I’m teaching a pop-up Sunday morning class this summer, mostly for the folks whose regularly scheduled classes don’t meet again until back-to-school time. We call it Food 4 Thought, in part because there are bakery treats each week, and because we ask four questions of the Bible passage from worship that day. Three of the four questions are exactly the kind of thing you might expect in a Bible study. “What more would you like to know about it?” That’s when I offer some insights into the background, maybe a key Hebrew or Greek term. There’s also the question that asks, “What do you gladly receive from this passage at this moment of your journey?” That’s important if Bible study is going to impact our spirituality. And lastly, “What more do you hope to explore in terms of learning and/or living?” Bible study should always attend to learning and living.
All three of those questions generate enough conversation to fill the hour, and they’re beneficial questions on a person’s journey. But it’s the other question that perhaps generates the most discussion: “What bothers you or gives you pause in these verses?” Just so you know, this question serves as companion to the one about what you gladly receive, and both come from the French philosopher and Christian thinker, Paul Ricoeur. He had fancier names, a hermeneutics of suspicion and reception. Hermeneutics is the task of interpretation, and Ricoeur encouraged both welcoming a text and pushing back against it.
I bring this up because there’s a decent chance you were raised not to question the Bible, just receive it. Or if questioning was allowed, it was only to be taught a simple solution to disarm the text in question. In recent weeks, I have had several persons in our church describe their religious upbringing as stifling of inquiry and dismissive of other traditions with different views. To question was to betray the faith handed down through the centuries. Maybe it was how to read the book of Revelation, the practice of baptizing infants, passages about women being quiet in church, same-sex marriage, the list is long.
When one of our daughters was in middle school, she went on a weekend retreat with other girls, sleeping over at the house of one of them. There would be time for fun, food, but also Bible study. About halfway through the weekend, our daughter called home, that we should come get her. Now! I figured she was sick, but when she got in the car, she said they didn’t appreciate her asking hard questions about the Bible. It would be best if she left. Our daughter went on to become a religion major and unwavering feminist, of which I’m quite proud. But I was never prouder than on that weekend long ago.
It’s tragic how the damage done by narrow-minded judgmental churches in our youth can last a lifetime. The way I see it, we should simultaneously welcome the Bible and Church teaching into our lives while pushing back, asking questions. To practice either of these in isolation seems short-sighted to me, even dangerous.
