Big Questions: Whose Text is It?

Postmodernism has often gotten a bad rap in Christian circles. But to my mind, it has offered us many wonderful gifts — not the least of which has been the lifting up of voices that have not historically been heard in the Church (at least in the past few hundred years): especially the voices of women, People of Colour, and communities marginalized by economics, colonialism, and a myriad of other factors. As I’ve previously noted about this phenomenon:

Feminism questioned the historical dominance of men and masculinity, the colonized world questioned the West’s racism and imperialism, environmentalism questioned the ‘objectivity’ of modern scientific inquiry, which sought to understand the world as a collection of parts to investigated rather than as a whole, and on and on.

Far from trying to tear down the Bible (as they are often accused of), these critiques help us to sharpen our understanding of the text, refuse us easy or trite readings, and expand our awareness of a text and its impacts. Today we’ll be looking at the first big question I associate with such movements: Whose text is it anyway? That is to say, whose perspective are we hearing? Whose are we not hearing? What might God be saying to them?

These questions are important because they can help us get out of our echo-chambers. Diversity isn’t just a buzzword, but is beneficial because it can help us to make better decisions by allowing more perspectives at the table. Sometimes we don’t see something, or make certain assumptions simply because our own experiences have primed us to perceive the world in certain ways. For example, the feminist critique has demonstrated not that there is an absence of feminine language for God in the Bible, but an abundance of it that had simply been skipped over by the tradition’s predominantly male interpreters. Similarly, Black theologians’ talk of Jesus being Black were not claims about his racial identity, but about recognizing similarities between Jesus’ experiences and those of Black folk, between ‘the cross and the lynching tree’, as James Cone powerfully put it. And theologians coming from an ecological perspective rightly questioned the predominant interpretations of the commandment to “have dominion over the earth,” and what a genuinely “biblical” understanding of our relationship to our environment might be.

Whose text is it anyway? Does it ‘belong’ to men — written by men, to be read, interpreted, and applied by men? Or does it belong to women too? Does it belong to the White community that enslaved Black folk? Or does it belong to those enslaved persons too — who saw in the Exodus, the Psalms, and the Gospels the very promise of their liberation?

More than that, whose experiences are we seeing in the text, and just as importantly, whose experiences aren’t we seeing in the text itself? What might God have to say to Ishmael and the Canaanites and all the others who weren’t ‘chosen’ by God in our stories? The Bible actually has a surprising amount to say, and it isn’t what we might expect from the tenor of the main narratives.

Again, the point of these questions is not to cast doubt on the Bible, but to help us better understand it and its message by clarifying who is speaking, to whom it is speaking, and by opening our eyes to who might be missing from that equation so we can reflect on them through the lens of the Gospel to get a more rounded reading of our text.

Reflection Questions

1. Thinking of the well-known stories below, whose story are we getting? And whose perspectives aren’t we getting?

a) Jacob and Esau (Genesis 25-28)

b) David and Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11-12)

c) The Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15)

2. The Gospel accounts (e.g., Matthew 27.55-61, Luke 23.26-31 & 49-56, John 19.25-27) seem to highlight Jesus’ female disciples’ presence at his crucifixion. Why might that be? Is there anything else you notice about the people named in these stories?