Robert McAffee Brown, in Unexpected News, writes:
“There is a primary naïveté that accepts everything in Scripture at face value and digs in its heels when portions of the Bible threaten to be eroded by the acids of modernity.” I work at a critical reading but “After all that critical scrutiny, however, we have returned to the text itself, looking at it with a secondary naïveté, for we still have to ask the pesky question of the text as it stands, ‘What does the passage say to us?’”
Bonhoeffer, like Evangelical Christians the world over, knew that first level of naive Bible reading. He meditated daily on Scripture, seeking not to study it but to listen for the voice of the Spirit in the words of the Bible. He also knew and appreciated the critical level but had one great complaint about it: The critics tended to deconstruct the text and leave it in shambles without ever reaching a third level in which they again heard the Bible as a whole. It was Brown’s “secondary naïveté which Bonhoeffer sought, that level at which we deal seriously with Scripture as God’s self-revelation.
In their book Reading in Communion, Fowl and Jones say the goal of our work in Scripture is the “performance of Scripture.” that is, we do not want merely to know the Book but to live it. And Bonhoeffer, they say, “was an exemplary performer of Scripture.”
There are three fundamental levels of Bible study, I believe. In the first we observe carefully to ascertain what the Bible actually says. Second, we let the text and the Spirit lead us to insight and understanding by interpreting the text. Third, we live the text or, as Fowl and Jones put it, we perform the text. Having led many hundreds of small group Bible studies over the years, I can say that the biggest weakness of Christian students of the Bible is that they have no patience with the first level, observation, and therefore lay no foundation for interpreting it, leaving them with no clear understanding of what it looks like when the text is lived.
I agree with Fowl and Jones: Bonhoeffer was transformed by Scripture; he lived it. It is not the woman or man who quotes the most Bible who is the most biblical. Rather, it is the one who embodies the heart of Scripture who is truly biblical.
Great post. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks for the note, Taylor. I hope you find Bonhoeffer as interesting a challenge as I do. He followed Jesus Christ with a boldness we all need.
Mike