THE THIN CROOKED LINE
EDWIN S. GLEAVES

Anyone honestly concerned with Christian unity on the basis of the Scriptures can hardly fail to encounter the problem of Biblical interpretation. He who sees no problems usually professes that he does not “interpret”; he simply reads the Bible for what it says, or he invokes the well-used dictum of Discipleship, “We speak where the Bible speaks and are silent where the Bible is silent.” But twenty centuries of various interpretations of Holy Writ would seem to belie the finality of such a simple rule, until, at least, it answers the questions, “What does the Bible say, and how does one decide when the Bible really means what it says?”

No facetiousness is implied in these questions; they are dreadfully serious questions on which every religious group must decide its position sooner or later. Among certain theological circles, the mythological view of the Bible certainly puts more emphasis on the “how” than the “what”; but even among more fundamentalist bodies, the lack of agreement upon what the Bible says throws the issue back upon the fact that somewhere along the line, someone is saying, “Yes, this commandment applies, and that one doesn’t.” Why?

The tortuous processes of rationalization through which one religious group may go in order to arrive at a certain interpretation of a given scripture, while another denomination derives precisely the opposite view, are, of course, rooted in psychological and sociological phenomenon which themselves are deserving of intensive study by experts, but at least one reason for the manifold interpretations of Scripture is inherent in an outstanding fact about the Bible itself: that in richness of figurative language-simile, metaphor, personification, symbolism, allegory, etc.—the Bible is unsurpassed in all literature, a fact at least partially recognized by anyone who does not take literally the statements “The Lord is my shepherd” and “I am the Good Shepherd.”

Indeed, the primary approach that the Hebrew people, primitives that they were, took toward theology was a figurative, non-literal one. Rather than dealing in the sophisticated abstractions of philosophy, the Hebrew poet or prophet stated with simple grandeur: “The ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away”; “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God”; “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” “Unto thee will I cry, O Lord my rock”; “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength in whom I trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower.” To the unlearned but imaginative Hebrew, God could best be understood, and his own relationship to God expressed, through images related to his everyday experience. By such a means he gradually began to comprehend that which otherwise would have remained incomprehensible. And amazingly the figurative language of Hebrew poetry is as meaningful to most people today as it was for the lonely shepherd of the Palestinian hills centuries ago.

If we concede even the presence of figurative language in the Old Testament, we have no reason to think that it terminated with the coming of the New Covenant. In fact, the greatest Jewish teacher of all elevated the allegory to its highest form in the parables that He shared with His disciples. He persisted in the metaphorical tradition of the Hebrews: “I am the door”; “I am the light of the world”; “I am the vine”; and to the dismay of the doggedly literal Pharisees he answered questions with riddles, and demonstrated his principles of righteous living through perplexing symbols of his own. When He and His disciples left commands and examples to posterity through figurative statements and symbolic actions they condemned the Pharisees of later generations to eternal dissension among themselves. And when the heirs of a vigorous movement dedicated to restoring unity among all Christians in the name of New Testament Christianity finds itself the progenitor of numerous and contentious splinter groups, then we may safely look for the Pharisaical spirit at work. It is one of the saddest ironies of American religious history that the Church of Christ, which proclaims to the world its dedication to the principle of Christian unity, has never in its history as a separate movement united with anything or anybody.

Again, the reasons for this dissentient spirit are distressingly complex, but at least one reason can be traced, I believe, to our handling of figurative language in the Bible—not that we cannot see the figurative nature of some passages, but that we are simply inconsistent among ourselves and uncharitable toward those who do not share our inconsistencies Even our legalistic principles of example, direct command, and necessary inference do not seem to help when we have already prescribed a special interpretation. For example, Christ, in order to demonstrate humility and service, told His disciples, after washing their feet, “If I then, your Lord and Master have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done for you.” There we have it: the Bible has spoken and if Christ’s example (and statement that it is an example) and command were not enough, Paul mentions it again as a requirement for a widow “to be taken into the number.” Yet today, of all the Protestant groups claiming, in some manner at least, to follow the Bible, only one sect of the Baptists finds in this passage a command and example binding upon Christians today. The rest of us, including the Church of Christ, have simply decided that since footwashing was a custom of the day the command has only a symbolic value and we carry it out in principle by showing our humility in more modern ways.

Footwashing, however, is no isolated case of our updating the scriptures; it is simply the most obvious. The holy kiss, the head covering for women, the ministry of healing, the laying on of hands, anointing the sick with oil, holding all things in common—all go the way of footwashing, and he who tries to carry out these commands literally is, according to our unwritten creed, either wasting his time in his misguided sincerity or making trouble for those of us who know better. The same goes for those of our brethren who insist on believing the parts of Revelation which point to the thousand-year reign of Christ. This too is only symbolic, we say, just as are so many of the numbers cited by the writer of Revelation, and even by Christ himself when he spoke of seventy-times seven But somewhere between these “nonessential” points of doctrine and others on which we “hold the line,” we have drawn a thin and exceedingly crooked line which only the mind of the most discriminating and legalistic observer can perceive. Perhaps the line becomes most tenuous as it defines our views of the Lord’s Supper and baptism.

The Lord’s Supper, it is averred, is basically a symbol (the Catholic claims of transubstantiation to the contrary), a symbol of Christ’s body and blood. The statements “This is my body” and “This is my blood” were not meant to be taken literally; we eat the Lord’s Supper in a token remembrance of the first Communion. But, one may reply, do we actually eat the Lord’s Supper, or do we merely take a pinch of bread and a sip of wine, symbolic of the whole meal itself? (The Corinthians, you remember, went to the other extreme and made the Supper into a gluttonous banquet.) We thus reduce the Lord’s Supper to a symbol of the symbol, letting these fractions of the meal represent the meal which itself is symbolic—an interpretation and a practice which is generally harmonious with most of the rest of the Protestant world. But is it, to repeat, a symbolic act in which a part suffices for the whole—a manner of interpretation which should help us to understand why today only a minority of the Protestant world insists on complete immersion for baptism.

Few scholars deny that Biblical baptism was by immersion, or that the word “baptism” actually means “to dip.” Much of the Protestant world has simply applied the same thinking to baptism that we have to the Lord’s Supper: a part will suffice for the whole, a little water for much; a symbol of the symbol is all that is necessary. If in so doing some groups lose sight of the basic purposes of baptism, they can scarcely be condemned by a group which in our legalistic adherence to the forms of the Lord’s Supper has in the main made a mechanical travesty of what we claim to be our central act of worship.

It is not difficult to see, then, that the simple principles of interpreting symbolically Biblical practices and substituting a part for the whole can quite easily be applied to areas such as church organization (the first century church was only a primitive and symbolic beginning of the great Church to follow), qualification of elders and deacons (these are principles, not absolutes), and several other “matters of faith” which we have bound upon the world at large. Thus does a great segment of Christendom claim that they too are following the principles of the Bible, while rarely claiming, however, a monopoly on understanding.

In other words, it seems unlikely that the Church of Christ has found the final answer to the question of what is figurative in the Bible and what is not—of exactly when and how it speaks to us today.

If as heirs to the noble aims of the Restoration Movement we still seek for unity on the basis of the Scripture, then I believe that we must make a significant breakthrough and admit at least two things: (1) the figurativeness and thus the ambiguity of some of the language of the Bible, and (2) our own fallibility as human beings who still see through a glass darkly. Only by recognizing that we, like all students of the Bible, consciously or unconsciously select, cut, weigh, and pass individual judgment upon the scriptures and their intent will we ever grant this same privilege to others and perhaps offer to at least some of them the hand of fellowship. Such tolerance should force every Christian to examine his position and that of his neighbor with equal scrutiny, and it should jar him from the smug and self-righteous assurance of doctrinal infallibility for which the Pharisees received the most scathing condemnation of our Lord.

—Edwin S. Gleaves was recently a professor of English at David Lipscomb College and Peabody College. He is now at School of Librarianship, University of Washington in Seattle.