HUMAN AND SPIRITUAL JOURNEY AS SUBJECTIVE, PERSONAL, AND EXPERIENTIAL

The Bible features breathing and alive words not because it contains a single “correct” meaning associated with the texts, but precisely because it allows multiple varying interpretations and meanings based on the readers’ contexts and times. In my limited and humble mind, I love the generosity and expansiveness of such God in and behind the Bible. God does not and would not waste time and energy to test if humanity would understand one single right meaning behind each text within the Bible. That would be an extremely petty and small-minded God. What confounds the matter is that humanity is never isolated from countless myriads of cultures and languages. Not to mention the different epochs of times humanity existed over many centuries. . . It seems that God allows the bible as a medium to dance between partners of divine meanings with human involvement. In fact, God expects peoples in different cultures and times to give their “best” meanings and allow the Scripture to speak and dialogue where peoples are. God expects us to earnestly engage, not find one “correct” meaning, as life in real time happens and moves across time and experiences.

In this sense, the Word of God is living and active (Hebrews 4:12), whoever we are, engaging in the multiplicity of interpretations and meanings. Christopher Smith uses “pervasive interpretative pluralism.”[1] (It is also this very idea of the multiplicity of interpretations that we as humanity need each other.[2]) The very life and action of the Word of God takes place in the actual lives of the readers, being invited to converse, and dialogue with how the authors’ experiences and description of God with ours. This way, we are engaging both the original authors and us, not overlooking one over the other. What is required is the transparency and authenticity of the readers. God seems content that we engage, not necessarily to find one right answer and arrive at one certain dictation for all humanity.

It is not about whether we read the Bible or not that is important. Rather it is how we read the Bible that is critical. We are to engage our life, more precisely our experiences of God in our life and the life and authors’ experiences as how they understood God in the events of their lives. However, this interpretative process is not neat but messy and complex and is what Christopher Smith describes the Bible as “exponentially multivocal, polysemic, and multivalent, [and] semantically indeterminate.” I love the Bible not because it is the most lucid instruction manual or the air-tight rule book that man has ever seen across all cultures and all times but because God seems to expect us to dialogue with the Bible from our personal experiences using our interpretative lens of life wherever and whenever we are. The very process of how the Bible came together (canonization) and how the Bible went through a series of edits (think 200,000 to 400,000 times according to Bart D. Ehrman) lend to the observation I am making above.

N.T. Wright imaginatively captures, “We are listening, not to a single voice, not even to a single choir in harmony, but to several choirs singing different songs with some protest groups jamming in the wings.”[3] The fact that there are differences alone does not and should not divide the people of God, regardless of religious and cultural background. It is the inability and stubbornness of insistence that there should not be differences that divide us. This inability and the refusal to recognize and celebrate the differences betrays the very reading and hermeneutical reflection of the Scripture.

Then what interpretative filter are we to use? My conviction is love. While it is true that love is both ethereal and substantial, for love to be love though, it must be grounded, contextual, and practical. Ramon Llull set the grand context of love, “We are born out of love. We live in love. We are destined for love.”[4] Llull speaks of where we come from, how we ought to live, and where we will go. This framework is parallel to God who is Love creating us in His image and the apostle John charging us to pursue being in union with God who is Love through Christ. We are already love, living in love, and pursuing perfect love. It is out of this context we interpret the Scriptures and have the Scriptures converse with our lives.

Religion and Poetry

Relatedly but in a slightly tangential line, Richard Rohr connects poetry and religion.

In most of human history, poetry and religion were almost the same thing. Poetry was the only language worthy of religion. Good poetry doesn’t try to define an experience as much as it tries to give us the experience itself, just as good liturgy should do. It seeks to awaken our own seeing, hearing, and knowing. It does not give us the conclusion as much as teach us a process whereby we can know for ourselves. It does not overexplain and destroy astonishment.[5] (italicized mine)

No human being is simple. Every person is riddled with complexity and resides in a land full of contradictions, conflict, and irony. On top of every human being, add cultural, geopolitical, and generational layers of human societies at every conceivable level, then what we have is profound complexity in the most unimaginable immense proportion. No wonder life is and feels complex! No one can force such an intricate web of complexity into a simple and predictable prescribed grid of knowing and understanding. There simply is no way I can make the statement that black and white.

The fact of the matter is that I do not have to see far beyond myself to know how complex, weird, contradictory, and ironic the world is, as well as how amazingly beauty-ful, wonder-ful, and grace-ful the world is and I am. This is where poetry enters in to save, uplift, and tell me I am not alone in this human endeavor. I can choose to listen to poets of the past and now to draw parallels and sit at their feet. I can draw parallels because “what is most personal is what is most universal.” That is precisely what good poetry does, making the connection between what is personal experiential truth for me and what is universal perennial collective wisdom for all humanity.

[1] Christopher Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture.

[2] The existence of such a hermeneutical community needs to proliferate and multiply without the historically rooted pull toward standardization and propriety. To me, ASFM has been serving that purpose unflinchingly.

[3] N. Tom Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

[4] Ramon Llull, The Book of Lover and the Beloved

[5] Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality