Larry Hart

“Birds On A Wire”

Several friends, as they drank Negronis and ate roasted chickpeas with Moroccan spices, were discussing the photographs Ansel Adams took at the Manzanar Relocation Center during World War II. One of them was saying their favorite was “Birds On A Wire” –– a stark, sharp, beautiful, black, and white photograph of Black Birds, sitting on a wire, a telephone pole just off to the left, the distant Sierra Nevada mountains in the background, and a cloudy winter sky with the late evening sun partially shining through. “You know,” another interrupted, “anyone could have snapped that photograph.” “Yes,” replied their hostess, “but it was Ansel Adams who saw it.” What Adams apparently saw and shared that Manzanar evening he focused his camera and clicked its shutter, was the simple beauty of the scene along with its powerful symbolism. “Birds On A Wire” as a metaphor for the unsettled condition not only of those unjustly incarcerated Japanese Americans, but of humanity. And just off to the left, the telephone pole as a cruciform image. It is beautiful both photographically and contemplatively. But not everyone now looking at “Birds On A Wire” sees what Ansel Adams saw.

Three Ways of Seeing

To make my point obvious, there is a difference between knowing and knowing about a person or a thing––a difference, between theoretical and experiential knowledge, between looking and seeing. In fact, the koine Greek of the New Testament has three words for the verb “see:”

(1) BLEPO refers to the physical sense of sight. It is just seeing what is there without attempting to derive any meaning or understanding from what is seen. I turn my head and glace out the patio door. I see a profusion of green succulents in front of a high fence, and beyond the fence the tops of green trees.

(2) THEOREO describes seeing as observing or making sense out of visual clues. I look up into the night sky and I wonder: Is that bright light I see a star? It is so bright maybe it is just a satellite. It could be a passenger jet, and so I watch to see if it is moving or if there are any colored lights attached. That’s seeing as theoreo.

(3) HORAO is seeing that becomes knowledge. It is looking at something, observing something, thinking about something, seeing something in such a way as to grasp its reality and significance.

A crucial question for me in my spiritual quest has therefore been, “What is this book called the Bible?’ “When the ancient sages, mystics, and saints spoke of being guided by the wisdom of the Scriptures what did they mean?” “Can I see what they saw?”

It is, of course, helpful, and necessary to see the Bible in all three ways just described.

The Writings

There is nothing inherently special about the word “Bible.” It is simply a transliteration of the Greek term biblia––originally meaning the ancient paper like writing material made of papyrus reeds, and then by extension a book––although, until around 300 any book was more likely to be in the form of a scroll than a codex––sheets of papyrus or parchment sewn together with writing on both sides of the page. By around 225 there seems to have been a growing association of the words Ta Biblia, literally, “The Books,” with those writings important to Christians––namely, the 39 books of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible beginning with Genesis and ending with Malachi, and the 27 books of the New Testament beginning with The Gospel of Matthew and ending with Revelation. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches include seven of the apocryphal books of the Old Testament as Scripture (giving them 46 Old Testament books). While the Anglican communion also includes these apocryphal books it does not regard them as canonical. The Bible, then, in its most basic and simplest sense, is a compilation, an anthology, of ancient books related to the Christian religion and its origins, along with those earlier books concerning Israelite practices, history, poetry, wisdom, teachings, and prophecy which are necessary for understanding the emergence of Christianity. The dictionary definition of the Bible is simply: “The Christian scriptures consisting of the Old and New Testaments.”

Scripture and Bible are not synonymous, although many people speak as if they were. “Scripture” comes from the Middle English term scriptum, which was derived from the Latin scrīptūra, which was translated from the Greek graphe and simply means “writing.” Technically the term “scriptures” refers to the writings, or what we would call the books in the Bible.

Now although I have never done so, I understand it is certainly possible to read, to study, to analyze, and to see the Bible as nothing more than a book––” a purely human product” (as Borg put it). And if my hope were for fulfillment in the joy or notoriety of academic pursuits that might be enough for me. But because my quest is for a firsthand encounter with God nothing but the third sort of seeing discussed above will do.

Seeing Into the Spirit of the Bible

It is not that I am opposed to the mental study of the Scriptures. To speak dismissively of the scholarly study of the Bible would, in fact, be hypercritical of me. In reading and interpreting Scripture I want to make the best and most logical possible use that I can of historical, grammar, vocabulary, archeological, and literary studies. But beyond that, like Karl Barth (perhaps the greatest Protestant Bible scholar and theologian of the Twentieth Century and certainly one of the historical greats, “My whole energy of interpreting has been expended in an endeavor to see through and beyond history (to see through and beyond all scholarly efforts) into the spirit of the Bible, which is the Eternal Spirit.”

Signs of Integrity

There is no way to absolutely prove the basic trustworthiness of Scripture. I use the word “basic” because I do not believe the Bible has to be read like a bank statement in which absolutely every number and dot has to be correct or the whole thing is false. I do believe there are a number of factors which make it reasonable to trust the essential historicity of the Bible:

1) I believe that the evidence of history, archeology, religious tradition, and reason points to the major formative events claimed to have happened in the narrative of the Hebrew and Christian people as actual, objective, events. Although sometimes told using imaginative language I see the call and journey of Abraham and Sarah, the mystical commissioning of Moses at the Burning Bush, the Exodus and giving of the Ten Commandments and Torah, possessing the land of Canaan, establishment of the Davidic Monarchy, the building of the Temple, the Babylonian Exile and return, the Messianic consciousness of the prophets, a sense of God’s involvement in the puzzling and mysterious circumstances surrounding Jesus’s birth, the extraordinary power, presence, wisdom, hope and love people felt when they were with Jesus; and, the crucifixion, and resurrection,  all as real objective events. None of these are things I can prove in the same way I can prove I have been home all morning with Brenda and Jack, that I checked my glucose level at 6:45 a.m., or that I had granola, fruit, and coffee for breakfast. But for me that each of these events took place after some fashion rests well within the realm of probability.
2) For reasons noted in my podcasts, I find the challenges to the veracity of the Bible presented by non-confessing scholars unconvincing, and frequently as unreasonable and ridiculous as fundamentalists who claim they have found Noah’s Ark in the Caucus Mountains, or the remains of Pharaoh’s army, chariots, and all, at the bottom of the Red Sea; or have the shroud from Jesus’s burial and resurrection.
3) Although written by multiple authors over a period spanning centuries there is a strange continuity to the Bible, an astonishing unity. As the story of the acts of God, what theologians refer to as heilsgeschichte or salvation history, the Bible is one coherent narrative of God’s self-disclosure––the story of how God becomes known to humanity as loving power, presence, help and justice. I find this coherence, this unity, of Scripture significant.
4) I have confidence in the essential trustworthiness of the Bible because of what J.B. Philips famously referred to as its “Ring of Truth.” It is difficult to say exactly what I mean by this since it is more like an impressionistic painting for me than a photograph with sharp detail. But I am thinking about a number of things: I am thinking about how Scripture is written with utter simplicity; yet, paradoxically, is absolutely profound. There is no attempt at any sort of complex systematic philosophy or theology such as people normally like to weave, nor is there any effort to explain everything. Great truths unfold naturally more and more over time in what is a relatively simple narrative––a meaning more easily accessed by someone with an honest and humble heart than a mind crammed with academic information and pretentious concepts. It astounds me over and over and over again in the way it reverses conventional thinking and values. I find it compelling that the “Way” of which the Scriptures speaks is not merely written in the Bible, but in reality itself––and is therefore open to the pragmatic tests of lived experience. Nor does the Bible ever suggest that there is one way that is good for the ordinary person and another for the elite; or one way for humanity and another for God. What’s good for me is good for God. What I am called to be ethically and morally (just and loving) is what God is. Nor do I detect any self-serving tendencies in the Bible. And from beginning to end its characters, even its great heroes, are portrayed with a kind of clear-eyed honesty.
5) Personal experience. This, of course, is of no help to those who have never had the sort of experience of which I am speaking. By this I mean the sort of experience Augustine had in the garden when he read Romans 13: 11-13, or Luther had reading Romans 1:17 in the Black Tower; or the night I heard Mark 8:36-37 read in our little church on the wrong side of the river––an experience in which a text I had long understood with my mind suddenly came alive in my heart and was taken into my soul in a way and at a depth so marvelous that it can never ever be explained. I mean by this what the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur meant when he said, “No one can ever get near the meaning of a text who does not live in its aura.” I take that to include the non-confessing scholar. And I mean what the great Protestant Bible scholar and theologian Karl Barth meant when he wrote in the preface to the first edition of his commentary on The Epistle to the Romans: “The historical-critical method of Biblical investigation has its rightful place: it is concerned with the preparation of the intelligence––and that can never be superfluous. But were I driven to choose between it and the venerable doctrine of Inspiration, I should without hesitation adopt the latter, which has a broader, deeper, and more important justification.”

Experiencing the Bible as Sacred Scripture and Word

There is in this heading an intended implication that there is a difference between reading the Bible as scripture and reading it as Sacred Scripture, reading it as the production of human thought and reading it as the Word of God that comes from beyond human thought. Unhappily reading in this way runs counter to our natural inclinations; and, therefore, requires the discipline of reading for formation rather than for information only.

John Bertram Phillips was the priest of the Church of the Good Shepherd in London during World War II. As the people of London and his church endured the nightly terror, devastation, and death of the German bombings, Phillips decided that one helpful thing he could do, especially for younger people, was to translate the Bible into fresh modern English. Much of his work was done during the long nights spent in the air raid shelter with the bombs falling. He had earned an honors degree in Classics and English at Cambridge, and so it was a work for which he was well equipped. Phillips’ translation became enormously successful after the war, but its greatest impact was on Phillips himself. He later wrote this:

I found that once one gets to grips with the actual stuff of the New Testament its vitality is astonishing. I found myself provoked, challenged, stimulated, comforted, and generally convicted of my previous shallow knowledge of the Scripture. The centuries seemed to melt away, and here I was confronted by eternal truths which my soul however reluctantly felt bound to accept. The further I went with my work of translation the more this conviction of spiritual truth grew within me. . . . Although I did my utmost to maintain an emotional detachment, I found again and again that the material under my hands was strangely alive, it spoke to my condition in the most uncanny way. I say “uncanny” for want of a better word, but it was a very strange experience to sense, not occasionally but almost continually, the living quality of those strangely assorted books. To me it is the more remarkable because I had no fundamentalist upbringing and although as a priest of the Anglican Church I had a great respect for Holy Scripture, this very close contact of several years of translation produced an effect of “inspiration” which I have never experienced even in the remotest degree in any other work.

When this happens, we know the Bible for what it is––”God-breathed writing,” “Inspired Scripture” (2 Timothy 3:16), ” the word of God” (Hebrews 4:12;).

The Greek word for “word” is “logos,” It means speech or word. Because of the association of language with rational thought, it also came to mean something like eternal mind, truth, or principle. When the ancient Greek philosophers asked what it is that gives order to the universe and keeps it from dissolving into chaos, they concluded that just as words give order to our thoughts, so there must be a universal word, truth, or principle that orders and sustains the whole universe.

Word of God

To say that the Bible is the word of God indicates three things in New Testament terminology: First, it is used to designate Christ as the Divine Logos, the Word become flesh and blood (John 1:1 ff). Christ, the New Testament asserts, was among us as the incarnate speech of God; and, as such, communicated life to those who received Christ. Second, “Word of God” is used in reference to the apostles’ teaching and preaching of the salvific presence and power of Christ (1 Thessalonians 2:1-13). It is in this case the shared message both of and about Christ. Third, the phrase “word of God” is used as the name for Scripture–– for that body of literature that now composes the Hebrew and Christian canons (2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:21; 1 Corinthians 2:10; 14:17).

A Concluding Paradigm

In concluding I offer a Biblical perspective I think makes reasonable and spiritual sense of both the inspiration and transmission of Scripture. The Apostle Paul writes this in his Corinthian correspondence: “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us” (2 Corinthians 4:7). There is a significant spiritual paradigm here, a pattern we see reoccurring throughout Scripture. Repeatedly God does his most awesome work through what is seemingly small, inconsequential, insignificant, flawed, and powerless; indeed, it is in powerlessness, in moments of seeming failure and futility that God’s power is not only seen but shines its brightest (2 Corinthians 12:9). It is both astonishing and at the same time not at all surprising that this good message of light and life (of Christ), this treasure, is entrusted into the care of fallible human beings and their flawed ways of communication.