When I was working on my first Master’s degree in Biblical Studies, a classmate and I were sitting in my living room, tussling over the meaning of a certain passage of Scripture. We were sharing life experiences, considering nerdy stuff like grammar, examining the context, and basically wrestling with the passage together in light of our varied lives and cultures. We were having a good time. Then his wife chimed in rather haughtily, “You scholar types… always trying to figure out what a Bible passage means. I just read it and believe it.” I hardly knew what to say. “I just read it, and believe it”?! What does that even mean? My wife, Melodie, asked her, “How do you know what to believe if you haven’t taken the time to even figure out what it’s really saying?” I knew there was a reason I married her.
When you tell people that the Bible is God’s Word, written by inspired prophets to teach the people of God about God, man, and reality, helping them to find the path of life and to avoid the path of death, some of them get the idea that wrestling with Scripture shows a lack of faith or even arrogance. But what if I told you that God expects you to wrestle faithfully with Scripture?[1] Would that surprise you? That, however, IS the way of wisdom.
I am fully invested in the inspiration of the Scriptures. My attitude toward them is “Let God be true and every man a liar.” I trust the Bible more than I trust myself, more than I trust self-proclaimed and commonly recognized experts, more than I trust my mother and father. And let me tell you, that’s a lot of trust. I believe that in every single place that Scripture and I are in conflict, it is Scripture that is right. So I must wrestle with it.
Does that seem a contradiction? It’s not. To say, “I just read it and believe it!” is not a statement of faith; it is a statement of arrogance; it is to say, I’m so smart and soooo wise that I know what Scripture means and obey it perfectly with just a casual glance. It confuses acceptance of the truth of a passage for the meaty-muddy-gritty process of internalizing the message and making it your own in a deeply personal and practical way.
Me? I’m not smart enough and definitely not wise enough to fully digest the meaning of a passage of scripture with a light reading. I need to wrestle with it, and by doing so, make myself and my connection to its truths stronger.
I need first to make sure I understand what it is saying in its original context. I need to figure out what the author was attempting to accomplish in the lives of his original audience by what he said and in the way he said it. This is ancient literature, and though being ancient doesn’t in any way diminish its vitality as divine word, it does form a gulf between it and myself. I need to enter the author’s world and try my best to hear him correctly. Many Scriptures yield their secrets straightforwardly, but some will prove challenging.
Next, I need to understand my own world and how the truths of the biblical writer might relate to modern struggles… and it does relate… far more than modern people tend to know. The hustle and bustle of modern technological life does not change human nature, so it does not change how Scripture relates to us. Rather, the whirl of modern life, its busyness, its noisiness, merely distracts us from asking important questions about our own existence, and keeps us striving to find truth in folly and meaning in purposelessness. The paths of life and death have not readjusted themselves to accommodate electricity, motors, and the digital world. Thus, I wrestle with Scripture because it changes me in my willing defeat and strengthens me through the struggle. I make it my own so I can live it naturally and intuitively, rather than through some kind of “white-knuckle-ing” determination that I WILL walk the perfect line of divine command without allowing the Holy Spirit to change my inner-self.
What a torment it must be, for instance, to even imagine a life of monogamy and fidelity when one has never disciplined themselves in matters of sexual restraint and self-control. Such a one needs a radical change on the inside, a determination born of divine word, and the empowerment of God’s Holy Spirit on the road. One’s entire perception of reality needs alteration.
So, when Scripture calls us, for another instance, to a life of honesty and to a life of submission to authority, how does that relate to those who sought to save Jews from being murdered by the Nazis? How should we deal with democratic governments, where the rule of the people are the foundation of the society, or republics where a constitution is the law of the land? What should someone do when those in authority over them command wickedness or make righteousness illegal? What should we do about government corruption? Dishonest officials? Laws that violate the most basic principles of Scripture? How does one passage about honesty or submission to authority relate to the rest of Scripture? Does this one text or groups of texts stand in tension with others? Does this tension invalidate Scripture, or create a richness of wisdom in a complicated world full of human selfishness?
So, while part of me cries out before every passage of Scripture, “Let God be true, and every man a liar!” another part knows that I am weak in understanding and wisdom and weak in my resolve toward obedience. So I also cry out to God together with that overwhelmed father, “I believe, help my unbelief.”[2] I study to improve my understanding, and wrestle with Scripture before a messy world in order to increase my wisdom.
~Andrew D. Sargent, PhD
[1] When I say, wrestle faithfully, I do not mean that one should be skeptical or cynical, only believing what the text says once he or she has ferreted out every detail, proven every angle beyond even a shadow of a doubt. I’ve had students who sided against Scripture and in favor of themselves and refused to budge unless I could eradicate any ability for them to even imagine a reason to doubt. This is NOT faithful wrestling.
[2] The Gospel of Mark 9:24 in the New Testament.
