Exegesis

• "A text without a context is a pretext for a proof text."

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• -D.A. Carson

Friday is off to a good start. I had a nice call with Jim, and the morning fog is giving way to a sunny, cool September day out there. I may have to take a walk later.

• Not sure what these little square are that I see on my screen next to the text. Do you see them? My mastery of technology is always tenuous.

But my skills at exegesis are even more so.

Over the last couple days a friend and I have exchanged thoughts about a passage in the third chapter of Genesis, the scene in the Garden of Eden where God warns Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of knowledge "or you will die". How could they have known what "die" even meant, being newly created and blissfully unaware of a concept that, apparently, didn't extend to them at that moment? Given their inability to grasp the consequences, how could they be punished with pain and toil and being expelled forever from Eden? God seemed surprised at the transgression, seemed not to see his own role in setting up his creation for failure. Which, in my muddled, B- level theological thinking, means the sin Jesus atoned for on the cross may well have been God's, and not ours.

"Nonsense" came my friend's reply (well, he was a little nicer than that). The writers of that very old story, no doubt passed down as an oral tradition told around a desert campfire, surely weren't thinking of sin and atonement--we mostly have Augustine to thank for the notion of original sin, and this story predates his writings by well over a thousand years. No, this is more like Kipling's Just So Stories, explaining how the rhinoceros got his skin, or the leopard his spots. Here, the stories answer the questions of why childbirth is painful, why men toil, and why we all die. That structure of sin, repentance, and redemption we've built around it is all about the Christian lens through which we view the text, and not the intent of the authors.

But aren't we supposed to see a divine message rise out of the pages of the Bible, through the intervention of the Holy Spirit? "Hear what the Spirit is saying to the church", we say on Sundays after the first two readings. In turn this raises the question of why this sort of inspired reading is limited to scripture. I mean, our lectionary includes some pretty heavy stuff---bears being summoned to mangle little boys (2 Kings 2:23-24), an enemy king getting his head nailed to the floor with a tent peg as he sleeps (Judges 4-5), and a parable about a returning king who orders that his disloyal subjects be executed in front of him (Luke 19:27). What do you reckon the Spirit is saying to his church in those horrific stories?

And what's to stop us from discerning the voice of the Holy Spirit in a Jason Isbell song lyric, or Byron's poetry, or Tolstoy in The Death of Ivan Ilyich? Or in the sounds of the birds outside our balcony, or of the highway at night?

Those words in the Hebrew Bible were never meant to carry the weight we heap onto them, were never meant to serve as the foundation for this Rube Goldberg soteriological device we've concocted over two millennia. "The past is a foreign country; they do things differnently there", as L.P. Hartley famously said over 70 years ago. We could have made all sorts of things out of the texts we inherited in our Judeo-Christian tradition. Whatever direction we chose to go in that exercise belongs to us, and not the people who took it all down so very long ago.