Killing me softly. . .

Who does not love the sultry voice of Roberta Flack singing that iconic song Killing Me Softly with His Song?  I love it.  My personal favorite is the line, He sang as if he knew me.  It was not quite real.  So it is for those who view the Scriptures through an academic lens, as if its point were to mine the words to discover the individuals whose pen put them down, the cultural milieu in which they were written, and the way the first hearers understood it.  Of course, as interesting as that might be, it does not preach.  It does not really help.  It is as if we are looking at two different Scriptures -- the one that has God speaking and the one in which it is merely words on a page.  They speak of God's Word as if they know it but they don't -- they know only the Bible as book, words, curiosity, and detail.  They have focused so much on the text and what is behind it, they no longer hear Christ's voice speaking.

It is not that I am not interested, it is interesting.  The point is not that it does not capture the imagination but that it cannot address the heart.  For so long none of us can remember its beginning, we have been captivated by what some have called the “academic Bible” and have become a stranger to the “scriptural Bible.”  Commentaries seem to love the intricate details of the text but too often ignore what is said.  This modern view of the text with its preoccupation with textual criticism and theories of origin has treated the Scriptures like a corpse and attempted a postmortem to a book which we claim is alive and speaks life to us.  The invention of critical methodology has ended up killing the Scriptures, turning its life into an idea and the primary focus on where that idea came from and who it came from.  In early Christianity there was a reverence to the Scriptures not as a book off limits but because it was alive, still addressing the Church and the world with the words of life.  

There are those who open the pages of the Bible with questions and these questions are not directed to the Scriptures themselves but to what is not there.  It is a modern form of Gnosticism in which the Bible becomes a puzzle to disassembled in order to see how it goes together or how it might go together differently than what we have.  The people of God are not the focus of this kind of academic pursuit.  Everyone knows that when the people of God gather around the Bible, they come together to hear its voice, the voice of the Good Shepherd, still calling, gathering, enlightening, and sanctifying a people to be the Lords.  They respond with a single voice in common confession of this God, what He has said and what He now gives in the means of grace that are the Word and Sacraments.  The job of the Church is not to untangle a knot of words but to address us with the Word of God and in so doing to teach us how to read the Word.  The Church does this through catechesis, to be sure, but primarily through liturgy and preaching.  Here the people of God discover that this book is their book, not to do with as they please, but as the Word written for them. This Word lives in them and through them, ordering them and their lives and mirroring it to the world around them.  One of the benefits of reading the early fathers is to learn again the joy, focus, and application of Scripture as this living voice of God and not some problem to be solved or mystery to be made ordinary.  

Lutherans were, not surprisingly, the ones to coin the term Patrology, because they held up this sacramental Word, efficacious in its voice to accomplish in us what it says.  I wish I could say we still as a whole believed and practiced this.  We must reclaim the Bible for the Church from the academics which are killing us softly, enticing us with the idea of a story that ends up masking the voice of Scripture, and distracting us from what it says.  We need to get away from the idea of a synthetic or plastic Scripture and remember again what it is like to hear the voice of the living God speak in love to His people.  When this begins to happen again, we will find not only our preaching reinvigorated but our life refreshed as God means for it to be whenever we gather around His Word.  Without this, we will become a people who sing as if we knew Him when know only our own intellect, curiosity, and interest.