He believed what he taught....

I am in a discussion with a colleague who teaches New Testament at a university in the U.K. We discuss the state of our discipline, how helpful the historical approach to the New Testament was to overcome fundamentalist abuse of the Bible and how much information had become available through careful historical and textual studies. We talk about the value of literary studies. It helped us to understand more about the Bible as text which displays typically rhetorical features of his time. We understand better than before that Paul wrote his letters to churches in Asia Minor to solve specific problems. But literary theory and postmodern insights also made us aware of the constitutive role of the reader in interpreting texts. A married woman in Kenya, Africa will interpret the Bible differently in many ways than a professor in Biblical Studies at a Ivy League University in the United States.

All these approaches and insight have changed the face of our discipline over the last century or two. And yet, it seems as if there is something fundamentally missing. My colleague who was trained at a well-known university, tells me how he, as a student, was so impressed by one of his teachers who spoke about his subject with conviction. He lectured to them like “someone who believed what he was saying.” What impressed him was that his conviction somehow transcended pious, superficial ramblings about the message of the Bible and managed to reflect the transformative thrust of Biblical texts. His lectures represented a spirituality that seemed to reflect something of the claims in the Bible itself and the huge influence of the Bible through the ages. His lectures differed from those of his colleagues whose presentations created the impression that they were factual, informative, though uninvolved material about a distant past.

My colleague did not talk about this from a theoretical perspective. For him it was a matter of a successful professor who succeeded to communicate well with his students – the “Mr Chips” of British schools who managed to stir some interests through his enthusiasm from the thickest of thick pupils.

And yet this discussion is of special relevance for our discipline. For a long time we argued that a Biblical scholar should not interfere with the material he or she is teaching by “imposing” his or her personal convictions on it. He or she needs to teach “objectively” so that can present his materially as trustworthy as possible! We know better now that even the so-called neutral position is driven by ideological convictions. No individual can exclude his or her own convictions from determining. A scholar who was trained in the Lutheran tradition in Germany often read certain parts of the New Testament differently than an Anglican researcher in the U.S.A. Equally clear is that our asssumptions about the Bible – whether it is a historical book or a book with a transformative communication will determine the outcomes of our readings of the Bible. Except for our academic presuppositions our spirituality also determines our reading of the Bible.

We have thought much about reception theory in Biblical Studies. The reader plays a decisive role in interpreting a text. Two people will not interpret a text in the same manner. The question now is: what do we mean by the “reader?” Surely, it also includes the spirituality of the reader. The spiritual interests, concerns, prejudices, convictions of the reader do not only determine his or her attitude towards the text, but the text also forms and nurtures these matters. But how can this be investigated and analysed in an adequate and responsible matter? These are some of the issues that must be determined in Biblical Spirituality. This is important in the light of the Bible’s claims that it has transformative value.

These remarks will be controversial. They need to be motivated in order to avoid misunderstanding. But ultimately it has to do with how we teach our discipline. Do we believe what we teach?