Among the slogans that set the agenda for much modem study
of the Bible, the prescription that it should be read “like any other book”
seems to me singularly unhelpful. We do not read Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves
or Have it Your Way, Charlie Brown the same way we read Hamlet or King
Lear. Critique of Pure Reason and The House at Pooh Corner are
both, I believe, eminently worth reading (though, in the one instance, I am
relying on others’ assurances), but they call for rather different approaches. Textbook
of Medical Oncology requires yet another. To cut short a game becoming more
fun by the minute, we may well ask: Like which other book are we
supposed to read the Bible?
To be sure, these and other books can
all be read the same way if we approach each with a particular question in
mind: How frequently does the author split infinitives, dangle participles, or quote
Russian proverbs? Or, what do Romeo and Juliet, Concluding Unscientific
Postscript, and Pippi Longstocking tell us about eating habits at
the time of their composition? (This game, too, could be fun.) These are, I
suppose, legitimate questions — doctoral dissertations have certainly been
written on stranger topics — but they seem somewhat limiting. Classic
literature — William Shakespeare, Søren Kierkegaard, Astrid Lindgren — has more
to offer its readers; those open to experiencing the “more” soon learn that
different books make different demands on their readers.
Unless, then, we are reading the
Bible merely to carry out our own limiting agendas, the notion that it should
be read “like any other book” will be true only in the sense that the Bible,
like any other book, calls for a particular kind of reading. Sensitive readers
of the Bible, like sensitive readers of any text, will be alert to what is
being asked of them, given the nature of the text before them; it is then, of
course, up to their discretion whether they will attempt to measure up to those
demands.
Stephen Westerholm & Martin Westerholm, Reading
Sacred Scripture: Voices from the History of Biblical Interpretation (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans , 2016), 1-2
