What gets in the way of this? It’s interesting that Rev. White found the need to distance herself, at least initially, from her evangelical classmates as “backward.” She notices there is a “fear of doing it wrong,… getting it wrong,… fear of what one might find in the Bible.” One must then have recourse to “expert guidance,” even to what must be “withheld from the regular person in the pews.” The preacher feels compelled to become irreverent towards an otherwise frightening text. The fear, I gather, is of becoming “backward,” taking the text too literally and straightforwardly.

The problem here is likely complicated–many congregants in mainline churches rightly talk of damage from conservative churches that seemed incapable of critically examining their beliefs. However, Rev. White insightfully suggests that the problem is also that we would have to take ourselves literally and straightforwardly, for confronting “the violence described in the Psalms or in Judges” may entail confronting “the violence in our world or in our hearts.” We instead have the safety of a “favored topic.”

The answer is to intentionally place ourselves “under the authority of Scripture” with others. This accountability is described very concretely–“underline,” use the “right pen or pencil,” listen to “a decorous 75-year-old grandmother,” use a beautiful Bible with “saddle-colored goatskin.” Scripture is to be our “soil.” The contrast, I gather, is to a more intangible feeling and awareness, perhaps of God’s love, that may come from any number of places, even in solitude, as it remains within each person as their authentic self. The danger is that this feeling and awareness supersedes “the sounds and syllables of the Logos,” with all their roughness, and turns lectionary readings into useful “anecdotes” or legible “artifact[s] of history.” (In terms of sermon genres, even if long expository sermons are undesirable, this may lead to another undesirability: the inevitability of the autobiographical.)

Rev. White also notes that placing ourselves “under the authority of Scripture” along with others means “our pride must die,” especially our “pride in our abilities,” so the ascetic act of trying to understand Scripture itself, with pens and pencils and grandmothers, itself helps us to understand Scripture. The contrast, I gather, is to imagining that Christianity is immanent within us, so that our abilities must be reshaped by the right commentary or expert read in isolation, but that the Gospel narratives might finally be recontextualized away from Christ’s death and our death in him as telos.

Anyway, this was supposed to be short, but thanks for the posts!

Some of it also makes me think of a statement that David Barr made last year: the work of Hans Frei “has remained largely untouched by readers outside of the scholarly guild for nearly half a century.” Why is that?