PERSONAL, communal ‘lenses’
Why confusion, why so many churches?
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By Ed Rybarczyk “Why do the different kinds of churches have different doctrines? After all, they’re all supposedly reading the same Bible. Why are there so many arguments inside the Church, among Christians? Don’t they read the same book? It makes me wonder, why are there so many churches?” While a college theology professor, I commonly heard those questions, questions that were typically driven by lament. Especially in our pluralistic and pluralizing Western society those are fitting questions. Shouldn’t the church be on the same exact page about everything? One of my own graduate profs put it this way, “There is no naked reading of the Bible.” (Now that I have your attention, let’s see what that really means!) No one reads the Bible in a vacuum. We all bring our own historic era, culture, language, traditions, values, and understandings about truth to the biblical text. We also bring our own pre-existing beliefs about goodness, beauty, and love to the text. And we should be honest: there’s just no way to read the Bible apart from all that we ourselves are and all that we bring to the biblical text. We necessarily read through the “lenses,” the perceptional field of vision, that we already use, or better the “lenses” that we already are.
38 May / June 2022 | Christian Living
So what normally happens in Bible reading? We individuals read a chapter or passage as though the author’s reality was a one-for-one with our reality, or as though Jesus or Paul or King David were then feeling precisely what we ourselves are now feeling when he said what he said or did what he did. We assume we know exactly what the author is saying even though he lived in a historical-cultural setting vastly different from our own. And as each of us reads the text – indwelling our own respective frame of reference – we come up with interpretations that evenly-fit our immediate personal picture. Albert Schweitzer (d. 1965) put it like this: each theologian (we could say each believer) walks over to the well of history and peers down inside. Each one is hoping to see the “real” Jesus inside the deep hole. But what always happens? As the theologian (or Bible reader) looks down into the dark cavern he finally discerns the surface of the water on the bottom. And what does he see? His own face looking back up at him! In short? When each of us goes looking for Jesus’s identity in the Bible, the common tendency is to see Him through our own grid, to assume that his historical-cultural reality was a one-forone with our own reality. What a happy coincidence that Jesus’s identity corresponds directly to our own! That’s what happens at the personal level. Let’s move to the communal level.
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