able to walk and read as children of light (Eph 5:9; 1 Thess 5:5).” In other words, our local churches and our seminaries ought to be forming readers of Scripture whose lives bear witness to the light of Christ and bear the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
How does this kind of formation happen? Vanhoozer explores biblical language of transfiguration and encountering God’s glory to explore the transformation that the Spirit can bring forth in us when we read the Bible. He writes, “Like Jacob, Moses, and Paul himself, those who come face-to-face with God and hear his voice will not come away unchanged. To behold God’s glory in the face of Christ is to be transformed…To read the Bible theologically, with Paul, is ultimately a means of spiritual formation and transformation unto Christlikeness: in a word, transfiguration.”
But Vanhoozer recognizes that reading the text is not in and of itself sufficient to lead to this kind of transfiguration into Christlikeness. Rather than reading with unveiled face, a veil can remain in place, which Vanhoozer describes as, “sinful resistance to and refusal of the divine address and its implications.” This veil can lead “readers anxious to secure their own fleshly identities, to compel and sometimes violate the text to make it serve their own egoistic, ethnic, or ideological interests.”
What can we do to avoid reading the Bible with a veil in place that leads us, unwittingly or otherwise, to interpret the Bible in support of our own interests? How can our communities encourage the cultivation of faithful Scriptural engagement that leads to transfiguration and transformation into Christlikeness?
Vanhoozer believes that our local churches and places like Wycliffe College can make a real difference in inviting Christians into humble, faithful, and potentially transformative engagement with Scripture -- and I join him in that belief. Indeed, Vanhoozer draws on both Ephraim Radner and John Webster, former Wycliffe faculty, to encourage readers of Scripture to have a posture of receptivity as we approach the text, to read the Bible with the sense that we are entering the presence of the living God and standing on holy ground.
I think we need to continue to wrestle with what it looks like to encourage this kind of posture towards Scripture, on the ground. Vanhoozer suggests that it is important for local churches and seminaries to support this posture towards Scripture by equipping readers to engage the Bible theologically and canonically and by encouraging the cultivation of virtues (honesty, patience, charity, and humility as well as the “theological interpretive virtues” of faith, hope, and love) that will shape how we read and receive the text. Vanhoozer also recommends that when we read Scripture, we move beyond siloes – whether the siloes of academic approaches to the Bible or of our own ethnic or denominational readings of Scripture – so that we are reading Scripture with “all the saints, including exegetes, theologians, and church historians from premodern and modern times, East and West, industrial North and global South.”
These seem like important recommendations, even as I sense we need to explore them further to know how we translate them into everyday life in our respective communities (whether Wycliffe or the local church). Here at Wycliffe, I am grateful that as a faculty we continue to wrestle with how we engage the Scripture theologically, how we invite students into deep formation in Christ during their time as students, how we encourage students to read the Bible with Christians across the historic and global church, and how all of this needs to be reflected in our teaching, curriculum, and wider offerings. You’ll see this wrestling reflected in the revised curriculum we’re offering beginning next fall, as well as our ongoing Scripture and Theology colloquia.
I’m also deeply grateful for our alumni who are cultivating transformative engagement with Scripture in their ministries, even as I am eager to continue to explore how Wycliffe can support our alumni and local churches in this important work. I am hopeful that despite the seeming crisis in Christian formation today, the Spirit will keep us rooted and grounded in love, and will continue to sanctify us so that our biblical engagement can and will bear good fruit in this world. Please join me in praying and working towards this end.
