Over a decade ago I wrote the chapter on Genesis for the Global Bible Commentary. I still believe that my suggestion there that Genesis is intended to be read as dialectic rather than command is not only correct, but also vital in the context of our contemporary world and its realities:
Perhaps Genesis needs to come with a health warning. Do not treat it as history;
do not use it as a prophetic blueprint, or as an unconditional charter for a specific modern political arrangement in the Middle East. Above all read this book, which explores the development of an “adult” relationship between God and humanity, with the reflective heart of an adult. It is in some ways unhelpful that so many of Genesis’ stories Noah and his flood, Joseph and his brothers are ones which we first came to know and love as children, for in reality Genesis is quite a dangerous book to use with young people. We risk going wrong if we try (as is often done
in Christian education) to use the patriarchs simplistically as moral exemplars.
To read Genesis properly requires us to stand at a slight distance from the text, and explore it quizzically. It provides questions rather than offers easy answers.
Throughout its 50 chapters Genesis has teased out the relationship between two and one. It is notable that the last mention of God in this book (Gen 50:20) reminds us that God uses human beings to work his purposes. It is not good for human beings—or even God—to be one and alone, yet being “two” is only life-giving if both partners are prepared to engage with each other in a way which risks mutual change. But are we ever likely to be brave enough to treat the Bible itself as such a dialogue partner, and is it a message which protagonists in the Middle Eastern maelstrom will ever be ready to hear?8
8 Clare Amos, “Genesis,” in Daniel Patte (ed.), Global Bible Commentary (Nashville:
Abingdon, 2004), 15f.
Implications of Divine
Communication in the Christian Tradition: The case of 1 Samuel 1–7
Kenneth Mtata
Gerhard Ebeling, a twentieth-century German Lutheran theologian, is said to have summarized the history of the church as essentially the history of biblical interpretation. One could say, on the basis of Ebeling’s compelling argument and in the spirit of interfaith hermeneutics, that the history of the Abrahamic religions is one of negotiating the interpretations of divine communication. In the Christian context, Ebeling’s conclusion can be understood in two ways: it may mean that “many of the significant turning points in ecclesiastical (church) history had to do with conflicting interpretations over the meaning of particular texts and over the methods of biblical interpretation,” or that “the history of the church is essentially the story of how the church interprets scripture ‘bodily,’
through the shape of its community life.”1 Such differing interpretations of meaning and the tentative interpretive consensuses reached from time to time play a key role in the internal vitality of religious communities and help form the way religious communities engage with contemporaneous forces—both for good or evil. In other words, the interpretation of sacred texts transforms readers who in turn transform their relationship with their environment—even though this transformation is not unidirectional.
This transformative dimension of the Word of God is presupposed in the self-understanding of diverse Christian communities, including my own Lutheran tradition. In this tradition, the Holy Scriptures constitute one of the main “divine media of salvation,” salvation in a broader sense being the
1 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 418.
ultimate form of transformation. The scriptures are also highly regarded for their theological epistemological function, that is, they are considered the primary “source and norm of human knowledge of God.”2 Even though this knowledge about God is not fixed, without a momentarily fixed body of knowledge or claims about the divine, communities of faith cannot be formed and communities of transformation cannot be established. According to this understanding, strong in the Lutheran tradition, the church or believing community is a creation “of the Word (ubi verbum, ibi ecclesia).”3
The underlying assumption in this Christian tradition is that God speaks and in a language human beings can understand. The consequence of this divine communication is transformation or change. For this reason, in the Hebrew Bible, which is also the Christian Old Testament, God spoke in the beginning and chaos was transformed into order (Genesis 1–2). When chaos returned in the form of injustice, immorality or idolatry, God would send out God’s messengers, the prophets, who would restore the covenant relationship through God’s word. This divine communication was not always benevolent as it was, for example, in the Garden of Eden when human beings were given the privilege to eat and enjoy one another’s company. In the narratives of the flood or of Sodom and Gomorrah, for example, divine communication had disastrous consequences.
God is understood in this Christian tradition to speak in two ways. God sometimes spoke in kindness and grace and promise but, at other times, in judgment and justice. In both ways, the people of God would rather have a God who spoke than one who was silent. So the Psalmist cried, “God, do not keep silence; do not hold your peace or be still, O God!” (Ps 83:1).
Divine communication in this and other psalms is tantamount to the active intervention of the divine in the ordinary lives of creation.
I think that this is where the problem begins. If God human agency to actualize God’s communication, be it through a prophet or through interpretation of the written sacred texts, the vision of transformation had better be in ways with which we can identify. Transformation or change is required by a value judgment of the present situation. The Holy Scriptures provide faith communities with such value judgments. As has been pointed out by Ebeling, visions of transformation tend to diverge, sometimes violently. The problem is that in reading the Holy Scriptures, “hermeneutical
2 Hans-Peter Grosshans, “Lutheran Hermeneutics: An Outline,” in Kenneth Mtata (ed.), “You have the Words of Eternal Life”: Transformative Readings of the Gospel of John from a Lutheran Perspective, LWF Documentation 57/2012 (Minneapolis:
Lutheran University Press, 2012), 23–46, here 25.
3 Vítor Westhelle, Transfiguring Luther: The Planetary Promise of Luther’s Theology (Oregon: Cascade Books, 2016), 18.
communities” may find divine communication that was violent and can use such readings to sanction their own destructive transformation agendas.
Transformative reading of the scriptures is therefore, for me, a deliberate predetermination of the boundaries of the positive changes in individual and communal life that are possible in response to the demands or promises of the Holy Scriptures. Such visions of positive transformation are not necessarily inventions of Christian communities but can be traced throughout the Bible.
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout … so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it (Isa 55:10–11).
The transformative promise is that “the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken” (Isa 25:8). This God will make God’s home among human beings and dwell with them; “they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away” (Rev 21:3–4).