How to Read the Bible Richard Holloway

How to Read the Bible
Richard Holloway, Granta Books, 2006

One of the greatest challenges facing the Church today is the nature of the Bible's authority and how to get this across to ordinary Christians in the pew.

As Richard Holloway points out in his introduction, very few are aware of what he calls the "hermetic circularity" upon which claims for the Bible's authority rests. The Bible is almost universally regarded as the inspired source of God's revelation to humanity. Should anyone dare query on what authority this claim is made, the response is that the Bible says so.

That this is a circular and therefore invalid argument is not a recent objection, touted by a revolutionary minority of modern misfits eager to destroy millennia of tradition. It was, as the author points out, made by none other than Matthew Tindal in 1730, with these words:

It's an odd jumble to prove the truth of a book by the truth of the doctrines it contains, and at the same time conclude these doctrines to be true because contained in that book.

The truth is that the Bible has been radically deconstructed by Christians themselves over the past three centuries. The traditional doctrine of its divine inspiration can no longer be sustained - except by intellectually myopic ideologues.

Equally true, however, is that it's a whole lot easier to rest on the warm hearth of traditional teachings than to stride out into a raw wilderness of biblical uncertainty. When that adventure is embarked upon, one joins those who

... accord some authority to contemporary understandings of human nature, [and] hold that the Bible should be a partner in dialogue with humanity, not a dictator over it.

Given this tricky background, it takes considerable skill to advise others how to read the Bible - and that in a mere 120 pages.

The test of Bishop Holloway's skill for me was whether or not he could keep my interest. I'm reasonably well-read in the subject. At any rate, I didn't expect to be surprised by anything he might have to offer. As it turned out I was pleasantly surprised both by the method he used to approach this huge subject and by what he wrote [1].

The easy stuff is disposed of in his introduction. A distinction is made between factual discourse and muthos or "myth" - the latter being the lens through which the Bible is best illuminated:

... the Bible has intrinsic not extrinsic authority; it carries the power of its meaning within itself, like any great text.

Holloway details the parts of the Bible, deals briefly with hypotheses about its documents and attributed authors, and focuses on the question of the authenticity of the gospels.

But how to present that large compendium we call the Bible? It would be easy to skip over the surface of this vast subject and in doing so miss its essence.

The author's solution is a good one. He selects short passages from each of ten major themes and uses them to convey the spirit of the Bible as he sees it. It would not have done to attempt a technical survey.

This approach has its risks, I suppose. For unless the themes are given life they could all-too-easily crumble into dust. Holloway avoids this difficulty in part because he is a naturally good preacher and partly because he links the themes as they stretch through time. The preacher provides the human element, the anecdotes we all love to listen to. The scholar recognises the common factors which link us in the 20th century to the struggles of people just like ourselves millennia ago.

One example must suffice. The problem of suffering is as old as the hills. It might be tempting to summarise important contributions over the centuries to the debate about it. It is so central that few theologians of any worth have ever been able to sideline it. Holloway writes:

The problem of suffering is notoriously difficult issue for religions that believe in the existence of a good and loving creator who is transcendentally separated from his creation.

Whatever Spinoza or Jerry Falwell might say about the problem, none says it better than the author of the Book of Job, that famous novel written millennia before Sterne's Tristram Shandy (considered by some to have been the first true novel). Holloway anchors Job to the tragedies of the Twin Towers and the 2004 Asian tsunami so that you and I can glimpse the impact which apparently meaningless suffering can have on human beings. We must empathise before we can think things through to any effect.

But it is the author's treatment of Job's story which proves so interesting. Some may share my difficulty is sorting out the twists and turns of the elaborate debates between Job and his friends. Holloway brings out the main elements with an admirable clarity combined with sensitivity. Even though at the end of it all neither Job nor the Bible resolve the problem of suffering, there is hope. Implicit in the Book of Job

... there is another response to the problem. Those who follow this ... way find all theological justifications of suffering morally repugnant, but this does not lead them to abandon God. Instead, they respond to suffering practically by doing all they can to alleviate it. For the rest they choose to remain silent in its presence.

This is an interesting and challenging read which I can recommend to the amateur biblical learner like myself. It will also inform and delight the ordinary reader of the Bible who is seeking to inform and invigorate his or her Christian life in the world.
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[1] If I were to carp somewhat, it would be to say that Holloway could perhaps take a little more care with his expression. A book like this is not meant for academics. It's language should therefore be simple and its FOG Index low.

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