Father Richard recounts how Christians received the wisdom of Scripture through hearing it discussed in many different ways:
Most Christians today don’t know that the early centuries of Christianity—through authoritative teachers like Origen, Cyril of Alexandria, Augustine, and Gregory the Great—encouraged as many as seven “senses” of Scripture. The literal, historical, allegorical, moral, symbolic, eschatological (the trajectory of history and growth), and “primordial” or archetypal (commonly agreed-upon symbolism) levels of a text were often given serious weight among scholars. These levels were gradually picked up by the ordinary Christian through Sunday preaching (as is still true today). Multiple interpretations of Scripture came to be expected by those who heard them.
These different senses of Scripture were sometimes compared to our human senses of hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, and touching, which are five distinct ways of knowing the same thing, but in very different “languages.” After both the Reformation and the Enlightenment, Western Europeans reduced the multiple ways of knowing to one way for all practical purposes—the supposedly rational/literal/historical. At this point, we have largely compacted and limited the Bible to this single sense for several centuries, in both its Catholic and Protestant forms.
Our bandwidth of spiritual access to the Bible was consequently severely narrowed, it seems to me—and as many would say—to the least spiritually helpful level. That something supposedly literally happened in one exact way, in one moment of time, does not, of itself, transfer the experience to now, me, or us. I believe that such transference is the transformative function of any spiritual text.
The narrow, rational/literal/historical approach largely creates an antiquarian society that prefers to look backward instead of forward. In my experience, it creates transactional religion much more than transformational spirituality. It idealizes individual conformity and group belonging over love, service, or actual change of heart.
Actually, literalism was discredited from the beginning of the New Testament by the inclusion of four Gospel accounts of the same Jesus event, which differ in many ways. Which is the “inerrant” one?
Jesus repeatedly chose to teach through story and parable, revealing what God was “like”:
The earlier centuries of Christianity were much closer to the trans-rational world of Jesus and his storytelling style of teaching (which does not lend itself to dogmatic or systematic theology). The Gospel says, “He would never speak to them except in parables” (Matthew 13:34). The indirect, metaphorical, symbolic language of a story or parable seems to be Jesus’s preferred way of teaching spiritual realities.
Almost all of Jesus’s parables begin with the same phrase: “The reign of God is like….” Jesus fully knows he is speaking in simile, metaphor, story, and symbol. But in recent centuries, many Christians have not granted him that freedom, and thus we miss or avoid many of his major messages. We are much poorer for it.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, What Do We Do with the Bible? (CAC Publishing, 2018), 9–12, 14–15.
Image credit and inspiration: Image credit and inspiration: Paréj Richárd, untitled (detail), 2021, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Our relationship with the Bible may shift—sometimes clear, sometimes mysterious—yet still holding the promise of a greening, growing thing.
Story from Our Community:
I am anticipating this year’s focus on Scripture. After leaving an evangelical community after forty years, I stopped reading Scripture on a regular basis because of lingering interpretations that I found disturbing. I am looking forward to developing another set of eyes and ears for listening to the Word of God in my heart. Thank you for your help as I move forward in my spiritual walk!
—Andrea C.
