Sacred Texts: Scripture as a Communal Event
Editor’s Note: FāVS has launched a new series on Sacred Texts. In most religious traditions they are considered sacred because it is believed they were divinely revealed or inspired, and they form part of an authoritative canon. In this series we ask how scripture is used in particular traditions and if it’s necessary or dispensable. Is it subject to interpretation? What is its purpose? How have scriptures been used to promote or justify certain types of behavior? And, do ancient scriptures have any relevance today?
Commentary By Walter Hesford
One of my students, a devout Christian Scientist, wanted to write a paper on the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on Mary Baker Eddy’s “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” which itself is considered scripture by Christian Scientists. So I thought I should read Eddy’s work.
While my student found it inspiring, I found it bland.
I’ve had the same experience trying to read the Book of Mormon, some Hindu Vedas and (forgive me, Pete Haug) some Baha’i texts.
Here’s a hypothesis: since scriptures are shaped by and give shape to faith communities, unless we have experience of them as a communal event, they are likely to taste bland.
Sure, we may have meaningful individual engagements with scriptures. I, for example, enjoy having my mind reoriented with ancient Taoist and Zen Buddhist texts. And I devoutly read every morning a passage from the journals of Henry David Thoreau, one of my literary saints.
Since scriptures are shaped by and give shape to faith communities, unless we have experience of them as a communal event, they are likely to taste bland.
Walter Hesford
Still, I contend that the scriptures we experience communally are most tasteful.
I speak of “taste” since I grew up in a Lutheran community in which we were encouraged to “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” biblical scripture. So as I kid I had a visceral relationship with the Bible, sometimes going so far as to chew up savory passages. Usually, though, I was content to take in scripture with my eyes and ears along with my congregation.
Taking in scripture through the ears is especially important. In pre-literate and semi-literate communities, scripture is of course primarily an aural experience and as such can be enormously persuasive.
I could not begin to understand the power of the Quran until I heard a recitation in Arabic of some of its early suras. Not that I understood the Arabic, but I could intuit how this scripture could reach through the ear into the heart and soul of the faith community.
Hearing scripture may bind a community together and strengthen it. In Conservative Judaism, when the synagogue congregation completes a public reading of a book of the Torah, they exclaim, “Be strong, be strong, let us strengthen one another.” The primary religious function of scripture may be to strengthen the community of faith.
Scripture’s strengthening binds, I would argue, need to be loose enough to give room for conflicting perspectives, questioning, even doubt, in order for it be inclusive.
A remarkable example of inclusive scripture comes toward the climax of the extraordinarily beautiful Navajo “Night Chant Ceremony,” a nine-day healing event filled with ritual, dance and poetry. According to Washington Matthews’ translation, just as healing powers have successfully been brought from afar into the center to effect a cure, someone is given to say something like “Perhaps this is not so.”* In this way, skeptics who may be thinking of themselves as excluded are brought into the community.
Fortunately, for Jews and Christians who experience their Bibles as scripture, they are filled with lots of room for different opinions, for endless interpretive wrestling matches. Composed over many centuries by various communities with various agendas, Hebrew scripture naturally embraces a wide variety of perspectives. Even the four Gospels of Christian scripture, probably composed within a single century, represent Jesus in very different ways, as they were written to speak to different communities.
Scriptures should have the texture of a chunky stew. I’m wary of scriptures with the texture of a smooth puree, in which all thoughts are homogenous.
Walter Hesford
We can be thankful that the communities of scholars who put together the biblical canons, who decided which books gave authentic witness, thought it important to preserve diversity. Scriptures should have the texture of a chunky stew. I’m wary of scriptures with the texture of a smooth puree, in which all thoughts are homogenous.
The interpretation of scripture has also always been a communal event. In recent years, the scholarship of Latin American Liberation theologians, of feminist theologians and of Black theologians have greatly enriched Christian scripture for me, making it more meaningful, more inclusive.
I assume many FāVS readers have similar evolving relationships with the scriptures they experience communally.
Bon appetite!
*Matthews’ English translation of the Navajo “Night Chant Ceremony” is replete with respectful gaps and, doubtless, inaccuracies. Gaps and inaccuracies in translations of scriptures from ancient times and from different cultures are, paradoxically, signs of their authenticity.
