Guest Blogger Series: Part 10

During a busy academic conference, I sit in on one of my favorite AAR groups, the Society for Scriptural Reasoning. The main idea of the group is that Jews, Christians, and Muslims gather together and read each other’s texts, having them interpreted for us by those who profess that faith’s text but open to the inquiries and thoughts of those from other faiths. It’s a provocative way to do inter-religious dialogue-a way that simultaneously honors the integrity of each tradition and opens the traditions to each other. Many of the folks in SSR are friends; a couple are mentors. And one of the great things about SSR is that it’s a chance to do some heavy intellectual lifting without quite as much self-promotion as you find in some other academic groups. Anyway, we’re sitting in small groups doing our thing when a Jewish friend makes a comment about a passage from 2 Timothy that we’ve been looking at. Pow! The text becomes scripture as my Bible surprises me. Next thing I know, I’m eye-deep in a fresh vision of the practicality of 2 Timothy 3:16.

I’m sitting in worship (which, between teaching in a seminary and having a wife who is a pastor, I tend to do a lot of), kind of half-attending to what’s going on (which I also tend to do a lot of for the same reasons) when something odd strikes me about the text, which is out of 1 Chronicles, of all places! Bam! A Bible-whack to the side of the head and a sudden stream-of-consciousness project forms in my mind about how I’ll teach an ethics class that next hour-and now I’ve got ½ hour to re-prepare the already nicely-prepared-but-clearly-no-longer-adequate class.

I’m reading one of my favorite theologians writing on one of his favorite topics when that theologian says something almost tangential to the topic. Whap! All of a sudden, I’ve got the last two verses of the last book of the Bible to deal with again-and the tension between an original ending that isn’t an ending (“Come, Lord Jesus!”) and a second ending that is one (“Amen.”) becomes a trope for investigating how Christians understand their place in time.

That’s more than enough. You get the picture: my Bible on a bungee and me with various bruises of the absolute best kind. And here are three observations about these contusion-causing events: First, and rather unsurprisingly, the farther I get from it, the more it shocks me when it comes whipping at me. Second, the more these Bible-slaps happen, the more provocative and illuminating their results. I’m always a slightly different (and hopefully richer) reader after such an event than I was before. And third, the most surprising things happen when I don’t enter the situation thinking I’m supposed to read the Bible in a certain way (devotionally, via historical-critical lenses, for pastoral care content, as an ethicist, etc.). So now I make fewer assumptions about how I’m supposed to read it or what its benefits will be. Which is, I suppose, the way a Christian opposition to works-righteousness applies to reading the Christian text. I imagine those three observations are related-and that they have to do with the always shocking quality of a revelation that is always about more than texts but never entirely disconnected from texts. And I guess that’s what you get when there’s a bungee on your Bible.

Mark Douglas is the Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Columbia Theological Seminary. Mark’s interests include ethics in neo-orthodox theologies, medical and business ethics, the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism, and the role of religion in political philosophy. He’s also pretty good at frisbee golf. Mark co-edits an online journal for congregations on theology, church, and culture found called At This Point.