For the Bible Tells Me So

In the middle of my undergrad college campus, the government and law building stands as a testimony to the extravagance of Gilded Age wealth. Funded by Fred Kirby (a founder of Woolworths department store), construction finished in 1930 amid the economic freefall of the Great Depression. With its abundant artwork, travertine floor and walls, broad staircases, and oak book cases, clearly no expense was spared. At its opening, the New York Times hailed it as the most expensive construction project in the world. Atop the large front entrance reads an inscription, chosen by Kirby himself: “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?,” quoting Matthew 20:15.

Using scripture to defend free-market economics amid a depression while simultaneously spending lavishly to erect a building with your name on it? The Gilded Age certainly wasn’t shy about its self-justifications.

But neither are we, for that matter. Many of the ethical and theological battles today (left and right) are waged on the terrain of scripture, with a surplus of studies mirroring the many political controversies that make headline news. Whether it’s the war in Gaza, sexuality, immigrants, disability, gender, and any host of other topics, the abundance of contextualized readings of scripture probably says as much about us as it does scripture. Now, looking to the good book for answers is what Christians have done for millennia — and wonderfully so. Some Christians of recent memory were content to sidestep the Bible altogether, and a return to debates over the meaning of scripture is undoubtedly a welcome development. The days when divisions within the church could be predicted according to a measure of Biblical fidelity are largely in the rearview. But while we’re all reading the same book, there’s far less consensus on how it should be read.

The situation today isn’t all that different from that of the early church. To take one example, the Valentinians of the 2^nd century believed that Jesus only became the Son of God at his baptism in the river Jordan. Following Mark’s Gospel, these adoptionist readers of Mark supposed that the descent of the “dove” upon Jesus is when the life of the Son of God effectively begins. This was the moment that “the word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). To them, Jesus was indeed born of the virgin, Mary, but the virgin birth only illustrates the “indescribable skill” with which the creator “constructed” the body of the Messiah. To rebuff the Valentinians, Irenaeus proposed viewing Mark and John through the lens of Matthew and Luke. The terrain upon which the heretical Valentinians and the orthodox Bishop Irenaeus battled is Scripture itself. It was not a matter of which texts are deemed authoritative, but how these texts were coordinated with each other and understood.

Sola Scriptura is an important reformational doctrine, but it raises more acutely the question of how scripture should be read, how the multiplicity of the Bible might plausibly cohere, lest our discourse devolve into volleying memes of Bible verses at one another on Facebook. But the battle for theological truth isn’t won by having more Bible verses in one’s arsenal, but by demonstrating how the component parts of Scripture should convincingly be coordinated with one another, prioritizing some texts and interpreting others in light of them.

Such a stratification of texts is sometimes derisively deemed a “canon within the canon,” but there isn’t any theological system capable of giving equal weight to every verse of the Bible. Indeed, Paul himself posits an inter-scriptural antithesis between faith and works, citing Habakkuk 2:4 (“the one who is righteous by faith will live”) and Leviticus 18:5 (“the one who does these things will live by them”). Accordingly, Paul employs a faith-works hermeneutic in his reading of Scripture, especially in his retelling of the Abraham narrative.

If Scripture provides the raw data for our theological constructions, then it is our hermeneutic that attempts to best account for Scriptural data, ascertaining trend lines, discarding outliers, and discovering which data sets are the most relevant.  The mere citation of Scripture is not sufficient to understanding. Without hermeneutics, expositors of scripture may unwittingly espouse heresy.

This sorting, ranking, and sifting of Scripture is precisely what Martin Luther’s law-gospel hermeneutic seeks to do. Taking his cue from 2 Cor. 3:6, “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life,” Luther prioritizes Paul’s writings for making sense of the entirety of scripture in accordance with the impact it has upon the individual — whether it kills or makes alive. Paul’s distinction between law and gospel provides Luther the key to understanding the harmony of scripture, united in God’s salvific purposes. While detractors would take issue with making Paul the key to the whole of Scripture, the order of the canon implicitly does this by placing all of Paul’s writings immediately after the book of Acts. Paul then becomes the chief expositor in the New Testament for the significance of Jesus’ life/death/resurrection.

In its totalizing claims, Luther’s Law-Gospel hermeneutic is, at worst, a reductionist way of reading the diversity of Scripture (though no more reductive than rival hermeneutics like “covenant” or “narrative”). Indeed, Luther himself struggled with how to best apply it. In his early writings, Luther demoted the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke to a subordinate status below the more evangelical Gospel of John. Revisiting the subject years later, Luther revived these gospels by way of a distinction between understanding Christ as a gift and Christ as an example.

Even so, the vitality and ingenious utility of the law-gospel hermeneutic remains unparalleled, uniquely addressing the depths of human failure, loss, and brokenness and the good news of God’s salvific word. It does not see scripture either as a source of timeless guide for daily living or as a cudgel for our political debates, but as a word that confronts the reader with counterintuitive grace. It prevents us from subjugating the Bible and making it into our own image. Taking a cue from Luther, if the Word of God both confronts and comforts (killing and making alive), then the double-edged sword of Scripture forces us always to deconstruct our presuppositions and remake us into a people whose confidence lies solely in the saving death of Jesus. In other words, Scripture isn’t the kind of book one can cite on the side of a fancy building to justify what you already think, but one whose strangeness remains wild and untamed, always opposing us and our self-assuredness to make us live by faith in God.