I am not a Bible scholar. In fact, the running joke for people in my field (systematic theology) is that we have absolutely no idea what to do with scripture. So when the opportunity to lead a Bible study at my church presented itself this past spring, I surprised myself and jumped at the opportunity.
In a former life, I was a university campus minister. This involved a lot of Bible study—gathering busy college students every Tuesday night, poring over passages with the leisure and privilege of sitting somewhere with friends for hours on end, discussing ideas and ways that God was perhaps speaking to us in the text we were reading together.
This Bible study was not going to be that. This was a new context, and a new season of life. The group from my church had people just getting off from their 9–5 jobs, parents who had to adjust their bedtime routines with their kids, people who had been skeptical of Bible study for the ways it had been harmful and oppressive to them in the past, people who had never been a part of a Bible study before. I was excited, and maybe even a bit nervous.
My journey with the bible
One of the reasons I went to seminary was to be able to more closely examine the assumptions that undergird how I think about scripture and interpret it. Thanks to my Pentecostal background, I was raised to understand that the Bible mattered. It was a close friend that I knew very well. My encounters with God through the stories in scripture were powerful for me in my youth and adulthood.
Seminary can ruin this for a lot of people. Some people believe that “seminary is where your faith goes to die.”
This is largely thanks to seminary’s intellectual commitment to the historical critical method—a mode of Biblical interpretation marked by the European Enlightenment’s rationality and attentiveness to empirical evidence. Everything people have come to love about scripture can seem to easily slip through their fingertips as they dive into the historical power dynamics that led to the biblical canon’s formation, the process of evaluating manuscripts for authenticity, the hidden work biblical translators put into sleek new English editions of the Bible, and the interpretive, always political decisions that go into every single act of biblical translation.
And while this mode of interpretation is not inherently wrong, its rigor, expansive literature and sometimes-indiscernible conclusions can frame it as the only way to seriously engage with the Bible with intellectual depth. When this is you only framework for the Bible, the holy texts are caveated into a corner, unable to offer anything meaningful to say about life or the world or God.
For me, all of this learning pointed me toward a simple fact: I do not follow Jesus because of empirical evidence, or because of a scholarly consensus on the historical Jesus. Underneath all of this intellectualization exists an act of faith—a longing, or even more, a wager to trust that life lived in the way of Jesus was and is indeed good.
The reason theologians tend to shy away from scripture is that its seeming contradictions can get us into trouble. Some of these seeming contradictions exist because of how Christians, especially in the West, have tended to shoehorn the Bible in its totality into frameworks that are supposed to be frictionless and neat. Flip just a few pages into the first book of the Bible in Genesis, and you find two separate, seemingly contradictory accounts for how God created the world and creatures. Sometimes in Scripture, God is deterministic and rigid (think the plagues, and the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart); other times, God’s mind can be changed (think Jonah and Nineveh, or Israel getting Saul as its first King).
Scripture can also present an even more difficult problem: What do we do when things in scripture that seem to be sanctioned by God also seem unjust? After the people of Israel are liberated from Egypt, God (eventually) tells them to take possession of the land of Canaan, going so far as to commit genocide to secure it—an image that is hauntingly relevant today. How do theologians—and all followers of Jesus—make sense of these troubling passages?
As I prepared for this Bible study, the transformation that I had undergone personally and intellectually with scripture over the last six years pressed me to consider how I might approach it with this group of people. I was reminded that my journey through historical criticism and back reminded me that it was simply one tool among many to make meaning of scripture—a tool to sit alongside the storytelling and Holy Spirit-fueled preaching that had animated my spiritual life in my youth. What does it look like to hold both postures in tension? Or put another way, how does knowing what I know now force me to change my approach to leading others into scripture?
I settled on offering two anchors for how to approach scripture, which have helped me articulate how I endeavor to make meaning with scripture, both as a professional theologian and as a Christian: memory and sacrament.
Scripture as memory
One of the reasons it can be difficult to square one part of scripture with another is that it was written by so many different people in different times, contexts, and circumstances. The Torah likely reached its final form while the Jewish people were in exile in Babylon. The gospels weren’t written until the first generation of Jesus’ followers began to die out in the mid to late 1st century.
One way to make sense of this generations-spanning collection of different writings is to understand it as a collective memory.
Understanding scripture as an act of memory points to the reality that scripture has been used in the life of a community. When exile threatened to wipe out the memory of the Jewish people, scripture helped preserve their identity through story. The gospels were written as a means to remember the things that Jesus did and said, so that future generations could retell the good news to people who did not experience Jesus up close.
Understanding scripture as memory presses us to consider that sometimes memory can be a tricky thing—we don’t always remember clearly. Thus, what is preserved in the written Word might be understood as the memory and meaning made of a people. Sometimes, we get the memory right; sometimes we get it wrong, but there is a larger reality to which God’s character is being pointed. The memory contains traces of the longings and faith of a people who desired God’s rescue and restoration amidst oppressive circumstances.
This doesn’t mean that scripture isn’t true, or cannot be trustworthy in any historical sense. In A Black Theology of Liberation, James Cone helps us to think about the historicity of scripture. He says that what the Bible preserves is the overwhelming conviction that Jesus, in his actions and prophetic call, was about his identification with the poor and oppressed. The presence of the poor and oppressed was a reality in the time of scripture’s writing that continues on to this present day. The continual presence of the oppressed in our world, and the undeniable account that Jesus identified himself with the poor and oppressed in his time on earth, is for us a historical kernel that is indeed trustworthy and must be taken seriously. As Cone put it:
“We want to know who Jesus was because we believe that that is the only way to assess who he is. If we have no historical information about the character and behavior of that particular Galilean in the first century, then it is impossible to determine the mode of his existence now.”
Understanding scripture as communal memory helps us to situate the written word in the life of a community. It helps us to make sense of slippages and even seeming contradictions within the text of scripture. And it draws our attention to what has been preserved historically in the memory of the Church: Jesus’ identification with the oppressed and his liberation-shaped salvation.
Scripture as sacrament
St. Augustine understands sacraments as “an outward sign of an inward grace”—tangible embodiments of an eternal, hidden, intangible divine reality. The written word of Scripture, then, symbolizes the Word of God to us in ways that are graspable to us as humans. Understanding scripture this way helps us to remember that the written word of Scripture is not to be identified with the actual Word of God—it merely points to its reality and is the way in which we get to graciously participate in and hear God’s Word through the Holy Spirit. When we approach scripture sacramentally, we are able to recognize the mystery present in God’s Word to us. This posture presses us to remember that humility, attentiveness, and curiosity are how we open ourselves up to God’s Word to us as we engage with the written Scripture.
A sacramental posture toward scripture helps us to guard against biblicism—oversimplified, proof-texted appeals to scriptural authority that often use the doctrines of infallibility and inerrancy to conceal the interpretive aims of those who wield scripture. When we don’t understand scripture sacramentally, we obscure the reality that we are meaning-making creatures who make meaning using faith, what we know, and what we hope for. Sacramental approaches to scripture press us to hold the disparate parts of scripture in tension, make meaning for ourselves and our communities, and take accountability for our own interpretations, owning their implications.
Treating scripture sacramentally moves us away from making truth claims with scripture that are based solely on “…because the Bible says so.” This simply foists the responsibility of interpretation on something outside of ourselves. Instead, the stances and positions we take on that have been inspired by our engagement with God through scripture ought to sound more like, “This is how I am seeing scripture; this is how I am choosing to interpret it; this is how I think it matters for me.”
While this might run the danger of sounding individualist or even relativist, the reality of scripture’s communal nature should always press us to wrestle with scripture in community. It’s in this space where the Holy Spirit breaks through with revelation. This sacramental posture toward scripture frees us from needing to always have all of the answers; instead, we are pressed into the grace of community, encountering God’s Word together, asking questions in humility and patience.
Back to the Bible study
As I prepared for Bible study each week, I did my best to resist manufacturing outcomes for the people who would be participating, whether this was pre-prepared application or reflection questions. As a campus minister, the best Bible studies seemed to be the ones that felt organic and fresh. In reality, though, I usually nudged those studies in certain directions. This time, I wanted to do my best to be open-handed, and to empower the people in my study to own their own interpretations, and help them to interrogate their own habits or tendencies of interpreting scripture.
We obviously can never approach scripture as blank slates. We did our best to be honest about how we felt about the passages we were studying, how we had heard these things interpreted in the past, and whether or not we were seeing new things that we hadn’t noticed before.
As I offered up these anchors of scripture as memory and sacrament, people had new freedom each week to wrestle with what we were reading. As we saw Jesus do confusing things in the gospel of Mark (“Why is Jesus keeping his identity secret here, but not there?” “Why does Jesus seem to be using racist language with the Syrophoenician woman?” “I don’t understand why he can’t perform miracles there and not here?”), we resisted the temptation to tie neat bows on these passages. We asked honest questions and talked about what troubled us in the scripture. The holy practice of meeting together weekly was the grace in itself. Together, we saw Jesus’ story unfolding—a vision for a world in which authority was marked by healing and restoration. We got to watch Jesus’ disciples struggle to make sense of what he was up to, failing, being rescued by Jesus multiple times, and still not seeing what he was trying to do even though the miraculous happened right in front of them.
Through memory and sacrament, we, too, were getting to live into the reality of the disciples who experienced Jesus’ presence. We were people struggling to get a sense of what Jesus was up to. We were questioning how he prioritized his time, and his willingness to sometimes conceal the things he was teaching. Just as the disciples committed themselves to taking on the shape and life of Jesus, we, through our commitment to one another every Thursday night, did our best to place ourselves at the feet of Jesus, lingering to ask more questions and make meaning in community.
David de Leon is a doctoral student studying systematic theology at Fordham University in New York City. A child of Pilipino immigrants, David grew up in Vallejo, CA. For 12 years, he worked in university campus ministry. He has extensive experience in directing global justice immersion programs. In 2021, he received his Master of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School. He writes, teaches, and reflects on Pilipino/Pilipino American/Asian/Asian American identity, faith, and colonial histories.
