Big Questions: How Does My Interpretation Encourage Growth?

This series on “Reading the Bible Better” has been all about the Big Questions that can help us better understand, interpret, and apply the Scriptures in our day-to-day lives. They are also the questions at the root of the various steps of the Integral Hermeneutic method I developed a few years ago: 1. We experience the text by asking ourselves what our reaction to it is and what we feel it is calling us to do; then we encounter the various people or characters involved in the text; 3. we explore by casting a wide net on questions of history, culture, literary and narrative structure, and tradition; we challenge our emerging interpretations by asking tough questions about who the text belongs to, who it might leave out, and what our own cultural blinders might be contributing. Over the next three posts, we’ll look at the last and possibly most controversial step of them all: expand. This step is all about change and transformation. As we read the Bible not just to be informed about God, but primarily to help us be transformed ever more into the likeness of Christ, it makes sense to ensure that the interpretation with which we’re leaving a given text gives us a call to action that both promotes such change and change in the right direction. Today we’ll frame the overall aim of this step in terms of growth, and ask, “How Does My Reading Encourage Growth?”

The idea of growth as a paradigm for practical wisdom or spirituality can make some Christians roll their eyes. It has an association — fair or not — with ‘self-help’ or ‘new age’ spiritualities that are considered — fairly or not — with vapidness and promoting selfishness. But, as I’ve written over and over again here over the years, growth is a core biblical metaphor for the life of faith. There are two major motifs in this: the plant growth and fruitfulness motif and the stages of human life motif. The plant motif is found in texts like Psalm 1 (which imagines the contrast between a wise and foolish life in terms of a well-planted and -tended tree that grows and is fruitful and a parched and withering plant), several of Jesus’ parables (e.g., the Parable of the Sower, and the Harvest (John 4), and a consistent through-line in John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul that a genuinely faithful life bears good fruit. The stages of human life motif can be seen in texts like Ephesians 4, which exhorts its reader to grow up ‘into the full stature of Christ’, and 1 Corinthians 3, Hebrews 5, and 1 Peter 2, which speak of its readers as requiring spiritual ‘milk’ like infants (while in the last of these, it is an appropriate stage for the one to whom the epistle was written, in the first two it’s an admonishment at the lack of growth these immature Christians have demonstrated thus far).

These two overarching metaphors for growth can help us pinpoint some criteria on which to judge Christian growth. Christian growth is:

• Necessary: There’s a sense in some parts of contemporary Christianity that you come to faith in Jesus, are baptized and then you’re ‘in’ and that’s all that matters. These core New Testament texts have none of that attitude. Conversion and baptism are the beginning, not the end. We come in as spiritual infants and are called not to stay that way, to progress from milk to solid food, from infancy to adulthood.
• Christ-oriented: Christian growth is not a general kind of personal growth (though I believe it includes it), but specifically growth that makes us more aligned with the values and ways of Jesus. Therefore anything that would promote selfishness, greed, or a lust for power is not growth. If we are growing, we’ll be more like Christ, full stop. But as we’ve seen time and time again, paradoxically, the more we become like Christ, the more we will grow into the fullest and most unique expression of our own self, within the boundaries of our specific context.
• Fruitful: Christian growth is not about becoming as ‘big’ as possible ourselves — it’s not about hoarding virtue (to say nothing of hoarding wealth or power) — but about growing so we are strong and resilient and thereby able to live fruitful lives, for the life and thriving of the world world. The goal is not to become the biggest tree, but a healthy tree that produces enough apples to feed the whole forest — and make more trees in the process. (Remember: in the body, we call growth for growth’s sake cancer!)

All this has been preamble to the main point of today’s post, which is how we can use growth as an interpretive lens when reading our Bibles. So let’s return to that now.

Once again, we don’t read Sacred Scripture to get information about God, but to encounter God, and be transformed by that encounter. Asking how our emerging interpretation of a passage helps us to grow in the life of faith — to become more like Christ and more fruitful — keeps this front and centre, preventing us from leaving a text with just ideas instead of actions, and more importantly preventing us from leaving a text with a wrong, un-Christian message.

A great example of this for me came about in my study of Jehu’s rebellion (2 Kings 9-10), a strange and troubling story (that even the Old Testament itself is ambivalent about). While my study in the Explore step provided me with some ways forward, it wasn’t until putting the text up against the lens of the example of Jesus that things came together for me. It helped me to settle on Jehu as an anti-Christ figure, someone who had an admirable zeal for God but exercised it in the wrong way. As I wrote at the time:

[This reading] encourages growth by causing us to question how we deal with the energies of a situation: Both Jehu and Jesus are anointed by God for their missions; both are zealous to bring Israel back into a right relationship with God. But even within those similarities, how they dealt with those energies couldn’t have been more different. Jehu chose violence and, even within the very different moral standards of his time, was remembered with ambivalence. Jesus chose the way of the cross and became the saviour of the world. In big and small ways, we too have to choose how we accomplish the things we want to and are called to do in life. Which way will we choose?

Similarly, in my integral study of Romans 1.18-32, one of the primary texts used by conservative Christians to oppose homosexuality, ending the study by asking this question about growth allowed the text to cease being a weapon in the culture wars and come into sharp focus for all faithful Christians, irrespective of their sexuality. Paul’s point in Romans 1 isn’t to establish straight people as righteous and gay people as sinners, but that all people (in his case, both Gentiles and Jews) sin and fall short of God’s desires for the world, and he used standard-for-the-time Jewish anti-Gentile propaganda messaging about Gentile sexual practices, put in the terms of the pop psychology of the era, as an example. As I concluded:

By turning the attention away from the question of whether homosexuality itself is sinful or not, [this reading] also allows gay and lesbian Christians to face the far more compelling and challenging questions of how to use our sexuality wisely and in ways that honour the values of God’s kingdom. To paraphrase Paul, it allows us to move beyond the question of “Is this permitted?” to the more important questions of “Is this edifying?” and “Am I being controlled by this?” (1 Corinthians 6:12). And in this way, it can bear much better fruit in the lives of queer Christians than a strict, quixotic prohibition. As it happens, this also makes the passage newly relevant to straight Christians, since the questions of control and excess in sexuality that Paul asks here are just as applicable to them.

These are just two examples of the power and importance of ensuring our interpretations of a text promote genuine Christian growth. And, again, at the risk of repeating myself, genuine Christian growth — necessary, Christ-oriented, and fruitful — is the whole reason why we read the Bible in the first place. So making sure we ask ourselves how our interpretations promote that growth is important. Otherwise we risk turning the Bible into an idol, something to look at and admire, but without life.

(Note: I’m not going to do reflection questions for the posts on the ‘Expand’ step, since they assume one has already done the heavy lifting of the previous steps.)