Jamin Bradley

After telling some neighborhood kids the story of the woman caught in adultery, Shane Claiborne asked them what they thought Jesus wrote in the sand. “If this doesn’t work, run, woman!” one of the kids joked.¹ While scholars might propose serious suggestions for what Jesus wrote, no one can know for sure. The Bible invites readers into the story and asks them to imagine the answer. Was he writing something the woman understood? Was he writing down the Pharisees’ sins? Was he drawing a picture? Was he ignoring the oppressors?

Readers will experience this moment differently based on their social location. A white woman may see a Jesus who has come to protect her. A black woman may find this view too shallow and see a Jesus who has come to liberate her.² Meanwhile, some men might see this as a chivalrous rescue effort, while others might ignore it and focus on the fact that she was told to sin no more. There is a wide range of possibilities that readers can bring to the passage, for none of us come to the Bible tabula rasa.³

As another example, the majority may find the parable of the laborers to be unfair since everyone gets paid the same wage for working different hours, but as Justo González points out, the Latino minority who struggles to find work will instead see this parable as justice.⁴ All nations must be given a chance to speak into Scripture.⁵

Interpreting the Bible Historically

Between the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, archeological investigation, and modern technology, we have more biblical data available to us than our Christian forefathers. This allows us to see the inspired word of God in more of its original historical context, often causing it to mean something very different than we originally expected. Using historical research, scholars love to find fresh new interpretations for puzzling passages so that the Bible can finally be seen as the authors intended— for “The proper context for interpreting the Bible is the context of the biblical writers.”⁶ Such thinking fits well in the historical method of biblical interpretation, which “has dominated biblical scholarship even to this day.”⁷

While historical interpretation can be incredibly beneficial to minorities when they’re able to make a case on their behalf, there are many passages that are detrimental to their cause. Even if we understand such detrimental passages to be cultural, the fact that they’re biblical means there will always be someone accusing such interpretations of being heretical.

Interpreting the Bible with the Word

I thrive on the historical method of interpretation. Nothing makes me happier than blowing congregants’ minds with a radical historical reframing of Scripture. But I admit that we are in dire need of a multifaceted way of reading the Bible. After all, the actual Word of God is not an old book, but a living person.⁸ And when the Word of God read the word of God for himself, he had bold ways of interpreting it—sometimes declaring the near opposite of Scripture to be true. Jesus was the original deconstructor of the faith, telling us that though we’ve heard it said one way, it’s actually another. Law on papyrus is stagnant, but law as King Jesus is alive and flexible.

Therefore, the Scriptures must be read alongside the Spirit of Jesus and understood on a spiritual level. The post-gospel story hinges on this fact, for if the early church did not listen to the Holy Spirit, they would have had little to no inspiration to reach the Gentiles. Sure, the historical method may have given them the space to reach out to the Gentiles, but it was the Spirit that propelled them to do so quickly and audaciously. Left to the Bible alone, the early church would have likely administered conversion in a stringent way reminiscent of the Pharisees, rather than the freeing way of the church elders. The inspired word as ink could not do what the Word who inspired the ink could. Therefore, the same Jesus who brought the Scriptures to life for the disciples on the road to Emmaus must also bring them to life for us. We must give special attention to the red letters upon which all Scripture depends.

Sacred Eisegesis

Graduate students guilty of committing eisegesis risk failing their classes. Such loose interpretations may appease scholars in a devotional form, but they rarely take it seriously. The problem with this is that the Bible itself sacralizes and canonizes interpretive techniques that are far from historical. As Greg Boyd points out, “some of the specific interpretive strategies NT authors employed to find Christ in the OT are so culturally conditioned that they are no longer viable for us today.”⁹ Commenting on this topic, Peter Enns says that the New Testament author’s “biblical interpretation was not guided so much as method but by an intuitive, Spirit-led engagement of Scripture, with the anchor being not what the Old Testament author intended, but how Christ gives the Old Testament its final coherence.”¹⁰

This is a form of spiritual eisegesis that allows us to read the Scriptures with the Spirit, creating space for continued progressive revelation on various themes, like abolition. Despite the Bible’s endorsement (or at the very least, permitting) of slavery, most Americans would agree it’s wrong today—and we attribute this modern belief to the conviction of the Spirit. Black liberation theology has given us an inroad to the Spirit’s illumination of Scripture on this topic.

Conclusion

I once woke up from a dream with some lyrics from Twenty One Pilots running through my mind. I immediately sensed that the Holy Spirit was trying to give utterance to some inner turmoil I had at that time through those lyrics, but then I began to question them. Instead of taking the direct spiritual meaning that I knew was intended, I tried to analyze and contextualize the lyrics like a good scholar. As I did this, the lyrics lost their spirituality and became condemning to me instead of a comfort. Fortunately, the Spirit saved me from this conundrum by singing a new song over me when I fell back asleep. The lyrics of this new song were, “I sing between the lines”—in other words, I was supposed to look for the implied meaning, not the direct one. So I sense that the Spirit might call us to read between the lines of Scripture sometimes.

When we read the Bible with the Spirit, we are allotted the ability to see things that we couldn’t see before. We may even be able to ignore passages we can’t unsee, recognizing that though it may be God’s word, it doesn’t seem to match the convictions of God’s Word. When we read the Bible with the Spirit, we can continue to correlate the infallible ink of two millenniums with the same Spirit who wrote it. The canon of Scripture may now be closed off, but the canonizer is not done talking.

As we return to Jesus writing in the sand, we can imagine several answers. There is one historically/exegetically correct answer that we will never know, but as many eisegesis answers as there are people. From a spiritual perspective, there are many correct eisegesis answers that Scripture and the Spirit can guide us into—some answers may even be tailored by the Spirit to comfort the specific reader. But there are also plenty of answers people have come up with that are wrong because they do not match the fruit of the Spirit. How we understand and read the Bible has everything to do with how the Spirit can speak to us on minority issues.

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¹ Shane Claiborne and Tony Campolo, Red Letter Revolution: What If Jesus Really Meant What He Said? (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2011), 87.

² Though both examples here are of women, “Earlier feminist theologians, mostly white middle-class, were made aware by the emerging voice of minority-group feminists that their claims to speak for “womens’ experience” were in fact a female version of the same white male dominance that had always been present.” (Carolyn Osiek, “Reading the Bible as Women,” New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 1 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1994) 183.)

³ Or, to summarize Rudolf Bultmann’s argument, “It is impossible to interpret the Bible (or any other text, for that matter) without presuppositions.” (Moisés Silva, “Contemporary Theories of Biblical Interpretation,” New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 1 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1994) 107-124.)

⁴ Justo González, Santa Biblia: The Bible through Hispanic Eyes (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1996), 64.

⁵ As González says elsewhere, “If ‘catholic’ means ‘according to the whole,’ as long as a part of the whole remains outside, or is brought in without being allowed to speak from its own perspective, catholicity itself is truncated.” (Justo L. González, Out of Every Tribe and Nation: Christian Theology at the Ethnic Roundtable (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1992), 29.)

⁶ Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015), 16.

⁷ Moisés, Silva, “Contemporary Theories of Biblical Interpretation,” New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 1 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1994) 107-124.

⁸ For now on, when I am referring to Jesus as the Word of God, I will capitalize the “W.” I will use a lowercase “w” for the Bible.

⁹ Gregory A. Boyd, The Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Volumes 1 & 2 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017), 113, Kindle Edition. For more on this topic, see all of chapter 3.

¹0 Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, 2nd ed. Audiobook (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015). 7:50:00.